Steve notices Natasha's hands for the first time while she's dressing a deep scrape from a bullet on his bicep. He's admired the long, lithe fingers with an artist's eye and felt the calluses on her palms when he grabbed her hand to lead her through a smoke-filled room. But somehow he has never noticed the odd shape of her knuckles before.
Her pointer finger pushes up a little higher than the others as she cleans the skin around the wound with a damp cloth. Yet, despite the raised bend in the middle joint of her finger, her knuckle is higher. The joint is rounded and raised; the skin rough and slightly discolored. As Natasha begins wrapping the wound with gauze she keeps in her tactical bag, Steve notes that all of her knuckles are similarly malformed, though the pointer and middle fingers are the worst.
He waits until she ties off the bandage, then grabs her hands as she pulls them away. "Did you hurt your hands?" he asks.
"Hydra's full of blockheads, but none of them are actually made of steel. My hands are fine." She gives him a look, a tilt of her head and slight quirk of her eyebrow.
He glances at her hands again. The bumps look neither red nor bruised, so he decides to drop the subject. He has learned that it's better to let Natasha have her secrets and share them when she wants to than try to drag them out of her. "Okay," he nods and lets go of her hands.
For the most part, Steve has forgotten about Natasha's hands until Bucky returns. He doesn't have much time to notice while they're fighting Tony and the Security Council goons. And then they're too busy tracking down Zemo, always on the move. It's not until they have arrived in Wakanda and T'Challa's doctors and engineers have Bucky in a heavily sedated sleep so they can fix his torn arm that Steve notices.
He's sitting in a chair beside the hospital bed, and the team of professionals is mumbling to themselves in the corner of the room. Steve was surprised when T'Challa told him that he would be allowed to be in the room while they operated – apparently, the doctors didn't fully trust the sedation to keep the super soldier under and felt safer with Steve there as insurance. Steve was fine with that as he isn't keen to let his newly returned best friend out of his sight.
Steve could listen to the conversation in the corner if he wanted to, but the mix of medical jargon and Wakandan words is more than he wants to sort through right now. So he tunes the voices out and focuses on his friend. Bucky was never the skinny bean pole that Steve was, even before the army, but now his friend's physique rivals his own – bulky with muscle, two hundred and fifty or so pounds of killing machine currently turned dead weight. It's barely been twenty four hours since the fight in Siberia, but the bruises on his face and arms have already turned a sickly yellow, evidence of the super soldier serum in his blood speeding up the healing process.
Steve slides his hand under Bucky's and begins playing with his fingers like he used to do when they were kids, pushing one finger up at a time and then allowing it to fall back down. It is now that he notices the mounds of scar tissue on Bucky's knuckles, just like Natasha's. With Bucky sedated, he can't ask questions but he can examine the lumps more carefully. They are fairly round and raised about a centimeter above the rest of his hand. The skin is hard and calloused, darker around the edges and whitened and cracking near the center. The knuckles of his ring and pinkie fingers are not nearly as rough and discolored but still enlarged, as if they were swollen. Yet, as he runs his fingers across the joints, they feel solid, not soft and inflamed. These are clearly not a recent injury.
Steve continues to hold his hand, absentmindedly rubbing the strange callouses with his thumb, as the doctors return to working on the stump of Bucky's metal arm.
Steve doesn't get a chance to ask Bucky about his hand before he decides to go back into cryofreeze. But then Natasha shows up in Wakanda, her hair cut short and bleach blonde so that he almost doesn't recognize her when she walks past him in the hall one day. But she smirks as she passes, and he freezes. "Hey, Soldier," she calls. He spins around and crushes her to his chest before she can finish the "r." Before all this craziness with Hydra and the Accords, he wouldn't have dared hug her like this; but now they trust each other and they both need someone even if they're too proud to admit it out loud.
He takes her to see Bucky. She lifts her hand to the glass, right where his heart is, and Steve knows that she has more history with the Winter Soldier than she has let on.
A phone call to an amused Shuri and fifteen minutes later, a bag of Chinese carryout is delivered to Steve's suite. They eat in silence for a while, both caught up in their thoughts. Then he notices her fingers again, wrapped around the chopsticks, making her knuckles stand out. He thinks that he might have a chance of not getting roundhouse kicked now if he asks.
"Nat, what happened to your knuckles? Buck's good hand is like that too."
She chuckles a little. He thinks it might be at the nerves in his voice. "Training," she says. "The karate instructor in the Red Room made us punch boards wrapped in rope over and over again. It forced us to learn how to punch correctly. These callouses, they're a by-product. Sometimes we had to file them down to make out hands look smooth for an undercover op, but we always built them back up again. Now, I keep them mostly as a reminder."
"A reminder of what?"
"The blood on my hands. That these are the hands of a killer." She stared at her hands, turning them over and over. She could feel his eyes on her, heavy and concerned. "Don't give me that look, Rogers. We both know my history. I'm not running from it anymore. I know what I've done, and I've come to terms with it."
"You're not a monster, Nat," Steve says softly.
"I know," she replies, her words just as quiet. She reaches out and intertwines their fingers, giving them a gentle squeeze.
Then her voice lifts, definitively changing the subject, "Your Bucky went through much of the same martial arts training I did. The metal arm gives him an advantage but he still had to learn to fight with his right arm just as well. I'm not surprised he has ken-dako too."
Steve decides he wants to push his luck a little farther. "Did you know him? When you were… "
She pulls her hand out of his, though not harshly so he knows she can't be that upset. "Yes, I knew him. We trained together sometimes." The set of her mouth tells him that is all he'll get out of her tonight.
But then she surprises him with one more confession. "I didn't know who he was until after the Triskelion though. I wasn't hiding him from you."
It's a peace offering, even more than the manila folder she gave him at Fury's graveside with all the information she had drug up on the Winter Soldier. It's her way of letting him know that she understands how important Bucky is to him, that she isn't Tony who had no qualms about playing Bucky like a negotiating card.
He smiles softly and holds out a fortune cookie to her.
A/N: This started out as just little musing about Steve noticing Nat and Bucky having the same knuckle scars, then it got away from me and went rather touchy-feely. I hope it doesn't feel too out of character.
I haven't seen any of the movies since Civil War, so I'm just pretending those don't exist for the moment. And it's been a while since I saw Civil War, so forgive me if I've messed up some details.
Also, I just started karate training, and my sensei came back from a trip to Okinawa with knuckles swollen from punching makiwara (the board traditionally wrapped with rope or straw), which is what inspired this. I tried my best to research this, but please let me know if I've got anything wrong here!