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In her dreams she dances.
Her shoes are dark, midnight black, and she pirouettes across a marble floor. The music is distant, indistinct, but there’s a rhythm pounding in her blood that keeps her moving. It drives her onwards, faster and faster through unfamiliar rooms. Mirrors line the walls, and she’s spinning with a dozen other girls, just as lost as she. The ground is uneven under her feet and she stumbles, falters just long enough to look down. Sun-bleached bone crunches under her feet, razor-sharp fragments piercing her shoes and gouging deep into soft flesh. The pain is exquisite, nothing less than she deserves, and she leaves a trail of blood red devastation as she moves. She hears distant screaming but it seems unimportant, and she dances on, embracing the agony and transforming it into something beautiful. She is destruction made flesh and she is unstoppable. The music ends abruptly, leaving an echoing silence, nothing but her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. She slowly lifts her head and silently regards the figure that stares back from the mirror, face and limbs streaked with crimson. Her eyes follow a single drop, vermillion warpaint, as it gathers momentum, a mockery of a tear that runs down her cheek before slowly falling to the ground, a ripple in the ocean of bloody chaos that surrounds her.
She wakes with the taste of salt and iron in her mouth, limbs heavy with regret, and, like every morning before, she begins anew.
+++
Natasha can feel Steve’s eyes on her as soon as she enters the kitchen. It’s a sensation that’s beginning to become unsettlingly familiar, her body responding without her permission, warmth pooling in her stomach. But Natasha knows how this story ends, with broken bodies and bloody regrets, and she has no urgent desire to play this one out, certain that it’ll happen anyway. She does nothing more than acknowledge his bright greeting with a nod of her head, before reaching for the coffee, allowing the familiar aroma to envelop her, finally chasing away the scent of blood that seems to hover in the air.
“Bad night?” Steve says it in conversational tones, breaking the silence that stretches between them, as though either of them is unaware of the dangers that lie just below the surface of his question.
“No worse than yours, I’m sure.” Natasha offers Steve the blandest expression she can muster. She’s not surprised when he responds with a rueful smile and a shake of his head. She props a hip against the bench and watches him for a moment, blonde head bent over his sketchbook as he draws. She’s noticed that he’s started using it more since he found out that Bucky was still alive, and she wonders if it’s his way of trying to make sense of a world that’s falling apart. Unlike the others, she never asks to see his sketches. She knows, now, what it’s like to let people see the brutal reality of who you really are and she’s not sure that she’s ready to see Steve’s truths laid bare.
“Well, I guess we could both do with something to take our minds off our respective completely uneventful nights then. Training session?” Steve’s poker face has improved immeasurably since they first met, but Natasha can still see his ghosts, haunting the edges of the smile that he gives her.
“Nobody else want to take you up on your kind offer?” She arches an eyebrow at him before sliding into a seat across from him, and kicking her bare feet up onto the table.
“They’re all out.” Steve frowns slightly, staring at her feet. Natasha slowly counts down from ten in her head. She’s surprised that he makes it all the way to four before he says something. “Seriously, Nat? That’s really not very ladylike.” Steve gestures vaguely, as though he’d like nothing more than to push her legs off the table. One of these days she wonders if he’ll actually do it. Bring himself to lay a hand on her outside of training sessions and near-death situations. For a brief moment she allows herself to wonder what she’d do if he did, but rapidly steers her thoughts back onto safer ground.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, Steve, I’m not exactly a lady.” She leaves her legs where they are for three long seconds, just to prove a point, before swinging them down to the ground. “Doubt you’d want a sparring session with me if I were.” Natasha drains her cup and gets up without waiting for an answer.
“Just goes to show what you know.” Steve’s voice is quiet, but Natasha doesn’t miss the sorrow that laces his words. She realizes that she’s not the only one with a past that’s trying to tear her apart.
“Peggy.” She doesn’t need to make it a question. Natasha has spent years working out what’s most important to those who are trying desperately to hide it. Steve practically wears his heart on his sleeve. It’s refreshing, really, that she doesn’t have to be a spy around him.
“I wasn’t always like this.” Steve gestures at his chest. “I think maybe you forget that sometimes. I was a hundred and forty pound asthmatic who was pretty much a professional punching bag. None of the guys would train with me when I was just Steve. Peggy taught me some of my best moves.” His smile is distant, and Natasha knows only too well the look of someone who’s fighting not to get lost in their memories.
“I met her once, you know.” Natasha doesn’t know why she has the sudden need to share this with him. Maybe just to demonstrate to Steve that life goes on regardless. As if either of them really needs the reminder. “When Clint brought me in. She never asked me why I joined SHIELD. Just said she was sorry that she hadn’t been able to stop the Black Widow program and that she was proud of me. It was the first time anyone had told me that.”
“That sounds like Peggy.” Steve’s voice is gentle, and suddenly Natasha wonders if she’s inadvertently opening wounds that haven’t really had a chance to heal. She keeps forgetting that Steve’s been asleep for almost a lifetime.
“You miss her.” Natasha doesn’t really understand how she and Steve keep having these conversations. He treats her with an unsettling honesty that she’s not really accustomed to being given. Or giving in return.
“I miss a lot of things.” Steve shakes his head slightly, and takes a deep breath, clearly pulling himself back to the present. He stands and moves across the room to where she stands, rinsing her mug at the sink. He’s shoulder to shoulder with her when he speaks next. “I miss a life that never really existed except in my head.”
“It gets easier.” Natasha struggles to keep her voice light, shrugging a shoulder as she speaks.
“Really, Nat? When?” Steve’s voice is raw. She’s only heard him like this once before, standing in the rubble of a devastated city, staring a ghost in the face.
“When you know what’s true.” She can’t bring herself to look at him, to confront the understanding she knows she’ll see on his face.
“Well the truth is that your past didn’t recently try to kill us.” Steve gently removes the mug from her hand and shuts off the tap.
“No, you’re right. That was my present.” Natasha doesn’t quite manage to keep the bitterness from her voice. She still can’t quite work out how she, of all people, couldn’t see the lies that they were all tangled up in. “So I guess you and I are probably even, all things considered.”
“None of this is your fault Nat.” Steve’s hand hovers in the air, as though he’s unsure how she’ll react to his touch. She doesn’t give either of them the opportunity to find out, simply leaves the room with a murmured goodbye.
+++
Natasha spends the morning going through her old case files, trying in vain to pinpoint something, anything, that she might have missed. But either she’s looking in all the wrong places or Hydra really were that good at covering their tracks. She no longer has the comfort of knowing that every mission was for the greater good and she’s furious about it. She didn’t know how much she needed that reassurance until it was stolen from her.
She eventually admits defeat after lunch, slinging her reports across the room in an uncharacteristic outburst. She gets to her feet and takes three slow breaths, focusing on the exhale, on steadying her racing pulse. It’s an exercise she hasn’t needed in years and she tries not to think about the implications behind the fact that she’s doing it on a daily basis now. Natasha finally goes in search of Steve, and the straightforward release of a training session. She doesn’t want to think any more. Just wants to get outside her head for a while and lose herself in the simplicity of the fight.
She finds him in the gym, as expected, his entire focus apparently on beating the shit out of an uncomplaining sandbag. For a moment she just watches, allows herself a brief moment to wonder what might happen if she could drop her carefully constructed defenses long enough to let him in. But Natasha knows that she’s dangerous, that she’s been broken and put back together so many times that all she has to offer are pieces that don’t quite fit together. She can’t afford to let someone like Steve try to fill the gaps and make her whole. She’s certain that neither of them needs another person in their lives that they can’t afford to lose.
“Say, you seen Sharon recently?” Her features are composed into the perfect mask by the time he glances over his shoulder at her. Natasha’s expression is all teasing innocence, and she’s grateful when Steve glares at her and slides easily into his role.
“You mean the girl who lied to me about being in a secretive government spy agency before we destroyed it, and then joined another secretive government spy agency?” Steve throws another couple of punches at the bag, but Natasha can tell that his heart’s not in it now. “That Sharon?” This time he turns around and faces her, arms crossed over his chest.
“Well, when you put it like that…” Natasha pauses, debating how far she should push this, before continuing. “She’s a great girl though, did more than her share during that whole Triskellion catastrophe.” Natasha starts binding her hands, indicating to Steve that he should move over to the mats as she does. “There’s always Karen. She’s a nurse. And, take it from me, she’s smoking hot. And has no government agency affiliations that I’m aware of.” Natasha grins as she assumes a position opposite Steve.
“We’re not doing this.” Utter exasperation paints Steve’s features, and Nat knows that they’re back on safe ground for the time being. She uses her teeth to tighten the knot of the wrap on her right hand, ignoring Steve’s gesture that he’s happy to help.
“Doing what?” She gives him a look of baffled incomprehension. “I’m just trying to be a good friend. Find you someone to take your mind off things.” Natasha leaves out the part where she needs Steve to be completely off limits. They’re having too many conversations these days that cut a little too close to the bone. She used to think that they couldn’t be more different, but now she’s not so sure.
“Stop talking. Or I’ll kick your ass.” Steve looks more than a little proud of himself as the phrase trips off his tongue.
“Why, Captain America,” Natasha gives him her best scandalized voice, figures that he deserves it for being so utterly un-Steve-like, “That’s no way to talk to a lady.” She gives him time to roll his eyes at her before she continues. “Also, I’d like to see you try.” Natasha unleashes a blistering attack sequence that leaves Steve backed into a corner, grinning down at her.
“I’m glad you’re on my team, Nat.” Steve says it as though it’s the simplest thing in the world, like there aren’t hidden promises and shared futures dancing across his tongue. She forgets, sometimes, about how completely he can disarm her with the truth.
“Well, since I’m almost the only friend you have who isn’t nearing their centenary, that’s hardly surprising. Sometimes I lose sleep over the fact that you might break a hip and I’ll have to carry you off the battlefield...” Natasha dodges a flurry of punches and comes up smirking. “You know you’re basically the oldest person I’ve ever met?”
She’s fast and, although Steve’s undoubtedly stronger, he doesn’t fight as dirty as she does. For long minutes they’re evenly matched. Somehow, though, Steve eventually manages to hook a leg around hers and Natasha finds herself pinned to the mats. Steve’s face is only inches from hers and there’s a moment where she seriously considers seeing if his mouth tastes as good as she remembers. Natasha’s not an idiot though, they’re fighting a war and now isn’t the time to get distracted. But Steve closes the distance between them even further and Natasha gets the unfamiliar feeling that she’s no longer holding the upper hand.
“A simple ‘thank-you’ would suffice.” Suddenly Steve’s weight is off her and he’s offering her a hand to get to her feet. “And Peggy’s older than me by three months. Get your facts straight.” Natasha thinks that it might be the first time she’s really laughed in months.
+++
In her dreams she fights.
The enemy outnumbers them a hundred to one, but still they fight. Her suit is dark, midnight black, and she dances. She knows these streets, could walk blindfolded, and she’s here as a shield against the oncoming storm. Determination pushes her onwards, fuels the rage that keeps her moving. The ground beneath her feet is uneven and she stumbles, falling into the chaos. She lies on her back, staring up at a sky that contains the stuff of nightmares. She’s relying on adrenaline to keep her going, her body numb, barely feeling the dozens of tiny cuts that pepper her skin. A blazing comet streaks towards her, and it seems fitting that it’s the colour of blood. She’s not alone though, familiar bodies spinning through the wreckage towards her. She can hear terrified screaming in the distance, and it’s enough to push her to her feet, to remind her what she’s fighting for. The world around is painted in shades of red, white and blue and the face that stares back at her carries its own scars. Hope sings in her blood as her fragile body sprints towards almost certain destruction.
She flies.