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In her life, Natasha had come across many, many different people. She'd met underground crime lords, people from other realms, women who subtly controlled some of the most powerful men in the world, and a man who turns into a huge, green monster when he gets angry. Before Steve came into the picture, none resonated with her as much as her James had.
Despite what the files said about her, Natasha was quite a bit older than people thought. Like Steve, she was born in the earlier half of the twentieth century and, thanks to experiments from the Red Room, she was given a bastardized version of his serum that would keep her young for a very long time. But she hadn't told him that and, until James made a very dramatic reappearance, she didn't see the need to ever tell him. Her life was not fit for the consumption of another person and quite frankly, the idea of telling her boyfriend of only about two months that she'd had a very intense relationship with his thought-to-be-dead best friend didn't sit well with her.
James disappeared after the big fight, after he'd pulled Steve out of the water. Natasha always knew that it was him who saved her soldier, but no one wanted to believe it. Why would he save Steve? It was ridiculous to think that all the Soviet programming just stepped aside for affection and familiar words to match a familiar face. Natasha couldn’t argue with that even though she knew they were wrong. Maybe he’d never find his way back to them. There was a part of her that hoped he wouldn’t because if he did, she’d have explaining to do. He’d always remembered her in the past- there was no reason to suspect that it would be different this time.
But he did show up, knocking on Steve’s door late one night and looking every inch the lost boy she’d expected after what Steve had told him about their fight. She watched from afar as Steve embraced him, watched two uncertain arms embrace her soldier in return. When she made her presence known, the first thing James did was tense up, but when her face registered, he tilted his head to the side, not saying a word at all. She gave him a look and it was only their silent communication that kept him from spilling her secrets to Steve right away.
After that, things got pretty hectic for a while. Steve did what he could to integrate Bucky into their lives, introducing him in small stages to the team and the rest of their friends and colleagues. He moved into Steve’s apartment, taking the spare bedroom and frequently finding his way into Steve’s bed at night, just for the comfort of having someone else there. It didn’t bother Steve at all, but… Well, Natasha wasn’t pleased.
And she didn’t trust him. Natasha knew first hand how out of control someone coming down from that level of brainwashing could be. She’d held a knife to Clint’s throat way too many times to count when she was brought back to SHIELD and that knowledge alone made her fiercely protective of Steve and disapproving of all the time the two men spent on their own. She was not jealous; merely concerned.
“We need to talk about Bucky,” she said one morning while the assassin in question was still asleep. Resting her hip against the counter, Natasha peered over her mug of tea at Steve, who was pretending not to notice that there was a problem. “He’s dangerous, Steve. You can’t keep treating him like he’s the same man you knew.”
Well, he didn’t like that at all. “Bucky’s doing a lot better than he was,” he protested. “He even spent a few whole nights in his own bed this week. That’s progress, Nat.”
Pressing her lips together, Natasha moved to sit down across from him at their kitchen table, her mug hitting the top with a thump. “He also had an episode in the middle of that baseball game we went to and nearly attacked some random woman.”
She could tell that he knew she had a point by the face he made. “I’m not going to give up on him,” he said firmly.
Natasha was quick to jump in on that. “I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to—“
“Be careful, I know, but I can’t walk on eggshells around him. That’ll do him absolutely no good and you know—“
“It’s not like that. You can’t just be sure that he’s not going to snap one day and—“
“And you can be sure that he’s going to?! Jesus, Nat. He’s my best friend. He was everything to me back then. You can’t just ask me to let him fend for himself!”
Unfortunately, their shouting was enough to wake their sleeping house guest and a tired looking Bucky wandered out a moment later, rubbing at his eyes as he looked between Steve and Natasha. “Something wrong?” he mumbled worriedly. He’d long since found out that they were together- walking in on them fooling around was more than enough to cement that particular fact in Bucky’s mind. “Is it about me?”
Also rather clear by now was the fact that Natasha didn’t trust him. Her narrowed eyes and the way she very subtly tensed every time he walked into the room were very clear signs of distrust- signs Bucky knew because he’d trained her himself. If he ever got a chance, he’d tell her that he was proud of the person she’d become.
“No, of course not,” Steve answered quickly, moving to sling an arm around Bucky’s shoulders. “We were just… talking about me taking you out today.” The fact that he could make Bucky smile again was enough to make Steve’s anger just melt away. “Go and get dressed.”
Turning back to Natasha, Steve sighed heavily. “I’ll fix it,” he promised, pecking her on the lips. “Okay? I promise, I’ll keep him out of your hair.” Natasha wasn’t sure what to say, but she wasn’t happy watching him walk away from her like that, and she wasn’t happy about watching him lead Bucky out of the apartment a few minutes later.
In order to avoid any more fights, Steve had a long talk with Bucky about how he couldn't come into their room without knocking and how he really shouldn't be climbing into bed with them in the first place. The look on his friend's face... God, he hated it, so he said that if Bucky needed him, he would come to his room instead. It was a compromise meant to prevent Natasha from getting annoyed. In addition, they would be spending a lot more time out of Steve's apartment- either in the park or in museums or just in the main parts of the Tower. Steve was trying his best to help keep Natasha happy while also taking care of his best friend.
Of course, he didn't actually intend for Natasha to feel as slighted as she did. She knew that. Steve always had the best intentions at heart and it was only due to his optimistic nature that sometimes he couldn't predict how others might react to the decisions he made. The truth was that Natasha was incredibly jealous. She still didn't trust Bucky to remain calm and not hurt Steve, and she envied the time they spent together- her current and former lover. But Steve didn't even know how close she used to be to James, so she couldn't hold that against him, and he didn't honestly seem to notice that he was spending so much more time with Bucky than her, so she couldn't hold that against him either.
But she had every right to be pissed off when, night after night, she woke up to slightly cooled sheets and a missing soldier. She had every right to be a little miffed that they hadn’t had sex in nearly three weeks because Bucky this and Bucky that and oh, didn’t she care about his well-being? And since her anger was building and building and building, she had to have some kind of outlet. Someone had to pay. The issue was that since Steve was just doing his best and since she loved him to death, Natasha’s ire was entirely focused on Steve’s nearly constant companion; James.
She just hated seeing them together. It twisted her stomach to think that Steve might prefer Bucky's company over hers, that he might fall into the quasi-homosexual thing they had going on back in the day. Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course, but Steve was hers. He was supposed to spend every night with his arms around her, not around broken assassins.
Every time she caught herself thinking something like that, she had to take a step back. Maybe her heart really was made of ice like the rookies said it was. She knew what Bucky was going through. Natasha knew how hard it was to claw your way back to having a sense of self and she should have been supportive, but it was hard to be anything but annoyed when every time she walked into a room that contained the two of them, it felt like she was walking into a private joke.
Therefore, it wasn’t entirely her fault that it all came to a head one night when she felt it necessary to urge James into the ring with her, like they used to. What she didn’t take into account was that the savage reprogramming he’d suffered between the time that she left the Red Room and now meant that putting him in a situation where the violence was just this side of truly aggressive was incredibly dangerous. He caught her arm at some point and tightened his hand, not letting go until she shouted at him and pulled her arm out of his startled grasp, leaving him to stumble back while she examined the already darkening bruises around her bicep. They exchanged a look and while she met his gaze with outrage and suspicion, all she saw was fear.
A second later, he was vaulting over the ropes and taking off towards the elevator, presumably to seek out his best friend for the comfort and understanding Natasha just didn’t offer him.
Sure enough, Steve had himself two arms full of severely shaken Soviet assassin just a few minutes later. It took him a full thirty minutes to calm him, another twenty for Bucky to admit what had happened and another twenty for Steve to reassure him that he was still welcome there. It was only a mistake, after all, and Steve knew damn, right and well Natasha had goaded him into it. Once he had Bucky settled on the couch with a movie playing for him and snacks on the coffee table, the soldier himself marched down to the gym to give Natasha a piece of his mind.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Steve exploded, stepping into the gym to find Natasha already at the punching bag, attacking it with taped hands, harsh knees and a determined expression. “Natasha.
No answer.
“Natasha, for fuck’s sake. We need to talk about this.”
Nothing. Steve clenched his jaw and stepped forward, making another of quite a few mistakes in that he reached out and put a hand on her arm to stop her. In a split second, twisted it around in a calculated move and kicked him in the stomach, sending him sprawling back onto the floor. He didn’t even have a chance to see the bruises on her arm from earlier.
Sitting up, he glared at her for a moment before getting right to his feet and moving to tackle her down. If this was how she wanted to settle things, he wouldn’t protest. Through a series of complex moves, they made their way onto the mat nearby and Natasha slid between his legs while Steve tried to catch her.
“You can’t keep—“ He dodged a kick to the head. “Ignoring the problem.”
She did a backflip to avoid being grabbed and huffed. “There is no problem.”
Steve rolled his eyes and ducked down, attempting to kick her feet out from under her and swearing when she jumped right over his leg, using his shoulders as leverage to leap over him instead. “There’s definitely a problem,” he insisted, turning fast and catching her wrists in both hands.
She planted her foot on his chest and flipped over, wrenching her wrists from him and landing gracefully a few feet away. “No, there’s not,” she challenged, running at him. “Do you really think I care that you’re spending so much time with Bucky? I don’t care.”
Landing on his back with her on top of him, wrists pinned, Steve frowned. “I didn’t say anything about that,” he countered, rolling them over and getting two feet to his chest for that. He caught himself and moved to catch her as she jumped up, but she slithered away and wrapped her legs around his waist, tugging him off his feet and back onto the floor.
“Good,” she answered. “Because I don’t care.” Steve reached out unexpectedly and grabbed her ankle, pulling her off her feet so she landed on her back with a groan. Flipping himself over, he pinned her down with his whole body, hands on her wrists again.
He peered down at her and a little, knowing smirk tilted his lips. “Are you jealous?”
The look he got in return said everything and nothing all at once. A second later, she was squirming under him, trying to knee him in the ribs to make him let go. “You are,” he nodded, finally coming to that particular realization- one that should have come to him a long time ago. “You’re jealous of how close we are.”
Natasha used the heel of her foot to hit his lower back and Steve arched, letting go and rolling off with a groan of pain. Goddamnit. A second later, she was on top of him, just planted on his chest with her knees keeping his biceps pinned to the floor. She got real close to him, leaning down until their noses nearly touched. “I am not jealous,” she said through gritted teeth- all the confirmation he needed, to be honest.
“You’re definitely jealous,” he repeated without fear of whatever retribution was coming his way. “Don’t worry. I think it’s cute.”
She was going to kill him for that, but Steve figured that the look on her face was worth it. Surprisingly, what he got was a long, open-mouthed kiss. “I’m not,” she insisted, her voice softening. “I’m not jealous.”
Steve leaned up to meet her lips, taking advantage of when she let go of his arms to reach up and push her hair back, cupping her chin while she held herself up over him. “You don’t have to be jealous, you know,” he murmured back, looking up at her. “No reason at all.”
She considered that for a moment and pulled away, sitting up beside him. Once he’d picked himself up too, she reached out for his hand and laced their fingers together. “I have to tell you something,” she said seriously. “But I want you to promise me that you’re not going to leave. It’s not fair and you might want to and I don’t blame you, but please don’t.”
It was a simple promise to make, he thought, but it left him feeling unsettled because Natasha never opened herself up like that. She never let him know that she was scared. “I promise,” he said anyway, knowing that it would take something really terrible to make him leave her- and he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
Steve sat and listened, admittedly tensing when the story began pouring out. She told him everything; about being born in the twenties, about her parents, the Red Room, about her James. She told him that she was young, that James was all she had for a while, even though they used to take him away from her. She told him that he always remembered. She told him that she was worried James had finally found the soldier that had meant so much to him even back then, the soldier who’s name he could never remember, and they would both leave her alone again.
She told him that she was worried she’d lose both of the men she loved, though she loved them in vastly different ways.
When it was all over, Steve took a deep breath and let it out nice and slow, trying to make all the little pieces fall into place in his mind. He did feel somewhat disappointed that she’d lied to him to such an extent, but he lightly squeezed her hand and pulled her closer, kissing her temple. “I wish you’d told me,” he said quietly. “I really wish you’d told me.”
Natasha found herself reaching up to hold onto his shirt, unwilling to accept the idea that he might leave her now, all because she’d neglected to tell him the truth. “I’m sorry,” she offered. “I thought you wouldn’t want me anymore. I’m still not sure you will now, to be honest.”
Steve shook his head and kissed her hair, pulling back only so he could make her look at him. “All because you slept with Bucky literally decades ago and... and… happen to be almost as old as I am?” He chuckled and winked at her, giving her a cheesy grin. “Doll, you don’t look a day over twenty.”
Rolling her eyes, Natasha smiled and shoved lightly at his chest. “Don’t be a dork,” she told him, but leaned up for a kiss anyway, holding him there with a hand on his jaw.
When they parted, he gave her a look. “You know you have to apologize to him, right?”
She made a face and sighed, but she was resigned to her fate. Bucky hadn’t deserved what she put him through. “Let’s go see him, then,” she suggested, standing up and pulling him up as well. “Nothing like a heart-to-heart to make the day a little better, right?”
Steve chuckled and patted Natasha’s behind as they made their way into the elevator, seeking out Bucky on the sofa to explain what was going on. He watched Natasha warily, but eventually slipped into rapid-fire Russian that left Steve looking back and forth between them like he was at a tennis match. They hugged at the end of it, but the look they gave him when they turned to glance in his direction left Steve with one particular goal in mind.
Learn Russian, and fast.