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Steve was uncomfortable. His new uniform was tight in all the wrong places and he was surrounded by bickering strangers, one of which had appeared out of a thunderstorm. It was safe to say he felt sufficiently out of his element.
A flash of red hair sliding into the seat next to him made him smile. Romanoff. She was relatively calm considering the madness unfolding around them, but he supposed years of training as a spy would do that to a person.
A particularly loud outburst from Stark shook him from his thoughts. Steve let out a sigh, running a hand down his jaw as he contemplated how easily he could slip out of the room. A snicker from his right made him turn to the woman sitting next to him.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“You,” Natasha replied. “It’s funny how stressed out they all get you.”
Steve grumbled inaudibly in response, crossing his arms as he leaned back in his chair. “I’m not stressed, I’m just…” he trailed off as he floundered for the right word to describe how he was feeling. “Out of place.”
Natasha’s features softened at his reply, her heart tugging as she listened to him describe an all too familiar feeling. “I get it. It can be a lot.”
Steve quickly flashed her a partial smile before turning back to his surveying of the room. He was once again disturbed from his watching by a sharp jab in his ribs.
“What the heck, Nat?” He exclaimed.
Natasha smiled at the nickname. “I was going to offer to split my sandwich with you, but if I’m bothering you…”
Steve blushed, feeling guilty for snapping at her when all she was trying to do was help him. “I’m sorry, I’m just a bit on edge, I guess. Are you sure? I don’t want you to be hungry.”
The redhead smiled at his sweetness and ripped her sandwich neatly in half. “Don’t worry about me, Rogers. Just eat and try to relax.”
Steve took a large bite of the half she had slid his way, laughing in surprise as he tasted what kind of sandwich she had made. “You brought a peanut butter sandwich to a debrief about how to handle an alien invasion?”
“Even superheroes get hungry,” Natasha said with a shrug. “Plus, I read your file. Coulson left a note that you had eaten thirteen of these after they pulled you out of the ice. Figured they’d might be a favorite.”
He turned in his chair in order to fully face the spy, his eyebrows wrinkled in confusion. “You made my favorite sandwich… on purpose?”
Natasha smiled. “I figured you might need a friend on the team.”
————————-
He waved goodbye to Sam as he slid into the passenger seat of Natasha’s fancy new car. It was sleak, fast, and decked out in a shiny black; it reminded him of her in battle.
“Where are we off to now?” Steve asked as he cranked the A/C, trying to cool himself down so he didn’t drip sweat all over the leather seats.
“Don’t know. Didn’t ask,” she said with a smirk that clearly conveyed the opposite. “There’s two peanut butter sandwiches in the glovebox, though.”
Steve smiled at that, popping the box open to see two sandwiches as promised, both wrapped in napkins and sealed in a ziploc bag with a smiley face drawn on in marker. “You’re the best, Nat.”
“I’m aware,” the redhead said with a nonchalant shrug. “How was your run?”
“Good,” the soldier muttered through a mouthful of sandwich. “Sam gave me some new recommendations for my list.”
“That’s good,” Natasha said, turning her eyes away from the road to look at the man sitting next to her. He had a glow about him, whether it was from sweat or just from being Steve, she didn’t know. There was something about him that piqued her interest, that had allowed her to let him in on a level she hadn’t with anyone since she had become friends with Clint.
“What?” Steve asked when he noticed her stare. “Am I getting crumbs all over the car?”
“No, Steve,” she said, turning to look back at the road ahead of her. “Don’t worry. You’re perfect.”
The blonde grumbled at that, shrugging his massive shoulders. “I don’t know about that,” he muttered through a mouthful of sandwich.
“Trust me,” Natasha replied, staring ahead at the road, overtly ignoring the gaze of the man sitting next to her. “I’ve seen a lot of shit in this world and you, Steve, you’re as perfect as they come.”
Steve turned about ten shades of red at her explanation. “I don’t know what to say,” he said.
“Don’t talk. Just eat,” Natasha finally allowed herself to look at him, flashing a small smile.
So he did.
————————-
Natasha had been staring at her bedroom ceiling for an hour now. Steve cocked his head as he observed her alarmingly still form. If he couldn’t see the gentle rise of her toned stomach, he’d think she was dead. He shifted uncomfortably from his position on the floor, trying to make as little noise as possible.
“You don’t have to sit down there, you know,” the spy’s lilting voice replied.
“Yeah, I just didn’t want to, you know,” Steve searched his vocabulary for the words that would be least likely to make Natasha through a pillow at him. “I don’t know, I just didn’t want you to be uncomfortable. After Banner. Leaving and everything.”
“I’m aware of what happened,” she snapped, her shoulders tensing up as a mix of disappointment and something akin to anger washed over her. Banner hadn’t been serious, hadn’t truly been much more than a nice guy wanting to give her something instead of taking, but still, his sudden departure stung in an unexpected way.
“Nat,” Steve sighed, his weight tilting her mattress as he lay down next to her, jolting her out of her thoughts. “I’m really sorry. I, uh, I made you this earlier. You didn’t seem like you would’ve wanted it before, but, uh…” he trailed off, setting instead for dropping the slightly squashed peanut butter sandwich from his pocket onto her chest.
The redhead picked it up and looked at it, an intense look on her face that alarmed Steve. She looked like she was coming to a realization of sorts, but the way her eyebrows were arched seemed to suggest something about her thoughts were making her less than excited.
“I’ll just,” Steve jerked his thumb towards the door. “I’ll see you later, Nat. Sorry if I made you feel worse.” He placed a chaste kiss to her cheek and begin to push off the bed, only for Natasha to roughly jerk his body back down to hers.
“Steve?” she questioned.
“Yeah, Nat?” the blonde replied. He tilted his head up from its resting spot on her shoulder, shifting his body so he was curled in a comforting cocoon around the left side of her body. She was so much smaller than he was and even though he knew she could take him down with her pinky, sometimes it still overwhelmed him how delicate she seemed in his hands.
“I think I love you.” Natasha said after a long pause. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I really do.”
Steve was silent for a minute, trying to work his brain through its confusion. She has been moping over Banner not even five minutes ago and now she was giving him proclamations of (possible) love?
“I know what you’re thinking. But this whole thing with Bruce made me think about it,” she flipped from her back onto her side, tucking herself into the curve of the soldier’s arm. “I didn’t love him. He was a nice distraction from everything. But it wasn’t love. And I knew that. I also knew that when you and I were standing on that cliff together, looking death in the eyes, there was no one else in the world I would have wanted by my side.”
He finds his fingers running gently up and down her back before his brain can process what he’s doing. Being with Natasha is natural to him, it’s as easy as breathing air. He’s loved her for a long time now, but the idea of that love being reciprocated had truly never crossed his mind. Natasha was such a complete human being. She didn’t need anyone else to make her whole or hold herself up. She was the strongest person he had ever met in the entire world and the fact that she was entrusting her love with him made him breathless.
Natasha lifted her head up to look at the blonde. “Steve? Can you say something? Because you’re making me kind of-”
She was abruptly cut off by Steve’s lips pressing against hers. She was shocked by his brashness, her lips still against his for a moment, but his hands drifting to her waist jolted her into movement. One hand tangled in his hair, the other lightly tracing down his sharp jawline. Natasha’s body was on fire wherever Steve’s hands wandered: from her waist, her hips, her neck.
Steve rolled her gently on to her back, his big hands drifting underneath her t-shirt, exploring the soft skin he finds underneath. His fingers catch on the raised scar from the Winter Soldier. He reluctantly breaks apart from Natasha’s lips, grinning at the huff she lets out in response.
“Can I take this off?” he asks, toying with the edge of her shirt.
Natasha just nods, a gorgeous blush spreading up her chest that Steve is all too happy to see in its entirety. He throws her shirt somewhere in the room - it’s unimportant now - and can’t help the dumbstruck look on his face upon seeing miles more of her fair skin.
He starts right behind her ear, gentle kisses that make Natasha squirm underneath him. Steve travels down her neck, down her chest, pressing chaste kisses over the tops of her breasts that are peeking out from her bra. He tries his best to ignore the deep inhale she takes at that, tries his best not to get sidetracked from what he’s set out to do.
Finally, he kisses his way down to her scar. He remembers the first time she showed it to him, in the hospital room with her back against a wall and every fiber in his being screaming at him to just kiss her. She made a quip about bikinis and he knew with total certainty that her humor was hiding her insecurities about it. Steve hadn’t found her any less stunning then and he certainly didn’t now. He presses his lips softly against the shiny pink scar, his fingers gently resting against her skin.
“Natasha?” he asked, his voice deep and his heart thumping heavily in his chest.
“Mmhm?” the redhead choked out in response.
“I love you too.”
Natasha quickly pulls his face back up to hers, flipping him on his back without a struggle.
The peanut butter sandwich lies long forgotten on the bed next to them.
————————-
Every single muscle in her body aches. She’s exhausted and her brain is running at a mile a minute and the motel bed she’s sitting on is lumpy and she just needs the world to stand still for a minute.
She can feel the tears streaming down her face as she hears a knock on the door. She knows it’s him and can’t decide if she’s feeling more elated or more pissed knowing who’s behind that door.
“It’s open,” she calls out as she frantically tries to wipe the tears from her cheeks.
“Hi, Nat,” Steve says as he slips into the room, delicately sitting on the edge of a frayed chair in the corner. He doesn’t know where the stand after everything that’s gone down these past few days. Yes, she risked herself to save him, but that was just the kind of person she was.
“Did you break them out?” the redhead asked, shifting through her bag for a shirt big enough to sleep in. She didn’t feel like small talk or pretending like she hadn’t just spent the past week fighting with her friends, with her family. She was tired and mad and wasn’t sure whether she wanted to smack Steve or hug him.
“Yeah, they’re okay. We can meet up with them tomorrow if you’d like.” Steve shifted awkwardly on the couch as Natasha began to peel her suit off, not sure if he was allowed to look at her. A week ago, this wouldn’t have been a problem. A week ago, he would’ve made a comment about how he was the luckiest guy in the world, would’ve wrapped himself around the tiny spy, would’ve kissed her neck, and told her he loved her. Now he wasn’t even sure if he could look at her.
Natasha turned around and sat criss-crossed on the bed in an oversized t-shirt that had ‘Brooklyn’ spelt out in a big white letters across her chest. She had stolen it out of Steve’s closet the first time she had spent the night at his place. It dwarfed her petite frame, but then again, so did Steve.
“Are we going to talk about it?” she asked.
Steve sighed. “Can I just hold you tonight? I’m tired and I know you’re angry at me, but I just want to hold you, Nat.” He looked up at her with his bright blue eyes filled to the brim with tears and Natasha swore she heard her heart broke. “Please, Nat.”
Natasha nodded and crawled under the covers, leaving a side flapped open for the soldier to crawl into her. Her angry didn’t dissipate when he wrapped her tightly in his arms, her back pressed fully against his front as he buried his nose in her hair, but she didn’t fight away the relaxed feeling that overtook her body by the presence of his familiar warmth.
They lay together quietly for a while, the sound of breathing and the traffic outside filling the room. Steve thought Natasha had fallen asleep when he feels her shift against him, before she turns her head to look up at him.
“I’m hungry,” she says with a poke to his shoulder.
“I think I saw a convenience store down the street,” he says as he pulls himself away from her, grabbing his jacket as he slips on his shoes. “Peanut butter sandwiches?”
Natasha smiles. “Peanut butter sandwiches.”
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They’d been running for longer than he can count now. Originally he started ticking off the days in a paper calendar, but after they went through three of them, he gave up. He was tired, his shoulders seemed to perpetually sting, and he hadn’t had time to just sit and read the paper with a cup of coffee in God knows how long.
But he had her. She was blonde now, her hair a dirty platinum, cut to just past her shoulders. Her suit was now a charcoal and utility green, her widow bites traded in for police batons that packed a serious punch. But still, it was her. His Natasha.
She was currently standing in front of the cracked mirror in their motel bathroom, brushing her teeth. Her red roots had started to peek out and she was sporting a nasty constellation of bruises on her thighs (only two of them were from him). She was wearing a heather grey shirt of his and a pair of mismatched socks and he didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so beautiful in his life.
“Steve, stop staring,” Natasha sassed as she spit in the sink. She felt gross, her entire body a map of scars and bruises and yet Steve was staring at her as if she was a supermodel during fashion week.
“But you’re so beautiful, Nat,” he muttered, his fingers itching for a stick of charcoal to draw her likeness with. One of his bags was half-full with just sketchbooks, their pages filled with charcoal, pen, ink, and graphite drawings of Natasha. She kept nagging on him to get rid of them, saying they were unnecessary baggage, but he could never bring himself to throw a single drawing away.
Natasha rolled her eyes as she flopped on the bed next to him, her fingers instinctively clutching around the neck of his worn tank top. She feigned annoyance with him as almost a joke at this point in their relationship. Sure, he could be a bit thick-headed, but Steve Rogers lit up her world in a way no one else could ever have dreamed of.
“What do we have planned for today?” she asked, praying he would say nothing and knowing he was about to rattle off a new target.
“Sex trafficker in Holland,” Steve said, nodding to the thick file lying on top of the coffee table across the room.
Natasha sighed and shook her head. Their work on the run with Sam was important, it was fulfilling, but it was also exhausting. She knew she shouldn’t, but all she truly wanted was to spend one day curled up in a shitty motel bed with her boyfriend, while the only decisions they would have to make was what to order for dinner and when to have sex.
“That sounds like a dream,” Steve said, smiling at Natasha’s blush once she realized she had thought out loud. “I would love nothing more than to spend a day doing absolutely nothing of importance with you, Natasha Romanoff.”
“But?” she asked.
“But this guy is only in Holland for the next two days. If we don’t cut him off there, we’re gonna lose him in the black market.” Steve explained.
Natasha grumbled as she buried her face in his chest. She knew what they had to, but it didn’t make her want to do it anymore. She felt selfish, but after spending the entirety of her life doing what everyone around her demanded of her, she felt she deserved it now.
“Can we just have an hour? Just the two of us?” she said with a pout.
Steve smiled gently and nodded, placing a chaste kiss on the spy’s forehead. “You hungry? I got a fresh loaf of bread from the vendor in the marketplace yesterday.”
“Only if you bought peanut butter!” Natasha exclaimed as she watched the soldier pull a loaf of bread from a brown paper bag.
“Of course, I did!” Steve said, feigning hurt as he shook his head. “What kind of barbaric do you take me for?”
She chuckled at that, smiling brightly as the blonde pulled out a jar of peanut butter from the paper bag. “Your favorite,” she said.
“No,” Steve said as he began to spread the peanut butter over a slice of bread. “Our favorite.”
————————-
“You know, if you’re about to tell me to look on the bright side, I’m about to hit you in the head with a peanut butter sandwich.”
He chuckled at that, looking down at his shoes. It had only been a couple of hours since he had left for the support group, but she looked infinitely more tired and distraught than when he had left. “Any good news?” Steve finally spit out.
“Of course not,” Natasha said with a sigh, nudging the plate with her sandwich toward the empty seat in front of her desk, a silent invitation to her boyfriend to come closer. The minute Steve walked into the same room as her, she felt like the weight of the world she had been carrying on her shoulders was being lifted, as if she wasn’t shouldering these burdens alone.
The blonde sat down as silently instructed, taking a minute to really look at the woman in front of him. Her hair had grown so much longer, curling naturally at the tops of her breasts. It was an interesting red to platinum ombré, but Natasha made it look effortlessly beautiful. She had gotten tanner from their daily walks outside the compound, her dark circles deeper, and her petite frame had pronounced muscles in new places from her foray back into ballet. She looked so different from the first time he had met her and yet he loved her just the same.
“When this is all over, we’re going on vacation,” he said with a small smile.
“I hear Tahiti is nice,” Natasha said, her heart warming at the sight of Steve’s smile. She could stay like this forever, just the two of them, cracking jokes and soft smiles. Steve was more than her significant other; he was her safe place, where she could sob for hours in his arms or kiss him until her lips were numb.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, reaching across her desk to gently rub his thumb down the crease between her eyebrows.
“How much I love you,” the redhead replied nonchalantly, smiling at the bright flush that overtook Steve’s cheeks.
“I love you too, Nat. So much. More than I ever thought was possible.” Steve let his hand drop from her face to her hands, clutching her smaller ones in his.
Natasha nodded, feeling her tears run softly down her cheeks. “I’m gonna fix this,” she murmured. “I promise.”
“You don’t have to do it alone,” The soldier said. “I’m here.”
“I know,” she replied, as she leaned back into her chair, feeling the need to ground herself against the violent storm of emotions within her.
“What can I do? Let me help you, Nat,” he pleaded.
“Just eat the sandwich,” she said, pushing the plate again with her foot. “You’re getting too skinny.”
Steve rolled his eyes and took an over-exaggerated bite. “You’re lucky it’s peanut butter.”
Natasha smiles. “It always is.”
————————-
He hadn’t been to the cemetery this regularly since he emerged from the ice. The Rogers plot was mostly empty, just four headstones for his grandparents and parents. Well, five now.
Her stone was a sleek black marble, her full Russian name and the message he had filled out on the form through tears engraved across. Natalia Alianovna Romanova, beloved friend, lover, and hero. You were always enough. It wasn’t enough for her though. A measly grave in his family’s plot. She was a fucking Avenger. She deserved more than what he had been able to give her. What the world has given her.
He sat down in front of the stone, dropping his bag down next to him. He pulled out the fresh red Turk’s Cap lilies, her favorite, and swapped them out with the bouquet he had left last week. His lunch dates with Natasha had become a habit he couldn’t shake.
He pulled out the two ziploc bags with sandwiches wrapped in a napkin and a smiley face drawn on them that he had been bringing with him every week for the last two months now. He placed hers next to the flowers before he opened his, taking a bite as he tried his best to force back the tears that always managed to slip out by the time he left.
He used to talk to her more in the beginning, telling her what everyone was up to, telling her how much he missed her, how angry he was with her, how much he loved her. But as the weeks went on, he got more silent as he realized that no matter how many conversations he had with her, it would never be enough. It would never bring her back, it would never be enough to convey how absolutely shattered her felt without her by his side.
He settled for crying as he thought about her bright smile. He settled for telling her he would love her forever. He settled for weekly bouquets of her favorite flowers. He settled for peanut butter sandwiches.