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1.
Sam’s mouth is tight as he watches the doctors file in. “Five is not gonna be enough,” he says.
Natasha clenches her fists hard enough to feel her nails digging in; five is too many. If she’d had her way, Steve would have been rushed to somewhere underground, away from prying eyes, with one well-trained and well-trusted specialist to take care of everything. Things being what they are…
Things being what they are. What had she told Loki? Regimes fall every day, I tend not to weep over that. The urge to run, to fight, to hide, hammers from the base of her neck down her spine, to the balls of her feet, but she stays. Focus.
Steve is beyond her reach, but Sam Wilson is right in front of her, tapping his bruised knuckles against the wall. She gently places a hand on his shoulder. “He heals fast. Now come on, we shouldn’t be seen.”
They end up going to a bar.
As far as post-mission rendezvous go, it’s surprisingly pleasant. Sam is polite—which is to say, he neither bleeds on every available surface nor passes out on top of his burger in the middle of a conversation—and as it turns out, they share common interests.
“Acrylic?”
Natasha purses her lips, but Sam just shrugs. “Heartland yarn. Nice and soft.”
“Synthetic,” she points out, “I prefer silk.”
Sam snorts. “Of course you do. But that shit is expensive, I can’t pay for that regularly on a therapist’s salary.”
“But you do knit,” Natasha says, “Regularly.”
“So do you. Regularly.” At her unimpressed look, he sighs. “It’s…calming. ‘Specially if I stick to the easier patterns, don’t mess up my count? I started a little…club, with my patients, and not a lot of people showed up at first, but now…” He frowns, and then shakes his head. “Every Thursday. Guess I missed our last meeting.”
She makes a noncommittal noise. “Going to teach Rogers?”
He gapes at her, and then laughs. “If he wants, I guess? Doesn’t seem like the knitting type, but then—“ he gestures between the two of them. We don’t seem like the type either.
Natasha does not smile. “You’d be surprised.”
Sam stares at her, his grin fading, and for a minute they are silent, taking the measure of each other.
“He’s going to go after Barnes,” Natasha says, finally, and Sam’s mouth tightens again. “As soon as he’s able.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not going to stop him.”
“Hard to stop a guy like Captain America,” he says, flashing her a hard smile, and: hm.
She’s read the files on the Khalid Kandil mission, and if Clint were here, he would have made some nebulous gesture and stage-whispered baggage. But Clint is not here.
Sam is still staring at her with a challenge in his eyes. “So?” he asks.
Well. She shrugs, and raises her stein. SHIELD is gone, Steve is in the hospital, but for now she has Sam Wilson and his penchant for Heartland yarn. “So. I’m going to drink you under the table, Wilson.”
Eleven drinks later, Sam teeters from the barstool, almost falls. “Do you seriously not feel anything? ”
Natasha drops the olive back into her martini glass, watches her drink as it ripples. “Maybe a little tingle,” she says.
2.
“It’s just for a couple of days,” Coulson says.
“You don’t have to stick around, she doesn’t need to be watched,” Coulson says.
“She calls herself Skye,” Coulson says.
Calls herself, Natasha thinks. Remembers. “I don’t take in strays, I’m not Barton,” she tells Coulson, but the door swings open anyways.
Once Coulson takes his leave, she gestures at the small duffle on the floor: “Is this all you have?”
Skye nods in two quick jerks. “Sorry. I mean—yeah, that’s all.”
“You can put it in the spare room,” Natasha says. Watches the way Skye stuffs her hands deep into the pockets of her oversized shirt, watches the way her eyes flicker to the front door, to the fire escape, to the open window in the kitchen. Calls herself, Natasha thinks. Remembers. “Back door in the bathroom is easier. There’s also an emergency hatch in my room, goes to the sewers.”
Her new ward flinches. “I didn’t—I’m not—“
“It’s fine.” Natasha watches, again, as Skye’s hands plumb even deeper into her pockets, as her eyes stare determinedly down at the floor. She smiles. “Do you play poker?”
Of course poker’s meant to be played in a group, but it’s serviceable as a one-on-one deal, and—this one is Clint’s—there’s no better way to get to know someone.
Skye, Natasha learns in the first three rounds: has a terrible face for bluffing, even though she really tries. Keeps her bets low, but every once in a while her fingers twitch, like cautiousness is something she’s trying to relearn. Counts cards the way she’d counted exits, the way Natasha counts her dead—methodically and unconsciously, unless she makes herself stop, unless someone stops her.
Which is all well and poetic, but after the first three rounds Natasha gets tired of losing money to a doe-eyed post-pubescent.
“Every time I ante?” Skye asks, staring at the shot glass in front of her like it might bite.
Natasha gives her a smile that’s all teeth. “I’ll match with you.”
“I’m not Russian.” Still, Skye picks up the glass; downing it in one go seems to almost work before she sputters and nearly spits the gin out over the table. “This isn’t fair at all, okay—I’m the biggest lightweight, I’m the lightest lightweight—I’m like, allergic to alcohol.”
“You’ll live,” Natasha says placidly as she steals a quick look at Skye’s exposed hand. “Raise.”
“This is illegal ,” Skye declares two rounds later, but she’s looser now as she squints down at her cards. “Like, probably actually.”
Natasha hums, tosses in another dollar. “No such thing. Where’d you learn to count cards like that, anyway?”
The bleary smile on Skye’s face falters. “I…I didn’t, really. It’s a coding thing I learned, at...”
“Rising Tide,” Natasha murmurs, flicking an ace up from her sleeve.
That gets Skye’s attention. “Wait, you know? Or—what am I saying? Of course you know.”
“Did anyone honestly think that we’d never find out?” Pause; we. The word had slipped out of its own volition, and for a second she is adrift. Who is we now, with SHIELD torn asunder? She shakes her head. “Stark dug it out of SHIELD’s files in about a week, we’ve been keeping an eye on your squad ever since.”
Skye makes a noise that might have been a laugh, but it’s too raw in all the wrong places. “Yeah, that worked out really well.”
Natasha remembers the day she’d read over the dossiers with Tony and Clint. The three of them had had had a nice laugh Grant Ward’s obnoxiously messianic name, over his obnoxiously predictable scowl. Straight out of Batman, Stark had said, and well—he hadn’t been wrong. “Hm.”
“Hey, it’s not like I can—I’m not blaming you, or—or anyone. I mean, if anyone should have been paying attention, it should have been…the hacker girl, right? I wasn’t even part of SHIELD, I—I probably should’ve…”
Her shoulders slump. Natasha hesitates; she’d told Clint don’t and she’d told Steve none of that’s your fault, but she owes this girl nothing, not even lies. Especially not lies.
It turns out that she doesn’t need to say anything, because after a second Skye shakes herself back together. “Anyway. The counting thing’s pretty easy—the trick to a good Trojan is setting a neat pattern beforehand and then sticking to it, right? ‘Cause if you don’t, the whole thing gets thrown off.”
“Was that a problem, before?” Natasha asks.
There is something of the wolf in Skye’s answering smile. “Almost.”
3.
Tony is drunk already when she makes her way down to the lab--halfway to blackout--but she pushes the bottle of overpriced Scotch toward him anyway.
He squints at the label, and then up at her. “Yes?”
“I’m here to see your better half,” she tells him, but doesn’t leave.
“Pepper’s upstairs in her office,” he says, shrugging extravagantly. “You know. Why are you here bothering me?”
Natasha hesitates, not entirely sure on the why herself. “Pepper texted me.” Not a lie; Pepper had texted her. A short, cheery message asking if Natasha was free on Tuesday to go over some paperwork that did not mention Tony at all, not even a cursory indulgent complaint. Hence, Natasha’s detour at the lab.
“What, like you guys get along or something?” Tony says, and—really, he should know better, even when intoxicated.
“Have you somehow time traveled to four years ago, Stark?”
He bends back over…whatever he’s working on, giving her a negligent wave. It’s the universal sign for go away, but instead she just pulls up a chair, and waits.
“I kind of want to set the Potomac on fire,” he says conversationally, after a moment of silence. “I mean. That’s weird, right? It’s not like any of—“ another wave, “—this is the Potomac’s fault. But still. River, fire. I kind of want to do it.”
It’s a rather tedious routine to follow, but she knows some arbitrary response is necessary. “The whole thing?”
“Well. Why not? Fairfax Stone to the Chesapeake, we’ll dump NO2 over the whole thing, and then—just, fire everywhere. It’ll be a…” he falters, and then takes another gulp of Scotch. “It’ll be a statement.”
“Not very subtle,” she points out, and he scoffs.
“Have you met me.”
“Hm.” She sneaks a peek at…whatever he’s doing. “Is that what this is? Flashy accelerant?”
Tony shakes his head. “I’ve been working on a flux capacitor since—1985? Sudden brainwave last week.”
“Hm.”
Tony whirls around, jabbing a screwdriver in her direction. “Will you—? Stop doing that hm thing, it makes me nervous.”
She stares back at him, expressionless, until he relents. “Fine, okay. I suck. Happy? I fucked up. I sent Fury those improved designs, I didn’t dig deep enough when I had JARVIS poke around SHIELD’s databases. I suck. So! Trying to fix it.”
Natasha is tempted to hm again, but progress—however pigheaded—is worth…acknowledging, at least. “With a time machine?”
“Yes. No. I—“ If possible, he slumps even further down into his chair. “You know, when the nukes dropped—Oppenheimer at least got a chance, okay. ‘Now I am become death,’ and then…he got out. No more fuckups.”
Natasha thinks of winters, Natasha thinks of ledgers. “You could never be so lucky.”
“Yeah, you’d know,” he shoots back, but he hands her a glass of Scotch anyway. “Well? What do we have to drink to?”
He looks at her. He looks to her. Natasha stares into the contents of her glass. Out of respect for Pepper and for the sake of her mental health, she’s made a deliberate effort not to make Stark’s business her business, but. “Howard Stark,” she says. “Maria Carbonell.”
Tony swallows hard. “Right,” he says, “Right, I can do that.”
He downs the whole thing in one gulp, squints up at her when she sets her own glass back onto the counter—still filled. “What, you going abstinent on me?”
I blew all my covers, Natasha thinks. There are no names that belong to her—not in the way Howard and Maria belong to Tony, not in the way Bucky Barnes belongs to Steve.
But Tony—Tony is still waiting for an answer. “It wouldn’t be respectful,” she says, finally. “They’re not…they are yours.”
“Hey,” Tony says, and looks…worried. “Hey. Are you okay? With the. I can call--your better half, probably, or. Do you need…?”
Natasha looks at him, and turns away. “Keep tinkering, Stark.”
4.
“Late,” Melinda May says, her face expressionless.
Natasha sits down at the booth, flashes her most insincere smile. “Hi.”
Five minutes of complete silence later, a waiter strolls by. Natasha asks for water, watches May’s eyes flick over the whiskey section before ordering a water as well. “Tee-totaling, Romanoff?”
She stretches her smile even wider. “Only for you, Melinda.”
Predictably, May doesn’t deign to respond, so Natasha gets down to business. “Coulson?”
“Drove me here. Made him stay in the Corvette.”
Natasha lets out a slight huff of amusement. “And?”
“Hill, ten o’clock. Cosmo.”
Sure enough, Maria is sitting at the bar. Natasha allows her lip to curl a little; only two people she knows would drink a Cosmo willingly, and Pepper only does it to lull her competitors into a false sense of security. Maria Hill, on the other hand, just really likes the taste.
Maria catches her eye at that instant, raising her glass in a sardonic toast. Natasha grins before turning her attention back on her companion. “So?”
May stares hard into her glass, hands skittering over the edges of the table. “I assume Coulson has told you about…recent events.”
Five years working for SHIELD, and Natasha has never known Melinda May to hedge. She blinks. “You know that he has.”
“Of course,” May says, voice stilted.
Another pause. Natasha is silent, peering unabashedly at her erstwhile superior. May has always had the face of an ancient—not old so much as somehow timeless, inscrutable.
She just looks tired now.
“We—,” May says finally, before stopping again to shred the napkin in her hand, “I. I wanted to see if you would…reconsider.”
Natasha drums her fingers lightly on the plastic of her seat, still waiting.
“I’m sure Coulson has given you his pitch,” May says, “And I—know that we’ve had our differences in the past, but. I agree with him—here. You’d be a valuable—“
Natasha keeps her face blank, but May scowls at her own choice of words. “What I mean is. You’d be welcome.”
“And why are you the one giving me the pitch this time?” Natasha presses, “Why not Coulson again? Why not Fury? Why not--”
Barton, her mind whispers, but she tamps that bit down. Thankfully, May doesn’t seem to notice. “I volunteered,” she replies. “I heard your speech during the hearing.”
“The world is a vulnerable place,” Natasha murmurs, picking absently at a loose seam on her jacket.
“It was good,” May says, looking Natasha full in the eye now, “You meant it. Coulson and I...SHIELD might have done things they shouldn’t have in the name of peace, but--that was with HYDRA pulling the strings. If we start now, we can use old contacts, old resources to rebuild the protection this world needs.”
It’s possibly the most amount of words Melinda May has ever uttered in her presence. “And why me?”
May smiles now. “The world still has its secrets.”
And me to keep them, Natasha thinks, and me to break them. It’s a tempting offer--had been tempting when Coulson had asked, but even more so now, a week after, with Barton still AWOL, with Steve and Sam in God Knows Where chasing ghosts, with her, Natasha, flung into the wind. And she has no doubt that May means every word she says. The world still has its secrets, says the soldier to the spy.
Her hand does a strange fluttering movement—a pointless, useless motion, but she’s been doing it a lot of those lately. “I’m afraid I have to say no again.”
May frowns, opens her mouth, but Natasha holds up a hand. “I appreciate the gesture--really--but my reasons haven’t changed. I’m just...”
Not in the market, she’d told Coulson, and that had been the truth, but not all the truth. Regimes fall everyday--she’d burned this one down herself, stuck around for the aftermath, but she’s learned enough to know not to build a new house from old ash.
“I have always respected you,” she says, out loud. “And I’m certain that whatever comes out of this effort, it will be better--”
“Low bar,” May points out, mouth twitching.
“But for me, personally...” How ‘bout a friend? Steve had asked, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “Other things matter more.”
“And the others?”
Natasha frowns. “Rogers, Stark, and the rest? They’re grown men. Or close enough approximations. They’re free to make their own choices.”
(If she does not mention Barton by name--if she hasn’t since all this began, or ended--then it is mere oversight. He is free to make his own choice as well.)
May nods, and then abruptly breaks eye contact again. “And Skye?”
It’s more than a question of living space. “Still with me,” Natasha says. “When you get SHIELD up and running again, you’re welcome to ask her to come back.”
“I suppose that’s...fair.” May says, but she still isn’t looking at Natasha. “Will she? Come back.”
Natasha stares at her. SHIELD had been a lie, and its loyal, valuable agents—they had taken it and added minute lies of their own. Now with all it stripped away, the truth is almost uncreative. She’s read the files; the truth of the Calvary is that she had fought, and people had died. The truth of Melinda May is that she had fought, and people had died, and she had gone on caring.
And the truth of herself--of Natasha…she doesn’t know. She doesn’t remember. Possibly, there are not enough files in the world.
But May is still waiting for an answer, and Natasha respects her enough to only dance around the contours of her faith. “Well, Stark’s taken a shine to her,” she says lightly, “so it could go either way, really.”
She smirks, May rolls her eyes; the script begins anew.
They sit in silence again, pretending to browse the slightly greasy menu until Maria Hill sidles into their booth. “All done?” she asks, setting her Cosmo right in front of Natasha, who winces. “Perfect. The sweet potato fries here are delicious.”
May shifts. “Coulson’s still waiting,” she says, getting up.
Natasha snags her elbow--and really, it’s a testament to how much they’ve worked together that she doesn’t have to duck right after. “Oh, come on,” she says, cracking that blinding, insincere smile again. “Just us girls! My treat.”
5.
That night Natasha dreams of a blue rising from the Potomac, drowning the world in frost while two red pricks emerge from the depths, burning, burning--
The kitchen window clicks, and she is awake. The knife from under her pillow slips into her hand as she pads out of her room. Generally, there is only one person who could get in without permission, and through the kitchen window, no less, but after what’s happened--
She grabs her gun from the bedside table, but doesn’t flick off the safety. If she’s right, there is no need to wake Skye. If she’s wrong...
There is no need to wake Skye.
The sounds of extremely messy eating fills her ears as she approaches, and Natasha relaxes. “I’m never watching Game of Thrones with you again,” she says, in lieu of a greeting. It’s a continuation of the discussion they’d been having before he’d left for Kuwait.
Clint grunts a response through a mouthful of foie gras. “Wild Turkey,” he says after a period of enthusiastic chewing, “This is salty as fuck.”
“That’s because you’re not supposed to shove it in your face in one go,” Natasha replies, but gets the bourbon out anyway. He ignores the glass she sets in front of him, opting to swig directly from the bottle.
Natasha watches him, hand still clenched around her gun. She trusts Clint--she thinks, but in this world where new Natasha hadn’t been so new after all, just the same under a different mask, and Clint--
Clint had given it to her, this mask, and she’d taken it as a gift and only ever asked why me, never why.
Maybe she should have.
The bottle thunks onto her dining room table, at least a quarter empty, and then it’s just she and Clint, staring at each other like they’re meeting for the first time again across the shaft of his arrow.
He looks okay, she notes absently. Smells kind of like he hauled himself out of a sewer, but not--the clear, unforgiving part of her mind says--like he’s been plowing through HYDRA agents on his way back to the States.
(Her gun’s safety is still on. She doesn’t move to change that.)
It’s Clint who breaks the silence, just like the first time. “I thought you’d be in Budapest,” he says. “I was waiting there.”
“I thought you’d be here,” Natasha says, before she can stop herself. She doesn’t let herself parrot the second part. She hasn’t been waiting, she’s been--
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? She’d told Steve that she wasn’t staying, and then she had.
Clint holds her gaze for a few more seconds before digging the heel of his hand into his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”
There are a million things Natasha wants to say, ranging from damn right to where the fuck were you to are you still to were you ever, but she doesn’t say a single thing.
“You know the mandatory leave they gave me, after Midtown happened?” Clint asks, face now buried in his arms. “I thought: two options. Either I could buy a farm in Kansas and retire, or I could buy the farm. Either way it’d keep me away from SHIELD, or at least far enough so that if I snapped again I wouldn’t...”
“That’s bullshit,” she says, on instinct.
That gets a rueful smile. “Which one?”
“Both.”
He takes another generous swig from the bottle. “Well. I’m here, aren’t I? Told myself to get the fuck over it, get back into the good fight. SHIELD had a use for me still, just pointed and I shot--”
Suddenly she can’t bear to listen to this--pity party, he’s having for both of them. “Your baggage isn’t all that personal, Barton, so you can slap on your ‘we did dirty work for dictators’ Band-Aid like the rest of us and--”
“Oh, fuck off,” Clint snaps. “SHIELD was everything I had, alright? Not everyone can just turn off their emotions and do the whole ‘I’m Russian, I don’t stick around’ routine like you do.”
“I stuck around,” Natasha says, flatly. “Give me that, you’re not drinking all of my bourbon.”
He hands her back the bottle. “Sorry.”
She ignores the apology, opting to drop her gun between them on the table.
“Natasha,” Clint says, looking surprised at this gesture of peace.
“Where were you?” she asks.
He sucks in a breath. “Montreal. Cirque du Soleil was in town, I wanted to...”
“And before?”
“Budapest, like I said.”
“And before?”
“Pyongyang, for my mission. Natasha,” Clint says, quieter now. “Why did you stay? When you didn’t show up in Budapest, I thought you’d gone full-on dust in the wind.”
She doesn’t reply.
“Coulson called me and said some bullshit about restarting the whole thing, but--that’s not why you’re here, right? You can’t just glue the pieces of this back together--”
That, at least, wrenches a laugh out of her. “I’m not staying to rebuild SHIELD.”
He looks at her. “Then why?”
“I--”
“Natasha? I heard a--oh my God, you’re Clint Barton.”
Skye’s standing in her doorway, hands clasped together, the light from her room flooding out around her. Clint stares at her, mouth open. “Uhhh. Yeah, hi. You know who I am?”
Natasha rolls her eyes. “Barton, Skye. Skye--”
“Your bow is awesome,” Skye breathes, and then seems to catch herself. “That--that wasn’t a euphemism, I just think it’s amazing--how did you program your quiver to switch arrowheads like that?”
“He didn’t,” Natasha interjects before Clint can reply.
He gives her a scandalized look. “Yeah, but I thought of it, didn’t I?”
“But how does it work?” Skye asks, completely entranced. Her eyes scan the room. “Is it here? Can you give a demonstration?”
Where did you find this kid? Clint signs to her, before turning back to Skye. “Yeah. Yeah, I have one right here--”
“You have more than one?”
“Yeah, I used to have just the single, but then Tony Stark--you know him? He…”
Natasha snags the bottle of bourbon as Clint stands up, letting the talk wash over her. It’s--normal, from the weapons babble to the signing; they might as well be back in Avengers Tower, explaining their SHIELD-issued tech to Tony. It’s normal, and she could stay.
“Don’t blow up the house,” she says, bounding up. The room is too cold.
Clint blinks. “Nat, where--”
She only pauses to grab an extra bottle of alcohol on her way out.
1.
It’s not that he hates home invaders, Steve thinks as he jumps out of bed at the sound of someone blundering through his balcony. At least, he doesn’t hate them more than your run-of-the-mill bad guys. He just wishes they didn’t always come at the worst time possible--like just an hour and a half after he finally dropped off to sleep after a week of looking for Bucky, for example.
He slides his shield out from under his bed before making his way to the living room, which is dead silent, until there’s a soft noise to his right that could be a weapon but sounds more like, well.
A hiccup.
Steve flicks the lights on, and there’s Natasha, practically buried under the mound of cushions he always keeps on his couch.
“Rogers,” she says, with profound gravitas. “Have some bourbon with me.”
He stares down at what seems to be a half empty bottle of Grey Goose, and sighs--mostly relieved that no one is currently trying to kill him, but also feeling maybe a little…
Left out, he realizes. Like he’s with the Commandos again, always separated by the serum from the raucous, over-happy wealth that comes with being drunk.
(Or, later: desperately throwing down shot after shot after Bucky’s fall, and not feeling anything.)
He looks at Natasha, who despite her offer is holding the bottle of Grey Goose like it might be her last possession in the world, and sits down silently next to her. “So where’s the fire?” At her blank look, he shrugs. “Just asking. Any injuries I should know about, anything important happen that dropped you here?”
Natasha stares him some more, and then blinks slowly. “Some guy tried to mug me on my way here. I broke his wrist, but I’m fine.”
“That’s--okay,” he says. “Is that...why you’re here?”
She makes an impatient noise like he’s being deliberately obtuse. “No. I just told you, I was already on my way here.”
Steve rubs his forehead--maybe that can forestall the oncoming migraine. He likes Natasha, he reminds himself. Natasha is probably his favorite Avenger. “Right. So you decided to come here, because…”
Natasha’s response is to sink even deeper into the cushions. “Your couch’s more comfy.”
He can’t help it; he laughs. “You know, I didn’t even know you could even get drunk. How many drinks does it take, usually?”
“Exactly two shots less than it takes to get Thor drunk,” she says, and then scowls. “I’m workin’ on it.”
“Uh-huh.” And then, because Steve’s seen Thor drink: “Are those shots in gallon buckets?”
She aims a cushion carefully at his head, lets fly; it lands about five feet away from the couch. He gets up to retrieve it, still laughing. “You are gone, aren’t you?”
Natasha just squints at him. “I’m here. Like you.”
“I live here.”
She turns away suddenly. “I wasn’t expecting you to be home, I thought--I thought you’d be on the road.”
Steve feels his grin drop. “I was. Just got back.”
“And how is Operation Hobo Rehab going?”
There’s a deceptively light quirk to her lips, and Steve tenses, despite himself. “It’s...going. Thought I’d come back for a couple of days, get my bearings.”
Natasha lets out a quiet, concussive breath. “Seems like that’s going around.” And then before he can ask: “Clint’s back.”
“Ah,” he says, still trying to gauge her mood. It’s always this dance with Natasha--a second on solid footing before she launches him into the air.
Or...something. Steve’s still not a dancer, but he knows something about partners and letting yourself fall, so he waits.
“He broke in and ate through half my fridge, bitching about SHIELD going to pieces and asking stupid questions like why I stayed, which woke Skye up, and…”
“And?”
She takes a slow breath. “And I came here to say goodbye. I’m leaving--he was right, there’s nothing keeping me here anymore.”
“You just said you didn’t think I’d be here,” Steve points out. “You just...swung by to say goodbye to my apartment?”
Natasha cuts him a sharp look. “It was a symbolic gesture, Rogers--you of all people should understand that.”
“Or you could have just called me, you know my number,” he replies, “And--last I heard from you, you weren’t staying--what happened to making new covers, all that? You didn’t have to stick around for all this fallout.”
“I didn’t want to stick around,” Natasha says, angry now. “But there wasn’t anyone else, I’m--I’m uniquely qualified, to watch regimes burn down.”
“But not for what happens after,” Steve says quietly. “But you stayed anyway. You took a stand.”
“Stop trying to paint this as something noble,” she hisses, and then the anger suddenly drains out of her again, leaving her slumped bonelessly next to him.
Steve hesitates. “Natasha.”
“Don’t,” she says, and takes a deep shuddering breath. When she speaks again, her voice is dull. “You’ve ruined me.”
“Pretty sure I haven’t.”
But she just shakes her head. “You, and Clint, and Sam, and Skye, and--even Tony, with your illusions of taking a stand and doing the right thing and safety, or whatever it is you think of next--”
“It’s not a crime to want to feel safe.”
“Safety is a dream for children. The moment you think you’re safe is the moment you die, and I can’t--not in this. Whoever you want me to be, I’m…”
“I’m not,” Steve says. “I don’t want you to be anyone, Nat, I just want you to be…” Happy. Secure. Able to ask for help without thinking it a weakness. “If you need to leave, then you should leave. There are other people who can hold the fort down, and I’m back now anyway. But don’t just--hide away in someone else and never come back again, alright? I just want you to be you. My friend Natasha. Is that okay?”
She sniffs a little, and then laughs. “Sure. Whatever.”
Steve grins. “Well, good. Now--do you want to crash here, for the night? I know you wanted to pour one out for my apartment and then leave for parts unknown, or something, but to be honest I’m not even sure if you can get up right now--”
“Fuck off,” Natasha groans, but she’s practically melded to his couch by this point.
“So you should sleep here. With the cushions that you love so much. I’d offer you my bed, but--”
“Your bed’s the worst,” Natasha informs him, voice muffled. “S’like a concrete slab, and you only have one pillow.”
“--I’m not that much a gentleman,” he finishes, smiling. “All settled?”
The only reply he gets is a quiet “mmpphh,” so he just gets up and flicks the light off again. As he does, though: “Steve?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a good mom.” There’s a long silence, and then a sound like Natasha’s trying to force something out of her throat. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve says, “Can you--I didn’t catch that second part. Did you just say--”
A cushion whizzes out of nowhere and hits him square in the face.
When he gets up the next morning, Natasha’s still on his couch, dead to the world. He hums a little as he pulls up iTunes, and starts playing 1812 Overture on full blast.
“Turnabout’s fair play,” he says, as Natasha executes an acrobatic leap out of her nest, cursing in Russian. “How do you like your eggs?”