Archive of Our Own ^beta

I awkwardly tell you I like your T-shirt. You say it’s just a grey T-shirt. You kiss the backs of my legs and I want to cry. Only the sun has come this close, only the sun.

— Shauna Barbosa

Ah. The shrieking has stopped. The others are breathing. The room goes quiet. Sometimes it is enough just to recognize a camino. Your bitter heart heals my heart, oh stay with me.

— Anne Carson

***

Natasha has seen a lot of films since leaving Russia for good. In films, love is everything, and people fall in love through big sweeping glances, in cities or wide-open landscapes, with big eyes, faces tilted up rapturously to receive a kiss, tilted down to witness a proposal. The knowledge is certain and breathless. Their love weathers storms, survives sinking ships, presses through comedies of errors until their happy ending, earned but still just a little dreamy and implausible, arrives by the time the story finishes. They are always so sure of things. They plant flags of their love in the sand.

Natasha doesn’t realize she might be in love with Clint until she’s fighting him on a helicarrier, icy blue coating the brown of his eyes, her knee on his balls. It’s a shitty time to know something so solidly, and then ten seconds later it doesn’t even feel solid anymore. His hands are around her neck and when he’s killing her, she can only hate him. It must not be real if it can change so quickly, like the wind, like her personas, like the world. It must have been a fluke that she felt it even once. Still, she worries at it, like a loose tooth. She wonders.

He’s lying sideways on a couch in Tony Stark’s living room; asleep after their long battle. She’d been planning to walk past him and into the hallway, to find a kitchen somewhere, to get a glass of water, but her hand is on his shoulder before she knows what she’s doing, and she watches as he opens his eyes. 

They’re deep and brown, dazed with sleep; there’s no hint of blue left. She doesn’t realize she was looking for it until he blinks again and yawns, and then she takes a step back, ashamed of herself. Takes another step so she’s in the doorway into the hall and then she turns and leaves him there, blinking on the couch. She doesn’t run, it’s not that, it’s just—her hands are not shaking, but they feel like they should be, or that she should be crying, or that her body should be manifesting emotion in some solid heartfelt way. She should be able to prove what she felt before, what fell over her so immensely when he was lying on the cot and sweating, asking her “Do you know what it’s like? To be unmade?” and after that, when he’d blinked the blue out of his eyes for a second and he’d looked at her like he was ashamed of even posing the question.

“You know that I do,” and her fingers on his elbow—that was forgiveness, and he knew it, and the tension had gone out of his body in a slow, gentle breath. And she had loved him, then, known it from her fingernails to the roots of her hair, known it so desperately that she had stood and went to undo the restraints on his wrists so she wouldn’t have to look in his eyes. And then: Steve at the door, everything else, the world coming back into that room where it had just been the two of them. And now she isn’t sure. 

She takes a detour into a bathroom and prods at her face, her flat mouth and her green eyes, and doesn’t feel anything except stupid. She thinks of the end of every war movie where the husband comes home and the wife stands in the doorway, on the top of the steps, hand over her mouth, eyes shining. The relief, in that moment. The love. He’s alive, and he’s back, and everything is going to be okay.

It’s not the first time she’s wondered if emotion was burned out of her completely in the Red Room. It’s the first time the notion has bothered her. She looks herself in the eyes and asks herself the question. Behind everything else, intangible and swirling, she is sure of one thing: she’s angry that Loki said it first, that he’d thought he had the right.

Is this love, Agent Romanoff?

That’s all that’s left, isn’t it? She saved his life, like he saved hers. Her debt to him is paid, and she still wants him near her, still wants him safe and alive, still wants his hands on her shoulders and his grinning, gentle face. 

She puts her hand over her mouth. She blinks her eyes hard, quickly. She tries to cry for him, but her eyes stay stubbornly dry.

She lowers the hand and presses both to the sides of the sink, bows her head until her forehead is touching the mirror. She imagines it cracking—it would, if she were in a movie, and her face would look back at her fractured into a million pieces, made metaphorical and indifferent and strange. But it doesn’t, and the sharp line of her nose remains, the cold green of her eyes. She takes a deep breath and wants to scream until she faints, but doesn’t. It would wake him, for real this time, and he’s only just down the hall.

The next evening, Tony throws them a party, and she tells Clint he’s a hero, and she’s trying to help, comfort him, something—and he looks her in the eye and says he still wants to kill her, he’s still burning up inside with it, and drops her hand, and turns away. 

This dredges up grief. But she doesn’t cry, or anything close to it, she only wants to scream, to rip something apart with her teeth like a wild animal. When she was a little girl she fell asleep sometimes gnawing at the inside of her elbows, but never the one chained to the bed, which would have been explainable—but in Natasha’s experience such things are never explainable, just cruel. She still has baby-teeth marks on one of them, a scar that never quite faded. The biting stopped when they put her en pointe, which they called self control. Natasha knew, though, that it was only because now her feet bled, instead. These days she’s always bleeding, always a cut here or there. It’s not enough sometimes. Sometimes she wishes she was still a monster and could get away with mutilating herself. 

“Just until it goes away,” Clint pleads, and leaves.

So she goes home, too. She doesn’t say goodbye. She doesn’t think any of them expect it of her. 

Natasha likes her apartment for the same reason she likes most things—it belongs to her. She enjoys that—closing her eyes under a roof that’s hers, triple locking the windows and front door and making herself meals, sitting and watching the rain out the window. She’s cultivated a taste for these tiny things. They remind her of her own independence. She does not have to ask permission for the things in her apartment, and she never will. It’s a space she doesn’t think she could ever give up. 

SHIELD gave her a room in their base when she first joined up and got out of medical. It wasn’t bad, all things considered, though it had a bunk bed and the pillows were shit. But it belonged to her as long as she kept her act together, which had been nice. Unexpected, too, in its niceness. She had thought that was all there was in the world, then; scraps of unexpected niceness that one could enjoy but could never plan for. Cold rooms and bunk beds with shit pillows. All she would ever own in the world—and look at her now. She collects small pieces of glass from the street like a magpie and keeps them on her dresser, her bedside table, her shelves in the kitchen. She likes the way they look when the light hits them, something that could so easily cause damage glowing from within. And it means she always has a weapon within arm’s reach, no matter where in the room she is. 

No one has ever been here but her. And she likes that, too—being alone is a luxury she used to long for. 

She sits on her couch and curls one leg up to her chest, looking out the window at the street below. Usually she gets into the room and just the fact that it’s chosen, the fact that it’s hers, is enough to calm her. But today, it isn’t. Today she keeps thinking, instead, of the events of the past week, of receiving a phone call out of nowhere and feeling her whole world shake in its careful foundations. She had never wanted to let anyone so close that their loss could hurt her; she’s always been so sure it would be a disaster. But Clint slid in through the cracks, with his typical perfect aim, and now she—

Well. Feels something that she is hesitant to define as love. It’s heavy, whatever it is.

She looks at her bed and thinks about getting an hour’s rest. She hadn’t slept well the night before, because all of Tony’s beds were too stupidly fucking luxurious, too soft. Rogers had the same problem with the sleeping arrangements, if the way he looked in the morning said anything about it. But she doesn’t get up from the couch. Instead, she finds herself thinking again about getting out of medical and climbing the stairs to her SHIELD-issued room, as if tracing her past to its source might give her some kind of clarity; about that room with the shitty pillows and white walls, and Clint standing in the doorway looking at her as she hesitantly sat down on the bed for the first time. 

She remembers noting with surprise that the locks were on the inside of the door, not the outside.

“It’s pretty spartan now,” Clint had said. “Mine was, too. But you can spruce it up.” He lifted onto the balls of his feet and shifted down again, nearly a nervous gesture. “Or get your own place. They’ll probably give you the OK to move out when you’ve finished psych evals.”

“Right,” she said. “When they’re sure I’m a normal person.”

“When they’re sure you’re not a danger to yourself or others,” he corrected, gently. “They did it to me, too. After the circus.”

“The . . . circus?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, leaning against the doorframe, his hands in his pockets. He was looking at her searchingly, shrewd and interested. “Remind me to tell you about it sometime. They called me Trickshot.” 

Sometime surprised her; that promise that there would be a future where they talked about these things. Would he expect her past in return? 

“I’m going to sleep,” she told him, terrified at the friendship he was offering, and he nodded once and smiled again before he left. 

In the here and now, she closes her eyes and lets the side of her head hit the cool glass of her window. She sleeps there, lightly and fitfully, her face pressed against the windowpane. 

Nick calls her back into work only three days after New York. Clint isn’t there when she arrives, and Maria gives her an inscrutable look while she hands her a folder. 

“Do you know where he is?” she asks, before Natasha can leave the room. 

“His apartment,” she says; it makes no sense to lie. She had gotten a text from him saying he was alive and nothing else. Maria nods like that’s enough for her and Natasha feels an unexpected surge of rage that she doesn’t care enough to ask further, however unfair that is. 

But she smiles back tightly and goes on her mission—greeted at the Quinjet with Steve Rogers.

“Captain,” she says, surprised.

“Steve, please,” he corrects, reflexive. “I don’t—” He looks a little guilty, suddenly, and lowers his voice. “I’m not actually a captain.”

She sits and buckles herself in, feeling amused. “Really?”

“Well,” he says, “they might have actually promoted me. I don’t know. But I was just a cadet when they gave me the serum. I think ‘captain’ just sounds impressive.” 

“Hmm,” she says, and expects the conversation to fade out, but he’s surprisingly shrewd when he looks sideways at her, and it intrigues her. 

“Are you all right?” he asks, and for a surreal moment she thinks he’s asking about her feelings, and then he continues, “you took a lot of pretty big hits the other day.”

“I heal fast,” she says, “like you.” He grins, then, and holds up his hands in mock surrender. 

“Understood, ma’am,” he says, but his eyes are twinkling and ma’am feels like a joke, and Natasha smiles back without intending to. Soft and genuine, and her hands shake when she realizes it. When he asks her to train with him a few times over the next few weeks, asks her to teach him the way she backflips, she doesn’t say no, and she keeps not saying no for a few days, and then those few days turn into almost a month, and she still hasn’t seen Clint in all that time.

They’ve still been checking in with each other, of course—that’s just what they do, it’s simple and practical and a pre-established fact of their partnership—they’re Clint and Natasha, Strike Team Delta, the most formidable pair of agents SHIELD has ever trained, and every few days they text and tell each other they’re alive, whether that’s from burner phones or borrowed phones or phones they buy under false names and then destroy. They always find a way to contact each other. 

Not seeing him isn’t strictly an issue or a worry—they’ve gone months without laying eyes on each other many times—but then she sees him in the SHIELD gym again after that month without him; there are bags, heavy and purple, under eyes that keep darting to all the windows and doors in terror, and she knows that there’s still so much he needs to get a handle on. Natasha has never tried to fix someone before, never wanted to. She’s only ever destroyed people, or taken them apart. But Clint shakes on his feet in the practice room, and he’s so clearly trying to pretend he’s himself again and not quite reaching it, and once she finds out he hasn’t eaten in days she drags him back to his apartment and rests her legs across his lap while his thumb finds her pulse and then his mouth finds the heels of her palms, one at a time. He tells her he doesn’t know how to live with what has happened. (This is not how it goes in the movies, Natasha thinks of saying. She wonders if he will understand what she means by that. He always understands everything else.) 

In his sleep, he whispers her name. She whispers his back, and rests her nose in his hair, and wishes Loki wasn’t in Asgard awaiting trial, because if he was here she would kill him, calmly and slowly. She would find out how to make a god suffer and how to make him die. Someone would have to hold Thor back from her for the rest of her life, and no one at SHIELD would ever forgive her for ruining relations with Asgard, but it would be worth it to see Loki scream, to know that he would never touch anyone with that fucking scepter ever again. She wonders idly, Clint’s head on her shoulder, if he would bleed red or something else; if maybe the same icy blue would leak out of him that was rotting in Clint’s eyes for so long. She would have something to direct her rage onto, if so.

Maybe not. Maybe she would just have another death to make up for and rage that still wouldn’t leave her. She has no means of knowing. Loki’s life is no longer even slightly in her hands. 

In the corner, the dog wakes up, and climbs onto the couch on the other side, to press against Clint’s thigh, and on top of Natasha’s feet. The furry warmth of him, so different to Clint’s solidity, is a shock, but he stays there like he’s been born to it, curled and watchful, looking with one bleary eye at the door. 

She thinks he’ll be safe enough with the dog for an hour or two, and disentangles herself to get food. In his sleep, he reaches out; before she can think too hard about it, she presses a kiss to the heel of his palm, just like he did to hers, desperate for some kind of transference. She’d willingly carry his pain if it meant he didn’t have to for a while. She’d take the sleepless nights and the lack of appetite and nightmares. She’d let him rest. 

She’d saved him in the Helicarrier by bashing his head in, but she’s desperate, still, to keep saving him now. 

“Rogers,” she says one afternoon, months later, “you should get a dog or something. Clint has one.” 

“He does?”

“He found it on the street,” she says. “He has a habit of that.” She means Kate Bishop, with the sharp dark eyes and the biting sarcasm and the rich family she doesn’t want. She means Lucky, one-eyed and faultlessly loyal. 

Steve examines her carefully, and she realizes he thinks she’s talking about herself. 

“Maybe I should get one,” he says finally, mercifully not talking about it. “It does get awful lonely. But I’ve got no one to watch it for me when I’m away.” 

“I’m sure you could find someone to do it,” Natasha says, dry, thinking of the old lady who only speaks Russian who she employs to leave chicken and water out for Liho when she’s away. “This is a big city.” 

Steve lifts a shoulder then drops it, not a confirmation or a refusal. Then he smiles a little, sideways. “I’m hungry,” he says, which is how she ends up across from him in a diner booth and texting Clint to come join them, and how she steals one of Steve’s fries and Clint and Kate both dash in at the same time, Clint telling Kate to fuck off and Kate bitching at him about something. Natasha grins, quiet, and takes another fry. 

Steve raises an eyebrow. “Who’s the dame?” he says, which is Steve trying to be funny. It only works because Kate takes him completely at his word and seems to struggle for about two minutes with her desire to scream at him versus her grudging respect for an American icon.

“Don’t be a dick, Steve,” Clint says, understanding instantaneously what he’s doing, and sits down next to Natasha in the booth. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but he’s already ravenously picking at her side salad, so he at least has an appetite. 

“Kate, Steve,” Natasha says; “Steve, this is Kate Bishop. Clint’s friend.”

“Not my friend,” Clint says, delicately picking out a cherry tomato from Natasha’s salad and eating it.

“Fuck off,” Kate says, “you wouldn’t last ten seconds without me.”

“You have a very poor view of my skills,” Clint says. “I’m a secret agent. I’ve been doing this for a little while, Katie.” 

“Some secret agent,” Kate says, “just announcing it in the middle of a diner—”

“Josef’s cool,” Clint says, and waves to the cook, who waves a spatula back. “Me and him go way back.”

“Sit, Kate,” Natasha says, when it becomes more clear that she doesn’t intend to. Clint shoots her a betrayed look and then stretches his arm behind her shoulders, against the booth; not touching her, but with the potential to. She feels like an idiot and a teenager for buzzing at the space between them. 

“No,” Kate says, “sorry, I have a thing, I was just making sure Mr. Stupid over here—”

“Oh, Mr. Stupid, very original, Katie, thank you.” 

“—Mr. Stupid over here got some food in him before the end of the day.”

Clint’s face shifts gears for a second from fondly irritated to genuinely angry. Steve looks between the two of them, baffled, as Kate seems to realize that she’s misstepped. Natasha tries not to feel prickled right along with Clint at the clumsy way Kate cares.

Kate opens her mouth, then closes it, correctly realizing that an apology would ring too genuine and only draw more concern. “Nice to meet you anyway,” she says, and runs out the door.

Clint eats another tomato with a very deliberate crunch. “You call me in for a reason or do you just wanna feed me too?”

Natasha blinks at him. “Ona slishkom starayetsya,” she says. “Eto ne yeye vina.” She's trying too hard. It's not her fault.

“Eto net?” Clint says, petulant. It's not? The waitress comes, and he opens his mouth to order only to find that she’s already setting down a plate in front of him; blueberry pancakes, bacon, black coffee.

Natasha sips her own coffee and ignores Steve’s intrigued look. “Ona ne znayet tebya tak, kak ya,” she says. She doesn't know you like I do. She holds his eyes for a moment, until the line between his brows softens, then looks back across the table. “Rogers and I are gonna see a movie.”

“Are you?” Clint says, quirking an eyebrow. “What ‘cha seeing?” He says this through a mouthful of pancake. Natasha eyes him and contemplates threatening to sting him with her Widow Bites until he develops some decent table manners. 

“Natasha said I need to catch up with the 21st century,” Steve says. He’s still looking between them with a combination of bafflement and distant, fond remembrance, tinged with longing. It’s an expression he has a lot. “So we’re seeing When Harry Met Sally.”

“Nat!”

“Don’t start with me, Clint,” Natasha says. She watches him relax, minute by minute, as he eats and realizes she’s not going to ask him to talk about what Kate said. 

“You can’t show him that as his first rom com!”

“Oh, and what would you suggest?”

“It has to be The Princess Bride, Nat, there’s no way it could be anything else.”

“It’s . . . very much not my first romantic comedy,” Steve interrupts, amused. “That genre existed in 1940.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Clint says, this time through a mouthful of bacon. “You still need to watch The Princess Bride. It has everything. Swordfights, true love where one party doesn’t admit it for a while and then just as she does they’re separated by circumstance, Inigo Montoya—” He pauses for a sip of coffee. “—who is the sexiest man alive—”

“You have awful taste in men,” Natasha says.

“Do I?” Clint says. “I don’t think so.”

“You wouldn’t,” she says. 

Steve looks between them again, then says, careful, “Are you . . ?”

Clint squints at him, takes another sip of coffee. “Yeah,” he says. 

The two of them continue looking at each other for a minute. Natasha rolls her eyes and goes back to her food.

“But you,” Steve says. He nods in Natasha’s direction; or at least she assumes he does. She can tell from the way Clint’s arm goes stiff for a second behind her, the way his leg twitches. He takes the arm away, ostensibly to cut his pancakes, though he was managing them one-handed for a while before that. 

“Yeah,” Clint says again. “You get it?”

They’re having a conversation that Natasha is not involved in, but she understands the language. Her stomach twists. She looks at him, once, careful, and he looks back; then she looks at Steve, who looks like he’s aware he’s tread on some feet by asking the question. More than that, though, he just looks a little sad, a little lost in the kind of headspace he gets into when he’s thinking really hard about the past.

“Yeah,” he says. “Well, anyway. Speaking of rom-coms. Have either of you ever seen Bringing Up Baby?”

Natasha has, in her late-night searches for Hollywood women to base herself off of. Clint hasn’t, because he only watches the Bachelorette and Dog Cops. She and Steve talk about it and she feels Clint watching her, eating the lunch that she already knew the order for, his arm conspicuously absent behind her. She knows if she looked over she’d find him tender-eyed and waiting, conscious of the general nature of her feelings even if he doesn’t know the exact details of them. She doesn’t know how much longer either of them can bear it, this odd quasi-intimacy, this between-space where they don’t belong to anyone else but they don’t really belong to each other, either. So she doesn’t look back. 

You get it, Clint had said. She does. 

She wonders when she’d first realized that he loved her. It might have been now and it might have been forever ago. Maybe when he hovered in the doorway of her SHIELD-issued bedroom and offered a story about the circus, or it might have been him at the door to the lobby to her new apartment, holding a silly little plant and wearing a big grin. 

She pressed a palm to his chest and stopped him in his tracks. “I don’t want you to come in,” she said. 

“Natasha,” he said, taking a step forward. She stepped with him, both of them still frozen in the doorway. He always said her name like she was a normal person. That had been the most unsettling part, and it had only been a few months since they’d met; which was not nearly long enough for her to be okay with the way he looked her in the eyes, earnest and teasing, and waited for her to match him. He was still holding the stupid plant, the grin fading into concern. Emotions fell so easily through him, like water through a drain. On her they all got clogged. 

“I don’t like what you make me into,” she told him, without looking straight at him, and then shut the lobby door in his face. 

They’d never talked about it again. To this day, though, he’s never asked to come to her place. Instead, they see each other at work and in cheap restaurants, and at his apartment in Bed-Stuy, with his dog nestled over his feet or watching her from the other side of the room.

Clint is battered and living, tender and snappish and scarred, but he still loves with an abandon that shocks her, loves his dog and loves Kate and loves her in a way she can’t comprehend feeling herself. Her love, if it exists, curls up tight and only comes loose in the safest of moments; his love is always there, spilling out of him. He’s so vulnerable with it that it makes her twitchy, forever peeling herself away. 

But she can still feel his mouth against the inside of her palm, like a stone for her to carry wherever she goes. She shakes her head and tries to shake it off, but it remains, stubborn and kind. He loves her and thinks she does not love him back, and he has made himself content with that, content to be near her and touch her sometimes and keep her alive, to have her friendship and protection and presence. It’s a little unselfish and a lot masochistic, which is him to a T. He thinks she does not love him back and he might be right and he might be wrong, but he thinks it for all the wrong reasons—it’s not that she doesn’t, it’s that she might not be able to; it’s that maybe there isn’t enough of her in her body to love anything. She wants to explain this to him—it’s not your fault, I just don’t know if I’m real—but she knows how it would sound and how he would take it, so she lets the lie sit between them, gathering dust. It’s easier that way. In the meantime, she tries to make sense of it. 

She thinks he must be in love with the version of her he thinks exists, not whatever tattered pieces of a person are left after everything. It kills her, a little, that she would be willing to let him continue to believe that if she could be sure she loved him back. His unselfishness is her selfishness, but his masochism is her masochism. They both like to hurt themselves for different reasons. 

“I love you,” she tries, one night, into the mirror. “I love you.” She’s trying to look in her own eyes while she says it, hunting for something to prove that the words are genuine, not planted by movies or music or other people. She wishes she knew what it was like to feel something that wasn’t modified from some other source. 

He gives her a necklace with an arrow on her birthday. She wears it. No one says anything about it, but it runs rampant across her mind every time she feels the movement of the charm against her throat, and sometimes she reaches up and wraps her fingers around it. 

Masochism. Steve watches her hold it sometimes, when they’re on planes or trains together and it’s late at night. He pretends to be asleep and she pretends to fall for it. Knowing he’s awake is not as off-putting as it once might have been. He’s living on borrowed time and she’s trying to take her time back; she feels something kindred in her gut with him, this living relic who is also trying desperately to pick up the pieces. So she lets him see her hold it. She lets him see her try, when no one else is watching, to understand love. 

In Budapest, in June of 2010, that was the only time she’d ever tried to fuck him. Maybe she’d ruined everything for good then, and never knew it. 

They’d been working together for about six months at that point, and training together for longer; she’d been out of the Red Room for a year and she had been working on making sense of him. He liked bad TV and read sparingly, mostly just the newspaper, and when he did read he mouthed the words on the page silently to himself. He was from Iowa, a small town that he’d showed her on a map once when they were in a jet. He could do a backflip on command, and he moved with his bow like he was always in the middle of forgetting it wasn’t constantly attached to him, like an odd third limb. Together, these things made a hazy whole picture, affable and generally friendly, kind of a smart-ass. 

What bothered her was that she couldn’t tell what the hell he wanted from her. He’d saved her life, and she’d been searching, since, for a way to pay him back for it. Then she caught him watching her, when they were fucking around in Budapest at a bar, killing time before their flight home. She was people-watching and he was watching her, an odd, fond little curl to the side of his mouth, something warm in his eyes. She didn’t let on to him that she’d seen it, just tested the thought out, rolled the words around in her head— he wants me. 

It wasn’t completely unexpected. Most people did, especially men. 

So that night she followed him into his room, which was also not completely unexpected. Sometimes they were together after the mission was done, dozing on chairs or talking about his childhood in the circus or running through drills together. Today she waited in the doorway, leaning against it as he sat down with a sigh on the end of his bed and scrubbed at his face with one hand. She considered him, the way she might a target. She thought— well, all right, that’s something, not exactly with interest but not with disinterest either. It wouldn’t come close to repaying him for her life, but she could do this thing to make him happy. 

And he wasn’t unattractive. So she crossed the room to him and, when he sat back to look at her, sat on his lap, hands linked behind his head; they watched each other for a moment, and she was aware suddenly of how tense he was under her, how warm. She had not let anyone touch her much, since—since. She waited, eyebrow cocked, for him to take the invitation. 

Only he didn’t touch her, he blanched and pulled back and just looked at her, his eyes brown and baffled and compassionate enough to make something prickle on the back of her neck, and said: “No, Nat, no.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “You want—”

She couldn’t finish the thought. The way he was looking at her, his eyes wide, not from horror but from something sad and deep that made her feel watched, pitied. She stood, hurried, awkward; she was never awkward. 

Before she could retreat, he touched her arm, careful at first, then closing his hand around it when he saw she wasn’t going to run. 

“It’s not—”

“You don’t have to be nice to me,” she said. She tried to growl, to be her old ice-faced self, protected by her own lack of shame. But she was ashamed, she could feel it in her limbs, even if it didn’t show on her face. 

“I’m not,” he said. “It just—It’s gotta be on you, all right? It’s gotta be what you want.”

“What about what you want?”

“I think you already know that,” he said, and it was gentle, but it made her eyes sting, unexpected and sharp. “You’re good at figuring out what other people want.” It wasn’t a critique. But it hit her hard, made her forcibly aware that she didn’t understand herself in the implicit, instinctive way that other human beings understood themselves. That wanting things or enjoying things was so foreign to her that it may as well have been unknowable. 

She knew she needed something from him, something warm and nebulous, but she didn’t know how to articulate that or if it would even be willingly given. But she knew what he wanted. She could tell. She could give him that, if he’d let her.

She didn’t reach for him again. He said no, and that was that. Frustration bubbled under her skin, and she nodded. “I’m sorry.”

He laughed, in this half-disbelieving way, shocked and a little sad, and with a little of that tender gentleness that always made her want to stand up straighter. “You don’t have to be sorry, Nat,” he said. He touched her shoulder, carefully, before she went, shutting the hotel room door with a quiet click. 

She stared at nothing in the hallway, still frustrated. If she didn’t have to be sorry for trying to fuck him, and he didn’t want her to fuck him, then what the hell was she supposed to be feeling right now? What did he want? 

That was the thing about Clint, though—for a spy, for a liar, he was so bad at lying. He never stopped meaning what he’d said in that room. His smile the next morning while they walked their bags out to the taxi was enough for her to know he was never gonna talk about it again. His honesty terrified her, and so she never mentioned it either. 

They’ve gone two years without ever talking about it. For all she knows, he never thinks about it, just goes about his life and sees her as she is now rather than ever remembering the weight of her across his lap. But she can’t get it out of her head, the way his shoulders moved under her hands when he breathed. She does not know what it means to want someone; it doesn’t feel dizzy and lust-drunk like she thinks it should feel. But it stays in her skin like a scar, waiting in the background for her to close her eyes and remember it, on trains, in her apartment, halfway to sleep. His breaths, in and out. His body underneath her. His hand tender around her wrist. It’s got to be what you want.  

In the middle of December, Liho cries outside her window, and she lets her in. She wonders if she’ll be timid when stepping over the windowsill. But Liho is only determined, confident, and slow, walking in like she owns the place already and has only been waiting for Natasha to realize it. Natasha finds that she is jealous of her own cat, annoyed enough to ignore Liho, unfairly, as she winds around Natasha’s ankles and purrs. At least Liho knows what she wants and where she belongs. At least she knows who she is— 

She puts a stop to this line of thinking before it can get too far. It never gets her anywhere; it only ever makes her palms sweat or the back of her neck hot. Embarrassment, probably, at the self-pity of it, or the idea of failure. Sometimes she wonders at how easy it would be to leave and hide herself and make a new role, to play it and play it until it became second nature. It would, at the very least, take away the uncertainty she feels. All of this has been about freedom, but sometimes freedom exhausts her enough to consider giving it up, to fall into old habits, to mold herself into strangers and pretend she isn’t a murderer of thousands. She never got to just be a person, and sometimes she wonders what it would be like. 

Clint would say, in all his surprising practicality, that trying to find out what being a person is like through pretending to be something you’re not wouldn’t work. She knows that—she does. But , she wants to say to him sometimes, when he looks at her like he’s proud of her for slogging through it, for trying, but I am so tired. For today—just this once—can you choose for me? Can you be my conscience? Can you tell me what I am supposed to do? Little decisions overwhelmed her at first, apples or oranges, coffee or tea, toast with or without butter. Once he sat down with her after training and cut an apple with a knife from her thigh holster, offering her half the slices without asking. She found that she liked apples. 

She is not incapable of life, or of living, or of deciding, as she reminds herself every day, with every action; she is straight-shouldered and determined and unflappable. But sometimes—sometimes she is tired, too. 

“There’s 200 different kinds of cereal in the grocer’s,” Steve says, hopeless, at dinner one evening. They’re sitting in the booth of another diner, this one in New Mexico and dotted all over with alien memorabilia. They’ve just paid a visit to Jane Foster and her research team, mostly because Thor was there, also visiting, and Fury wanted someone around to watch him while he was on-planet. To Steve’s knowledge, it’s just a vacation to visit an old colleague. She offered to bring him to Roswell, too, but he declined on the grounds that they’d already met a real alien and an alleged one would be kind of a letdown. 

She sips her tea. “You get used to it,” she says.

“How?” he asks. He gestures at the diner menu. “Even this—it’s too many options.” 

She scans the menu. “Try the eggs Benedict,” she tells him. “I like those.”

“It’s supper time,” he says, frowning; she smiles at the word.

“Diners never mind,” she tells him. “Breakfast for dinner is kind of the draw, for a lot of people.” She’s thinking of Clint and his near-constant order of blueberry pancakes. 

“Well, I mind,” Steve says, and orders a trucker’s steak and mashed potatoes, and finishes it all before she’s gotten halfway through her eggs.

A few weeks later, on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, she sees Steve’s steady, too-easily given trust start to waver. She had always thought it should have been withdrawn before this; she was still crushed, privately, when it happened. He looked at her in a way he had never looked at her before, that night. In that moment, she was not a friend or an ally or even a comrade, only a stranger. She had been made commonplace and unfamiliar. You are too näive, she thought of telling him, I am always telling lies. You should have known that all along. It still hurts, though, solid and unflinching in her chest. She wishes she had justifications for him, reasons, explanations. She doesn’t, though. She only has regrets, and her orders. That’s not enough to base forgiveness on. 

“You need to give me the details,” Steve tells her. “How am I supposed to keep everyone safe if I don’t have the whole story?”

She knows what he means. She wishes the world was that simple. 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she says, on the flight home, hostages safe in the belly of the plane. “I’m not sorry.”

“I didn’t expect you to be sorry,” Steve throws back, and in him it’s cruel. “I don’t know why I even expected you to trust me.” 

He storms off, and she doesn’t follow. She doesn’t know why he expected it, either. 

There’s no time to shake hands and make up, though she wishes there was. There is only the Winter Soldier—cruel and unending, merciless and silent; there is Nick vanishing under their noses and her and Steve running to the house of a man named Sam and then the Soldier coming for all of them. Natasha always wondered, when she took the time to think about it, if he would ever come back to finish the job he started. If his aim would be better this time, if it would hit somewhere other than her hip. 

When she had known him, in Russia, it had only been for three days. He had whispered his name into her hair when he had her pinned to the ground. They had been sparring, practicing; he had said James penitently into one of her curls, nearly-silent, like a breath. Everyone was watching. She steeled her courage, and whispered Natalia back.

He was not so dead-eyed then as he is now. Then, his eyes were blue and deep, and lost—like the eyes of a dying animal, wondering for the warmth of its mother, one last time—but unable to find it, only searching, searching. 

Sometimes, when she is wondering if he will return, she will wonder if he spared her because he knew her name, and if he meant for her to run that day, fast and far, away from Moscow and over the steppes to Ukraine, through the Black Sea to Turkey. Far enough that the Red Room might just think she was dead, somewhere she could rent a room and build herself up from the bones she still had. 

She hadn’t left, though. It hadn’t even crossed her mind. She had only whirled back into the dance, found the nearest safe house, and put her neck in their hands again. 

It feels important, to this day, that he gave her the opening. 

James, she thinks, stuck between fear and sorrow, the whole way to the safe house. James.

Steve’s hunched over his own lap, shuddering. Sam’s hand is on his shoulder the whole way, his thumb moving back and forth. Maria watches them both with an eyebrow quirked, closer to irritation than Natasha is comfortable with; she wants to snarl at Maria for the first time in a long time. How dare she think he’s not handling it well. If he isn’t, that’s no one’s business but his. Is she handling it well? Is Sam, is anyone? She wishes Clint had come. 

As the car stops, Steve lifts his head. Maria heads in with a calm, quick stride, giving Natasha a sharp look. They shuffle inside the safe house in silence, and he clears his throat. 

“It was Bucky,” he says. “ He. He was Bucky. I don’t—”

“Woah,” Sam says. “Who’s Bucky?”

Steve laughs like it burns his throat to do it. Natasha, bizarrely, has the urge to reach out and take his hand.

“You know, it’s funny, he said,” Steve says, “the same fucking thing.” 

Then he walks into the next room, where Maria vanished, his shoulders tight. Natasha, hand tingling, heart pounding, follows. 

“So Nick’s alive,” Natasha says, carefully. “And your friend.”

“He’s not the same,” Steve says. “He doesn’t know me.” The admission appears to pain him; he throws the shield across the room of Nick’s safe house and it sticks in the drywall, and he stares at it like he’s never seen something so awful in his life. 

Then he storms out the door and Sam follows him. She doesn’t. She’s thinking about the way his mouth formed the word Bucky , how she’s heard him say Bucky’s name a million times before with a kind of mournful tenderness, but never this monumental rage, this ache.

There are other ways to love, she thinks, and thinks of Steve’s rage and then of looking at herself in the mirror the day after New York, trying to find proof of her own heart. There are so many ways. 

Sam comes back in after a few minutes. Distantly, she hears cracking noises; elsewhere in the house, Steve is attacking the walls. 

“Can you—do you know what to do?” Sam asks. He looks frustrated. “He’s gonna hurt himself.”

She stands. “I think he wants to.” She knows that feeling, tearing at the walls until your nails bleed and then realizing that all you wanted was to hurt somewhere physical, as if that made your chest ache less. Wanting to dig your teeth into your own flesh until you felt the blood in your mouth. 

“You should go talk to him.” 

She nods, not saying anything more, and leaves the room, picking her way down the stairs into the garage area where Steve is standing, an old, shattered chair on the floor in front of him.

She raises an eyebrow. “Mature.”

“Fuck off,” Steve says, then, “ God, I wish I could get drunk, Jesus Christ —”

She watches as he stumbles around the room for a second, aimless and graceless in his grief, then slumps against the wall. He looks young in his sadness, and it strikes her that he is—younger than Clint and Tony and Bruce, certainly, possibly even younger than Sam. 

A bright-eyed twenty-four year old recruit sent off to die for his country, over and over again, she thinks, and for the first time wonders if they should have given him the suit after thawing him out, if her jokes about fossils have not landed the way she thought they did. She’d thought she knew Steve, but she hadn’t ever sensed this rage, which seemed so impossible now; it is bigger than his body, exuding out of him everywhere. How much he has silenced himself until now baffles her.

I let you see me, she thinks of saying. Don’t you get what that means? All those nights on trains where they both knew the other was awake; didn’t he realize, then, that he’s the first friend she’s had in years? It’s impossible to say it, now, when he’s in so much pain. She wonders if he could stand to hear it later. She’s starting to think it might be more important to say things out loud than to take them on chance. 

She sits down next to him. “You loved him,” she says. 

Steve makes a noise, half sob, half shout. “More than anything,” he says. He puts his face in his hands for a little while; his words, when they come out, are muffled by flesh and twisted with sobs. “You all surprised me, y’know. When you woke me up. No one asked why I did it.” 

“Why you did it,” Natasha repeats.

“I could have bailed out of the plane,” Steve says dully. “Set it to autopilot. Peggy even says it on the recording, I remember her saying they could come find me . . . I kept waiting for someone to ask. I mean, sure, it was the Arctic, but I was damn near invincible. All I had to do was send a location and they would’ve had me out of the ice in a few days.”

He lifts his head and looks at her.

“But everyone kept not asking,” he says. “Soon enough I realized they just—didn’t know. Didn’t realize. Or didn’t want to, or maybe it was easier on everyone’s minds if they thought I had no choice. That I laid my life on the line because I was some big hero and I didn’t make it out and I—”

She doesn’t say anything, just watches him. 

“I mean, to a degree, it was true,” he says, more to himself than anything. “I wanted Red Skull dead. I would’ve done anything for it. But I knew I wouldn’t get off that plane.”

“Because of Barnes,” Natasha says. Things are making a horrible kind of sense now. 

“His name was Bucky,” Steve says. He says it with such tenderness that Natasha shudders. “The only one who called him James Buchanan was his mother, and now that’s all anyone calls him. Books and the museum and all that. All of them think he’s James. They say it like only I ever called him Bucky. But I didn’t, everyone did.”

He looks across the room, at the shield, still stuck in the wall. 

She sits down next to him, not letting their arms touch. 

“I can’t lose him again, Natasha,” he says. 

She looks back at him, at the fierce blue of his eyes, the tears still shining in them; the certainty of can’t . Has she ever loved like this? 

“Tell me about him,” she says, to give herself time; to separate this man Steve loves from the James she met once, her recognition of his name so distant it feels like a dream.

Steve takes another of those deep shuddering breaths, the ones that sound too big for his lungs. “He had three sisters,” he says, “Becca and Heather and Aggie. His family invited me over for Passover and Rosh Hosannah even though they knew I wasn’t Jewish. He went with me to the graveyard to see Ma every time I couldn’t stand the thought of going by myself, and he held my hand every time, right there in the open, even though we both knew it was a terrible fucking idea, and he—”

Steve stops, there, and leans his head back against the wall, and closes his eyes. 

“He was the first person who ever loved me who didn’t have to,” he says, after he sits there a moment. “He was the first person I ever loved like—like I’d die without him. I can’t lose him again. I won’t.”

She watches him, the tears in his blue eyes. Her stomach aches. She stands, and holds out a hand.

“Well,” she says, “you’re not gonna jog his memory in the Kevlar.”

He opens his eyes and frowns. His voice is hoarse. “What?”

“We have to show him something he might recognize, right?” she says, and wiggles her fingers. “How do you feel about breaking into the Smithsonian?”

There is a slow smile growing on his face, breathless and terrified, trusting and uncertain. He takes her hand and stands. 

“I’ve been wanting to break in there since I woke up,” he says. “You know they still won’t give me any of my stuff back?”

“We can fix that,” she says.

The fight will be hard. But the planning is harder, the way it always is, and they only have hours to plan this one. Distantly, she wishes for Clint again, not for anything resembling tactics but for his range and his ability to make her shoulders smooth out. He does this thing where he touches her, carefully, just between the shoulder blades, and it’s like all the anger leaves her body. 

Instead, it’s Maria, and the twist to her mouth is more sympathetic than irritated now. Natasha doesn’t like it any better. 

“You don’t have to do this,” she says. 

“It’s our only option,” Natasha says. “All of it has to get leaked. I won’t have time to fine-tune it.”

“Even so,” Maria says. 

Natasha shakes her head and stands. “Do me a favor, okay? Before all this starts?”

“Sure,” Maria says. “I can get Clint on the line—”

“Not him,” Natasha says, though his name in someone else’s mouth makes her want to scream. “Get Stark. See if he can get me Banner.”

“Banner?” Maria says, nonplussed. “Why?”

“He has about as many enemies as I do,” Natasha says. “I’m not the only one people are gonna want to put down for being a monster. I’m just best at defending myself.”

“He’s the Hulk , Natasha,” Maria says, still confused. “I think he’d be fine.”

“Just call him,” Natasha says, and turns away. The idea of doing this without at least giving Banner a warning puts a sour taste in her mouth; he terrifies her, but he also terrifies himself, and she knows what that’s like. “All right?”

“Sure,” Maria says. “Sure, fine.”

After that, it’s like she’s on auto-pilot. Break in. Climb the stairs, maintain the disguise. Take it off and shoot at just the right moment. 

Did I step on your moment?

And then just a simple bit of hacking. 

Simple. Just the press of a button.

Her hand trembles above it. 

Steve has the hard job, really.

Everything, Natasha. They’re going to know everything.  

Every kill. Every man she’s ever fucked and then destroyed. Every fire started, every drink poisoned. Every knife to every throat. Every strand in her finely woven web.

But more than that—her first apartment, the one she pretends to still live in. Steve’s apartment, the one he was dumb enough to think was untapped. Clint’s brother’s farmhouse, empty and waiting in case they ever need it. Evidence of lives lived, after these atrocities were committed; that’s what they’ll really be angry about. The idea that she was happy, for even a second. The idea that she—that any of them—got away with it.

Her hand trembles again, and she presses the button. 

I’m sorry, she thinks, not knowing to who, and then Sam bellows something into her earpiece, and her auto-pilot takes over again.

She finds Sam quickly enough, joining up with him on the roof. His wings are busted, but it’s nothing Stark couldn’t fix in an afternoon or two. He points to the falling Helicarrier with a shaking hand, and Steve is falling from it, too far to be reached, and Natasha bites hard at the inside of her own cheek to dull an animal’s scream. 

“Nothing else,” she says, stepping forward even though it won’t help, “no one else—fuck!” Sam’s hand wraps around her upper arm; she wrenches free. From far away, she sees a black shape dive after him. Sam’s voice crackles into her ear, both her earpiece and the real one. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Yeah,” she says. The black shape slides clean into the water amid all the debris. She remembers Steve, hunched like a child or a much smaller man on the floor, saying I knew I wouldn’t get off that plane. No one had come for him, then. He was almost lost to the water again, but for James Barnes.

Their heads breach the surface. She and Sam both watch, helpless to do anything else, as the Winter Soldier drags Steve to shore. 

Natasha had been holding her gun, but now she tucks it back into the thigh holster and reaches up to touch the necklace, still there, even after everything. Barnes stands over Steve on the shore, staring down at him, then runs for the trees. 

“Should we go after him?” Sam says, uneasy. 

“No,” she says. “Steve’s—Steve’s more important now.” 

“Right,” Sam says, and shoots her a still-uneasier sideways glance. “You all right?”

Barnes is alive, Natasha thinks. And he shouldn’t be. And he doesn’t remember anything, he doesn’t have anything to go on, but there’s still this. This undefined thing. This thing that sits still and waits for its moment. This thing that means protect, that means keep, that means save. It goes along with him, as long as he lives, and it wasn’t erased or covered up or ripped out. They couldn’t do it, no matter how hard they tried. He still knows it, even now, even mindless. Even without knowing why.

“I think I need stitches,” she says.

She doesn’t let go of the arrow and wants to scream or sob or go limp. Barnes still knows how to love, and so she—so she—

“I think I need—”

She doesn’t finish the sentence. Sam shoots one more anxious glance at Steve, flat on his back in the sand, then heads for the stairs. 

Oh Christ, she thinks, on the way down the stairs. The intonation is Steve’s; just another thing that she’s picked up from being around him so much. Everyone knows everything, now. The thought makes her stumble on the stairs, something she only ever does when facing both blood loss and shock and quite possibly a concussion. Sam turns back and offers his elbow; she’s not too proud to take it. Gasping as the wound in her leg starts to leak again, she lets herself prod at the thought, the reality of it: everyone knows everything now.

It doesn’t feel as awful as she thought it would. There’s something cleansing about it, to have all of her lies uncovered, all her secrets told. But—and she stumbles on the stairs again, Sam catching her—it’s not just her. It’s everyone; it’s everything. It’s Clint and Banner and Maria and Nick. Banner will be all right, because he has Tony’s stubbornness to protect him against any and all media onslaughts, and he’s safe in the Tower, and he’s been warned. Maria and Nick have weathered storms before. Clint—

Clint has her, she thinks. And she has Clint. And—and. There will be time enough for everything once they get Steve from the side of the river. For now, she steels herself against the pain in her side and leg and head and she keeps going.

Eventually, when Steve has been deposited in the nearest hospital and Sam is sitting in wait for him, she gets on the train. She pulls her hood up and pretends to sleep on the long ride into New York. It’s a madhouse, which makes it easy enough to slip through, to go mechanically from train to train and then walk the four blocks to Clint’s. She hopes Kate isn’t there. Even if she is, she would probably know to leave if she saw the lumps of bandages under Natasha’s clothes, or the look in her eyes. Or if she’s read the news lately. 

She only means to sleep, when she gets there; it’s the middle of the afternoon and she imagines that he’ll be out, and that she’ll fall onto his couch and wait for the morning to sort everything out. But he’s home when she opens the door, her hands shaking. He’s sitting on the couch staring at the TV, the news running, and he clicks it off when he sees her come in. 

There’s a beat, a moment of silence. She takes two steps in and closes the door behind her. His hair is mussed, sticking up in the back in the way that means he’s been in the apartment alone all day. He’s looking at her with the endless compassion that made her skittish when they first met and angry in Budapest. She takes another step towards him and says his name, once, reedy. 

She feels it again, washing over her like panic, but so much worse and better and bigger. She loves him more than she’s ever loved anything, the kind of love that would jump out of a plane and kill a demi-god and sit on the couch with him as he slept just so he could feel the steady beat of her pulse when he woke. She takes two more steps and then two more and he says “Natasha,” and then she’s touching the sides of his face and leaning down to kiss him, frantic and terrified.

She sits on his lap. She can feel her cheeks, damp and somehow far away from her. Her body feels loose and free and not like hers. She’s sitting above looking at it, hopeless, haunting. “Touch me,” she says, “I want you to, I want—” 

And then she’s choking on it. On the wanting, pushed back so far she’s forgotten how to use it. He puts his hands on her hips. And she feels them, then, feels them like she’s close to them, and she reaches down and takes his hands and moves them up to her cheeks, and he rubs his thumbs tenderly against the dampness. Against her tears. She rattles back into her body. She wheezes, half a laugh, half a sob. All uncertainty. 

She holds his hands there against her cheeks. He doesn’t try to move them.

“I’ll try,” he says, “I’ll do whatever you need me to, Nat, but you gotta tell me,” and she leans forward and kisses him again on the me, and she’s still shaking, still crying silently, and it’s not a good kiss, not passionate or heartfelt or even very warm, because she’s terrified and the world is burning and she doesn’t know if she’s alive or dead, and everyone knows everything now. But he’s here, and his hands on her face are keeping her in her skin, and that—that has to be love, it has to be, because she came to him first, before anything, before any one, she came here, to Bed-Stuy, to his apartment and his couch, and she couldn’t cry until she was here. 

His mouth touches her jaw; she imagines him suddenly and vividly with needle and thread in his hands, stitching her skin back together. He’s done it so many times; he knows how to do it so it hardly scars. Once, when she was half-passed out from blood loss in a hotel room in France in 2011, he kissed her palm in that way of his, just before he started sewing up her arm. How did she go so long without letting everything fall through her like this? How did she go so long believing there was no possibility of it? How did she spend all this time letting the Red Room still decide what she was and what she wanted? Barnes still knows how to love, after everything they took from him. Can’t she have that, too? Can’t she keep herself breathing, keep those soft parts alive, even if she keeps them close?

“Clint,” she says against his mouth, half-crazed. “Clint. Please.”

“Shh,” he soothes. “Shh, I got you.”

“Everyone knows,” she says. “Everyone—my files. Your files. Barney, you have to tell Barney—I’m so sorry.” 

“Don’t,” he says. “Just breathe. It’s okay.” He kisses her again, which is not conducive to breathing. But she clings to him, her port in the storm. Do you realize, she thinks of saying, of pulling back and brushing his hair off his forehead, that all this time I’ve been able to love you? 

“Just,” she says, and pulls back from the kiss. “Just.” And she doesn’t know what to ask for.  

“You’re shaking,” he says, and takes her hands from his hair and just holds them in his. Clint wears his sadness in his eyes, always; he looks devastated now. “Nat, no , you’re shaking.”

He thinks she’s doing it again, she realizes; repaying, self-destructing. She pulls one hand free and presses it, shaking, just like he said, to his cheek.

“You know you’re my best friend, right?” she says. It comes out quiet, secret, sure.

He wipes another tear from her face. “Nat,” he says, so gently she doesn’t know what to do with herself. “C’mere.”

She thinks it should feel new, leaning into him like this; her forehead on his shoulder, his hands tracing her back. It should feel new to sit so close to someone for no reason other than her own comfort. But it doesn’t feel new, it feels expected and calm and gentle, his hands and his breath ruffling the hair at her temple and the solidity of him, a port in a storm. She doesn’t melt into him, because she doesn’t know that she can, but something in her chest stills, and slowly, her breathing follows it, settling, resting. At peace. 

“Thank you,” she says, muffled. 

His lips at her temple, just for a moment, replacing his breath. “Anytime.” 

She doesn’t mean to fall asleep. Steve’s still out there somewhere, and so is Sam, and so is James Buchanan Barnes, not dead after all, and not really alive either. Somewhere in the middle, like her. She thinks that Steve might need her help on this more than he expects he will. But Clint’s hand is moving in slow circles over her back, and the TV is being clicked on again, playing quietly in the background, and the dog has come to lay by his feet and she can hear the soft whuff s of its breath. So she drifts off that way, his shoulder under her cheek, hearing the dog breathe and feeling him do it, her fingers twitching and searching for the beat of his pulse.

She wakes up tangled in the sheets of his bed, and to the water running in the bathroom. 

She feels absurdly calm, clear-headed. Something very stiff and uncertain faded out of her last night. She could not be a real person in front of him, and he didn’t leave. He only held her and helped her remember. 

She taps two fingers on the arrow at her neck. She remembers him in Budapest, years ago, and she knows that if she doesn’t say anything about last night he never would, either, never again, masochistic and unselfish like he always is. But here’s the difference: this time, she knows what she wants. 

He’s humming when she walks into the bathroom, shaving his face over a towel in the sink. The humming stops abruptly when she tugs off her clothes, unselfconsciously, and pulls back the shower curtain and gets in. He’s silent for the first minute or so as she washes up, getting stray dirt and blood from yesterday off. Then he clears his throat. 

“Nat—”

“Please tell me you have shampoo,” she says, tugging the curtain open again and peering out at him, “and you don’t just wash your hair with soap or something.” 

There’s an audible noise when he swallows whatever he had been planning to say. She bites back a smile, but he notices it anyway and scowls at her. This, at least, is familiar. 

“I’m not a barbarian,” he says, and hands her a shampoo bottle.

She closes the curtain again and pours shampoo into her hand, scrubbing her hair clean of all the grime of yesterday. While she does, she thinks about it; sitting on his lap like a mirror of the last time she did it, his voice cracking on the word no, heartbroken, a way it never had before. She rinses the shampoo out of her hair. “I think it would be too much to ask for conditioner . . ?”

He sighs. “No, Nat, no conditioner.” 

She lingers for a minute more, cataloguing the tone of his voice. She realizes, chest tight, that he thinks she is going to tell him she was wrong yesterday, that her mouth on his was little more than a fevered, panicked dream.

She gets out of the shower, clean now, wrapping a towel around herself and looking squarely at him. He’s wiped the shaving cream off his face, leaving it clean and smooth; he’s in an old T-shirt and boxers, his eyes meeting hers as easily as ever, something both resigned and kind in them, waiting for her to speak. 

“I love you,”she says. 

He sucks in a breath like it was the last thing he was expecting. It’s different, saying she loves him here. In the mirror, her face just stays cold, expressionless; here, she can almost feel her cheeks heat up. His face, too, changes; he looks like a man looking at a red, full moon, lost in awe and a little afraid.

“Nat,” he says, almost a warning.

“I’m not telling you that for any other reason than—than I think you should know,” she says, and is surprised to feel herself stumbling over it. Maybe she is a little nervous, after all. 

He opens his mouth.

“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” she adds. “I’ve been thinking it over for a really long time.” 

He closes it, considers her, opens it again. “How long?” 

“Two years,” she says, “or just about that, I guess. Since New York.” 

His face shifts again, considering and hopeful, eyes bright. She watches the change as it occurs and feels her heart twist in her chest, longing, so she gives into it and leans over and kisses him, just to test it out. And his mouth is soft, a little lazy from the early morning. One of his hands cups the side of her face, thumb moving on her cheekbone. She thinks about making a morning of it, pressing closer, opening her mouth. But she doesn’t—she just pulls back and smiles at him, instead. She’s struck by the unfamiliar feeling of having all the time in the world. 

“Right,” he says, a little strangled. “Okay. Breakfast? I can do that. I can make us breakfast.”

“Breakfast sounds great,” she says, and turns back to the sink, hunting the cabinet for a spare toothbrush. She hears the door move, but his feet don’t; she wonders at his hesitation for a moment, and then his hands rest on her shoulders, his lips pressed gently against the nape of her neck, then just a little lower at the center of her back. 

She shudders. The touch is so small, so seemingly insignificant, but it makes her want to press back into him, a hopeless wanting thing, wrapped up in him until she can’t tell where she ends and he begins. She feels him smile against her skin, a gesture that on anyone else would be smug in its delight, but on him is just peerless, joyful.

“I have some of that tea you like,” he says, “I’ll make that,” and then he goes.

“I love you too,” he says, later, leaning against the counter, later. A second pot of coffee is brewing, and the remains of their eggs and toast are on plates in the sink. “I figured that was, uh. Established. But just in case.”

“Yeah,” she says, “it was established.” She thinks of his fingers on her wrist after New York, the purple bags under his eyes and how she’d wanted more than anything to smooth them away. How he’d slept, fitfully, with his face against her neck. “You’re kind of obvious,” she adds, “you know that?”

He kisses her again in answer, reaching down under her chin and tipping her face up to meet his eyes. “It’s part of my charm,” he says. 

She snorts. “You think you have charm?”

“You seem to like me fine.”

“I like you because you don’t have charm,” she says. “Because you’re never trying too hard or pretending, you’re just—you.” She’s blushing, actually blushing, she realizes, horrified. “Never repeat that.”

He laughs, warm and baffled and framed from behind by the light from his window. “Nat, you fuckin’ romantic.”

She smiles into the rim of her mug. “Maybe a little,” she allows. “I don’t know. I’m trying it out.” 

“Well, shit, cheers to that,” he says, and drinks some more coffee. His eyes are gentle, his thumb moving over the side of her hand. “Is Fury gonna try to call us any time today?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she says. “Why?”

“Well,” he says, grinning, “I dunno. I might have plans.”

“Oh, you might, huh?” she says. “With who?”

“My partner,” he says, and she likes that, likes it better than girlfriend or best friend or any of the other words he could have used. She’s always been his partner. It’s the most cultivated and real thing in her head, and she knows he knows that, and likes even more that he knows it, and she sways in closer to him and bites the inside of her cheek against a smile when he puts a hand to the small of her back. “She just showed up last night out of the blue.”

He’s so bad at flirting, she marvels. He’s smiling at her in his kitchen. He’s all hers.

“Everything’s gonna be different, now,” she says. He blinks, and then, hurriedly, she says, “not with us—I mean, yes, with us. But I meant—SHIELD’s gone. We need new jobs.”

“Or the same ones, under new management,” he says. “Nat, we’re, like, superheroes now, and we both have a lot of money in a ton of different accounts, but we—there’s gonna be a media storm, and people are gonna ask you a lot of questions you don’t wanna answer. That’s what I’m worried about.”

She shrugs. “We’ll get through it,” she says. “We always have before.” She eyes him, hesitant, wondering. He touches the inside of her wrist, runs his thumb up and down, and she feels her whole body melt into softness just by that touch. 

“I’ll go with you,” he says. “Wherever you wanna go.”

“You promised that last time,” she says.

“I meant it last time, too,” he says. “Think about it, okay? They don’t need to have all of you.”

“No, I—I mean, I’m not gonna seek them out,” Natasha says. “But if they need me to testify. I’m going to tell the truth.”

“That you were brainwashed from the time you were a child? That you were physically abused, and mentally —”

“Yes,” she says, which shuts him up. “Clint—the Winter Soldier, he’s Steve’s friend from the war. James Barnes.”

His throat clicks. The calm mood in the kitchen is completely broken now. “Okay,” he says. “That was—are you sure, Nat? Is he sure?”

“He seems sure.”

“Grief does shit to a guy, though,” he says. “I mean, if you died, shit. I’d be seeing you everywhere.”

She feels the back of her neck go hot, completely without her permission; so he is taking this whole whatever-it-is as an invitation to be as emotional as he wants to be. To not bite things back. It’s not bad, by any means, it’s just—

“Nat?”

She unsticks her jaw. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We’re both pretty sure. So I have to testify, don’t you see?”

“I don’t,” he says. “Explain it. Tell me like I’m dumb.”

“You aren’t,” she says, automatically. “You just pretend. But he’s been brainwashed, too. He didn’t even know Steve’s name. If I set a precedent—”

His face clears and she stops talking. He’s looking at her like he was looking at her when she said she loved him, like she’s a red, full moon, low-hanging and beautiful. “And you think you don’t have a heart,” he says, low, like he doesn’t mean for her to hear it. Then, louder, “Yeah, okay. That makes sense.”

“It—he’s a good man,” she says, feeling flustered. And you think you don’t have a heart. “It’s the right thing to do. Aren’t I supposed to do the right thing?”

He only grins. “Did I ever tell you I’m really fuckin’ proud of you?”

“For what?”

“For everything,” he says. “If you get to be proud of me for getting out of bed in the morning I get to be proud of you too, Nat. That’s how this works.”

She takes a step closer to him, feeling luminous with his pride. It reflects off of her like the sunrise on glass. He takes the invitation and wraps his arms around her, letting her siphon off warmth and comfort, and close her eyes again. 

“Today, I think we should sleep,” he says. “We can call Steve and figure the rest of this shit out tomorrow. But just—today, I need rest. You need rest. So. Sleep. Is that cool?”

“Two days,” she says. 

“What, really? You’re that tired?”

“No, I’m not,” she says. “But if you’re penciling today out for sleeping, I’m penciling out tomorrow for fucking.”

His arms twitch around her; she laughs. 

“Yeah,” he says, voice a little too high, then getting mad when she laughs harder, into his chest. “Oh, fuck you, Nat!”

“I was thinking I’d fuck you,” she says, nonchalant, “but if you’d rather—”

“You’re so goddamn—” he said, and kissed her, and she laughed into his mouth and wrapped her arms around his neck, and mentally switched the order of the events in their schedule.