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The burner phone sat on top of the table across the tiny room, almost seeming to mock her. She had tried, more times than she could count, to tuck it away into a drawer or toss it out a window — she’d even contemplated smashing it with her foot — but she couldn’t seem to bring herself to actually do that. She had never cared about objects before. Mementos of the past meant nothing to her.
But this was different. They had given this to her.
So instead it sat on the table, always in her eyesight, reminding her again and again and again about how much she had lost and how much it now hurt to know she was never going to have any of that back again.
•••
Of everyone she had ever worked with throughout her entire life, they were the easiest to sneak up on. She figured that out on accident the day she came back into D.C., a few months of trying to find herself only leaving her more confused about where she belonged. She knew from the research she had done while she was away that Sam and Steve went for a run together every morning and often ended up back at Sam’s place after.
So she slipped inside while they were out and waited for them to get back.
She could tell instantly from the towels on the floor and the coffee mugs in the sink and the newspaper clippings and laptops on the table that Steve was staying with Sam now. She didn’t blame him. His apartment was infused with memories of those days on the run, and she wasn’t the only one who needed to put SHIELD and everything it had stood for behind her.
They had come home not long after she arrived, opening the door between laughter and fast talking. They hadn’t even looked around to see if anything had been tampered with, and she scowled as they both startled at her presence, hands to their hearts and gasping as though she had popped out of nowhere and shouted “Boo” instead of being perched literally on top of the kitchen table.
“Have you learned nothing?” she groused at them, as they both stared at her in shock. “This is why I had to come back. You’ll get yourselves killed without me here.”
•••
The phone was heavy in her hand, as though it were physically weighing her down. She still wasn’t sure how he’d found her. She hadn’t left any trace of where she was going. Hell, she hadn’t known herself where she was going when she’d left the hospital in Germany. She had just gone, trying to get as far away from the people who were sure to come after her as she could.
She suspected Tony might have found her first. It wouldn’t have completely shocked her if he had tracked her in some way and then told Steve. But if it meant he and Steve had talked, even once, then that was a good thing.
She had come home one afternoon to her non-descript apartment in the small Irish town she thought was safe enough to find an envelope on the floor. Inside was the phone and the note in the handwriting she recognized instantly. She put the phone on the table and tucked the note in the nightstand by her bed, even though she wished she could tear it up.
She had learned long ago not to get attached — to anyone or anything. Possessions were never meant to be things to hold on to. They were never things to need.
But sometimes she liked to take the note out, to unfold it, to push away the wrinkles, to look at his sloping print.
Call if you need us. was all it said.
She would never call. She couldn’t. They had made their choice, and she had made hers. The Avengers, and everything they had ever been, had ended in an airport in Leipzig. She had lost the closest thing to a family she had ever had, but it was a family she never should have had in the first place.
She was born to be alone, raised without a home. She was never supposed to need a family, need people to love, much less want them. She just had to learn to live again without it all.
But the phone in her hand, and the connection that it promised, was proving to be harder to erase that she could ever have expected.
•••
Steve’s head shifted and he scowled at her for probably the tenth time in the same amount of minutes. They hadn’t even made it to the highway yet, due to the excess of traffic in the Manhattan streets.
“Eyes on the road,” she said. She was analyzing the GPS instructions on her phone, wondering why they hadn’t agreed to just use the jet Tony had offered them.
“Feet off the dash,” Steve said, like she hadn’t just said anything. “I don’t care if you called shotgun. Sam is sitting up here if you can’t behave.”
Natasha looked away from her phone, one eyebrow almost disappearing into her hairline at that. “Did you really just tell me to behave?”
Behind them, she heard Sam snort and then quickly try to cover it up.
Steve wasn’t fazed. “I tried to tell you to behave. You’ve yet to listen.”
Natasha stared at him. Part of her thought she should be offended. But the other part wanted to prove Steve right. Instead of removing her feet from the dash, she planted the soles of her feet directly on the glove compartment. She let a smirk cross her face.
“Natasha,” Steve said.
“Steve,” she answered back.
He looked like he was searching for the right words. Probably trying to question her ability to help him lead a team. Or wondering if he needed to send her to her room when they got to their new compound.
She waited.
Finally, he just sighed and shook his head.
“If the world could see you now,” he said.
She grinned and dropped her feet from the dash.
“You love me,” she told him.
“That’s what you think.”
•••
It was almost fitting that the nightmares that had once haunted her so much but had subsided sometime after they defeated Ultron would return full-force now that she was alone and on her own and no where in any position to be committing the crimes she had grown up committing.
The nightmares hadn’t gotten easier to deal with in the time they had been away. She woke up, each time, breathing heavily, sweat on her brow, heart pounding in her chest, hands shaking. A couple times she felt tears she couldn’t remember shedding in years sliding down her cheeks.
That was how she found herself holding the phone one night, staring at it. There was only one number programmed in.
She took a breath, part of her hating herself for needing this, and dialed.
Steve answered on the second ring. “Natasha.”
His voice was warm and safe and just as she remembered.
“I need a friend,” she whispered into the phone, the words choking into existence even as she feared she shouldn’t say them.
But the voice at the other end understood.
“I’m here as long as you need,” he said without question, “I’m not going anywhere,” and she gripped the phone tighter as she sank on to her bed, her lifelong a world away but there with her when she needed him most.