Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the morning, Natasha wakes slowly, her awareness filtering in with the gauzy light peeking through her curtains. It takes her a few seconds to realize she’s home, and not in one of the half-dozen unfamiliar beds she’s slept in this past month. 

The weight at her feet is the fraying but precious blanket her grandma crocheted for her when she was born, and not the tightly tucked hospital corners that were drilled into her at eighteen and have since become second nature. The sheets beneath her fingertips are the silky, high-thread count set she splurged on for her twenty-eighth birthday, rather than the well-worn, standard issue carrier sheets she can never quite get used to, no matter how many nights she falls asleep in them. 

After almost a month away from home, the familiar cocoon of her own bed is a delicious comfort to settle into, holding her fast to a hazy consciousness. Monday is dawning, and she’ll have to get out of bed soon, but she could stay burrowed under the covers for a long while yet. 

Even the warmth radiating at her back is familiar. Natasha is no stranger to men in her bed, but there’s something about the fact that it’s Jake Seresin that sends a little jolt through her. 

“Are you watching me sleep?” she asks eventually, still feeling only half awake. 

“Checking you for skin cancer, actually,” Jake responds, voice sleep thick and full of affection. And boy is that weird, to hear affection in Hangman’s voice, directed at her, and not just pointed, near-antagonistic teasing. His hand is running lazy lines down the curve of her spine, leaving a trail of goosebumps in his wake. It’s a languorous motion, and she lets the heat from his fingers sweep across her back, up her spine, and into her core. 

“You’ve spent a lot of time in the sun lately. Always better to be safe than sorry,” he murmurs, attention focused on the slow crawl of his fingers across her admittedly sun-kissed skin. 

There’s a large part of her that thought this would be weird, that the light of morning would reveal truths she couldn’t see last night, but it’s easier than she thought it would be, waking up to Hangman in her bed. It’s new, but not unwelcome, and feels like it could become old—comfortable, something else she could sink into.

“Careful,” she teases, voice light, reaching for her phone to check the time and make sure she doesn’t need to be rushing them both out of bed. Assured that they have at least another fifteen minutes before she should worry, Natasha finally remembers to text Bob back before returning her phone to the nightstand and shifting onto her back to be able to look up at Jake. She misses the feel of his fingers against her skin instantly. “Wouldn’t want anyone to think you worry about me.” 

He looks right back at her. She’s so used to the smirk and wryness, the charm that masks any genuinely held feelings, that the open and honest expression he’s wearing is still a shock every time she sees it. His face softens when he’s not putting on an act. 

“I worry about you.” He says it frankly, clearly, and without reservation.

“You do?”

Other than the detachment, she’s not sure when he would’ve had occasion to worry about her. Sure, they’ve been around each other forever, and technically it was kind of his job for a while back at the Academy to make sure she stayed alive, but none of that implies the need for any sort of constant worry. She worries about him, too, in the vague way she worries about all of them—enough when she happens to think about it, but never enough to actually affect her day-to-day, and not in the way she thinks he means. 

“’Course I do,” he answers as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Did you think I don’t?”

“I don’t know—” Natasha starts, half wanting to make a joke, but then she pauses. His admission is frank, quick, decisive, and it stops her in her tracks. 

“I worry about you,” he repeats into the silence she leaves.

She’s had a feeling that he’s known for longer than she has, that this isn’t a sudden, middle-of-the-night realization for him, but it’s never been more plain to her than now. And with that realization, something else clicks into place in her mind. 

“Is that why you were such a dick to Rooster?” 

“I’m always a dick to Rooster,” he responds easily enough, rolling away from her and onto his back, tucking one hand beneath his head. “He just makes it so easy.” His words are insouciant, the devil-may-care Hangman peeking inevitably through. 

“Jake…” She follows him, laying out fully on her other side, head perched in her right hand, left hand dropping to her hip.

He turns his head to look at her, still not answering her question. “I like it when you call me that.”

“What? Your name?” 

“You never call me by my name.” 

“I’ve called you Jake,” she argues.

“Yeah,” he agrees dryly. “When you were being an insubordinate plebe. You haven’t called me Jake in years.” 

He looks at once amused and vulnerable, and if they’re going to go any further, she should probably stop thinking either of those expressions is weird.

“You had me reprimanded for it,” she notes with a raised eyebrow.  

“It was supposed to teach you a lesson.” He looks at her, and there it is again—that affection. “Didn’t work at all,” he sighs, looking back at the ceiling. “You’re as impertinent as ever.”

Rules were sacrosanct at the Academy, to prepare them for the way regulations and hierarchy would shape the rest of their careers in the Navy. She gets it, but the rebellious youth in her hadn’t just vanished because they cut her hair, put her in a uniform, and yelled at her as a basic form of communication. She’d pushed against them where she could—in ways that wouldn’t get her into too much actual trouble—and that often meant needling against Jake. The memory brings a smile to her face. It was nothing back then, just two strong personalities butting against each other, but with the rosy benefit of hindsight, that nascent banter between them seems to carry much more weight.

After the reprimand, she’d stopped calling him Jake at all, sticking to his title or last name, and eventually various forms of his callsign, in all instances, even—especially—social, for more than a decade. That hadn’t changed as their paths crossed over the years, from calling him Ensign Seresin when he’d somehow managed to come back for homecoming to the increasingly creative iterations of his callsign she can come up with.

His actual name is almost foreign on her tongue, but she’s recently realized she likes calling him Jake, too. Likes the way she can mold the syllable to her desires, letting the consonants run jagged and rough when she’s annoyed, softening them to her breath when she’s not. 

Natasha moves to rest her chin on his chest, peering up at him with a grin, fingers skimming against his bare skin. “You’d hate it if I weren’t.” 

His gaze turns soft at that, sincere, and he brings a hand to her cheek, brushing a lock of loose hair behind her ear. “Yeah, I would.” 

She hums, skimming her fingers over his collarbone, a small smile playing at her lips. “Who knew you were such a softie?”

“Soft?” he responds with a challenge. The expression on his face changes instantly, turning into something she’s much more familiar with. “You calling me soft?” Effortlessly, he turns them so she’s on her back, his weight pressed against her, proof of just how not-soft he is resting firmly against her hip. 

She slings a leg over his thigh and an arm around his neck. “What’re you going to do about it?”

What he does about it leaves her breathless and boneless and floating. She could get used to this, the weight of his body, the slip of his skin, the heat of his touch. 

“Jake,” she whispers when they’re both spent, tilting her chin so her lips brush against his when she speaks. She pokes him in the chest for good measure, just to make sure he’s paying attention. “Thank you for worrying about me.”

“That’s not something you have to thank me for.” He brushes a hand through her hair as he says it, meeting her eyes.

“Still,” she insists. It feels nice to know he cares. “Thank you.” 

He looks at her intently before deciding something, rolling his weight off her and sitting up. “Come on,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at her. “We should get up. I’ll make you breakfast.”

She sits up, too, and reaches to the foot of her bed for a shirt that landed there last night. “You don’t like breakfast,” she says, voice muffled as she slips it over her head.

“But you do.” He’s looking at her with a raised eyebrow, case closed, when she emerges from the tangled cotton.

It’s not until they’ve both reached her kitchen that she realizes, “There’s nothing in my fridge.” She cleared it out when she got the summons, having learned the hard way what an open-ended return date meant for the contents of her fridge. She’d meant to put in a grocery order when she got home last night, but, well… things happened.

Refrigerator door halfway open, it slams shut when Jake releases the handle and turns on his heel to face her. “I’ll take you to breakfast, then.”

Her first instinct is to say yes, but something causes her to hesitate. “Jake, I—” she begins, and then stops, unsure how to continue. 

When she’s quiet for too long, he breaks the silence. “You breaking up with me already, Phoenix?” His features are schooled into something relaxed and neutral, but she can see the tension corded through his stance, and feels slightly guilty for putting it there.

“No,” she says quickly. The exact opposite, actually. In the clarity of morning, she realizes this is something with staying power, and not just fueled by loneliness or roadtrip-induced mania. And because of that, it’s something she wants to protect. “It’s been—” She doesn’t usually struggle to find the right words, but the stakes of this feel tremendously high and surprisingly scary, and she’s having a hard time articulating what she’s thinking, let alone feeling. In the end, she settles on, “Really nice, actually.”

He appraises her, chin dipped, eyebrows raised, lips twitching.

“Shut up.” She feels her cheeks flame. “I’m just saying I like where this is going, but I’m not sure I want to deal with interference from the sidelines right now, while we figure it out.” 

“I dunno,” he smirks. “Javy’s a pretty good play caller.” 

“You sure you want Coyote anywhere near our plays, Jake?” She rolls her eyes before continuing. “I’m being serious, Jake.” 

He nods, considering her, eventually responding. “This is going to be forever, or it’s going to go down in flames?”

“Exa—Did you just quote Taylor Swift?”

“Eighteen-year-old sister.”

“Right.” The wood of her kitchen chair is chipping, the jagged edge digging into her palm. “It’s true, though, isn’t it?” Pop lyrics or not, the sentiment is the right one. Somehow, in the last week, while she wasn’t paying attention, Jake Seresin became a person she could see forever with. It’s surprising, and there’s some part of her that wants to reject the notion wholesale and choose the flames instead, but… “This could be something.” She looks up at him, all her cards out on the table, and finds he’s already stepping toward her. 

“Yeah,” he agrees, coming to a stop just inches from her. “It’s true.” He lifts her chin so he can look right at her before bringing his lips to hers, murmuring against them, “We’ll take it slow, Trace.” 

“But not too slow, right?” she asks when she pulls back for a breath. They might still burn out tomorrow, but as she deepens the kiss, his hand at her back to bring her flush to him, she thinks this smolder might last a while, and she just might just want to fan the flames. 

“Just the right speed.”