Natasha understands the urge to put things in boxes for better categorization and study. She isn't a scientist, but there's always been a need for compartmentalization in her life, and she is very, very good at putting things in boxes and keeping them there. It's what she'd originally done with her feelings for him, before she'd ever confessed them in the first place: kept them in a box, weighed her options, measured risk vs. reward, need vs. want. It wasn't always so cold as that; it was rarely cold, but... she'd always been good at choosing what was necessary, and not necessarily what was selfish. And then things had fallen out the way they had, and she'd put those feelings back in that box and not taken them back out. Until now. Until this second chance she hadn't known she'd ever get, because second chances weren't the kind of thing people like her got. Can she really be blamed for not wanting to give up that chance?

"I wouldn't say no if you asked me out," she says, and there's a faint smile in the words. "Movie might be a little hard, but dinner isn't impossible." The words fade, though, and she sobers again as she listens to him talk about Ross. Ross, whom she already had no love for, Ross, a dangerous man with a dangerous set of ideas in a position no man of his ilk should be in. She has her own ideas about Ross and how to handle a problem like him. Those she doesn't share with anyone. And they aren't the problem at hand. She can hear the problem in his voice, hear the guilt.

"That doesn't reflect on you," she tells him quietly. "Who they are, what they did. You aren't any less just for wanting a father." And you aren't them, she doesn't say, not yet, but the words are there, too. She can see the parallels that he might think were there, but the Hulk is nothing, nothing at all like those men. Nothing at all. And neither is he.