2.7k

Platonic

Angst/Fluff

Brief mention of addiction, continuous themes of living in foster care, lack of acceptance surrounding neurodivergency.

You were a hard worker, everyone who knew you knew that. It's the reason why Fury had promoted you from being a regular ol' SHIELD Agent to being an Avenger.

You were beyond excited. Your hard work had paid off, and you had proved everyone who didn't believe in you wrong. You spent nearly all of your life in the system, your father had never been present in your life, and your mother was an unsuitable guardian. Addiction clouded her mind and unfortunately clouded her love for you. The substances gave her more than you ever could.

When you were three you were taken away by child services and promptly placed into the system. You burned through foster homes like there was no tomorrow, your endless amounts of energy was off-putting for them, which didn't make sense to you. You were a kid, surely they should expect energy?

You felt as though your liveliness was a big part of you, but it was also the reason that you were unwanted, so you learned to loathe that part of you, and tried to hide it. The suppression only made you angrier, prone to outbursts.

This was another off-putting feature. So, you remained unwanted, stuck in group homes.

You learned to live with it. It didn't hurt less, but you could deal with the pain.

When you were sixteen you joined your school's coding club. As you grew older you began to get seriously fed up with sharing a room, especially as your roommate was six years younger than you. You were becoming a young adult, you needed your space, but instead, you shared that space with a ten-year-old whose life goal was to annoy you.

So, you started spending more time outside than in, starting with coding club.

You loved it, this was your space. You felt competent for the first time, and this allowed you to let go slightly, to not waste brain power on suppressing yourself.

Your teacher watched you in awe as your skills progressed, you were like a young prodigy. When she started talking to you about joining competitions you immediately began to feel a closeness to her, and she made a point to tell you that she loved your energy, she knew that some of the teachers in the school were harsh to you, so she wanted to reassure you. This caused you to let out the biggest grin you had ever given anyone. This woman was the first person to give you a genuine compliment and made you feel good about yourself.

She easily became your favourite teacher.

After a few more weeks of observing you in her classroom, she approached you and explained the possibility of you having ADHD. She explained the ins and outs of it, how for some people it can display as an internal battle of lack of focus, and for some, it can make them mini balls of high energy, not that that was a bad thing. She explained that she thought you might be someone who mainly displayed it as hyperactivity.

She suggested that you talk to the school's counsellor to try and get you on track for testing. This teacher was the first person to ever look out for you, so even though you weren't happy with the idea of having it, you would do as she said.

Your teacher was right. You'd been living with ADHD. You didn't go on medication, but you sought the help of counsellors for a few months to learn methods to keep your focus.

After this, you were unstoppable. You were excelling in your schoolwork, winning in coding competitions, and not having as many outbursts back at home. Not that this was an easy feat, it took all of your willpower to achieve this, but you were achieving nonetheless.

Your coding caught the attention of SHIELD who were looking for new young recruits. You were older now, but they had looked back through records and saw that you had come first place in multiple national competitions for your skills. So, they hired you along with some others, all ranging between ages twenty-two and twenty-five.

You were twenty-two, the baby of the new pack.

You remembered the first time that you met Clint and Natasha, they were in charge of training your group of new recruits. You had been hopping up and down on the balls of your feet in anticipation, you had come so far to reach this point, even with all of the odds being stacked against you. So yes, you were excited.

Clint loved your enthusiasm and said that he hated getting the same old drawl of people coming in every year. Natasha... she had an opposing opinion. Which sucked, because as soon as you had first locked eyes you knew that this was the start of an embarrassing little crush. Which you of course suppressed.

Your energy was perfect for physical training, you were very much excelling. The problem was the training for desk duty tasks. When you sit still and do work, you tend to fidget, whether that be by pen clicking, knee bouncing or tapping the pads of your fingertips on the table.

Natasha found your fidgeting unnerving. It was unpredictable, which meant that you also were.

Natasha didn't like unpredictable, and therefore she didn't like you.

If she heard even the slightest tapping coming from your table she would send a glare your way. You hadn't felt this small since you were sixteen.

You never wanted to feel that small again.

Clint noticed the looks that Natasha gave you, but before he could really do anything about it, training was complete. You had passed it with flying colours. Clint couldn't be more proud, but once again Natasha had a differing opinion. She didn't believe that you should be an Agent, even if your test scores suggested otherwise.

But you let it go, you didn't have to interact with her again. Until now.

As you arrived at the compound, you were thinking about how with Clint and Natasha there, there would be at least one friendly face. Just one, because Natasha hated your guts.

When Fury introduced you to the team, you were met with a room full of kind eyes and bright smiles. Except for one person. Natasha kept a blank face, but you could tell that she was in complete disbelief that you were the new recruit.

You weren't sure why she still had a vendetta against you, you had proved her wrong. You were a good Agent who had saved countless lives on missions. Yet, she still viewed you as her pesky little recruit that she had been forced to train years ago.

Clint stood and threw his arms around you as he gave a chuckle of relief. He always knew that you'd come far, and you had proved him right. His eyes crinkled with joy as he took you in, it had been a while since he had seen you and you had matured a lot.

Natasha's face scrunched up as she took in the scene in front of her, not getting why her best friend was treating you so nicely.

---

You'd been with the Avengers for a few months now and you got on with everyone incredibly well, aside from Natasha of course. She avoided you as though you had the plague.

She couldn't avoid you at meal times though, but she did sit the farthest away from you as she could. You really didn't care though, it was her loss. She was the one going out of her way to make herself feel uncomfortable in her own home.

---

One morning you had woken up early due to Tony wanting you to check out the cool contraptions he had made for times of restlessness of ADHD. He also suffered from it so had started a new project that the two of you could work on, and today was the finalisation of it, something you'd been looking forward to for weeks. You loved how with Tony you didn't have to feel ostracised, you could openly discuss the struggles.

What you didn't know was that as you were sitting in the kitchen eating your bowl of cereal, you were intruding on the time that Natasha usually had to herself in the mornings.

As she entered the kitchen she let out a sigh of frustration when she spotted you, but moved towards you anyway, she needed to eat so that she could begin her day.

You felt a bit awkward but you too needed to eat, so you stayed sitting as you finished your cereal.

Today was a particularly restless day for you, you felt like your skin was crawling and you felt uncomfortable, so restless fidgeting was taking place absentmindedly. With it being early in the morning and encroaching on her time, you were already on thin ice with Natasha. So, when she started hearing your bowl scraping back and forth across the counter between each mouthful, she snapped.

She began shouting at you for acting like a child, for not being able to sit still, and how she will never understand how you started making your way through the ranks, but then she told you something that stung. Something that you had heard a lot throughout your childhood, but never expected to hear in your own home as an adult.

"Just be normal".

You felt humiliated as you sat and took everything that Natasha was throwing your way. This wasn't just a lecture stemming from early morning annoyance. She was berating you.

Natasha eventually stopped when she had felt like she said enough.

Guilt pooled in her as she took in the sight of you. You were breathing heavily, your hands were shaking, your eyes darting about the place as they brimmed with tears. What really broke her walls was when she saw your bottom lip wobble.

She just huffed again though, pushing the guilt away by blaming it on you acting like a child again.

You swallowed thickly and muttered a small apology before rushing to clumsily clear your bowl and leave it in the sink before scurrying off to your room. Your heart broke into millions of tiny pieces. That little crush you had years ago did fade, instead, leaving you with admiration for the woman, she had overcome a lot too and was brilliant at her job. You wanted to be friends with her but didn't have the confidence to do anything about it, especially as she had proved time and time again that she couldn't even stand your existence.

The small guilty feeling that Natasha had stayed, especially after seeing you look so hurt, but she continued making her smoothie. She sat and slowly sipped her breakfast as she made a mental plan for the day, but was interrupted by Tony waltzing in. She rolled her eyes at her early quiet time being interrupted once again.

"Have you seen Y/n?", he asked Natasha. he had expected to find you in the kitchen after you hadn't shown up to meet him in his lab.

"No, why?", she lied, though she wasn't sure why she was lying. "She was supposed to meet me in the lab today". Natasha's face was plastered with confusion, not understanding why you would be going into the lab.

Tony's face lit up as he realised that he would get to explain the project to another person. He started explaining about how you two had been planning different contraptions to help with fidgeting and hopefully, if they worked then he would be able to make a bunch and donate them to various charities.

Nat gave him a 'really?' look at the fact that he was accommodating that type of behaviour in the workplace. But when he hurriedly added on at the end that it was for those with ADHD her face dropped. Very visibly.

"You okay?", Tony asked her. She responded with a small nod before rushing off to your room.

She had no clue what she was going to say, she had belittled you the entire time that she had known you for something that wasn't even your fault. Now she had joined you in the self-loathing club.

Eventually, she got the courage to knock at your door and opened it when she heard your broken "Come in", which only made her feel worse.

You were sat cross-legged in the middle of your bed, it was clear that you had cried, but the tears had dried up now, just leaving your face looking sadly splotchy.

When you looked up and saw that it was Natasha who had entered your room, your breath hitched. She was the last person that you wanted to see.

Natasha took in your appearance before sitting on the bed. She saw how your hands were rubbing against each other slightly, but as soon as she sat your body stiffened and your hands were frozen in place, clearly suppressing the need to do whatever it was you needed to.

Guilt.

She shakily exhaled as she turned to look at you and you couldn't meet her gaze. "I'm sorry". You turned to look at her with a shocked expression, you were half expecting her to yell at you again for running off or something. An apology was the last thing that you expected.

At your confusion, she continued, "Tony told me about what you two were doing in the lab... and why. I didn't know. So I'm sorry that I said those things to you. None of it's your fault".

Your jaw immediately tightened and Natasha knew that what she had said hadn't hit the mark, so she looked to her lap.

"Not knowing...", you began shakily, "Is no excuse to treat anyone like shit for years on end. It doesn't matter if I have it or not, it shouldn't have mattered".

Natasha turned to look at your hardened gaze, "I know. I have no excuse. All I can say is sorry, and that I promise to do better". You nodded slightly.

You weren't particularly one to hold a grudge, but you weren't going to roll over because someone made a simple apology. If she showed you that she could do better and put an effort in, you didn't see why you couldn't move on, especially as you two shared living spaces. But she would have to do a lot better, quickly.

After an awkward silence had begun, Natasha ended it by asking about your experience, wanting to know more. She explained that she had grown up in a place where the sort of stereotypical behaviours that came along with ADHD wasn't tolerated, so she didn't know much about it.

You explained that even though you had a very hyperactive and disruptive nature in school, you were late to be diagnosed because the adults in your life always assumed that it was just behavioural difficulties due to being raised in the system. Natasha once again felt a pang of guilt at learning this information.

But when you started explaining about how your teacher helped and you went from failing every class to passing and doing well in competitions, she didn't feel anything other than pride. She was so proud of you.

You caught her expressions changing and felt like you were on the same wavelength as her for the first time since you'd met her.

Immediately you noticed a difference in Natasha.

She started sitting next to you at meal times, which shocked the team. She invited you to go places with her and watch movies, it was nice, a friendship had blossomed.

But it was the little things that made you like Natasha and enjoy her company more. If she was out and spotted something that she thought you'd like she would buy it for you, no questions asked.

If she woke up in the middle of the night and went to go and get tea, she would briefly stop by your door. If she heard movement she would bring you tea as well. In this line of work nightmares and sleep difficulties were expected, so it was nice for the both of you to have someone to share that with.

Natasha was trying, and she was proving time and time again that she was worthy of being your friend.