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Looking back, she realized it had begun when he smiled at her. Her breathing went shallow, her heartbeat quickening. Of course, she had passed it off as an adrenaline rush due to the fact that they were on a very high-stakes mission.
The pair had ducked behind a counter, crouched on the floor to keep hidden. She’d had her eyes closed, listening closely for movement in the next room. Upon opening them, she made eye contact with Steve, who’d been watching her. He’d given her a genuine smile, one that made the corners of his eyes wrinkle. It said that he was happy to be back in the field, that it was Natasha he got to work with. The moment was short-lived, for the next second, there were gunshots. Natasha rolled out from behind the counter and fired at the enemy.
---
The first time she realized she had feelings for him, he was talking about just how great his date with Sharon was. Of course, Natasha had been the one to suggest that he ask her out.
The pair was flying a SHIELD jet from Germany back to headquarters and he would not. shut. up. It was all “Sharon this” and “Sharon that,” and frankly, it was getting on Nat’s nerves.
“-so then I picked her up at seven and she just looked stunning. She’d done her hair and makeup, not like she normally does, but like she was ready for a night out, and she had on this blue dress. God, she looked gorgeous…” The sound of Steve’s voice was far more annoying than usual. Natasha had tuned him out by now, though her grip on the controls tightened any time the star-spangled man with a plan complimented Agent 13.
“-she just looked so beautiful-” Natasha very nearly swerved the jet off course.
“-and she’s got a great sense of humor!” She pushed the buttons for the navigation controls far too hard.
“-her eyes are so /blue/!”
“Steve, would you please shut up about Sharon?”
“Hmm? What? Oh, okay…” Steve seemed a little put out.
“Sorry, just trying to concentrate on not crashing this jet.” She sounded apologetic.
“Oh, right.” The sad puppy voice did not go away.
Natasha sighed. “Uh, where did you guys go for dinner?” She tried to put some curiosity into her voice, feeling bad for making Steve feel bad.
“I took her to the-” And off he went.
Meanwhile, Natasha listed all the ways she could maim or kill Sharon without Steve finding out.
---
Natasha finally accepted her feelings for Steve when she thought he was going to die.
SHIELD had sent them after a group of terrorists who called themselves “The Dragons.” Natasha had spent a good fifteen minutes laughing at it when she and Steve were being briefed. She’d spent another fifteen minutes laughing when she found out they consisted mostly of sixteen to twenty year old boys.
“Agent Romanov, are you going to be able to take this mission seriously, or do I need to assign someone else?” Nick sounded furious, though she could see his lips pulling up into a smile.
Nat coughed before responding. “Yes, sir. I can take it seriously.”
Fury had assigned a small team to join them on the assignment, one gloriously devoid of Sharon.
Upon arriving in Manhattan, Steve and Natasha led their teams in separate ways. The men were hiding out in a warehouse just down the street from where they’d landed. Steve took his team around front, planning to distract them. Nat led her team around back, ready to surprise them from behind.
Almost immediately, there was the sound of gunshots and screams.
About halfway through the battle, Natasha heard a gunshot followed by a familiar grunt. She’d spent far too much time training with Steve over the past few months and essentially had his voice memorized. She finished drop-kicking the man she was engaged with before spinning around. Steve was on the ground, his shield nearly halfway across the room. She sprinted to his side and dropped to her knees to check for wounds.
A small pool of blood was beginning to form in the curve of his stomach, another near his shoulder. Steve coughed, blood spraying out of his mouth as he did so. He lifted one of his hands to his stomach, feeling his wound, and groaned in pain. His eyes were trained on the ceiling, not seeing anything.
“Steve? Steve, c’mom. Get up.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. Her eyes shone with tears that she refused to let fall. Her hands were pressed to his stomach in an attempt to keep him from bleeding out. Despite his strength, the supersoldier serum couldn’t save him from blood loss. “Steve, please. You’re supposed to survive. You’re supposed to be the one who survives these things.”
It took her a moment to clear her head. Generally, she was great in a crisis, but this was Steve. She wasn’t supposed to be taking care of Steve. He wasn’t supposed to be injured. Once she’d cleared her head, she tore off the bottom of her shirt. She used the too small piece of fabric to try to stop the bleeding in his shoulder. Normally, she’d try to dig the bullet out to prevent further damage, but she didn’t want to hurt him. For all she knew, the thing could be broken up into pieces, maybe against an artery that she could damage if she went in without any knowledge of the wound.
Natasha tore her eyes from Steve’s bleeding form to glance around the room. There were agents and terrorists alike, laying dead all around her. She took a breath and crawled to the nearest body, not bothering to see if it was one of her own. She stripped it of it’s jacket and crawled back to Steve. She balled up the fabric and pressed it to his stomach. Steve let out a groan, his hand flying up to grip her wrist.
“Tash… Hurt…” His speech was weak, barely reaching her ears among the sound of gunshots and shouts. She began to panic.
“Hey, c’mon. Just look at me. You’re fine, just focus on me.” She moved one of her hands to his cheek, turning his head to her. It took a moment, but his eyes focussed on her. “See? There you go…” She paused, looking up to see the rest of the fight. It was mostly over by now, or maybe it had just dispersed. It definitely looked like less people, even counting the corpses. She didn’t want Steve to notice this, though; she definitely didn’t want him to slip into shock. “Right, have I told you the story of how I met Clint?” Steve shook his head, his forehead creasing. He was shaking now.
“Right, well, you know that I was a spy, well, am a spy, but was a spy for the other side. SHIELD sent Clint after me, to kill me, y’know?” She moved her hand from his cheek to hold his hand; it would twitch every now and then, most likely due to the pain. “Anyway, when he was just about to do it, we got into a sort-of fight and nearly ended up killing each other. But after that whole ordeal, he decided that my skills were too useful to get rid of- hey, you listening?” His eyes had moved back to the ceiling. Steve nodded. Natasha continued. “He decided to bring me back to SHIELD, to see if I could be useful. Of course, Nick was furious. Clint always completed his missions, so this wasn’t exactly normal. It took a few years before anybody trusted me enough to let me train. Most of the time they just made me file paperwork, which was useless because SHIELD keeps everything important on computers… Anyway, a few years later, Fury gave me my first mission. He assigned Clint to supervise, which was annoying. Clint should never supervise. After that, they kept giving Clint and I missions together, I think just because we were a good team…” She trailed off, lost in her memories. It was only a few seconds before she snapped back to attention. Steve’s breathing had grown shallow.
“Steve, you okay? Are you with me?” He didn’t respond. Only seconds later, his arm spasmed, pulling free of Natasha’s grip. “Steve, c’mon buddy, you’re fine.” She took a breath before examining the room around her. There was no one left, either they were dead, dying, or fleeing from the scene. She sighed and pressed the button on her communicator.
“This is Agent Romanov, we need a medical team immediately.” She gave them the coordinates to their location, and then prepared to wait.
“Steve, hun?” She pushed his hair out of his face in an attempt to calm him. “Steve, you’re gonna be fine.” Nat had no idea what to say other than his name. It didn’t seem like he could hear her, even in the slightest. “Right, okay…” She began to hum, mostly to calm herself, but also in an attempt to sooth him.
It lasted a few minutes before she began to worry; SHIELD was normally quick to get medical teams out when called, so why weren’t they there yet? Steve had stopped moving, his eyes closed. Natasha began to sing her tune, though it was more of a whisper. It was an old Russian lullaby, one she had not sung since she was a kid. But it was all she could do to keep herself from running from the scene. As the minutes passed and as she sang, tears began to fall down her cheeks, landing lightly on the ground in front of her.
Just as Natasha was finishing the lullaby, she heard the sirens. If she believed in any god, she would have praised them. The sirens were music to her ears. Maybe- hopefully, Steve would live.
It wasn’t long before the medical teams came in and moved Steve into an ambulance. They left Natasha there, mostly because she couldn’t move. She had stopped crying, but her body shook with silent sobs.
Not long after the sirens faded did Fury show up to move Natasha.
“Agent Romanov…” Fury kept his distance. Natasha looked up but didn’t move from her spot. “Come on.” Nick stepped forward and offered his hand. Nat took it and lifted herself up. Nick put his arm around her and walked with her out of the warehouse. “He’s a fighter, Natasha. He’s gonna make it.” But she didn’t believe him.
Later that night, Natasha sat in the waiting room of the hospital, her hands still soaked in Steve’s blood, her body still covered in dirt. She’d been there a good twelve hours, silently cursing Steve for making her fall for him and then getting himself fatally wounded.
---
The first time Natasha said her feelings out loud was the next day, in his hospital room.
The doctors had spent all night patching Steve up- removing the fragmented bullets and replacing his blood. The supersoldier serum had allowed his healing process to be much easier and quicker, thereby making him fit for visitors the next day.
Fury had taken first dibs, though he’d had to go through Natasha first. He, technically, had better reason, for he had to talk to Steve about when he’d be fit for duty, what kind of medical measures he’d have to take, and what the time off meant for missions. When Fury left the room, he nodded to Natasha and left, carrying a folder with paperwork. Nat had immediately jumped at the chance to see Steve, but was barred by a pair of nurses.
“Ahem, we don’t want our patient contaminated,” the one in bright pink scrubs said, nodding pointedly at Natasha’s hands and clothes. “You oughta go home and shower, change your clothes, before seeing Mr. Rogers.” Her voice was firm. Natasha didn’t want to start a fight after 48 hours without a minute of sleep.
“Right, of course.” Natasha smiled politely, though her face immediately fell into a grimace as she walked away. She was about halfway down the hallway before she turned back, only to find that the nurses were still guarding the room. She smiled curtly and continued on her way. Muttering to herself, she took the elevator to the next floor and went into the first bathroom she saw. Very casually, she washed the blood off of her hands, followed by the dirt from her clothes. She examined herself in the mirror, then proceeded to wash the dirt off of her face. She looked again and tied her hair back so that it was in a relatively short ponytail at the back of her head. “Good enough…” With that, she went back to the floor below.
The nurses had left the door, only to sit at the nurses station about two feet away. Natasha slid into the room before they could stop her and was greeted by a groggy-looking Steve Rogers. He must have been trying to sleep after Nick left, but had only gotten about halfway there.
“Tash? That you?”
“The one and only.”
“Mm, what’re you doing here?”
“Making sure you’re not dead.” She smiled at him before shutting the door and casually locking it. “You look better, hmm?” She gave him a brighter smile and slipped into the chair beside his bed. Steve nodded and tried to push himself into a sitting position, though he groaned as he moved. Natasha put a hand on his chest to stop him. “Hey, it’s all good. No need to get formal. It’s just me.” Steve nodded again and slid back down, wincing as he did so.
“You look worse than me,” he commented casually as he eyed the dark circles under Nat’s eyes and the cuts covering her hands.
“Pfft, I’m not the one who almost died.” She tucked her hands under her legs as she said it, mostly to keep his attention on him rather than her.
“Please, I was barely hurt.” He gave her a genuine Captain America joking smile, though it was weak at the edges. “Seriously, you okay? You don’t look like you’ve slept for a week…”
“I was here last night, waiting for word on you…” She shrugged in an attempt to pass it off as unimportant; Steve didn’t buy it.
“Somebody could have called you. I’m sure Nick would have, as soon as he got word.”
“Hey, it was no trouble. Do you think I stay places I don’t want to?”
“Well, no…”
“Exactly.”
“But-”
“Hey, stop worrying about me. How are your wounds? They were pretty bad yesterday.”
“Nearly healed, apparently. Doctor says I’ll be out of here by Wednesday.”
“And you’ll be coming back to work on…?”
“Fury says I can come back a week from my discharge date. You’ll have to find another partner for the next week and a half.”
“Nobody’s half as good as you, though.”
“Besides you, of course.”
Nat rolled her eyes. “Right, I should go… Let you get your sleep.”
“Mmm, see you later?”
“‘Course.”
Natasha stood to go, getting about halfway across the room before turning back. Steve was already asleep, snoring heavily. She walked back to the bed and pressed a kiss to his forehead. “I love you, dork.”
---
The first time she told Steve how she felt, he overreacted a bit.
“What do you mean you love me? Like, platonically? Or like, ‘Hey, I’m really glad I have you around on missions to cover me and the amount of times you’ve saved my life has turned you into a valuable asset so I suppose I love you the way I love kicking butt and shooting guns’?” Steve’s voice was joking, though he held back more than he normally would have.
“Steve. I mean I love you. Not like shooting guns or kicking ass, but like… love. Like…” She’d already said it once and it was becoming increasingly harder to force herself to word it again, in a way he could understand. “Okay, you know when you’ve just gotten through a really hard winter of straight snow storms and hardly a day of sun? And then there’s that first day when it’s not super warm, but it’s a nice kind of warm? With the sun shining in your eyes and on the trees and a warm breeze blowing? And there are a few clouds in the sky, but they’re the wispy kind that are there to add texture but not sadness? And you don’t have to wear sweaters and boots anymore, but you can wear jeans and a t-shirt? You know that feeling you get when that day finally comes?” Natasha wasn’t looking at him now, just at his shoes.
“Yeah, I know that feeling…”
“Well, that’s the feeling I get when I look at you. Or think about you. Or hear your name. Or see the exact shade of your eyes in some distant object. And it sucked at first, but now I’ve told you and now I’ve accepted it…” She trailed off, looking like she had more to say but didn’t want to voice it.
“Tash-”
She cut him off. “You don’t have to reciprocate these feelings or anything. Honestly, I don’t expect you to. You’ve got Sharon. And I promise this isn’t gonna affect my ability to work missions or act normal around you. I just thought you ought to know, y’know, in case…” She shook her head, trailing off again.
“In case…?”
“In case you do happen to feel the same way. But don’t feel obligated.”
“I, uh…” Steve seemed at a loss for words.
“Right, well I’ll just go then. Uh, this was nice. I’ll see you later. Have fun with…” She made an all-encompassing motion at him and the room. Nat gave him a short smile before turning to walk away, tucking her hair behind her ear as she left.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid.” She mentally face-palmed as she walked down the hallway.
---
Their first date consisted of conning a conman and then nearly being blown up.
Steve had been assigned as head of the team for the mission and had gotten permission to choose who he worked with. The first person he went to (even before he asked Sharon) was Nat. He’d very casually asked if she wanted to be his right hand gal. She’d very casually declined, telling him that she wouldn’t be reduced to his sidekick. He’d rolled his eyes and asked her to be a sort of co-captain, to which she’d happily agreed.
The mission had gone over well. They’d managed to get all of the information that SHIELD needed. The explosion had been highly entertaining for the both of them, though not so much for the rest of the team, or the now dead conman.
Upon arriving at SHIELD headquarters, Natasha and Steve had broken into a fit of giggles. The reaction was long overdue and therefore far more obnoxious than it would have been. Fury, Sharon, and Phil gave them glares as they laughed. Natasha nearly fell over a chair, though Steve caught her before she could. She nudged him in the gut as a way of saying thank you for saving her face. Steve nudged her back, knocking her over the chair anyway. She simply laughed louder.
---
The first time they kissed, Natasha had just returned from a mission.
Steve had spent a good amount of time worrying about her. Worrying for Steve Rogers meant pacing almost constantly, bothering Fury for updates, and attempting to get in contact with Nat. Pacing only agitated him. Fury refused to give him any answers and had eventually locked him out of HQ. Nat never answered his calls, most likely because she was focused on her mission. Still, he continued to worry.
Natasha was gone for a whole three days before returning. To Steve, it felt like two months. He’d asked Fury to tell him immediately when Natasha returned and therefore got a call at 3am on a Thursday night.
“Is she back?”
“Yeah, she’s back.”
Steve was at HQ within five minutes, his hair tousled from sleep and his clothes wrinkled due to the fact that they’d been sitting on the floor for God knows how long. He pulled open the door and basically ran to the briefing room that Fury had given him. Sure enough, Nat was sitting there. She looked tired and annoyed, though she held an air of confidence. She was speaking, informing Fury of the details of the mission.
Steve Rogers was in no way overt. At all. Ever. But at 3am, when the girl you’ve been worrying about turns up unharmed after a dangerous mission, you tend to be overt. So he stepped into the room and pulled Natasha up with one arm, sliding his other around her waist and then he pressed his lips to hers in a kiss that was desperate and worried and let her know that he’d been almost sleepless waiting for her to come back. And she was kissing him back, letting him know that she had seen his calls and that she would have called him back but that it was so, so much better to just see him in person. And then Fury coughed and they were nearly a foot away from each other, both red from embarrassment.
---
The first time Steve and Nat decided that they were exclusive was one night on the balcony of Avengers Tower. They’d wandered outside for fresh air and had somehow ended up sprawled on the ground, watching the admittedly starless night sky.
“You see that one?” Steve was pointing at a blank spot in the sky, a grin on his face.
“The one that looks sorta like a mongoose?” Nat asked, following his finger.
“No, the one next to it.”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“It’s called Romanova and it’s my favorite constellation.”
Nat couldn’t help but smile. “You see the one beside it?”
“The mongoose?”
“No, on the left.”
“Yeah…”
“It’s called Rogers and that one’s my favorite.”
Steve rolled onto his side to face her. “Nat?”
“Hmm?” She turned her head, a bit of hair flopping in her face.
“What are we?”
“We’re a couple of SHIELD agents who are admittedly quite dumb, but can definitely kick some ass.” She gave him a charming smile.
“No, I mean… Us. Together. Are we together?”
“Currently? Yes. Seeing as we are beside each other and I think that means we’re together.” She quirked a brow, her smile not fading.
“You know what I mean.”
“Would you like to be together, Steve?”
“I think so…”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I’d like to be together.”
“Then, yes, we’re together.”
---
The first time Steve said he loved Natasha, she was dying.
She’d taken three bullets to the stomach, chest, and shoulder on their mission. The doctors had allowed Steve into the viewing room while operating on her, though they did quite a good job of blocking his view. He stood there, trying to see her vitals on the screen, but to no avail. So instead, he took to watching both her and the reactions from the doctors as they worked. Natasha was out of it and therefore didn’t give away much. The doctors must have played a lot of poker, for their faces were blank. Still, Steve didn’t move.
The only thing that managed to calm him was the mostly steady beep of her heart coming from the computers within the room. That is, until her heartbeat wasn’t steady anymore, but dropping rapidly to a rate that could only mean that she was losing too much blood and dying and dammit, Nat had to live because Steve refused to lose her. And then he was praying, but not exactly to God, more to some unknown force. Except he wasn’t really praying so much as muttering curses at Nat for putting him through this and even more curses at the man who had shot her and then he was saying it over and over again until the words didn’t sound like words anymore.
“I love you, Nat. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you. I. Love. You.”
And then her heart stopped and Steve felt himself break. The beeping was gone, the echo continuing in Steve’s head. But that was fading too and it wasn’t enough to see the doctor’s trying to bring her back to life because Steve had to do something, he had to help her. But there was no way he was getting in that room so he settled for what he could do- watch and hope and pound on the glass like he’d pound on her chest if it would bring her back.
The doctors brought out the cart and Steve pounded. Gel on her chest and Steve pounded. “Clear.” Pound. “Nothing.” Pound. “Clear.” Pound. “Again.” Pound. She wasn’t responding. “Time of death…” Pound. Pound. Pound.
And then it was back. The beeping was back. Slow at first, but getting stronger and Steve was thanking God that Natasha was a fighter, that she wouldn’t give up on life so easily. Three bullets, a load of blood loss and she still fought. And dammit that made Steve love her even more.
He pressed his forehead to the glass, registering the tears that were flowing down his face. He was smiling and sobbing, both cursing and celebrating. Natasha was alive and that was the most amazing thing that could happen to him.