Chapter Text
Natasha readied for another hand-to-hand clash as she witnessed Steve’s stolen quinjet, with Barnes also onboard, clear the hangar and throttle up. With any luck, and help from Falcon, the two would make full escape.
T’Challa, trying to grip the retracting gear with a single hand in a last ditch effort to stop them, found himself thwarted. The black-suited man descended to the concrete again. He turned towards Natasha, and she knew from his posture that he was ready to dispatch his newest enemy. Her.
“I said I’d help you find him, not catch him,” she explained, though the words came as a small defence while the fight continued in the air. “There’s a difference.”
Natasha gambled that with the single focus he had on the Winter Soldier removed from him, T’Challa would see some sense.
“That difference will not save you from justice,” he pronounced, his vibranium claws extended menacingly as he stalked towards her.
-----
72 Hours Ago - London
Natasha slipped into the beautiful Anglican chapel without anyone recognizing her, finding a place near the back with other mourners of the extended friends and family of Agent Margaret Carter. She had done the English thing by wearing a demure black hat for the service, and it kept her anonymous. Sam, she discovered, was saving a seat for Steve in the front pew.
All the Avengers knew this time was coming, even Wanda and Vision. Steve would take a weekend every month or so away from the upstate New York compound to visit his old flame from another time. He always come back quietly. After a night’s rest, he’d return to their training routines and their operations with renewed focus and effort, as if determined to carry on the legacy of the SSR.
Everything they had built since the defeat of Ultron was upended when Tony and Secretary Ross came to call, leaving the Avengers to decide the ramifications of putting their names to a three-hundred-page, double-sided document.
A moment after the text came on his phone, when Natasha and the others so were all still debating and bickering over the Accords, Steve abruptly excused himself. The room fell to silence.
Sam was the first to speak, “You know what? Do what you gotta do. Me and Cap? I think we’re ‘bout to take some leave.” Out of the five Avengers that remained, only Wanda was too uncertain to sign.
Uncertainty, Natasha knew from many years, was next to useless.
Regimes fall everyday, she had reminded herself. Public sentiment about enhanced individuals’ roles in world peace would shift again when -- and she did believe when and not if -- the next extra-Earth threat came knocking and the Avengers answered. They just had to weather the outcry, pacify the UN with one hand while finding covert means to achieve what needed to be done with the other.
That wasn’t Steve’s way. That would never be his way, no matter how much he and the rest relied on her methods. He trusted Natasha deeply and fully when it came to co-leading the Avengers, but beyond the Soviet-era file on Barnes that she had retrieved for him a few years ago, he didn’t ask anything more of her when it came to tracking down the Winter Soldier.
It was probably for the best.
Natasha walked a tightwire twisted of memory and loss, kept taught by her secret from the world: that a Black Widow spy of the Red Room once loved the very man Steve was obsessed in finding. They put the Soldier in his terrible throne and assured he was made loyal again, to sear her forever from his mind. If Natasha thought on it too long, nightmares would resurface. So she didn’t.
She carried on, she survived.
But Loki had been right: she was ultimately sentimental. If Steve couldn’t have his blood-brother back, she’d at least try to serve in Barnes’ place as Cap’s second-in-command, like both Peggy and Bucky had done with the Howling Commandos. It was the only way she knew to honor the past without it swallowing her present.
From dreams, Barnes’ voice reverberated. ”The Avengers can’t be divided. Not by what I’ve done.”
She honored that, too, only faltering once when Wanda, briefly and naively, dredged up and amplified the horrors of Natasha’s past. Run, Natalia, the Soldier implored so long ago. Ensorcelled, she pleaded Bruce to do just that with her, years later. A small part of her must have believed it was still possible, to escape, to let her heart be in the driver’s seat...like it had been when she was so much more naive.
It took Steve to bring her back to her senses. Remind her not just of duty, but that she was the closest he had to family, orphans both. And if Rogers had any superpower beyond what the serum had given him, it was his ability to draw people to his strength and certainty. In the Avengers, they had both found a home.
Because of that bond and her secret, despite his doubts on signing the Accords, Natasha stopped on her way to Vienna to simply be there for Steve in his time of mourning, as Sam was.
From her vantage, Natasha watched as Carter’s bedecked coffin was marched solemnly down the aisle, Steve at the fore of the pallbearers. It should have been the other way around, Natasha decided, glumly. The blond hero should have walked with his dark-eyed love as groom and bride, striding out of the church arm-in-arm and united, to everyone’s joy and applause.
Natasha recognized Sharon Carter as she stood in the pulpit, sharing a profound memory of her great aunt.
Black Widow had been one of the few in S.H.I.E.L.D. to be entrusted with Agent 13’s full identity. She had even tried setting her and Steve up to no success. He didn’t permit himself the fleeting pleasures of seeking amorous companionship, not with any free time he had to spare after visiting the dying Carter or attempting to track down the only other soul that meant life itself to him.
Then again, Natasha hadn’t a good lay for quite a while, too, unless she counted the kinds of companions who ran on batteries. Bruce had been...safe….an attempt to get over her damned, fully categorical attraction to super-soldiers. She had herself to blame in the first place for using techniques that she knew would confuse her emotional instincts with designing the Hulk’s Lullaby.
Not that she should be dwelling of such things as a love-life in church, but Natasha was never really God-fearing. Some Russian ways of looking at the world stuck with her.
Still, if there was an Almighty God, Natasha hoped that He was watching over Bruce. He hadn’t really deserved what she had tricked him into believing and feeling, but she knew that she had even lied to herself for a time. Believed it real. Because it was needed.
As she refocused on the service, she realized the music was beautiful, the prayers and passages elegant and well-chosen. Yet she couldn’t help but wonder, quiet and half-shrouded by the angle of her hat, whether this was heralding the death of the Avengers themselves, of everything she had sacrificed for the everyday lives of regular people. Even if some of those people were caught in the crossfire.
Anytime she wanted, Natasha could glance to the front, just to the left of Carter’s coffin, and see the back of Steve’s head. She sighed with half empathy and half affection.
The priest made his final benediction to those congregated:
“Where can I go then from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also.
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand shall lead me,
your right hand hold me fast.”
Soon. Soon Natasha would approach Steve, but not until the crowd thinned out.
From a spot by an old churchyard oak and a good ten yards away from the wellwishers, Natasha watched the hearse drove slowly away, with several black sedans following slowly behind. She saw Steve simply turned back into the church as a dozen of Carter’s blood relatives continued onto the burial site, a sad look on his face. The rest of the well-wishers dispersed in front of the chapel, knot by knot.
“Fuck tradition. Ya know?” came Sam’s voice, just behind her. On any other occasion, Falcon might be silently smiling inside that he spotted her and got the upper hand on the famously paranoid Black Widow. That she hadn’t, for once, been watching her own back because she had been too focused on Steve. “He has just as much right as those cousins three-times removed.”
Well, so much for the hat. She pulled it off, loosening the couple of hairpins that kept it at a fashionable, obscuring angle.
“Hey, Sam,” she greeted, turning around to face him.
“I’m going to assume you have more class than to shove a pen in his face right now,” he continued, hands deep in the pockets of his suit.
“You’re not the only one that cares about him, remember?” she retorted, casting her eyes down, feeling her lips twist to a frown. Her forefingers traced the brim of her hat as the silence grew between them.
That shamed Sam enough to back off and look away himself. “I hate this,” he confessed, looking at the church door.
“Me too,” Natasha agreed. “I’m trying to do the best for us all, Sam.” She shook her head slightly. “You just have to trust me. It’ll blow over. Give it time. We just have to seem to...to comply.”
“Not get caught, then. Yeah, I get it.” Sam shook his head. “That’s a tall order for high-profile, world-class superheroes. Of which you’re one now, Romanoff. Remember?”
Touché.
Her fellow Avenger continued, “I’m telling you, Nat, Steve’s not going to budge on this one. We worked it through on the flight.”
“Hold this for me,” Natasha shoved her hat towards Sam, and he took it, furrowing his brow as she passed him. “I’m going to talk to him anyway.”
As Natasha walked slowly down the red-carpeted aisle, glowing with the multi-colored light filtered through stained glass, she was surprised that Steve wasn't sitting, his head bowed in prayer. He stood instead with his hands in his pockets, staring at the black-and-white photo of Agent Carter in her uniform, surrounded by white flowers.
Rogers heard her approach, and in the open silence of the vaulted ceilings, he shared his thoughts. “When I came out of the ice...I thought that everyone I had known was gone. When I found out that she was alive, I was just lucky to have her.”
“She had you back, too,” she offered by way of comfort, knowing without being told that Steve’s hunt for Bucky would only become more obsessive.
Cap didn’t let his grief overwhelm him. He glanced away briefly and changed the subject. “Who else signed?”
“Tony, Rhodey, Vision.”
“Clint?”
“Says he’s retired.” Natasha was uncertain about how long that status would last, but her long-time friend decided to compromise for his family’s sake. Nathaniel needed to get to know his father.
“Wanda?”
God, that was more complicated. “TBD,” she offered neutrally.
She made her best entreaty, soft and open. “I’m off to Vienna for the signing of the Accords. There’s plenty of room on the jet.”
Steve didn’t respond to her invitation except for lowering his head and sighing. She expected this, but she could still sense his internal struggle.
Natasha stepped closer slightly, broaching the invisible physical boundary that lay between acquaintances and friends.
Steve looked back up at her, and she offered both her reasoning and her conviction. “Just because it’s the path of least resistance, it doesn’t mean it’s the wrong path. Staying together is more important than how we stay together.”
She had said that to her Soldier, too, long ago. That rather than defect and leave him, as he urged her again and again, she’d do the Red Regime’s bloody deeds if it assured they continued to be assigned as mission partners. Together, as long as they could. Until their covert rebellion became intolerable.
With things coming apart like this, Natasha contemplated confessing finally. That the glimmer of Barnes that she found buried underneath the programming of Winter Soldier was the very star that guided her all those years to becoming an Avenger.
“What are we giving up to do it?” Steve challenged, softly.
It was her turn to sigh. It was her turn to grieve anew what was past and what soon was coming to an end.
“I’m sorry, Nat. I can’t sign it.”
It was her turn to be confronted again with the fact that some fights were destined to be lost.
“I know,” she acknowledged.
Still, Steve didn’t immediately dismiss her. He looked her in the eye. “Then what are you doing here?” Their complicated friendship still meant something even if their partnership -- since the days of S.H.I.E.L.D., when Cap had replaced Clint on her STRIKE team -- was taking another turn.
“I didn’t want you to be alone,” was all she could say. It was everything she meant.
That’s when Steve's walls fell. She rested her hand on his shoulder, drawing him into her embrace.
“Come…” she half-murmured as his arms fell around her hourglass waist. She patted his back, briefly, and felt his strength give way just a little as he leaned ever-so-slightly against her.
“I wish Buck could’ve been here,” he whispered. “They had a rocky start, but eventually he and Peg saw eye-to-eye.”
“They both loved you,” Natasha replied, glad that he could not see the expression on her face, only feel her fingers curl soothingly through his short dark-blond hair. In her arms, he gave a shuddering exhale.
“Don’t look behind,” she advised, quietly. “Look ahead. Take some time off. Get to know Sharon some more.”
Steve muttered, composing himself. “That again? I thought you were done playing my matchmaker.”
She shrugged. “I figure third time’s the charm.”