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Natasha fumed. Sometimes she had to remind herself that Steve Rogers was human. He was fallible and breakable and just as capable of being wrong as she was. Not that she thought that he was an alien or a monster, even if there were times when he sat too still or moved too fast. But goddammit, she wanted nothing more than to march back into his grim little hospital room in D.C. and remind him just how fallible and breakable and capable of being wrong he could be. Though, she reasoned, he was probably doing a fine job of that himself.
If she’d learned anything about Steve Rogers these past few months, it was that he never let himself forget his own failings.
*
When he woke up, she'd watched Sharon go in, all done up in her 1940s cosplay that Steve saw right through. She'd watched him run away. She'd watched him stand, dazed, in the middle of Times Square and find out that he was 70 years too late to one of the most famous non-dates in history.
She had continued to watch him for a whole year after that at Fury’s behest. Fury called it ‘observing how Captain Rogers adjusts to the 21st Century’. Natasha called it babysitting. Swings. Roundabouts.
Natasha kept her distance. She hadn't needed to wear the glowy, mesh mask made of the finest nanotech that Tony Stark could provide. She knew how to blend in and disappear without it. Steve, on the other hand, did not. He stuck out like a sore thumb wherever he went, too big and too old fashioned to fit in anywhere.
Even as a girl, she was well acquainted with the legend, the mythos. Only, this sad, quiet man didn't seem to match up to the bolshy, apple pie image that had been planted in her head. He kept a rigid routine, nodded with solemn eyes and pinched eyebrows whenever someone at SHIELD suggested he join their cause, and hitched a plastic smile on his face when children pulled at their parents' pant leg because, " Mommy, look! It's Captain America! "
She quickly found that he was, in fact, distressingly human.
“Did you know that he visits his own grave?” she told Clint one evening curled up on the sofa in his tiny, broken apartment that was the closest thing to a home she had in the city.
“S’not just his though,” he replied thickly, signing with one hand while the other rubbed gentle circles across her knobbly ankle.
No, she supposed, it wasn’t just his grave. In comparison to the huge statue in D.C. that honoured Steve’s sacrifice, the plain little headstone was nothing. But there were two names etched there where the statue only had one. Age had weathered the stone but the cross and the names were as clear as day.
James Buchanan Barnes
Steven Grant Rogers
Brothers, friends, heroes.
Where one goes, the other will surely follow.
In the beginning, he went there a lot. He sank to his knees and traced the letters of their names.
Grief and guilt. It was written into his very DNA. He wore it like a yoke across his shoulders, like a heavy chain around his waist. She could see the way it bowed him and slowed him whenever he thought that no one could see him. But put him in front of a room of people and he straightened, retrieved a smile, squared those impossibly wide shoulders and Steve Rogers disappeared. If he had ever been there before.
*
Captain America .
The title had a funny effect on people. It made them stand up straighter and made their eyes go wide and eager. And she pitied them for it. In the darkened recesses of her mind, the part that chanted along to Snow White and still urged her to handcuff her wrist to her bedpost each night, she was disgusted by it.
Coulson had just about pissed himself when he found out he’d be Captain America’s primary liaison.
“I have all the baseball cards,” he’d told her brightly and when he brought them in, she’d held them up to curious eyes and examined his plastic smile and glossy eyes as he offered a cheery thumbs-up to the camera. “They’re vintage, you know.”
Those cards were closer to the films and newsreels than the man that stood in front of her and bobbed his head, called her, ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Agent Romanoff’, and sometimes couldn’t meet her eye because she didn’t know how to dull her sharp edges enough to make him feel comfortable in her presence. Wherever he went, there was a disconnect. What they had made and who he actually was, were two very different people. She understood. In her own way. There were many versions of Natasha Romanoff twisting beneath her skin and even now, she didn’t always know which parts of her were real and which parts were the lies she’d told herself so often they had crystalised into truth. It was a tangled web of her own weaving.
Clint and their lakehouse were real, even if the story that went with them was fake. She held onto that because it was a precious thing she had built with her own two hands.
*
Clint took her to Peggy first because he couldn’t take her to Fury. He’d disobeyed a direct order after all. He’d left her alive.
“They were brainwashed kids. I couldn’t do it,” he rasped, tugging on the bow tip that curved up behind his head.
“The other one?”
“She ran before - couldn’t have stopped her.”
The woman nodded, grey hair bouncing on her thin shoulders and she tapped a finger to her lips as she sat in front of Natasha on the coffee table. Natasha’ legs jittered and her eyes flickered around the quaint room. There were three exits: two windows to the right - one storey up, she could land that - and a door at her ten o’clock - blocked by the archer.
“Well, what do we do with a Black Widow?”
“ The Black Widow,” Natasha blurted, breaking her 18-hour long silence. Her voice was sandpaper and broken glass.
Peggy clasped her left hand between frail fingers and let her thumbs drift across the snarl of red scars around her wrist. Her dark eyes were warm and shrewd, penetrating and calculating.
"Of course, dear. The Black Widow. Now," she said in stiff Russian that never quite managed to lose its English intonation. "Why don't you tell me everything."
In a shadowy corner, Clint chewed on his thumbnail.
*
On the screen, an old newsreel flickered and twitched. A man in stars and stripes walked across a battlefield flanked by a steely-eyed man with a sniper rifle. The image changed to the atomic bomb, thousands of people fleeing, mouths open in a silent wail. More bombs, planes, tanks, explosions. Death. Destruction. And through it all, the same man; blonde, stars, stripes, serious with his mouth downturned.
"You will make your parents proud, Natalia. You want that now, don't you? Make them proud and you make your country proud. And a proud country takes care of her daughters."
"You are our sharpest dagger, paučók. "
"You are nothing. Disposable. Cut off one head and two more will grow in its place. Always remember that."
The Ladies whispered such things in their ears at all hours of the day. Lady Red murmured it sweetly, stroking her hair as she lay panting on the mats, lip bleeding, before delivering a stinging slap to her cheek and dragging up by her pigtails. Lady Black was fond of a cattle prod that sizzled with blue electricity and threatened to stick it where it hurt the most if she thought they would not comply. Lady White made them chant their mantras while they pirouetted until their feet bled.
Snow lay thick on the ground when the American came for the first time. They were mangey girls, all skin and brittle bone, barely able to muster a punch. He was there to fix that, to make them strong and fast and durable. He was there to carve them from marble.
Brutal. Efficient. But never cruel. He had hard features that were desperately trying to be soft and bright eyes that darkened to something low and dangerous with just a few words from his stony faced handlers.
For all they called him The American, there was no trace of it in his accent. He barked his orders but never struck them, not like the Ladies. It was a different matter entirely when they were training, then he would strike them down into the snow without mercy. At first, it was nothing but a lazy swat, a back-handed strike with an unyielding metal hand that stuck to hot skin. Some didn’t get back up. But Natasha did. She pushed herself up and up and up, raised her fists, stood on quaking legs, and met his indifferent eyes. Every single time. She could do this all day.
It was enough for her to earn his only smile.
“You are better than this, paučók ,” he hissed on his third visit. Her attempt to fell him had failed. He held her by the throat as her feet dangled and kicked at thin air. They were inches apart, his words only for her. Scrabbling against his metal fingers, she tried in vain to snatch a breath. “You must be better.”
He dropped her unceremoniously in a heap. A ripple passed through the surrounding girls. Gasping, Natasha gazed up at The American. His face was slack, lips parted and eyes impossibly sad. He didn’t seem so old to her now.
“Again,” she choked and scrambled to her feet.
The American nodded.
“Again,” he confirmed.
*
“Where did he go today?” asked Clint, passing her a cup of the strongest, sweetest coffee he could make, just the way she liked it. Outside a few snowflakes drifted past the window.
Natasha had papers laid out across the coffee table and a folder was balanced across her leg as she sat curled into herself like a pretzel. Clint sat down next to her and she twisted herself around until she pressed up against his side. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and she soaked up his easy warmth.
“Coney Island,” she murmured, taking a sip. A shiver ran through her. February in New York was a bitch.
Coney Island was the latest stop on Steve’s tour. A few days a week, he’d venture out of his bare East Williamsburg apartment and travel to some seemingly random spot around Brooklyn. As the year had gone on, he’d become better about blending in, even if it was just a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Wherever he went, he walked with a hunch, his shoulders up at his ears and drawn close together, and Natasha couldn’t decide if it was because he didn’t want to be recognised or if he wanted to be smaller again.
She’d have to ask him sometime.
At first, she didn’t understand what he was doing. Each spot, on the surface, appeared random. A brownstone in Park Slope. An innocuous street in DUMBO. A garage that used to be a gym. A little chapel. An old school building that had been converted into apartments. He visited each one as if it was a pilgrimage and he the lowly pilgrim. Sometimes he stayed for only a few minutes, other times it was longer. Usually, he parked himself on a bench and stared into the middle distance. The history books told her that he was a Catholic but she didn’t think he did much praying these days.
It became clear. Slowly. Like she was piecing together a puzzle. They were all places he had known before. These were all the places that Steve Rogers had called home. Sometimes he cried, fat tears leaking from the corners of his eyes that he scrubbed away with the back of his hand. But mostly, he sat still and quiet, jaw clenched and trying to shrink the mile wide expanse of his back to inches.
Natasha observed all of this and one thought came to mind: Steve was unmoored. He was a boat tossed out to sea with no direction or bearing, and there was no lighthouse to guide him back to the safety of land. Natasha understood a little of what that was like.
“Do you think he misses his friend?” asked Clint, plucking a picture of a handsome soldier from the file laid out on her lap. He cocked his head at it.
Natasha hummed.
“He went to see the sister a few weeks ago,” she said, pulling out an official photograph of the Howling Commandos from the file. Sergeant James Barnes stood at Steve Rogers’ right shoulder. Clint leaned in to get a better look. “There’s not much about him out there, only what the army and SSR released about their missions. The family hoarded their memories of him. Tried to do the same to Steve but-”
She shrugged, frowning.
“He was public property?” Clint offered, finishing her half formed thought.
“Something like that,” she said, looking at the picture of the two of them until it blurred.
*
But then, of course, aliens fell from the sky and it all went to shit. In the midst of a battle with beings that shouldn't exist but did, Natasha was finally able to see where the legend came from. He launched her into the air off his shield without batting an eye. He gave orders, found the strategy, took it all in his stride. So when she found surveillance footage of Steve Rogers whispering, "Heil Hydra" into Jasper Sitwell's ear, she knew that this was some special brand of bullshit.
Sure, it looked like him, he wore the same star-spangled unitard that Coulson had taken far too much delight in designing but there was something about that face that raised the hair on the back of Natasha's neck. The Steve she knew still had a softness to him, a pliant willingness to jump back into the fight because it was the right thing to do. This one was brittle and cold. This one was a little dead behind the eyes. She couldn't explain it. So, she didn't try. Instead, she commandeered the footage, took it to the soft, still grieving Steve she knew, asked him to trust her and begin yet another fight not of his making.
He'd been ready to burn Hydra, SHIELD, the world, to the ground that afternoon. She watched the way he pushed Steve Rogers down, squared his shoulders and clenched his jaw and became Captain America. Even his voice changed. There had been a moment where she thought he wouldn't listen to her and would go tearing through D.C. without a shred of evidence.
There was a roiling rage lurking below the surface. Hidden beneath the grief, just out of sight. She’d glimpsed it when he’d argued with Tony but to stare it down so close, swelling, and in the flesh, sent a sharp thrill of fear through her.
When she asked if the imposter had said anything else, Steve's response made her stomach drop out.
"He told me that Bucky was alive," he said, gazing sightlessly across the lake in front of Peggy’s D.C. nursing home.
Bucky Barnes. His best friend. His right hand man. The one whose empty grave he’d collapsed in front of. The one who had walked the streets of Brooklyn with him. The one who he had followed into war. The one who had followed him right back.
And they were going to find him.
SHIELD and Hydra would go too - they had to - but Natasha knew that finding Bucky Barnes came first. Everything else was secondary.
Suddenly, she wasn’t just watching anymore. She was there, in Steve’s space, in his life, seeing him up close. For all she thought that she knew him, it turned out Steve was so much more. Going undercover with the Strike Team? Not a problem. He did it without question. He took his malleable, readable face and forced it behind a new type of mask.
*
“You’re going to break into Alexander Pierce’s computer? Tasha, come on ,” groaned Clint, blinking at the sky. His nose was busted and a one-eyed labrador sat at his feet.
It had been months. Their investigation had stalled. And when the investigation stalled, Steve got antsy. He stalked around the apartment like a captive animal, talking about how much he had to find Bucky. It was like his life depended on it and sometimes, she believed that it did. So, when Steve had suggested in the midst of yet another frustrated rant that they could break into Pierce’s computer? She thought, why not. Three weeks and one goober later, they were ready.
“That’s a three person job. You know that right? He can’t go in there. Unless you want your mission to fail?”
“Of course I know. Why do you think I’m telling you, golubchick ?” she sighed, signing as she spoke.
They were ensconced in the alley next to Steve’s building. Natasha chewed on her lip and hunched her shoulders.
“He’s desperate.”
“He’s compromised, is what he is,” Clint grumbled. His face, which was normally so clear and open, was twisted up in a frown. Deep lines rumpled his forehead, creased his beautiful blue eyes, and puckered his mouth. She reached out and swept a quick hand across his skin, trying to smooth him out. He caught her wrist, pressed a kiss to her scars. “I’m coming with you.”
*
The more time that Natasha spent with Steve, the more she suspected that there was more to the story he was telling. When he spoke about Bucky, he got all misty eyed and his voice pitched up, got a little husky.
“Zola experimented on him, gave him some knock off serum, and I didn’t notice,” Steve rasped the night they sat crammed into his too small fire escape. His head fell back on the railing and he stared at the sky, drowning in everything he had done wrong.
City sounds washed over them. She still had her arm looped through his and her head buzzed from the pack of cigarettes they’d shared.
“They made him like me and he survived.”
From the shadowy corners of her mind, a figure flickered. Bitter cold and metal stuck to hot skin. Be better, paučók .