Archive of Our Own ^beta

It isn’t an immediate thing.

Steve finishes the mission. He’s debriefed. He eats with the team, he showers, he reads a chapter of the book that Pepper has leant him and then he goes to sleep. He has a headache, but he ran through miles of sewer today, was tazed at least twice and had a lab self-destruct around him, meaning an irritating number of their targets rabbitted away. He doesn’t think this is unreasonable.

Only when he wakes up, opens his eyes and sees absolutely nothing does he realise he should have paid more attention to the pain.

“But he’s Captain America,” Fury is saying in his deep, dangerous way, his usual impatience with time-wasting elevated to the rumbling menace that his voice gets when he wants answers yesterday. “Somebody give me an explanation of why the serum isn’t kicking in to fix this in three sentences or less before I’m forced to give Stark the floor and then we’ll be here for a month.”

“Hey,” Steve hears Tony say, but it’s Bruce’s voice he angles in on, turning his head this way and that to get the best triangulation. The doctor has always been the quietest of them save for Natasha, but it’s Steve’s sight that has been affected, not his hearing, and he has all the incentive to listen to him talk, however technical it gets.

“Neurotoxin,” Bruce says. “Optic nerve,” Bruce says. “Bone is easier to regenerate than myelin, the serum boosts his natural healing speed, it doesn’t make him Wolverine,” Bruce says. And Steve actively, unfairly snaps at Sitwell when he tries to be helpful by couching it in language that he thinks Steve will understand. Normally, he endures the continued assumption that he struggles with ‘modern’ discoveries, but just because he was born in the twenties doesn’t mean that he left his ability to learn there. He’s had a lot of downtime since they thawed him out. That’s a lot of time to learn how to make use of the glorious thing that is the amount of freely available knowledge on the internet and Steve used to be underweight and asthmatic. Learning things fast (other than when to shut up and back down) had been the only thing in his favour.

It comes down to this: Steve was exposed to something, a chemical something, that has effectively severed the connection between his eyes and his brain. From what they’ve observed over the past eighteen hours, the nerves aren’t regenerating. He’s had an MRI, two different sorts of CAT scan and allowed a British woman called Faiza Hussain do something that felt extremely strange to him that apparently let the doctors and scientists get an up-close look at the inside of his head.

It really comes down to this: Steve can’t see a thing and they don’t expect that to change on its own.

It’s not at all like closing his eyes. With his eyes closed, Steve can still pick up some changes in light, he can sense high enough levels of brightness through the thin skin of his eyelids. He can open his eyes, if he wants, and see the world again.

Now, Steve knows he’s opening and closing his eyes because he can feel his eyelashes brushing against his skin. That’s the only thing he senses though because the world, his world, is solidly and uniformly black. It’s not the red-tinged darkness of his eyes seeing the capillary tangles in his eyelids, it’s just black. Not even the absence of light, but the absence of the ability to see it, to tell the difference between it being there and not. Steve could be locked in a blacked out room, he could be standing in a light box, and he would see exactly the same thing: nothing.

It has been violently, jarringly unsettling since he first realised he couldn’t see and spent nearly ten minutes looking for his phone and then another six painstakingly trying to remember the sequence of buttons he’d normally push to call Tony. Steve used to get seasick before the serum, because of course he did, he used to suffer from everything before they changed him from the inside out. It’s a little like that now, the body’s inability to reconcile the differences between the movement it feels and the picture it sees. Maybe he’s enhanced, but everything he is was built on what human beings could do in the first place. A doctor, one he doesn’t know well enough to have been able to identify by voice alone, said that people could sometimes take as long as a decade to reconcile themselves to being blind when Steve had asked about likely adjustment period lengths. Him being immediately and angrily hushed hadn’t stopped Steve’s stomach from sinking until it went past his knees, his feet, down through the floor in a way that felt like it was never coming back.

Steve remembers being small. He remembers things physically seeming smaller when he himself shot up nearly two feet. Never before, though, has the world seemed this big, this looming. Never before has he felt this vulnerable and that includes the winters when he was sick enough that an entirely different set of doctors were doubtful about whether he’d live to see spring.

He asks to be taken to his room and left alone for a while. Tony leads him, which he prefers to an agent because Tony – either by habit or by design – doesn’t hold his hand or anything mortifying like that, he just carries on talking non-stop and lets Steve follow the sound. He’s all about there being a quick solution, listening to him. He has faith in Bruce, he has faith in science, he’ll build Steve new eyes if he wants and how does Steve feel about lasers? Snapping at Tony for being unhelpful, unlike snapping at Sitwell for being the opposite, is not out of character for Steve, but he can’t even manage that. He feels locked inside his body, like the desire to withdraw within his own skin is a direct response to being cut off like this from the world outside of him, and he just says thank you, politely, and leans against the door when he closes it.

His room is familiar. He knows where the bed is, where his laundry basket is. It is more than within his capabilities to find his way to the bathroom so that he can use the lavatory (though that in itself is a ginger and potentially messy venture, so he just gives up and pees awkwardly whilst sitting down) and then lie down on top of the covers in his underwear so he can stare at the ceiling. Or at least point his face in the direction of where the ceiling is. But then when his responsible side prompts him to want to set an alarm (if there’s a chance of him napping to escape from being conscious of what he can’t see) he realises his alarm clock has a touch screen, nothing that lends itself to communicating with the pads of his fingers. And, besides, he can’t see what time it is now. Frustration surges inside of him like a flash flood and then it’s a moot point because he can feel the crushed remains of the clock in his hands, the first victim of this entire mess other than Sitwell’s feelings and, of course, himself.

Someone is saying his name close to his ear and Steve wakes up violently, full of adrenalin and only half-remembering what has happened to him. The sensory deprivation is like being plunged anew into the threat against him, all too conscious of what he is lacking, how vulnerable he is, and he jumps to fight rather than flight before his mind catches up. He can’t see, but he knows where the assailant is and he swipes out, messy but cobra-strike quick. He hears a quick intake of breath, feels his hand come grazingly into contact with cloth and flesh and there’s a sense of moving air and the sound of a retreat.

Then Steve remembers himself, remembers the state he’s in, and is angrily ashamed. The anger isn’t entirely at himself because what idiot woke him up like that, standing over a man who can’t see, but he’s mainly upset at how this is already making his control fray. He struck out at someone without even knowing who they were. That’s not the way that he fights.

“Steve,” the person says as he masters himself and now that he’s awake and listening of course he knows who it is. “I’m on your left, by your wardrobe.” Natasha’s voice is pitched to carry, calm in the way he knows to read as wary, with an odd inflection he can’t quite place. “I’m sorry, they sent me to fetch you and I didn’t think about how you were likely to react to me waking you the way I did.”

The note he is unused to hearing in her voice, Steve realises, is penitence. Natasha does not grovel, but this particular cadence to the way she’s speaking means that she’s owning up to a mistake. Steve’s heart is still racing towards a fight that won’t actually happen now, but his anger ebbs, sinking into the blackness wrapped around him until it’s more low-key and simmering, the on-edge tension he’s had since the last time he woke up into an entirely dark word.

“…S’okay,” Steve manages eventually. He points his face in her direction, or in what he hopes is her direction. Not being able to say, he’s almost painfully conscious of anything that does in fact make it to his brain, including the feel of cool air against a lot of his skin. Thankfully, he’s in boxers, but he doesn’t normally like to be unnecessarily unclothed in front of people, especially when she’s likely dressed and can see him while the same isn’t true in reverse. He tries not to show any discomfort though; he’s keenly aware of the indignity and exposure of his current condition and he doesn’t want to add embarrassment to that. “Make more noise next time though.”

“Noted.” Natasha’s voice is back to neutral and, darkly, Steve consoles himself with the knowledge that being able to see Natasha’s face has never guaranteed any degree of ability to know what she’s feeling. At least with her he isn’t hugely disadvantaged when it comes to working out what’s going on in her head since he’s likely just as clueless with his sight as without it. “The doctors would like to see you for some more tests, though.”

If Steve were to give in to despair, he might have bitterly asked what use more of the same would do. But he’s a soldier at heart if not in technical training, he’s someone who knows not to argue with those who know their field better than he does. And he now knows that taking out his frustration and shamefully growing sense of panic out on the messenger. Even if she did just give him a fright.

At least it was Natasha though. Natasha is fast and quick, quicker normally than him. He’s surprised he even grazed her. Anyone else, slow and humanly vulnerable, with the strength of the degree to which he’d lashed out…

Steve feels queasy and sits up to quash the sensation. It takes him longer than he would have liked to actively think his way through working out where his wardrobe is in location to him, his hesitation only winding him even tighter. He makes himself take a breath though and he stands up to take a few careful steps forward. He is measuring his own stride in a way he has never consciously done before – there is a difference between carelessly knowing the feel of his own walk and trying to reconcile that instinctive certainty with a loss of being able to see where he is going – and he hopes that quiet rustle of cloth was Natasha moving out of the way otherwise he’s going to be walking into her soon.

It was and he doesn’t and Steve slides his hand down polished wood, finds the handles and pulls. There’s another long moment when he has to puzzle out how to do this – does he bother trying to remember where he hangs his shirts and in what order? Does he just pick one at random – and the sheer laboriousness of it all makes him clench his teeth. Natasha doesn’t say anything. Whether she is tacitly choosing to stay quiet so as not to make him feel pitied or babied or sparing him the humiliation of watching at all he doesn’t know. But when getting dressed is already proving this much of a trial, he doesn’t quite have it in him to let that be yet another thing that upsets him.

He recognises his most casual shirt by how soft and worn the fabric is against his questing fingertips. He does up the buttons by feel and doesn’t bother with the sleeves, just rolls them as far up his forearms as they’ll go. Pants are easier because the differences between denim and canvas and linen and sweats are much easier to feel, but he makes himself sit down on the bed to pull them on because he’s already aware that his balance is off and he doesn’t want to risk falling over by standing on one leg and fighting with fabric he can’t even see.

Then Steve is at a loss because he can find his way to his sock drawer, but he can’t remember where he carelessly toed off his sneakers after his last work out and he’ll have to dig around in his wardrobe to find his dress shoes, then fight with the laces, but only after he’s worked out which goes on the left and which on the right and he’s keeping them waiting, he’s keeping everyone waiting--.

“Natasha,” he grinds out, hating the angry helplessness in his voice, but then there’s warmth precisely by his right elbow, the smell of soap and a sneaker being rested on top of his clenched fist.

“That’s the left one,” she says, still distantly neutral. “The right one is by your right foot.” Nothing about her suggests judgement or pity, and while Steve is currently too unhappy, too unlike himself to be grateful for that kindness on her part, he’s not ungrateful either. He’s just…he’s Captain America and he’s just spent more than ten minutes getting dressed.

Steve holds his shoe in his hand, sees nothing but black and actually misses the time when the Chitauri were the worst he had to deal with.

Not being able to see means not being precisely sure of who’s in the room until they announce themselves, deliberately or not. It frays his nerves more than he would have expected, not knowing how many people are around him. It’s worse when he thinks he’s finally got it sorted (Fury, Sitwell, Tony, Bruce, doctor, doctor, doctor and Natasha, unless she’s slipped out without him noticing which is a very real possibility) and then hears Clint say something low and grim and unintelligible a way away from him because it’s scary realising that he wouldn’t even have known that he was there if he hadn’t chosen to speak.

Then again, it’s all scary, starting with not being able to see his hand in front of his face and ending with not knowing if he ever will again. Steve has never seen the point of pretending that things do not make him afraid, not unless he’s rallying troops or staying strong for those much more emotionally fragile than himself. Being brave isn’t about not being afraid, it’s about accepting that fear and still acting nonetheless, in spite of its presence. Steve is definitely accepting the fear now. Can’t avoid it actually.

They’ve parked him on a chair like the kind they have at the dentist he’s been to exactly once (perfect, apparently, means you get a candy sucker) and the doctors are talking over him rather than at him, which isn’t at all reassuring because the internet is great, but it’s not a fancy education. Steve can keep up with the basics, but this has long since gone past his level of comprehension. Actually, it’s a lot like the moments before they injected him with the serum and bombarded him with vita-rays, him lying there, waiting, tense to attack a foe he can’t fight.

Except with the serum he might have died, sure, but he was doing something right. He was taking a risk. He was choosing to chase towards something better and brighter. Now it was something done to him, something taken from him and while he might get back what he’s lost…he might not as well.

They’re trundling something on wheels that rattles away from him when something (someone?) knocks on the edge of the seat, the way you would before entering a room. The deliberate clearing of the throat has Fury’s rasp and even if Steve is too grim to turn his eyes towards him he’s listening. Fury – who might, Steve realises, understand at least fifty percent more what he’s struggling with right now than most other people – doesn’t seem to care if he ‘looks’ at him or not, or at least he doesn’t insist on it. Steve thinks it’d take more than the lack of perfunctory eye contact to offend Nick Fury.

“We’ve got all of the science division on it and then some,” Fury says, matter of fact. Like Natasha, if he’s feeling sorry for Steve he doesn’t let it show in his voice. “There are a few outside contacts I’m going to reel in, but until then you’re off the active and emergency rosters, and you’re confined to HQ.” Steve’s hands curl into fists. “No, Rogers, we’re not fighting about this.” There’s an edge of warning in Fury’s voice. “Let’s not even pretend you’re any use to me in the field and I can’t have the press getting wind of Captain America being this seriously out of commission. No sight of you is better than them seeing that you have no sight.”

Steve clenches his teeth so hard they’d probably crack if they too hadn’t been serum-enhanced, but he makes himself see that Fury’s seeming cruelty is in fact precisely calculated. Given any leeway, any sense that he could help and he’d be bulling down that route. Blindly. Probably causing more trouble than he could compensate for with his help. Fury doesn’t pull punches, but the unavoidable point of all of this is that, pulled or not, Steve can’t see punches.

Through sheer force of will, Steve makes his hands relax. He hears a brisk grunt of approval from Fury and feels like a toddler congratulated on backing down from a potential meltdown. It does not make struggling to maintain the usual composure he has made himself known for any easier. “Stark, get your ass over here and shut up for a second. You too, Banner, they can do without you for five minutes.” Steve can hear obliging footsteps – he thinks the louder, slower ones are Bruce because Tony normally wears softer-soled shoes in bright, ridiculous colours and is more restless in his movement.

Someone female clears her throat in the vicinity of his feet and Steve thinks it can only be Natasha or Maria, and he isn’t sure the latter would think to announce her presence whilst the former knows better now. If that is Natasha there then surely that means Clint is within hearing distance as well since the rest of the team sans the absent Thor has been called over.

Certainly, Fury’s brisk words have the sense of a team meeting to them. “I’ve already sent forensics to the wreckage of the lab, but I want two of you to rendezvous with them there as well to see what you can make of it.”

“I’ll go,” says, surprisingly, Clint and there’s no hesitation whatsoever in how fast he spoke up, proving Steve correct about his presence. Not being able to see his face, or indeed any of their faces, Steve might be imagining the slightly long pause from everyone else after that, but he can’t be the only one surprised by the speed with which he’s just volunteered.

“I’ll come with you.” Bruce’s offer seems less out of the ordinary. “I want to see what they were keeping in that lab, sample whatever residues are still there. And if we can get a decent idea of Steve’s route through the sewer tunnels, I wouldn’t rule out him having been exposed to the neurotoxin there since he’s the only one of us showing any symptoms.”

“Fine,” Fury says, all curt, angry efficiency. “Take Sitwell with you. Hill’s already on site, take your orders from her and for God’s sake don’t argue about proper containment gear, yes Doctor Banner I mean you as well. The last thing we want on our hands is a Hulk flailing around because he can’t see.”

“Understood, Sir.” Bruce’s voice is dry. So is his hand when it rests briefly on Steve’s forearm and, in spite of the touch being gentle, he jumps slightly. “We’ll do what we can, Steve,” he says, and the words might be simple, but Bruce Banner is a cautious man who speaks in terms of confidence intervals and statistical hypotheses. He doesn’t promise that which he cannot deliver. Steve likes it better than unfounded optimism, which is surprising since his own usual way of cheering on a colleague in crisis is through staunchly insisting that they’ll fix things.

He thinks that, maybe, in the past he has not been as helpful as he has previously thought.

He hears Bruce’s fading tones asking “Do you think they have protective gear that’ll stretch to fit the Other Guy?” and Clint saying something grim and unclear in response. His hearing has always been good, but with it being his only real way of tracking people he’s finding it hard not to get distracted by multiple strains of conversation in the same room.

“Stark, if you’re still here, the recon teams are already bringing in some of the tech recovered from the lab wreckage.” Fury’s voice, at least, is distinctive and impossible to mistake for someone else’s. “Can you--.”

“Go and work my magic?” Tony replies breezily. “Why, Commander, I thought you’d never ask. Hang tight, Cap, they’ve got their best man on it. I’ll bet you a seeing eye dog that I find a useful lead before Katniss and Brucie do.”

Apparently, even if Steve can’t see with his eyes, it’s still automatic to roll them at Tony Stark’s unique brand of being a jackass. Strangely, he isn’t pissed off by the blind joke, just exasperated in a more champagne-fizz way than the smouldering anger that’s sustaining him now, and he waits for either the punch line or receding footsteps.

“…Stark, he can’t see your fist.” Compared to the neutrality she’s been sending Steve’s way. Natasha sounds scornful where Tony is concerned.

“I know, I know, I was just testing whether he’s turned into Daredevil yet. Apparently not. Try working on that, Cap.” Tony fires his words like machine gun bullets, raps what Steve hopes are his knuckles against his own and then squeaks off.

“Daredevil?” Steve asks.

“Costume down in NYC,” Fury answers. “Blind, apparently copes by using echolocation to ‘see’. But he’s also giving the cops in Hell’s Kitchen no end of grief, so he’s not top of my list to come and give you lessons.” Steve blinks, or at least he thinks he does. “If we’re lucky and that den of would-be terrorists hasn’t destroyed all the evidence, we won’t need him. Until we get any leads, though…”

“You want me in my quarters,” Steve says tiredly.

“I want,” Fury enunciates impatiently, “you safe. If that ends up with you in your quarters then so be it, but so long as you don’t leave HQ I don’t care. Just don’t knock anything breakable over.”

Steve hears a dramatic swish of cloth and decisive footsteps. In spite of not being able to watch Fury go, he keeps his face pointed in that direction, rubbing absently at where a cannula site is already healing. He wishes he could be as pragmatic about this as Fury is. Then again, Fury is actually beating him in the functional eye department right now. And Tony’s breezy optimism just sounds like his usual cocky belief that throwing all of his qualifications at a problem will always fix it.

“Would you like me to walk with you to your quarters?” Natasha asks, the last of his team still here, and her voice has leagues and leagues of polite distance in it. She sounds like a recorded message, or like the GPS in his car, just smoother. Impersonal. That’s the word. And he knows that Natasha isn’t a robot, just a tightly-furled person, but based solely on her voice right now it’s kind of hard to remember that.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Sure.”

“We’ve questioned the suspects we apprehended at the scheme.” Apparently, they’ve given up on making him come to meetings and are just sending people to relay the discoveries and developments to him as they come. It’s why Agent Hill is standing somewhere in the vicinity of his doorway and Steve is hovering in the empty space between his desk and his bed, strung out between his newly memorised number of strides between landmarks in his room.

“And?” It’s rare that Steve has ever had to prompt Agent Hill. She, like her direct superior, is not prone to reluctance. But he can sense her hesitation. It’s in the spaces between her breaths.

“…and we have reason to believe that we’re dealing with a modern branch of the group you knew as Hydra.”

Steve stiffens because of course. Of course. Not enough that Hydra took Bucky and Peggy and the Howling Commandos and his own century from him, but now they’ve taken his sight from him as well. “What did you get from them?”

Agent Hill’s pause is shorter this time. “The evidence for them being agents of Hydra came from the neural implants that were activated two minutes into each of their interrogations.” Then, with a crispness designed to clarify, “They’re dead, Captain Rogers. All of them.”

Steve’s face was only pointed at her to be polite when all he was getting from this conversation was her voice and the occasional noises she made when she shifted where she stood. Now he turns it away from her so that she can’t see him and the look of bitter disappointment he knows he has to be wearing.

“We’ll get Jarvis hooked up in here, Cap,” Tony is saying, frenetic and fast-paced, chattering to fill the empty spaces where Steve ought to be saying something and pretending he doesn’t notice the desperation in Tony’s voice. “That way you only need to say a command and he’ll sort if for you. Even if we just download him into your phone, that’ll be helpful. Gimme twelve hours, Cap, I’ll make this place so advanced that people will wish they were blind just so they could play with the toys I’ve got in mind…”

“I’m so sorry,” Bruce says lowly, “none of the samples were a match for what got into your system.”

(Clint, notably, does not come.)

These are the things that Steve, when he could see, has taken for granted:

Conveying his food from his plate to his mouth via eating utensils.

Spitting toothpaste into the sink without cracking his forehead against the mirror.

Shaving and only risking cutting himself once or twice if he’s being particularly clumsy.

His shield.

Having anything to contribute to briefings. If he’s even invited at all.

(A week passes.)

“Hey.”

Steve wasn’t expecting company this soon, not when Tony’s only just bustling out the door now, but he hears him make some glib comment about Natasha’s haircut and her chuckling at him before she announces herself.

“Hey,” he says back, grimacing as he rolls Tony’s latest gift around in his palm. She rustles obligingly as she walks in, a nice change from her usual, silent stalk, and he dutifully points his face in her direction. His questioning head tilt is natural though. “Haircut?”

“It’s shorter.” Steve thought he’d been imaging it at first, but he’s now almost certain he can hear when someone’s smiling. With Natasha and her subtle, shifting-sand nuances it’s more difficult to tell, but she’s not someone he can exactly ask to let him press his fingers to her lips while she speaks. “Also blonder.”

Steve whistles at that and wonders whether his mother would chastise him for doing that indoors when he can’t actually see that he’s indoors. Probably, he decides, since he knows he’s indoors, doesn’t he? She was a stickler for politeness like that. Natasha probably doesn’t mind though and he tries to imagine her blonde.

“It makes me look younger,” she supplies, like she’s reading his mind.

It still doesn’t necessarily make it easier to reconcile the picture of her in his head with the platinum shade he’s thinking of. Not many dames had had hair the colour of Natasha’s in his day and so she’s fairly unique, even now. It’s hard to imagine her looking like anyone other than the version of herself he knows, which is ridiculous really because he’s seen her don disguise after disguise. He’s seen her morph into a hundred different people, characters so far removed from what he knows of her that a simple hair colour change is the least of it. But those are roles, he supposes. Maybe it’s hard to imagine Natasha as herself with yellow hair. Length is easier. He’s seen photos of her as Natalie Rushman because Tony likes complaining about how she had essentially spied on him. Her hair was longer then and sometimes curlier. It was prettier. But he likes it short as well, a sunset-coloured aureole, practical in length and style if maybe not in colour when it comes to blending in.

That makes him wonder why she’s changed it. “Mission?” he asks, cautiously because as far as he knows she and the team are only working on tracking down Hydra, but he’s also aware that she gets assignments every now and then that the other Avengers don’t get the details of.

“Precautionary measure.” There’s a languid easiness to Natasha when she’s at rest, a relaxation that belies the constant readiness lurking underneath her skin. Steve hasn’t realised until now, with his image of her reduced to memory rather than anything in the present, that most of that leisure is confined to her voice. Just listening to her, he could almost believe that she was completely tranquil. “I’m not ideal to send in to deal with Hydra because I’ve had dealings with them before, but it was a long time ago. From before I joined S.H.I.E.L.D. I’m still a potential option if Plan A doesn’t work out.”

“Plan A?” Steve echoes and something mutinies in his chest. He’s aware that the active agents don’t necessarily have the time to fill in a (currently) non-essential team member on the minutiae of the mission’s progress, but feeling this out of a loop is nearly as frustrating as the number of times he’s barked his shins on thing or how humiliatingly difficult it is just to get dressed in the mornings. It isn’t considerate. It isn’t kind.

“Clint’s sniffing around the edges of that lead we had in California.” Steve is slightly mollified. He knows about that, a chemical company selling some of the rarer base compounds Bruce and the other scientists had found at the site of the lab. But only slightly because Clint is his. Part of his team. And he’s blind, but he’s not suddenly a civilian just because he can’t see anymore. As Clint’s field commander, he deserves to know when he’s deployed.

…as Clint’s friend, Steve wants the man himself to have been the one to tell him he was leaving.

“Oh,” Steve says. Then, more nonchalantly, “Is that why he hasn’t been around?”

‘Partly.” If Natasha ever does pause, they’re more measured than Maria’s. More deliberate. But she also doesn’t tend to use them as interjections; she’s not the sort to delay the inevitable, even if it’s unpleasant. “And bear in mind what Clint does for a living and what he might view his continued usefulness as an Avenger to depend upon.” She does pause then, but Steve thinks it’s mostly to let him catch up with her quietly spoken words. “Being around you doesn’t just upset him, Steve, it scares him, and Clint dislikes being afraid enough that he’ll run headfirst into any distraction offered to him.”

Steve has lived in close quarters with Clint and Natasha for over a year now and knows these three things about the two of them in particular and in terms of their profession: they know each other almost eerily well, they hoard any details about themselves and each other that could be translated into vulnerabilities like dragon’s gold…and they only choose to share details about each other with anyone else with a tacit understanding of the sign of trust that such a revelation is, yes, but also usually to make some point or another.

He closes his mouth when he catches himself about to say something and just…makes himself swallow any arguments he might have believed he had the right to voice. He doesn’t. Have any right to voice them that is. Natasha, arguably, knows Clint better than Clint does. And Steve is a little upset with himself that he didn’t think about how much blindness might scare a man known as ‘Hawkeye’ on missions.

…actually, he’s a little upset with himself in general. Over the past week, he’s grown more and more frustrated with the continuing darkness plaguing him. More than that he’s been angry, angry in a way he hasn’t been since his first meeting with Tony and that had at least been sharp, hot and ultimately temporary. This is like a malignancy, ever-present and malevolent, not quite aimed at anyone in particular. Just constant. Consistent. And hard enough to manage that maintaining at least curt politeness and the best attempts he could make at patient optimism when he felt particularly under scrutiny was all that he could manage.

Steve has been so wrapped up in himself – and at least partly justifiably so – that it hasn’t even occurred to him to thank the people around him for whatever allowances they’re making for him. And that particular brand of selfishness is something he cannot abide in himself, let alone in others, so he’s silently mortified in this particular moment of revelation. He has just been taking it as a matter of course when they get it right and snapping when they don’t.

No wonder no one is telling him the specifics of the investigation.

Steve is aware that being humbled now will not necessarily mean he won’t carry on being a colossus jackass when this loss of something so integral to himself saps at his ability to be himself, but he hopes he can hold onto this feeling. He hopes he can remember to remember that he may be the person worst affected by what Hydra has done, but he’s hardly the only one having to deal with the aftermath.

“Tony would say something insensitive along the lines of ‘I wish you could see your face right now’ if he were still here,” Natasha says and it’s her smiling voice again, with the warmth that’s more like the fleeting brush of fur rather than anything more constant and less ephemeral.

Steve wonders how his smile (rusty and a little awkward) makes his voice sound. “I’m surprised Tony isn’t still here, bugging me to go and use his latest piece of tech.”

“Oh?” Her footsteps might be a little unexpected, but they’re also extremely distinct, louder than he’s ever heard her move before. She’s telegraphing, Steve comprehends, giving him time to track her approach before she lays two cool fingertips against the hand holding the gadget. It’s an announcement of her presence, but it’s also a question. “May I?”

“Sure.” He uncurls his fingers. The slight weight of the gizmo leaves his palm without him feeling her touch him. Steve assumes the silence is her examining it, and the device is probably much easier to decipher if you can actually see it. It’s that or Natasha’s keen, supple intelligence that means it doesn’t take her long and she actually laughs softly when she turns it on and starts moving around if the beeps increasing and decreasing in their frequency are any indication. Steve wonders if she would have laughed if he could see her, or whether she would have just tilted her lips ever so slightly, the way he’s more used to.

“You’re going to sound like a car with assisted parking,” she tells him when she hands it back, soberly but with an undercurrent of amusement.

He makes a face in what he hopes is the right direction. “People are going to hear me coming from a mile off.”

“Is that necessarily a bad thing?” She asks that archly, but she also taps the device again – from the sharp, clicking sound of it, she uses just her nail. “You can always ask him to hook it up to an ear piece, so only you can hear it.”

“If he’s the genius, why didn’t he think of that?” Steve grouses and when Natasha huffs a laugh again he realises that in the space of ten minutes he’s heard her make more amused noises than he normally hears from her in a day.

He thinks Natasha’s version of being considerate is a strange and understated thing.

…that is not to say that he does not appreciate it.

There is a difference, Steve realises, between how Natasha treats him in any conversation or interaction they would have the same way if he could see her, and anything necessitated of her because of his blindness.

When she tells him who’s in the room or asks where he would like to be taken to after yet another meeting with the doctors or very precisely directs him to an object, to an empty seat, to a doorway, her voice is empty. It is neutral, it is robotic, it is free of anything but the clinical direction, the transmission of information or the query as to whether any assistance is necessary. She does not joke about it to make it less awkward the way Tony does or try and be gentle with her phrasing like Bruce. Nor does she entirely avoid it the way Clint effectively has. She says, asks or does only what is necessary. It is entirely impersonal and totally disconnected from their relationship and Steve feels like she’s two people, a faceless medical body that helps him cleanly and efficiently with what he needs and no more, and Natasha, his friend and teammate, the woman whose face he definitely remembers even if he can no longer see it.

As that person, she’s almost more animated than how she was with him before. Certainly, she has made the concession of replacing some of her subtle facial expressions with admittedly equally restrained sounds, but at least they’re audible. It means she laughs quietly rather than smiling and, in spite of what she has been trained to do and used to routinely exploit to make all of them (but Tony in particular) jump when she snuck up on them, she is scrupulous in making noise as she approaches him.

Is this her version of kindness, Steve wonders? Or is he just safer now that he can’t see her?

He can see what solace a woman taught from birth to shroud herself in inscrutability might find in the company of a blind man…

Fury barely waits for Steve to find and then lower himself into the chair to which Natasha has quietly and neutrally directed him in terms of number of strides and bearings before he speaks. “We have a name,” he says without introduction and Steve stops automatically feeling the edges of the chair with his hands for familiarity and sits up straight. It’s been ten days since Clint was sent to try and infiltrate Hydra, to try and chase up any leads, and Steve was getting ready to start climbing the walls by feel alone if they didn’t hear anything soon. Anticipation is almost sinfully sweet.

“Opheila Sarkissian,” Fury goes on. “Known to most of her subordinates as Madame Hydra.”

(“God, and I thought your codename took the cake in levels of angry feminist menace,” Steve hears Tony say, presumably to Natasha, whose silence surprises absolutely no one.)

Fury ignores that. Paper rustles. Presumably, the others are taking notes – either paper ones or on tablets – but Steve is freed from that particular responsibility. He’s left instead to tap his fingers restlessly against the table and frown as he readies himself to commit everything to memory. “Previously known as Viper, she was a costume in Europe. Ran with the Serpent Squad. She went off the map in ’98 when the rest of her gang were captured, but because her sole point of notoriety was wielding a bullwhip she was not classed as high-threat and investigations into her whereabouts were minimal.” The resentful quality of Fury’s voice suggests that someone is going to get an angry phone call for that particular bit of law enforcement laziness. “Barton says he was only able to make the connection because he’s actually seen her before – relax, Widow, he says he was fourteen at the time and is keeping his head down anyway.” (Steve wonders what Natasha must have allowed to show for Fury to pick up on her concern for Clint, though they all could have probably guessed at its existence.) “Aside from that, he’s only going on rumours. Hearsay is that she’s got ties throughout Africa and, allegedly, most of the time she was off our radar she spent in Japan. That’s likely how she fell in with von Strucker.” More paper moving. “…the only thing Barton knows for certain is that she works with poisons. Snake venoms, he thinks. And he says that just before he arrived, a would-be assassin tried to stage a hostile takeover and broke into her bedroom. No guards, but she doesn’t need them - apparently she threw something in his face.” Fury pauses and Steve isn’t even aware he’s holding his breath until he lets it out sharply at what the man says next.

“Clint’s seen where they’re keeping him now. Says the man can’t see a thing.”

For a few days, all of S.H.I.E.L.D. is humming with energy like an anthill. It infects Steve as well because this isn’t just their first real lead, it’s a good one. If this woman uses this venom as her trademark, then they just need to find her. It’s probably less simple than that, but Steve has faith in their scientists. He has faith in Clint. He has faith in all the agents who will work seamlessly to take her down.

Except the trail goes dead. Clint, given only a short time, has limited access and only to one peripheral base of the organisation. Sarkissian visits said base precisely once, for a meeting with its overseer, and then she disappears. Clint tries to find out where she’s gone to on von Strucker’s orders, but there’s only so hard he can push without risking breaking his already precarious cover.

Hope is dangerous, Steve realises, and despair is as black and as total as what this woman has done to him.

While the agents search for Sarkissian and the neurotoxin, the doctors and scientists still work sedulously to try and stumble on a cure in their own fashion. Nothing is working though. Nothing. And after two and a half hours spent in an MRI machine, fresh from the daily update on what they know about Sarkissian’s whereabouts which is to say nothing, Steve doesn’t just snap at Bruce when he asks how he is, he yells.

Afterwards, almost panting, Steve tries to use the adrenalin to hold off the shame that will undoubtedly follow once he calms down and remembers who he is. He and the Avengers have been a team long enough for any potential illusions to have worn off. They all know by now that Steve Rogers has a temper, even if Captain America might not. His first run in with Tony was evidence enough of this. But he’s usually only angry when he’s provoked and he hates what feeling so helpless does to him. He hates how it makes him lash out.

He hates that this might be forever.

He makes a frustrated noise and rubs his hand roughly across his face, feeling his eyes under his skin, the eyes that don’t even work and he hates them, he hates this, he hates feeling like he hates everything. But at least he recognises that feeling like he hates everything means that he probably doesn’t, that it’s just the anger speaking, and he certainly doesn’t hate Bruce – who is both unfailingly kind and someone who knows a lot about angry – not in the slightest.

“Sorry,” he mutters, tired in a bone-deep sort of way.

“There’s a stool to your left,” Bruce just says, mildly, and Steve hears water running as he finds the seat in question and slumps on it. “Here. Right hand.” Cool, damp glass touches his skin and even if Steve isn’t thirsty, he’s grateful for the gesture, and cradles the drink in his hands. “You know, we’re not doing all of this because we’re expecting you to fall down on your knees and thank us for our benevolence, right?”

The gentleness in itself stings at Steve’s pride. “You’re not doing it so I can scream at you either.”

“No,” Bruce says smilingly, “not quite, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.” He pauses. “I can’t pretend to understand, Steve…but if you ever feel like taking a shot at trying to make it so that I do, I’m always here.”

The water glass is exceptionally fragile in Steve’s hands. But it’s Bruce’s patient forgiveness that makes Steve feel like he’s the brittle one here.

“…thank you, Bruce. I’ll keep that in mind.”

In the end though, it’s not Bruce he goes to, it’s Natasha.

…and, actually, it’s less that he goes to her and more that she lets herself into his room one day, presumably sees whatever mess on the carpet that is the result of the mistake that started with him picking up one of his drawing charcoals, and then promptly makes him use Tony’s gadget to navigate the entire way to the gym.

“If they find a cure for your eyesight, then this will just have been sensory deprivation training, teaching you how to fight without being able to see your opponent,” she tells him, calm and implacable but Natasha rather than the mechanical, impersonal being she is when she’s guiding him around. “If they don’t, then you’re making a start on relearning how to defend yourself.”

“Natasha…” he starts to say.

“You think people won’t attack you because you’re blind?” she asks. “You think that hiding in your room will help us find Sarkissian sooner, or make it better if this is permanent?”

“Natasha!” he says, stung by her calculated cruelty, and he can hear Fury’s influence in her now. “What can I do to help? I’m--.”

“Useless?” she says coolly. “Only if you don’t put your guard up and try to stop me from hitting you.”

He glares at her, at where he thinks she is, but he refuses to be provoked into making a strike for her. It’s clearly what she’s aiming to do here, to get a rise out of him. He won’t give her the satisfaction because, yes, his patience is worn dangerously thing due to what the past two weeks have done to him, but he’s better than that. Or, more accurately, he thought she was better than this.

“You could have just asked,” he says grimly, settling into a ready stance.

“You’re going to need the anger,” she replies, simply, but then the attack seems to come from the complete opposite side he’s just heard that from and after that he doesn’t have time to speak.

She is very, very good at pointing out precisely where his weaknesses are. Steve has always had good reflexes, even when he was scrawny. The serum made what was already good exceptional. But reflexes only go so far and without being able to see her coming Steve only has sound and touch to go by. In a perfect world, his reflexes would be enough to let him block her when he hears her coming, but Natasha is fast like the devil. Hearing her coming doesn’t necessarily mean he’s able to block her and sometimes she plays tricks on him, like making a noise to his left and then attacking from behind. It’s frustrating, but in a far more immediate way than the miserable attrition of learning how to do the most basic things with any reliable consistency without being able to see them. All he can focus on is chasing after this will-o-the-wisp that he can’t even see, can barely hear, but definitely feels whenever she lands a blow.

To hit him, though, she has to be close to him. Even in the course of one session Steve feels his body catching on. He starts to be better at feeling that first whisper of even a hard blow and moving immediately. Not necessarily avoiding the strike but lessening it. He pays more attention to what differently angled blows feel like, to where her vulnerable points are going to be when she hits him in particular ways. He learns to take a light blow from her so he can land a harder one himself, and while he can feel the unforgiving marks she has left on him, he’s also fairly certain that she’ll carry some of her own.

But even if it’s profitable, he’s angry with her for trying to manipulate him. He doesn’t speak to her outside of professional meetings for two days and she, sensing that, avoids him.

(It’s that or, if she passes him in the hallways, she no longer makes her footfalls loud enough for him to hear her.)

His bruises have long since stopped hurting by the time they get word that Sarkissian is in Osaka, though he doesn’t know whether they’re still visible on his skin or not. He prods at them as he leaves the meeting room, Tony’s device beeping only lazily at his waist in spite of his restlessness and how that makes him walk faster, but this route at least is one his body has learned by now.

It’s a tentative lead, but hope still burns a violent path inside of him. He’s conscious of his increased heart rate, the way his energy levels have shot up. He can feel his pulse in his wrists, his thumbs, and he doesn’t think he was conscious of that before he had lost his sight.

He is restless and yet he is also caged and the sullen anger stirs within him again, red and black and burnt sienna.

Her footsteps, light but audible, are in themselves an open-ended question. He doesn’t know if they’re meant as an apology or in forgiveness. But he does know the answer to the question.

“Please,” Steve says.

It hurts when she hits him. She is all coiled, wiry strength. She is merciless when she aims for the points that will cause him the most pain and she does not hold back. Steve knows this because he has sparred with her before, when he could see her, and neither her speed nor her strength nor her viciousness have diminished at all.

But he has never sparred with her like this before, has never had to be quite so good at measuring her, gauging her, and he is learning. She can hit him three times in a second and then be out of reach again by the next. He can only rarely catch her at arm’s length. But if he takes those blows (because he was built for that, to be stronger than the rest, to take the hits that they cannot) and trades pain for grabbing at her when she’s within reach, then he can muscle her down.

She jabs at his floating rib, his throat, his ear. The last one makes his head spin, but the blow to his adam’s apple leaves her arm close to his and he traps it against his body. She trips him in return, but he doggedly holds on and through sheer abuse of his superior body weight and how much more surface area he has with which to smother her he pins her, though admittedly only because he rolls them into a wall he wasn’t even aware they’d ended up by.

Steve is pretty sure that he’s just smacked her head into the wall. She thumps him lightly in the shoulder though, in an entirely different way to how she’s just been hitting him and laughs. Almost silently, but audibly enough to let Steve know that she’s telling him he’s smiling.

The strike team sent to Osaka finds Hydra agents working furiously to put the city back to relying on nuclear energy again through three separate tiers of the Kansai Electric Power Company, but not Sarkissian. Hill grimly reports that the mission was not wholly a failure – they’re tracing the branches of this infiltration attempt to Kyoto and Kobe as well and this could have simmered beneath their notice for far too long without this intervention – but that, as far as Steve’s eyesight is concerned, it’s a dead end. Another one.

Steve thanks her, listens to her leave and doesn’t punch a wall. He doesn’t even shout his frustration to an empty room. He just sits on the end of the bed he now finds by touch and familiarity rather than sight, runs his fingers through his hair and wraps himself in the darkness he no longer needs to create by putting his hands over his eyes.

Despair is not something Steve has often felt in his life. Even in the face of certain death – and he saw it coming, watched as ice and water and the end of his life came rushing up to meet him – he committed. He knew he was doing the right thing. The hard, awful, terrible thing, but the right thing. This, though, it saps at him. It weakens him more than a scrawny build, asthma and a heart condition ever did.

It is not like Captain America to give up. It is not like Captain America to even contemplate losing hope and heart. But Steve…Steve doesn’t know how he can fight this darkness when it lies in himself. He doesn’t know how he can be any use like this.

He sits there and thinks about never driving a motorbike again. Never sketching, never seeing his team’s faces, never seeing his own again. He thinks about the loss of colour and of light and of careless, confident motion through a world that has no hidden surprises.

It was easier, Steve thinks, to have no future than to have a blank one.

Despair is a newly discovered corner of Steve’s heart, but it is not one he often dwells in. Even sightless he is stubborn and he cares too much for the people around him to give them even more to worry about. He senses it increasingly in them anyway though, in Bruce’s violent swings between quiet misery and trying not to sound like he’s pitying Steve and Tony’s increasingly self-righteous indignation pertaining to a problem that he can’t fix by throwing gadgetry at it. Arc reactors are all well and good for hearts, but they do diddly squat for damaged optic nerves.

His friends and co-workers are palpably starting to panic about what it might mean for the Avengers if Captain America never gets his sight back, so Steve is torn between staying out of their way and trying to make himself useful in whatever small ways he can. He might not be able to read reports, but his mind still works and he can offer advice on a situation if someone reads out the parameters to him. Jarvis is exceptionally useful in that respect, making up for a lot of the aspects of daily life that would have hindered Steve being functional let alone productive.

Still, until now, everyone has talked as if they’re going to find Sarkissian and her toxin and make this all go away. Now though, gradually, optimism is dying around him and Steve can smell it in the air, he can feel it in the way people are running out of words. He hears, unspoken, people wondering whether this is it.

Asking to be given the supplies to teach himself braille is meant to make him feel more independent.

Instead, it just feels like giving in.

Steve has been blind for a month and thirteen days now and Sarkissian is still invisible to everyone, not just him.

Communication with Asgard is always somewhat hit and miss and politics have kept Thor away from Earth until now, but all credit to him he comes as soon as whatever message S.H.I.E.L.D.’s scientists managed to telegraph to him gets through. Less credit to him, he brings his brother and Steve is acutely aware of how much he hates being in a room with Loki without being able to see him.

“There are…options that may not have occurred to your species that our sorcerers could explore,” Loki says in a voice like shed snakeskin and silk and smoke on the wind. It sets Steve’s skin to prickling and he has to work hard not to clench his hands into fists. Thor’s voice may be loud and booming, but Loki’s voice is like an entity in itself. It slithers around the ear in a way that Steve doesn’t remember from before. Maybe he is more sensitive to voices now. Maybe he just remembers the warnings S.H.I.E.L.D. gave him about the unknown harmonic qualities that linked an Asgardian’s voice and their own peculiar brand of magic.

“Magic,” Tony says flatly, and one-word sentences are rare for him, but he injects it with enough scorn and disdain to fill a book.

“My brother’s skills have always lain in finding novel ways around any obstacle,” Thor counters, his voice resonating with protective pride.

“Is that Asgardian for being a sneaky bastard?” Tony mutters, presumably to Bruce, in an undertone that Steve hears and that he doesn’t doubt Loki does as well.

Nonetheless, the being who once threatened all of mankind itself, carries on smoothly. Unperturbed. “Our magic transcends physicality in a way that may yet help the dear Captain recover what has been so tragically taken from him.” Steve knows he is not imagining the mockery in Loki’s cultured tones, but bites his tongue. The Asgardian is here to help. Supposedly. And presumably all at Thor’s behest. But being willing to hear him out is a sign of Steve’s desperation, not of his trust, and he is pathetically glad for Natasha’s uncharacteristically solid presence at his side. She’s saying nothing, but he can feel the small, clean lines of her where they match up with his. Once, she outwitted Loki. In a physical fight, with him wearing the shackles that are a condition of him being allowed inside Earth’s atmosphere, in a high security, hermetically-sealed room inside S.H.I.E.L.D., she will trounce him, of that Steve has no doubt.

(He still hates every part of this.)

“There are examples among my people of magics that allow sight to be had without a foundation in the flesh,” Loki is explaining. “Heimdall’s sight, for example, has little to do with his eyes. He sees the leylines of Yggdrasil with his spirit, the patterns of his own power, and so his vision is not dependent on anything as…mortal as what you Midgardians rely upon.”

“This is such dubious bullshit,” Tony says, but he’s not allowed to carry on.

“Enough, Stark,” Fury orders from across the room, but his voice carries like a bell. A deep, impatient, ‘mess with me at your own peril’ bell. “Hear me on this, Loki, you are only here because your brother has assured me that you might be useful, and that your probation with your own god damn family depends on his say so. You will be allowed to work your so-called magic in this room and this room only and so help me, if I sense any of your particular brand of trickery at play, I’ll teach you ‘Gods’ what real wrath looks like.”

“Understood.” Loki is tranquil and velvety smooth, sarcasm’s sharp edges wrapped impeccably in satin. “Now may I examine my patient please?”

Natasha stiffens by Steve’s side and, unthinkingly, he reaches for her wrist, which he inexplicably knows the exact location of. “It’s alright,” he tells her. “It makes sense that he needs a closer look at me.” If his voice turns grimmer on that last turn of phrase, everyone is kind enough not to comment on it.

She does not relax. The bones in her wrist still feel as fine and as delicate as spun steel under his fingers. But he hears her hair move and the quiet, deadly menace in her voice when she says “I still have room in that ledger for your name.”

“I consider myself duly intimidated,” Loki says in tones that suggest anything but. In spite of this, there are some metallic clanking noises and even a pneumatic sort of hiss and then Steve feels a presence – difficult to detect, but a little bit like oil on the skin left after washing a frying pan or the feel of the air before a storm breaks – glide towards him. “I am going to touch you now, Captain.”

He does and Steve only just manages not to flinch away. The touch itself is surprisingly neutral, just slightly cool fingers pressed lightly to his temples. But it makes something deep inside Steve rebel and now he does make those fists, focusing on the honesty of his own calluses rather than Loki’s lovely, soft skin and the sense of violation that has no concrete cause.

“Ah,” Loki says, just as inscrutable as Natasha at her most obtuse. Except Steve knows Natasha and trusts her even more than that. He’s got nothing on Loki and his teeth grind at his inability to read him. “The damage goes deep.”

“But can you fix it?” Fury demands.

“That is unclear,” Loki demurs. Steve’s temples are tingling uncomfortably under his fingers. He wants to pull away, but makes himself hold still. “There are no guarantees that a mortal body, even one so…gifted a specimen as that of Captain Rogers, could sustain the enchantments that would allow an Aesir to see without eyes.

“But you will try will you not, Brother?” Thor asks.

“I am,” Loki says lightly, “only here to help.”

“Bullshit,” Natasha says under her breath to his left and, in spite of her cussing, Steve can’t help but agree.

Thor and Loki return to Asgard. Bruce and Tony dive back into their labs for fifty-two hour stretches at a time. Clint has been gone for nearly all the time Steve has been without sight and now increasing numbers of S.H.I.EL.D. agents are being sent out as well, most notably Maria and Sitwell.

“Fury probably just wants Maria out of the way before she decides it’s a good time to stage a coup,” Natasha says lightly even as she ruthlessly presses down on Steve’s back, seemingly determined to turn him into as much of a human pretzel as she is. He manfully does not squeak at the pain, but it’s a close thing.

“Be nice,” he tells her sternly, or as sternly as he can manage when his breastbone is smushed against the floor and it’s a little hard to breathe because his stomach muscles seem ready to migrate into his chest. “Agent Hill is a professional.”

“Agent Hill,” Natasha retorts, “is ambitious, aggressive and dangerously good at knowing when her superiors are standing on politically shaky ground. It’s how she’s not that much older than me and is still several clearance levels above me. The only reason she didn’t stab Fury in the back over the Battle of New York business is that she actually agreed with him for once and she demonstrates honour at the strangest times.”

“You sound like you’re jealous,” Steve soberly informs the place he thinks her head is located. If he’s comfortable enough to let her torture him without him being able to see it coming then he supposes he’s comfortable enough to tease her as well. “Did she get the job you wanted?” He knows that Clint and Natasha prefer to work with each other above all others. Being this long without her partner must be tough on the both of them.

“She needs to remember what field experience is like,” Natasha says, surprisingly easy. Her hands are mercilessly firm against the small of his back, cooler than the sweaty skin found there where his shirt has ridden up. “And somebody needs to stay here to stop you from walking into walls.”

Steve laughs at that. Actually laughs. Then has to wince because she’s got him straining at his body’s limit to stretch against the grain, but the amusement is a pleasant feeling to the usual bitterness whenever anyone tries to make a joke about his blindness. Natasha isn’t just anyone though and her subtly unrepentant wickedness feels affectionate.

In days lacking the specific structure of when he was on active duty, these now daily sparring sessions have become something of an anchor in Steve’s life. Fighting blind is routinely frustrating and usually physically punishing, but their sparring is close to the only thing he actually has to look forward to. It makes Steve worry a little because it’s probably bad that the best part of his day is allowing a woman a foot and a half shorter than him to pummel him within an inch of his life, but nothing else makes him feel as if this - any of this – is getting better. He’s stumbling through braille lessons with fingertips that don’t feel sensitive enough and is already much better at simply not making a fool of himself in ordinary, daily tasks, but morality aside his strengths have always been rather based in the physical. His body has always been his tool for putting into action what he feels inside. Everyone else treads gingerly around him, treating him as if he’s frail or breakable or disabled.

If anything, Natasha hits him harder now than she did before he went blind. She pushes him hard, but she’s pushing him towards something. Technically, he’s fighting her, but it feels more like he’s fighting his blindness itself. Chasing a scrap of silk and steel around that has no qualms about hitting him full in the face even though he cannot see it coming does more for his ability to be aware of his surroundings than groping his way down unfamiliar corridors does. It trains him. It hones him. And there’s a strange sort of trust involved in knowing that Natasha will hurt him if he does not stop her, but that she’s doing it all for his own good.

She does not touch him kindly, but it is from kindness that this madness of theirs stems. Under her razor-edged tutelage he is not wholly vulnerable anymore, and her hurting him and showing him how to avoid being hurt…it’s making him better. Well, maybe not better, but less diminished. Sarkissian has taken his sight from him, but she has not taken away his fists, his strong arms, his reflexes. With Natasha goading him onwards Steve is learning to utilise more pins, locks and throws. He was never precisely careful with Natasha, for she is a creature of coiled steel and indomitable, fluid grace, but now he knows he needs to fight as furiously as possible just to stand a chance against her with the odds so stacked against him. As soon as he catches a hold of her he has learned not to waste a second as he muscles her down, tries to contain all of that sinuous deadliness, and he does not hold back. In this and only this can he move forwards with all that he has left to him, and their fights leave him filled with both grim, satisfied defiance and a burning desperation for more.

“A guide dog would be less of a waste of unrelated skills,” Steve points out, groaning as she finally lets him straighten back up again and stand. Changes in orientation are, by now, usually lacking the dizzy, standing on the edge of an unseen precipice feeling that they had possessed when the darkness had been new. Here in the gym especially his body has adapted to feeling its way through the world the best and that improvement has Natasha’s unforgiving handprints all over it. “Aren’t they missing you in the field?”

“Probably.” Natasha doesn’t sound sorry. “But you’d miss me as well. A guide dog just wouldn’t be as nice to you in your state as an invalid as I am.” She says that, almost sweetly, and then promptly sweeps his feet out from under him. He goes down hard, but he grins the entire way and flips back up for more.

If the gym is his safe haven then everything outside of it seems designed to test him. He spends less and less time in the ops room because he feels so out of place, so in the way, while everyone bustles around him with their jobs that he has to ask someone to give him the blind-friendly specs on if he wants to keep up with what’s going on. And now that he knows his way, sightless, around the corridors of the base he’s feeling increasingly caged. He misses fresh air. He misses confidently being able to walk into somewhere new and automatically know how to avoid falling over things he cannot see. He misses freedom and the absence of a sucking, demoralising resignation as the days tick by and no word on Sarkissian trickles back to them.

The lab requests fewer and fewer hours of his time as all of their options slowly prove fruitless. More and more, Steve feels as if they’re waiting desperately for either the Asgardians or the team delegated to finding Sarkissian to turn up gold. If they’re waiting at all. Increasingly, though no one ever says it aloud, he can feel people’s hope first dwindling, then dying, then going out altogether.

It’s hard for Steve himself not to join them.

“Cheer up, buddy,” Tony tells him in a superficially jovial voice, but Steve hears the layers now and there’s no avoiding how singularly unhappy his friend is even if he’s masking it with his usual devil may care attitude because Tony Stark apparently needs to pretend to be immune to feelings. “Did I tell you I was designing you a cane? Well I am. And we can upload Jarvis into that as well, and I’ll hide one of those swords inside of it too. Very League of Extraordinary Gentleman. No one will even notice you can’t see them when you’re running that into their gut.”

He chatters away, his kindness so very different in form and function to Natasha’s, but Steve appreciates it all nonetheless. Everything his team has done for him he appreciates. But it isn’t enough, none of it is, and he wonders at what point someone with more authority than him will call it and say that they’re not a team anymore…

He asks Natasha for more sessions in the gym, sometimes even three in a day. The rest of the time he spends in his room, silent and hunched, knowing that Nazis and aliens and even having been born slow and small and sickly had not managed to drive Captain America to bleak despair, but that this has.

Then the Asgardians touch down.

After Thor embraces him, boisterously, Steve has to subtly try and realign himself with where he is in the medical lab again since he’s now somewhat turned around. “Your three o’clock, two strides forward,” Natasha says, quiet and clinical, and he shoots an appreciative ‘look’ in her direction even as he turns and finds the chair precisely where she has said it’ll be. He sits down and tries not to be too obviously bracing himself even as anticipation thrums through him like an electric current.

“Captain Rogers, I’m going to attach the electrodes now,” one of the doctors says cautiously and then takes forever about it, too ginger with his touch as he presses endless sticky things to Steve’s head, his chest, wrapping something almost uncomfortably tight around his upper arm.

“Done?” Fury asks impatiently and the doctor must have nodded, forgetting that Steve can’t see and would like to know all of what’s going on around him, because he carries on. “You’re up then, Loki, and for the last time--.”

“Director Fury, you and yours have impressed upon me numerous times the awful fates that will befall me if I deliberately harm your dear Captain in any way,” Thor’s brother enunciates silkily. “Be assured, I have no desire to further some other mortal’s campaign against your team of heroes.”

“Meaning that if he’s going to screw us over, he’ll want to take all the credit,” Steve hears Tony mutter and no one corrects him. Steve can’t blame them. Were it not for the violent, burning hope lodged somewhere between his mouth and his heart, he would be suspicious as well. But the chance that the Asgardian’s magic will work, that he’ll be able to see again, he’ll let even Loki lay hands on him.

“Now, Captain Rogers,” Loki is saying and those cool, soft hands are touching his face without warning again. Everything in Steve rebels against letting an enemy this close, but he makes himself stay still. “I cannot predict how this will feel for you. There may be discomfort. There may be pain.”

“I can take it,” Steve says and even he can hear the tightness in it. “Just do it.”

“As you wish,” Loki says cordially. Then…nothing. It feels anti-climatic and Steve is holding himself warily, bracing himself the way he does when Natasha is circling him on silent feet, waiting for something, anything. He makes himself breathe evenly, not wanting to look a fool for holding his breath, and concentrates solely on the gossamer touch at his temples that reminds him chillingly of sinking into icy water. He waits and waits and nothing, so he opens his mouth to ask what is going on and then pain, sharp and electric, pain and a shock through every nerve in his body as if he’s been struck by a lightning bolt and then white brilliance exploding behind his eyelids--.

And then nothing, just the usual blackness, except Steve is falling into it and he knows no more.

“It didn’t work, did it?” Steve says unnecessarily when he wakes up and opens his eyes onto nothing, but he needs someone else to confirm it for him. If there’s actually anyone in the room because he can’t even tell that.

Luckily (debatably) there is. “No, buddy,” Tony says in a voice thick with remorse. “Your EEG started going berserk and you passed out. But you should have seen it--.” Tony cuts himself off and Steve, grappling with his own crushing disappointment, shakes his head and makes a carry on motion because they are so past accidental figures of speech like that being the things that hurt him now. “It was pretty cool. Natasha went right for Loki and did her thighs of death thing, had him on the floor and in a lock before your monitor had even had time to properly scream at the scientists who were meant to be making sure your brain wasn’t about to fry like an egg. You probably owe her having any of your senses left, actually, she reacted that quickly. And, for the record, Norse God ‘magic’ and the Super Soldier serum are like anti-BFFs. They just don’t mix.”

“So they’re not going to try again?” Steve asks. There’s a stone sitting in the pit of his stomach, heavy and bitter. He feels sick with disappointment and the crushing sense of ‘it didn’t work, nothing will work, this is it, this is it, this is it’.

“We can’t risk it, Steve.” He knows Tony is miserable because that’s it. No challenging optimism, no science talk, no claim that his genius mind and his money will make everything better. Just an unhappy desolation that he hasn’t heard in Tony’s voice since just after Coulson died and the weight of a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Steve.”

“Yeah,” Steve says thickly. “Me too.”

The morning that Steve wakes up to his phone’s alarm and Jarvis announcing the date as being that precisely two months on from when he first opened his eyes to only blackness, Natasha somehow wangles permission to take him off site. He’s bundled into the front seat of a car (he thinks), driven somewhere vaguely west of HQ (he thinks) and not given any chance to argue with her about any of it (of this he’s definitely sure.)

When they get out of the car, the echo from the noise of Steve closing the door means that they’re indoors, but in somewhere big, with far away walls. Steve does not really feel the cold, but he can tell the ambient air temperature here is cooler than that at S.H.I.E.L.D., so he suspects…a parking lot? A warehouse? Natasha, who is normally precise in a detached way about describing any unknown surroundings to him, gives him no explanation as to where they are.

“Practicing,” she replies implacably when he asks what they’re here to do. He frowns at her – at the general idea of her – and gets…nothing. Not a laugh to show she’s smiling, not a word, not any sort of sound that might count as an acknowledgement.

The nape of his neck prickles. “Natasha…” he says and then she kicks his legs out from underneath him.

He turns a fall into a tumble, into a recovery, and ends up back on his feet, upright and furious. ”Natasha,” he objects again, more upset by the betrayal than actually hurt by it. He might be protesting, but she says nothing, just drives an elbow into his solar plexus and lands a blow on his elbow that leaves his arm numb and dancing for a moment.

Steve grits his teeth and swipes at her when he thinks she’s too close for comfort, fingers barely grazing fitted cloth before she’s cuffing him around the temple and dancing away again. “Stop it,” he grinds out and settles back on his heels in frustration, crossing his arms to make it clear he’s taking no part in this. “I don’t want to do this today. Why on earth did you drag me here just to knock me around? Enough, Natasha, that’s--.”

Her heel drives into the meat of his thigh, relentlessly enough that he grunts in pain. Steve doesn’t want to be goaded into fighting with her though and stubbornly keeps his arms close in to him, however much the thick ache in his leg makes him want to wince.

“This is what it might be like now,” she tells him, and her voice rings with certainty. Even if it’s level, it’s not flat. There’s a difference, a difference Steve has only learned to recognise when he has nothing else to go on save for the cadence of her voice, and it’s the sole sign he has that she’s speaking to him and not his blindness. Or not just his blindness and the allowances she makes for it. “This could be it, the thing that you just have to deal with. You’re Captain America, Steve, and people are always going to come after Captain America regardless of whether you can see them or not. Some will even come because you can’t see them. And they’re not going to be kind and stick to environments with which you’ve trained yourself to be familiar.”

“So you’re giving up on me then?” And Steve hates how upset those words sound, how they’re a sentence that would never have occurred to him in the before time. They’re plaintive and pathetic and resentful. They’re everything he used not to be.

“The exact opposite, Steve.” The contact against his shoulder is a touch, not a blow. He only realises that after he’s responded with the automatic, frantic speed that’s become a habit if he wants to stand a chance against Natasha, but she doesn’t fight the hold he’s put her in. The deceptively delicate-feeling line of her wrist is perfectly relaxed even though Steve can feel the way his own fingers dwarf her entire forearm and her pulse is steady underneath her skin. “If this is permanent, then every new place is an unknown quantity for you. You need to start being able to respond, fast, wherever you are, whatever anyone throws at you.”

“And your way of teaching me this is by attacking me?” Steve wants to be angry about this, but there’s such a strange--…he doesn’t have a word for what’s in Natasha’s voice actually. She is not a gentle person. She is capable of calmness and smoothness, of an undramatic sort of compassion that makes no apologies and asks for no praise. Her kindness can slip past a person without them seeing it at all, so maybe that’s why Steve is suddenly more aware of it, turned on its ear as his world has been. He’s paying attention now. Mostly because he has no choice, but also because Natasha is not a gentle person and she has a way of zeroing in on what a person needs whilst usually entirely bypassing what they think they want and Steve is learning now that he’d think less of her – so much less of her – if she coddled him.

She is unyielding when it comes to the aid she gives, unswayed by hindrances such as pity or short-term mercy, and yet Steve can hear the fierce, determined, possessive drive behind her cool and collected actions. She isn’t willing to let Steve go and thus this is what he needs to do – what she’s making him do – to adjust. To learn. To get better. Natasha cares enough about him in the future to not give him any leeway in the present and, yes, anger. That’s what Steve would like to feel now. But in the face of that, the best he can summon is a certain peevishness that mostly centres around why everything has to be a puzzle with Natasha and why she can’t just say what she means in the first place.

…He realises what an idiotic thing to think that is about half a second after it grumbles its way through his mind and that rueful realisation does more to drain his frustration – about her, about Sarkissian, about the future he will live but might never see – than anything else so far. A world in which Natasha is plain-spoken is far more terrifying and baffling than having to adjust to blindness. Only a fool would wish for such a thing and, contrary to his appearance, Steve tries not to live up to the stereotype people believe of tall, muscled people with personalities more straight-forward than otherwise.

(And, in her own way, maybe Natasha did just say what she meant. After all, even Steve got there in the end, didn’t he?)

“We couldn’t have just gone for a walk or something?” he finishes, but there’s no real heat now and he’s the blind one here. Natasha’s observational skills and senses haven’t taken a beating the way his have. Steve knows she can see the reluctant, rueful but still present smile trying to bend his mouth in the opposite direction to its previous curve.

This close to her, her wrist still trustingly lax in his hand, Steve can feel the soft huff of laughter as well as hear it, and so he knows she’s smiling. It’s disorientating actually, touching her. Until now, it’s been limited to sparring, to bouts of furious motion and feeling as if he’s fighting a wisp of smoke that can still strike like steel. Being able to feel her – her breathing, her laughing, every casual shift of her perfectly balanced body – is almost overwhelming in the way it feels like too much sensory information now that it’s all he has to go on. He drops her hand, abruptly, on the heels of that quiet chuckle and is aghast by how off-balance her warmth makes him when it isn’t being used to pound him into the ground.

“Hitting you is much more my style than taking a walk,” Natasha says lightly, nothing about her tone indicating that she’s noticed his acute uncertainty. But Steve doesn’t have any illusions. This is Natasha. She outstripped him at seeing everything and then some even before he’d been made blind.

Whatever she sees in him, she responds to it by kicking him (gently, for her) in the shins and Steve can almost see the amused, challenging look she’s throwing his way now, can read it in the whisper of cloth when she folds her arms and stands just so, hips square and uncompromising, still with hair like fire in his mind’s eye even though he knows different. “Later on, we’ll let Stark build you all the gadgets he wants because if there’s anyone who can give you the world back it’s him, but for now your choice is between giving up or learning how to get by somewhere that isn’t the S.H.I.E.L.D. gym when someone’s trying to kill you.”

“Well, when you put it like that…” Steve drawls, not hugely thrilled by any of those prospects. Nonetheless, he sighs, stretches some of the worst ache out of the arm she hit earlier and makes a beckoning motion steeped in resignation at where he can hear her breathing.

The most Steve had to worry about in the gym was running into a wall. Well, running into a wall and Natasha. Here, it’s an obstacle course of things designed to make him as clumsy as possible, an entire blank portion of ‘here be dragons’ that he’s stumbling to fill in even as Natasha relentlessly pursues him. His feet get tangled in a clinking, metallic heap of something – chains, probably, maybe wire mesh? That slows him down enough for an opportunistic Natasha to clap cupped palms over both his ears – not enough to bust his eardrums, enhanced as they are, but it makes him dizzy nonetheless. He’s still groggily shaking his head when he’s knocked on his butt by a heavy blow, several actually, which means Natasha has probably just done that thing where she runs up him like a he’s a wall, leaving her crouched like a jungle cat and him on the ground. His ears are ringing enough from her strike that he’s finding it hard to hear where he’s coming from and trying to retreat just ends up with him walloping his shoulder against something unforgivingly solid. A corner? A pillar? Steve is almost missing Tony’s little proximity alarm, but that’s tucked into his belt and he’s too busy trying to scramble away from both Natasha and any dangerous bits of where they’re fighting to get it out now.

Besides…even with as horrifically imbalanced as this fight is, tech feels like cheating. Not against Natasha, but against himself.

She’s right, he needs to learn how to deal with this.

He needs to learn how to be useful again.

‘Useful’, Steve thinks around the ringing in his ears, isn’t him running around like a headless chicken and injuring himself without Natasha even having to do anything in the first place. What he’s doing now isn’t what Natasha has been helping him learn within the relatively kind environment of the gym. Has he forgotten all of that so easily? Steve sets his jaw, irritated with himself and – in spite of the stacked odds, the unseen dangers hidden in every step he takes, the trained agent who won’t pull her punches for his own good – forces himself to think.

When Natasha launches her next volley, Steve ‘lets’ her drive him backwards, retreating and retracing his previous, clumsy steps. Even when she throws something and only whistling air lets him duck in time. Miraculously, he knows where the pillar he smashed into earlier is, just from something subtle changing in the echoes of his footfalls and his admittedly excellent memory for spatial awareness. Now he has something solid at his back and there’s one direction now at least from which he’s fairly certain Natasha won’t attack. That’s something.

And Steve can work with something.

Defending himself blind, Steve is realising, is about doing what he can to try and force an opponent to fight on his terms rather than theirs. He can’t see them. He can’t change that. But being blind doesn’t change the strength of his arms or the surprising suppleness of his body. In terms of pure physicality it doesn’t change the quickness of his reflexes or reduce the number of fights he’s been in over the course of his life. What people seem to forget about him is that most of those were ones where he was always the underdog, small and physically outmatched, every single time. He’d fought then, scrappy and stubborn. And he’s fighting now, bigger or not, blind or not, and if he can’t chase an opponent then he’s going to make them come to him. Because when they’re close he doesn’t need to be able to see them to fight them.

Close, with an idea already of where she’s coming from, Steve can feel the air Natasha displaces. He can hear her moving, however sleek and quiet her clothes are designed to be, however light her footsteps are. He milks every advantage of the serum that he still has left to him and an enhanced ability to take even small sounds and triangulate their origin very quickly is one of them.

She attacks from the left and, astonishingly, Steve blocks it. For one, straining moment his forearm lines up with hers and, in a contest of strength, his is always going to win. So it’s no surprise that she immediately darts away from an outright push-pull battle like that, but Steve knows she’s within his range now, knows there’s only so many ways she can have gone. On a hunch he lunges forward and there she is, eeling away from his imperfect grasp, moving in a way that ought to defy the human spine so that she can thump him right between his shoulderblades. It knocks some of the breath out of him and Steve misses his shield fiercely. Even if he can’t sling it around anymore it can still serve as protection. As, well, a shield. There’s no reason he can’t make new uses for it in this new style of fighting in the future, no reason he can’t take all that Natasha’s giving him and reinvent himself if this is indeed his lot for the rest of his life.

Right now, though, Natasha grounds him sharply in the present. It’s hard to waste neurons on thinking of much else as he grapples with her, or tries to anyway. This is how their fights always go. If he wants to stand any chance of winning he has to grab a hold of her, keep her firmly within his range and stop her from running rings around him. She can’t hurt him unless she comes close (though Steve is very grimly not thinking about how that only applies to hand to hand, and what ranged weapons will end up meaning to him) but he can’t really tell where she is until she does so. When they do come together it’s furiously, both of them fighting for the upper hand in quick, ruthless flurries of motion, his strength against her speed. Is this what she wanted him to realise? That, so long as he’s smart about it and doesn’t let his own weaknesses stab him in the back by his own hand, a fight here can be the same as a fight in a place he knows as well as his own heartbeat?

…it’s not the same, though.

Or, rather, Steve isn’t the same. It’s not the new setting, or fighting Natasha. It’s Steve himself, on this day and in this place, finally facing up to the concept that this might be forever. Him and the blackness, him and relying on his ears. Him and everything being a mystery, being lost in every new place he’ll ever visit again. Him and every vulnerable spot he has, the ones he’s now expected to defend without even seeing what’s attacking them.

Natasha moves fast and presses him hard, but Steve can’t lose himself in this fight, even if it was clearly intended as a distraction. He just can’t forget the bleakness of his future and the death of hope. That’s what hurts the most, not the blindness itself, but having to accept that. Steve has gone toe to toe with every disaster in his life and he knows he’s stubborn, knows it has nothing to do with what the serum did to him, that it’s just the way he is. He’s meant to be someone who never gives up, who’ll go down fighting, who has gone down fighting.

He can’t pilot this plane into a frozen ocean. He can’t do anything, that’s the problem, nothing to change the inevitable anyway. He can adapt and do the best he can, but Steve has had the ground ripped out from underneath him, an entire portion of his world just cut out of his consciousness. He is no longer all that he was and he doesn’t know what to fill that gap with, that empty place where his sight used to be.

Tony would pour ingenuity into it, try to replace what was lost with metal and code and his stubborn refusal to accept human limits, but Steve believes in souls and what God designed men to be. He isn’t sure that computers can make up for that.

Bruce would smooth the jagged edges of the wound and teach serenity, teach acceptance of the things that cannot be changed and the burdens that must be shouldered. But Bruce’s weakness is also his strength, however unwanted, and Steve has neither the mind of an academic nor the madness of a monster to increase in compensation for the loss of the other.

There’s no ‘would’ with Natasha though. Natasha is teaching him, showing him, forcing him to take what he has left and to make the most of it. To be cunning and resourceful. To turn his back on an old purpose that no longer suits and to forge himself anew. He knows a little of her past and so is keenly aware that she understands, intimately, what it’s like to start again. She has helped him without pity or condescension, but more importantly without any of the doubt that even he has within him. Natasha is more certain of Steve’s ability to still be something than even he is and that’s what he’s increasingly conscious of in the long, strained moments between when she’s evaded his grip and when she attacks him next.

Steve is so aware of her every move that it almost hurts, and it’s not just that he’s stretching out with every sense he has left to him to try and work out where she is, what she’s doing. It’s more than that. Because, these days, he’s always aware of Natasha and it’s strange. Jarring. She’s someone who lives in the shadows, who should be impossible to pin down, but it took being plunged into darkness for Steve to even come close to seeing her. It’s not just the physical hold he sometimes manages to latch onto her with when he’s sparring, it’s what she’s willing to give him in the form of audible smiles and the difference between what she says and what she means. It’s the increasingly clear understanding Steve is growing, at least where her actions towards him are concerned, of how she does what is right rather than what is kind.

It’s how she’s clearer to him now blind than she ever was before.

Has she let him in? Or has he just become better at paying attention? It plagues Steve as he waits fretfully for her next attack, to the point where he only blocks it half-heartedly when it does come and gets smacked in the face for his lassitude. Something more pressing than a potentially blackening eye weighs on him though, squirming somewhere in the space between his heart and his gut. Even invisible to him, Steve is realising, Natasha is radiant. He doesn’t need to see her to depend on her and when did that change? When did he start wanting her to be doing this for him rather than the team?

Natasha is grace and death and violence wrapped up in perfect, controlled discipline. Defending against her requires strength, training and total concentration. Distracted by his own mental flailing Steve stands no chance and he goes down, a knee driving into the small of his back and unforgiving hands yanking back on his wrists, making his shoulders scream.

He doesn’t fight it. If this is indeed it, then Steve has no illusions. He knows that he can’t be an Avenger anymore, even with what the serum has left him. (And he also suddenly realises why Natasha has insisted that they train today, that it’s because she knows this to and knows she only has so long left with him and is therefore forcing him to take what he can from her before S.H.I.E.L.D. sends her back to saving the world in secret and leaves him without her merciless form of kindness.) They might not be able to take being Captain America away from him, but the Avengers are a team and Steve can’t see what he could offer the outstanding people he has trained and fought and lived alongside. He respects them too much. So he can accept that. He doesn’t really have a choice about it, but he can accept not being one of them anymore, for the good of the team and what they do.

What he can’t accept is losing this, the charged space between him and Natasha, waiting for her to hit him and knowing that every strike is designed to make him better than he already is. Knowing that, even blind, Natasha thinks he can still be better.

What he can’t lose is her and her relentless faith in him.

“Natasha,” he chokes out and Steve is mortified. Frustrated too, with futility and the future and how it was never meant to be like this. It’s too much for one day, the realisation that this darkness could be forever and that he’s been so very blind (oh God, he hates every little bit of the English language) about the difference between feeling something and knowing it. Too much to grasp, too much to process and he almost wishes he’d never tipped over into the comprehension of what it means to feel as if he needs-wants-loves Natasha because it had been easier (sort of) not knowing it.

But you can’t unthink a thought.

You can’t rewind a revelation.

You can’t change a bad thing that happened to you, however much you try.

It is a stumbling, graceless epiphany though and, mostly, Steve is ashamed. It feels like desperation, like reaching too hard for something he doesn’t deserve, and entirely at the wrong time. Natasha’s helping him, or trying to, and he’s rewarding her by being a fool, incapable of lasting any longer with her closeness, her fierce grace, the agonising awareness he has of everywhere they’re touching.

It doesn’t last long. The touching. The moment he grits out her name she lets go, like any responsible martial artist, but the sudden absence of the pain in his shoulders leaves him aching inside nonetheless. “Are you alright?” she asks and he hears the frown in her voice because she was hurting him, yes, but in a tolerable, negligible sort of way. It is not like him to tap out this quickly.

None of this is like him, that’s the problem.

“Yes,” he says.

“No,” he also says.

“God,” he says, with feeling, and at least that’s honest. He puts his head in his hands. Covering his eyes doesn’t change the darkness surrounding him, but it’s a habit. It doesn’t make him feel any better, but it doesn’t make him feel any worse either and like this he can almost pretend he isn’t here, that he isn’t a tangled mess of who only knows what in the body of a super soldier. A blind super soldier.

Natasha is still behind him and still quiet, not saying anything, but her presence is warm and solid. It would be reassuring if the comfort he takes from her isn’t the problem in the first place. He screws his eyes shut tighter, feeling his eyelashes against the heels of his hands. “If this is permanent, I can’t be an Avenger, can I?” he hears himself ask.

Natasha is a deliberate, precise person, not given to dissembling simply for the sake of it. Her lies, when she gives them, are flawless. Steve has known this from within five minutes of meeting her. So when she hesitates just a second or two before answering he knows it’s an answer he’s not going to like. But he also knows it’s going to be a real one.

“Not in the field,” she says and the fact that Steve can hear the sadness in her voice is almost painful for him, the agonising awe of her being this transparent with him. “Not when we have to be able to respond to everything.” He knows this. He does. But it’s the first time anyone has been brave enough to say it out loud to him and so he flinches anyway, her honesty more painful than any strike she has ever landed on him. “Oh, Steve…” Natasha says quietly, her compassion unfamiliar in a verbal sense even if he’s always known that it’s there in here however undemonstrative she usually is. Then she’s touching him, small hand careful and impossibly gentle on his shoulder. “You might not be able to fight with us, but you can fight for us. Stopping being a field agent doesn’t mean that you’ll stop being Captain America as well.”

“I know. I know.” Steve bites the words out. His chest is tight in a way that has nothing to do with the memories of asthma, of never being able to catch is breath. “It’s not that, it’s…”

He can’t put it into words. He just can’t. He doesn’t know how to explain that charging ever onwards towards the right thing to do, towards a better future, is all he’s ever known how to do. He doesn’t know how to say that nothing has ever made him feel as if he’s doing that more than being an Avenger. But most of all he doesn’t know how to put into words this sense of needless, wasteful loss and how he’s struggling to fill the empty spaces left inside of himself and how when everything else is being taken away from him she’s the closest thing he has to an anchor now that even his confidence in himself has been stolen. He doesn’t know how to say all of that, any of it, without sounding pathetic.

Except this is Natasha, and if he’s thought something then she was probably six steps ahead of him in comprehending it and so already knows. It’s Natasha and so Steve supposes he doesn’t need to say it out loud because Natasha knows people better than they do themselves.

Instead of speaking, Steve lays his big hand over her small one and doesn’t even fumble. Then - because it’s as if he has nothing else to lose today, not when unfamiliar despair is Captain America’s latest foe – he turns and reaches for her. And Natasha…Natasha lets him do it, lets him search around with his hand until the angles of her face are cradled within the cage of his palm. She isn’t smiling though. He can feel that through his skin, the way the muscles in her face are carefully neutral. Even blind she’s felt the need to retreat from him and Steve feels…watched. Regarded. Assessed.

This is an intimate moment and yet Natasha’s hiding from him. Steve hates that, this sense of being the only vulnerable one here (and, for once, he’s not talking about not being able to see), so he chases down that hard-won honesty from her the only way he knows how.

Her skin is soft beneath the calluses on his fingers. When he leans in he can smell the sandalwood in her soap and the honey in the tea she drinks each morning. He cannot see her, but Steve reads her through the senses left to him, through touch and smell and the sound of her breathing. He doesn’t need to see her for her to be real and for him to want every inscrutable, unfathomable inch of her.

She pulls away.

“I’m sorry.” The words are immediate. So is his mortification. This isn’t like him, not at all. For all that he has a temper he’s normally one of the steadier members of their team. Mood swings don’t suit him. Overstepping doesn’t suit him. Yet here he is, yanked up and down by despair and frustration both, but more than that he’s upset that he’s taken liberties. That he’s imagined Natasha’s kindness, or made more of it than is actually there, and has disrespected her somehow with his desperate attempt to hold onto something to which he clearly has no claim. “God, Natasha, I’m so--.”

“Steve, shh, no.” And Steve does in fact shh, but it’s almost out of surprise because this is the first time he’s ever heard Natasha sound so regretful. It’s more than that though because, as subtle as she is, Steve has been left to study her solely based on her voice for two months now and he knows her defaults, her baseline emotional levels. The quiet distress in her voice is like raw agony from anyone else and it throws him. “You don’t need to be sorry. You’re not wrong. It’s not the same between us anymore.” Her words, just on their own, might have been reassuring, but her resigned tone is something entirely different. After two months of wishing and hoping and praying for a cure, Steve knows better than to fall into hope’s bitter trapfall.

He’s right not to be optimistic. “I can’t though,” she says.

What else did Steve expect? It still aches though. It still hurts. “Is it because-.”

She knows he’s talking about him losing his sight and doesn’t even need to let him finish. “Not in the way that you think,” Natasha says swiftly. Her voice rings with certainty, but it softens again after she hesitates and then her warmth shifts – not entirely away, but just so that they’re lined up shoulder to shoulder rather than face to face. Her weight is familiar now, but it also makes him ache wistfully in an entirely new way. “Not because I think you’re broken. Never that.” Her fingers brush reassuringly against his. He doesn’t try to hold onto them though and they’re gone almost immediately. “But there’s a power imbalance here. I don’t want you to want me as a coping mechanism. And I don’t want to want you because I’m attracted to having an advantage over you.”

“Natasha!” Steve says, slightly appalled by what she thinks of him and of herself. “You think that’s why I like you?”

“I think it would make psychological sense,” she replies, quick and sure. “And I know I’d always be worried, in the back of my mind, that I was taking advantage of you, and you deserve better than that.” Steve starts to protest, not even sure what he’s precisely about to say only that he’s objecting, and she actually presses a finger to his lips. Probably because he wouldn’t have seen any other hushing gesture she might have made. “Steve,” she says quietly in a voice like steel wrapped in silk, in a voice that makes it very clear even to a blind man that she will not be swayed on this one, “I exploit my marks. I don’t want to do it with the people in my life. I refuse to do it.”

“…but what if it’s real?” Steve’s lips brush against her fingers and they shift again. He feels the light, ephemeral touch against his temple. He hears her quiet sigh.

“What if it’s not?” Natasha asks quietly. “What if it is just because you can’t see and the scientists manage to fix it? Where does that leave us then?”

“What if—,” Steve asks, bitterly, “—they don’t and we never even try?”

Natasha hesitates that little bit too long. Not that it is significant in itself, the pause, but rather that her phone rings jarringly into it. Steve bites his lip in frustration and feels her pull away, feels her answer it. Feels her stiffen from supple, dignified melancholy into a she-wolf on the hunt.

“When?” she asks in a clipped voice, her Black Widow voice. “How fast can you get me there?” The person on the other end of the line is speaking very fast and the connection is poor. Steve can’t hear the exact words, but Natasha clearly can because she’s standing and pulling on Steve until he does the same. “I can pass for Belova, yes, but not for long, Clint. We’ll have to move fast, there won’t be much time before Sarkissian realises she’s meeting with the wrong Black Widow.” A pause. “Yes. I can get Sitwell to take me to the hangar now.” An even shorter one. “You too, Clint. Stay put.”

Her phone beeps and Steve knows it’s an emergency because Natasha – who has always been scrupulous about giving him direction, but never manhandling him, leaving him his own physical agency – is dragging him towards what he presumes is the exit. “Sarkissian is meeting a Russian agent in Morocco,” she says in curt, brisk tones. Natasha is entirely sterile again and Steve is acutely aware of what she turns off inside of herself to do the job that she does and that this, them is no longer her immediate priority. (He wonders if it ever was?) “There’s a narrow window where I can infiltrate the meeting. The Russian agent was in the Red Room with me. I still know all the codes.” Steve thinks of past conversations, of blonde hair, and wonders how long S.H.I.E.L.D. has been sitting on this as a possibility. “I need to leave now, Steve. Sitwell’s on his way to pick me up now and someone will come with him to take you back to base.”

Steve doesn’t seek to delay her. He doesn’t protest that it might be dangerous. But he wishes – fiercely and desperately – that he could see her now because he’s never realised how hard goodbyes are when you can’t look someone in the eye and etch them into your memory. Just in case. And he runs a clumsy hand down her shoulder, her arm, until he finds her fingers and squeezes. Maybe a little too hard. His control isn’t great right now, not with everything surging and shaking within him.

If he’s hurting her she doesn’t show it. Natasha just squeezes back, hard and brief and controlled, and then fresh air is hitting him in the face and Steve can hear car engines roaring nearby.

Natasha doesn’t say goodbye.

Steve doesn’t wish her good luck.

Good luck would imply that he wants her to succeed in her mission to find Sarkissian and the neurotoxin that has taken the light away from him. And he does. He does. But mostly he just wants, needs her to come back.

When Bruce takes the bandages off three days later, the light drives daggers into his eyes. But he can see and even the agony is like a benediction.

Natasha finds him in his room when he is revelling in the simple pleasure of having picked out a shirt and knowing for certain that it’s blue based on something other than his mental map of his wardrobe. Maybe he can see again, but he has not forgotten what he learned when he was blind. No one moves quite as quietly as Natasha does so when the door opens behind him and that’s all he hears, he knows it’s her.

This is it.

Steve steels himself, closes his eyes for a single heartbeat and then makes himself turn around.

She was right. The blonde hair does make her look younger, and it clings too sharply to the curve of her skull. Steve misses the gentle, ocean wave of her longer hair, but mostly he’s just missed the sight of her. He drinks her in, battle-stained and straight-backed and serious-eyed, and thinks with a pang that he’d wanted her less when he was blind. Or, rather, he’d wanted her more desperately. More unrealistically. Now he just feels like he wants her all the more hopelessly because he knows that seeing her, looking at her, standing on equal ground with her just puts her back so very far out of his reach.

Looking at her hurts…

…and yet he doesn’t look away.

Neither does she and Steve has missed her clear-eyed grace, her inscrutability. She walks towards him and he can read nothing about her because she’s got her veils wrapped back around her. She is, once more, unreadable and distant. Touchable but not reachable.

(He wonders if he will ever hear her laugh again and have that be the sole focus of all that he is.)

(He wonders if sparring with her will ever fill him with that wild, triumphant elation again.)

(He wonders how she will break it to him that it was his weakness that she wanted and not who he actually is, and whether victory will still feel a little bit like a loss in the end.)

Then, slowly, Natasha smiles softly and stands up on her toes. The world turns dark, but imperfectly so. Steve can still see slivers of radiance through the gaps in her fingers where she’s cupping them over the top half of his face. He shivers at the contact, but his lips curve and he – of his own accord – closes his eyes.

She laughs quietly, just the once, before she kisses him.