Banner examined her in the ship infirmary.

“So what you’re saying is this infinite cosmic being mistook you for someone else?”

“What can I say,” Natasha shrughed. "I guess one redhead looks a lot like another from orbit."

“Did it say what it wanted?”

“It's... a little embarrassing.” Proclaiming itself as the cosmic embodiment of all life yet unborn, it had fused with her as its host, and in return was offering her... a child. She frowned as he approached wielding a thermometer.

“I have to measure your core temperature,” he apologised, his gaze betraying his intention with a glance between her legs. Heat was radiating from her womanhood like a furnace. Her eyes flared angrily, literal bursts of flame. “Mouth will do fine,” he gulped.

The moment the thermometer touched her bottom lip, the mercury began to rise in the glass tube, popping it from within from sheer heat.

“You’re hot.”

“Thank you for noticing,” she smiled.

The entity within her stirred excitedly. “The male is flirting with you. You may begin breeding.”

The entity had so far urged her to breed with every man they’d passed on the way to the infirmary, including half of the Avengers. Banner's regenerative physiology notwithstanding, she doubted if any of the men wanted their dicks turning into cooked hot dogs by the fire in her loins.

“That’s not going to happen.” she informed it.

“Why not? You have bred with him before."

“That was different."

She ran a hand over her abdomen. The X-ray had confirmed her excised uterus had regenerated. "Banner is… We’ve… he decided he doesn't want to have children.”

It was immediately apparent she’d said the wrong thing when the temperature in the room rose a hundred degrees. Anger burned in the being, as it tried to process a concept so antithetical to its nature of life and renewal. Why would life not want to beget more life?!

Glass beakers exploded, fabric ignited. Bruce ran but the heat had already melted the steel of the door, and the flames engulfed him. She saw a green brute rise within the conflagration, the bulkheads ringing like a bell as the Hulk thrashed his fists at the flames.

He reached his maximum height, his vast shoulders pressing against the ceiling. But no sooner had he grown, before he started to shrink. Globs of molten fat and muscle fell from his frame. The fire was eating him away faster than his flesh could regenerate, which dwindling away until his tiny form was lost within the inferno.

She begged it to stop, but it paid her no heed. The burning life energy continued to cascade out of her.

“THAT WHICH DOES NOT WORK MUST BE BURNED AWAY AND REMADE ANEW,” the entity roared. Its fires ceased.

Natasha pushed through the smoke, terrified of what she would find left of her boyfriend, expecting nothing but ash.

There, arms folded and pouting, sat a little green girl, sulking amidst the smoke.