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Wakanda is beautiful but it’s not home.
Towers of ivory trees line up the open space, branching up as high as Brooklyn skyscrapers. The teak-brown forest was a woody heaven, with verdant wands of pine mingling with the charmed air. Thin blades of grass prickle her feet, crispy and alive with the wind. She could hear a steady stream of water by the riverbanks, round robbins parroting the sounds of nature back into the bamboo pipes. She could see people rummaging out and about the sun, mingling with their people so naturally and at ease.
From the rich brown earthen hues of the forest ground to the sweetness of the blue-white sky, everything about Wakanda was mystified and magical.
But Natasha was too old to believe in fairy tales.
“Wakanda is all booked up,” T'challa says. “But Captain Rogers has the biggest room.”
When Natasha finds a piece of scrap paper and a burner phone on Tony’s desk with a single contact number, that's when she packed her bags and booked the first flight out into her exile.
It’s Sam who greets her first.
“Well, well,” he says, sauntering into the room and grinning widely and maybe his eyes were even a little glassy but she tries not to notice. “If it isn't the war criminal widow.”
Natasha was never one for hugs—or any physical comfort of any kind—but Sam is. He also saved her when he didn’t know her, and talked Bucky down from attacking her at the airport when he did know her; where she stood at the demarcation line, how far her allyship went; and still he stayed his gun. So she kind of one arm hugs him and ignores the look of relief passing his eyes when she doesn’t clamp up at his touch. She’s not used to that, being a source of comfort. “How have you been?”
“I’ve had better days,” Sam nods somberly, his grin dying down a little when he lets her go. “Hopefully ‘bout to get better. How long you staying?”
Natasha hasn’t talked to a single soul in over a year. Her social decorum is a little rusty, so she fidgets a little. “Yeah, about that,” she starts, and it’s then his eyes finally trickle down to her still unpacked bags and how she’s still wearing grubby undercover clothes. “T’challa told me they had no other room to spare. But I thought— I was wondering— Maybe you—”
“Are you kidding me?” Sam leers, gesturing to the grandiosity of the suite like it was the most obvious thing. She stared at those walls all day, trying to claw herself out the wallpaper. “I’d kill to have a room like this. I share mine with Bucky, and Cap offered to trade cause you know how he is, but figured he needed it more with how much time he spends on that war council.”
“I know,” Natasha fiddles with her hands. “That’s the thing—”
But Sam notices none of her distress. “Looks like all his overtime worked out in the end,” he smiles down at her. “You need help unpacking?”
Natasha hears the door unlock and springs up from the bed.
She still hasn’t touched any of her luggage, all of them still laid out perfectly in front of her. She changed into cleaner clothes but the feeling of being unearthed still wormed its way into her, knowing she was trespassing. She marinated in the room all day, unable to do anything besides stew in her growing unease, because despite what everyone said and insisted: she knew he’d mind.
Maybe he wouldn’t have back when they’d been wedged in a stolen car, trailblazing on the freeway to Atlanta. Or hidden in a nuclear bunker, with ashes and dust mingling with their breaths and only the solid linings of their bodies as comfort. And maybe even then at Sokovia: when they stared down the belly of the beast and came out of it stronger.
“Steve?”
But then everything else after: the Accords, Peggy, Tony: it scrambled the lines of their intimacy into one she didn’t know how to draw back. The invisible string that bound them together—no matter a shared ethos of corporate responsibility or seeing the end of the world unfold before their eyes—was demarcated, so largely and forcefully, that the years spent apart only widened the gaps in between. But Natasha was falling down the rabbit hole bad, and had, in a desperate attempt to claw her way back up: called for help.
“Natasha?”
Big mistake.
She could tell, the moment his eyes landed on her, that nobody told him.
They didn't tell him how Ross had been getting too close for comfort and she made a distress call to T’challa and all but begged for pardon and asylum, and how he gave it to her so easily it pinched her heart, and how sorry he was for not being able to come up with a more favourable housing for her during her stay. T’challa only ever saw them saving each other, and never got to the part where they finally couldn’t, so naturally he went there. It makes her feel even more of an intruder.
She didn’t get a burner phone after all.
“I’m sorry,” Natasha sputters urgently, already wheeling herself away with all her things. “T’challa told me you wouldn’t mind. I told him I could wait, but Sam, he—” she glances up, sending an apologetic glance his way. “I can.. I’ll leave.”
It’s only when she’s halfway across the room that Steve jerks into action. He doesn’t touch her, but he backs away into the door almost instinctively, effectively blocking her only entrance.
“Already?” His eyebrows knit together. “So soon?”
“Yes. Steve. Already.” Natasha really should’ve insisted on waiting out for a vacancy, or even, just not coming here altogether. “I can tell when I’m not wanted.”
Natasha doesn’t believe in fairy tales, of princes wooing maidens and singing lullabies at their windows every day: but Steve had rose-tinted her life in a way that she grew to expect, simply because he had in more ways than one, charmed her to disarm herself. So when she had been at her lowest, and maybe wanted to be spun into a song, only to look down and find no one but herself staring back down into the abyss: she’d hardened herself into being her own saviour again.
“I don’t think that’s fair.”
There are luminous petals of silver freckled all over Wakandan sky, little embers of tears immortalised into scenery. The stars hung low, crickets started their birdsong orchestra, but all Natasha could feel was the heat of his gaze and the sting in his words, but she knew how to play fire with fire.
“And you're the expert?”
Steve deflates a little. “I looked for you,” he whispered so tiredly and silently, that, she knew he told it to himself repeatedly as reassurance. “All the time. Tracked down Ross in Prussia and had Sam take down some of his trail. But you didn’t—” he took a deep breath. “You still didn’t come.”
Natasha remembers Prussia. She remembers men in black coats stalking her all over the city, that she for sure thought she had been made right then, only to cross over the street the next morning to find them gone. “How would you know what I wanted? Did you even stop and think to ask?”
“Ha,” Steve scoffs hotly, a mean sound. “I’ve learned better than to try that game with you, Romanoff. Not exactly the first time you turned me down.”
She remembers then: daylight streaking down gravel cobblestones, a chaste kiss on the cheek, his eyes giving everything away his words couldn't.
Natasha slants her eyes icily. She could be mean too.
“Now that’s not fair.”
The wedge. It’s there, and it shows, in the crippled and cryptic way they were now regarding each other; when for so long it was so easy, the easiest and smoothest one she’d ever had with anyone, and it tugs at her heartstrings how much of it they lost simply because he stopped asking right when she started expecting. Because they just stopped fucking talking.
“I know, Nat. I know.” Steve returns tiredly. His arms come up to take her luggage, wielding it in front of him and almost daring her to take it away. He looked bone-tired exhausted, but an edge of conviction clears in his eyes when he looks down at her.
“But when have you ever fought fair?”