It's a Spider Thing. {Peter Parker and Natasha Romanoff}

{4} he's a pain in the ass but my friend

IT WAS QUIET EXCEPT FOR THE MUSIC emitting from the radio in the kitchen, drifting through the small apartment. Weeks passed of the pair adjusting to their new dynamic.

Natasha had slowly grown used to having another person in the apartment who was just as secretive as herself and in a strange way it worked. She accepted that it wasn't going to be easy, but she never questioned the times when she found him standing on the ceiling and breaking the laws of gravity as he sleep-walked, or staring blankly at a wall when he sat on the couch or when he woke up at three in the morning with sweat clinging to his skin and a scream on his lips. Her solution was to make him a hot chocolate and either wait for him to acknowledge her or join him on the couch with a warm blanket and lemon biscuits.

It was going well- better than she expected and Natasha had been expecting bullets and bruises.

Peter was still struggling with coming to terms with the fact that Natasha apparently wanted nothing from him, that whenever she sat with him and ran a hand through his hair it was because she genuinely cared that he'd woken up screaming or was hearing phantom voices. As a show of good faith Peter was trying to let the woman learn more about him, like what made him tick and the things that went on his mind that even scared himself. Every so often Peter would add an extra comment to the discussion, and Natasha knew he was trying to push down the barrier he had built.

So, it was working. Weirdly.

Out of instinct Peter had gathered information on Natasha, mentally noting specific things and brief mentions to add to his knowledge of the woman. He'd learnt that she was a part of the avengers and that she had been working for Shield the past few years and her partner was Clint Barton- but then he committed less important details to memory that Hydra would have frowned at and dismissed, yet Peter felt strangely attached to the observations. Natasha liked old movies and made references that flew over his head until she'd sat him down and revealed a mountain of DVDs; he found it amusing when she mumbled along with the dialogue. More out of habit, Natasha watched Peter too. She knew he was from Hydra and eyed all of the exits the second he entered a room; though he seemed to slowly stop as time went on, his eyes no longer snapping to the window and the front door instinctively. She also knew he sleep-walked and had night terrors that made him look every bit of the kid he was, but Natasha knew the trivial things too. That he preferred his hot chocolate without cream and that he was smart. He'd always mumble the correct answer on the gameshows that she forced him to watch to learn about pop culture- he also developed an interesting fascination to Star Wars.

Eventually Peter revealed some of his less noticeable abilities- the enhanced hearing mostly, and that he could stick to anything- with a bit of prompting.

The hearing ability had come up when he'd switched on the radio and then proceeded to break it on impulse a second later. He'd apologised profusely, curling in on himself as though Natasha was going to strike out and hit him- she shrugged the incident off and made a mental note of his reaction to the offending noise. She bought a new one the next day, always keeping the device at a low volume.

Currently, they were sat in a comfortable silence, cleaning the various guns Natasha had splayed out on the coffee table. The assassin made no comment when Peter had joined her on the couch.

He was wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt that she had bought him in their first few days of living together. She had dragged him out of the house that day and it had been a quick trip, Peter having a sensory overload from all of the sudden voices and the dangers his weird sixth sense went off at, (Natasha was dubbing it the "Peter tingle" though Peter himself seemed far from impressed by the name). So, they sat together on the rundown couch in their lounge wear which was a sight all by itself, and Natasha couldn't help but note the way Peter's shoulders seemed to untense as he cleaned the weapon with routine precision that a fifteen-year-old shouldn't possess.