Work Text:
Nat was alone.
She had returned just moments ago from one of her longest missions, and all she wanted to do was fall asleep in the only thing in her life that was constant: her bed. However, she was a very light sleeper, and needed absolute silence to get even a little bit of sleep. And absolute silence wasn’t something she was getting.
Through the walls, she could hear faint sobbing from the next room over. She sighed. She threw off her blankets and got out of her bed. She walked silently through the mostly bare room to her door. The hallway of the SHIELD dormitory was empty as she walked over to Steve’s room, where the crying came from. She quietly knocked on the door, thinking that Steve needed to get a real therapist.
The crying stopped abruptly. “Come in,” Steve said in a choked and muffled voice.
Nat sighed and pushed open the door. The room was pitch dark, and she could barely see his curled up outline on his bed. The sobbing had continued again, and she walked carefully to his side.
“Steve,” she said, gently touching his shoulder. He slowly sat up, leaning against her.
“Nat,” he replied softly, tears streaming down his face. Her heart, usually made of steel, melted a bit. She wanted so much to help him. He’d been having plaguing thoughts for weeks about when he was a captain in the 1940s, and they always pitted him into him crying his eyes out.
“Is it Bucky?” she asked, looking into his eyes. He nodded, then let his head drop.
“Steve, it’s okay. He was your best friend. You can cry.” She could feel his tears soaking through her shirt. “It wasn’t your fault.”
This only seemed to make him cry more. They sat like that for almost an hour, with Nat wanting to make him not cry anymore, to make him feel better, but also knowing her comforting skills weren’t good enough for that. She decided to just trace patterns on his back, hoping that would relax him. Finally, Steve looked up at Nat.
“I— he— it’s all my fault he’s gone.”
“Steve, no!”
He shook his head. “It is! It’s all my fault! Even though I know he wouldn’t be around today, it’s my fault he died so young.”
Steve’s breaths started to catch in his throat, and he fell back onto her with a sob.
“Steve? Do you want— do you want to talk?”
He rolled over to lock his tear-filled eyes with Nat. “I’ve never told anyone this.”
“It’s okay. I won’t tell anyone either.”
Steve sat up, wiping his eyes. Nat put her arm around him comfortingly, and he half smiled.
“I was 21,” he said with a small laugh. “I was going through a lot of stupid shit, and— and I was in love with my best friend.”
Nat straightened up to look at him. “Peggy or Bucky?”
Steve didn’t meet her eyes. She lifted his chin up to her. “Steve, it’s okay. I get it. I’m gay.”
He nodded, and buried his head into her shoulder again. She could feel him take deep breaths through the thin fabric of her shirt. In a muffled voice, he said, “he was just so pretty…”
Nat couldn’t stop herself from letting a laugh out. Steve turned to her and stuck out his tongue.
“Anyway, it was the 40s. And in the 40s, a boy liking another boy wasn’t a thing. I mean, it was, but it wasn’t allowed. So, I was left to just stare at Bucky and his amazingly chiseled jaw for too fucking long. It was torture.”
“I feel you, Steve.”
“Yeah. Then one day, when we were alone, I mustered up the courage to tell him how I felt. I kissed him. And he kissed me back. But then— then he wouldn’t— he didn’t talk to me. He avoided me. I— I didn’t know what to do. And then, we went on that mission. When he fell, I tried to reach for him, and I cant help but to think the reason he died was because he didn’t want to take my hand anymore.”
Even Nat couldn’t hold back tears as Steve fell on to the bed, sobbing and unable to function. She wished she could say something to make him feel better, but there wasn’t anything she could form words to say. She knew how he felt. One-sided relationships were a staple point of any gay person’s life. So she just lied down carefully on the bed next to Steve, letting him cry, and letting her own tears fall. They didn’t move until the sun rose the next morning.