When Bruce had turned up in the contacts on her phone, it was only a matter of time - she knew - before they ran into each other. The timing could have been better: she'd seen Tony and Pepper both immediately after their break up and she was processing the fact that Bucky remembered her and therefore possibly everything about her training and a lot of things about her that she had put in a box in the back of her mind to ignore for the rest of all time.
That box had been opened and was stubbornly refusing to shut. And now Bruce was back. Back from outer space, it would seem, and he wanted to meet up.
In the interest of making the whole thing as smooth as possible, Natasha did what she did best: she slipped into whatever role was needed of her. Bruce, she surmised, would need a friend. Someone who was understanding of what he had been through, that wouldn't judge, and who certainly wouldn't have any expectations, judgement or put weight on what had been a brief and strange flirtation between the two of them. After all, last time they'd seen each other in person, she'd kissed him and then thrown him off a building.
Stepping into Starbucks with her hair tucked underneath her baseball cap, dark hoodie clinging to her figure, Natasha got herself a bottle of Diet Pepsi, a glass without ice and a lemon muffin. Bruce wasn't hard to find, her eyes had fallen on him immediately sitting at a table in the back.
As she approached, she was aware of the fact that she looked a little rougher than she'd like: split lip from the shark fight, fading bruise on her hairline that was barely hidden by the cap, bruised knuckles... She'd been in a fight and she didn't have a healing factor. Clint didn't either and both of them were nursing wounds that weren't seen normally. Sometimes being a human wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
"What's a guy like you doing in a place like this?" she asked, voice low and amused as she put her tray down in front of him, sliding into the seat opposite. "Welcome back."