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Steve had taken to showering at the training gym after his pre-dawn runs with Sam (and Rhodey, when he was around). He’d slip out of his quarters as quietly as possible, run rings around Sam until he actually broke a sweat, and get ready for the day downstairs. Natasha was not a morning person, and she was a notoriously light sleeper. She’d threatened him with bodily harm if he roused her before dawn without a call to assemble, and he knew she was only mostly kidding.
It had started months earlier—after Sokovia, after the things Wanda had put in their minds. They found they slept better together, anchoring one another when the nightmares wouldn’t loosen their grip. Whispered reassurances soon became murmured endearments. Lingering hugs became tender kisses. Kisses became more. Until one day, Steve found himself sneaking in and out of his own rooms so that Natasha could get a few more hours of rest.
He couldn’t always avoid waking her when he left, but he could minimize the disturbance by showering and dressing elsewhere. This morning, for instance, Natasha had been curled around him when he woke. As he eased himself from his (their?) bed, she cracked one green eye open and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like one of Wanda’s hexes. He’d murmured go back to sleep and placed a barely-there kiss to her temple before slipping into the bathroom to put on his running clothes.
When Steve returned nearly two hours later, slipping in the door as silently as she’d taught him, he took a long look around in the pale morning light. His eyes roved over all the ways his space had become theirs: her electric teakettle next to his coffeemaker in the kitchen, a set of widow’s bites charging on the dresser, honey-scented shampoo in the shower. He ran his fingers gently across the midnight blue satin dress she’d worn to the Stark Foundation gala, still flung over the back of the armchair from when he’d peeled it off of her the night before.
Standing in the bedroom doorway, Steve’s heart was full as he took in the scene before him. He was struck – as he always was – by how gorgeous Natasha looked in the soft light just after dawn. Her face was bare of makeup, and he could just make out the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her beautiful lips more kissable in their natural rosy hue than in any shade of lipstick. That little mole on the apple of her cheek that he kissed while she stood at the counter making her tea. The still-new scar on her shoulder from Bucky, pink and puckered and incredibly sexy.
This is the Natasha that he treasured the most—wholly her. No masks, no armor. The weight of the world lifted from her shoulders, leaving her face peaceful and content in sleep. The Natasha that only he got to see in these brief moments as the sun came up. This is the woman behind the formidable Black Widow, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, the Avenger. The woman he had fallen hopelessly, madly, irrevocably in love with.
No telling how long he’d been standing there, wondering how to tell her all of that, when her sleep-husky voice interrupted his train of thought. “See something you like, Rogers?” she asked without even opening her eyes.
His eyes were soft and his smile genuine as he crossed the room and slid back into bed beside her. “Yeah…you,” he quipped as she curled into his side with a happy little sigh, sleep still pulling at her. “Just you.”