Practicality had to be the thing that trumped everything else. Always. Natasha had been stupid. Two days in the Hotel Maximoff and all the attendant events that had followed, it had thrown her off her game, and badly. She could have kicked herself now for the way she'd behaved, for how off she'd let herself be, for the way she'd let herself wallow afterwards in the days since. And to just forget that she'd been promised to one of Stane's closest allies for the evening - for a dinner at Stane's fucking mansion for under a dozen people, for what humiliation that must have been and how very, very badly things could get for her...
She was not stupid. She had never been this stupid.
No, she'd made her own bed on this one, and if she didn't pull it together, there would be consequences. They would be ugly.
And so, practicality. Cold, flat pragmatism, about the cruelest, ugliest thing she could have asked James to do. It hadn't only been because he would be the only person who would make it believable, like she'd told him - it would have been just as believable coming from Bruce, and she knew it. But she'd chosen James because she'd known that he wouldn't say no, and the was the ugliest part of it. She knew he wouldn't say no. He wouldn't put up a fight, or ask questions. He would do what she told him to do at whatever personal cost it came to him.
As soon as he'd agreed, she'd gone to work. Flipped the table over in the living room and kicked a leg loose, knocked a painting askew. Wine spilled on the carpet with the bottle lying beside the stain, a broken glass, pillows and blankets piled in a mess on the edge of the couch so it would look as though she'd been huddled up there. And the bruising had taken no time at all. She'd knelt in front of a doorknob and banged her cheekbone into it, twice, fiercely, waited for the bruise to blossom over her eye. Clipped three of her nails down so it would look like she'd broken them off, squeezed her own throat, angled her head and left a vicious looking bitemark at the top of her breast. All of it so fucking easy, so entirely calculated, this tableau of violence and she had been fine through it all. Because it would work.
It was awful, it was a terrible thing to do to James. But it would work, and that had to be the only thing that mattered, even as she'd fired off the explanation to Stane.
The knock at her door had sent a shockwave of terror through her, though, worst-case scenarios building and building until she had finally squared her shoulders and pulled the door open. Of all the fucking people to see right now - God, she was not even close to being in the right temperament for this, not at all, and she scowled at Steve. "What's your business here, Steve, I've got a lot going on today," she snapped.