Some nights it starts with a whimper. She hears it as she heads down to the kitchen for her biweekly breakfast at three in the morning, and tries to tell herself that if he needs help, he'll come to her for it. He's good about that, about knowing what he needs. Besides, he's a grown man, more than that, actually, and if Steve needs something he's not exactly shy about it.
Except he is.
He doesn't talk about it, at least not to her. Doesn't even bring it up, as though he's certain that no one has heard him. She's not even sure if he knows he's audible. Either way she checks with Sam almost every time after, nonchalantly asking if he's spoken to Steve or if he's shown up to any of the Vets meetings that Sam continues to help at in DC. The answer remains the same.
"No, I haven't seen him since the last time he came over and handed me my ass in pool. Why do you ask?"
"No reason."
He hasn't gotten good at telling when she's lying at least. He tells her that he'll keep an eye out just in case Steve does decide to come speak to him, she tells him he's a doll and clicks off soon after.
On the nights when he doesn't make a noise she can't help but wonder and worry whether or not he's internalizing it all. Whether his mind has him wrapped in a ball, a tangle of sheets, the pillows tossed on the floor as his eyes flutter behind his closed lids. She has half a mind to ask Jarvis to keep an eye on him but stops. Bites her tongue until she's amazed it hasn't been cut in half. If Steve wishes to speak about it he'll do it, he knows where to find her. Each morning he wakes with the same cheery smile, wishing her a pleasant day before he starts out on his run. As she watches him walk away, coffee in hand, she wonders if it helps level him out.
She certainly hopes so. It's not her place to insert herself where she doesn't belong and she knows it, so it doesn't matter how her heart aches for him, how she wants to tell him over and over that whatever it is that troubles him it's not his fault. But she doesn't. She picks up her own coffee and heads down to the training room, demons of her own to exorcize. He plays at the edges of her mind as she pummels the bag into dust.
It's a month before she finally steps into his room, a month before the whimpers turn to groans, which turn into shouts. She only hears them because she's on her way down, bleary-eyed with one of Clint's extra hoodies zipped up to her chin, but she pauses when she hears him scream. She'd never heard that before, and before she can talk herself out of it she's already in his room, the lock undone and the door shut behind her just as silently as it was opened.
It's worse than she can imagine, and at the same time she takes half a second to thank whatever's in the heavens that he's still in the room, even if he's face down in the bed with his hands fisted at his sides. The blankets are in piles on the floor, and a pillow was sacrificed in the fight. It might've been funny, that Steve's surrounded by feathers with the split open victim on the floor, but its contents shake with every tremor that runs through his enormous body, the tremble before the avalanche. Natasha all but swallows her tongue. She's at his side before she can consciously put one foot in front of another, but she hesitates in reaching out to him. At the best of times she can take Steve Rogers, but these aren't the best. They don't even graze the top hundred. If someone were to wake her in the middle of a nightmare they'd be lucky to escape with their lives, so she falters in shaking him away.
"Steve." Her voice is so hushed it's hardly audible over the sound of the bed shaking. A feather floats from his shoulder onto one of his hands, and he swings wide with it, sending the feathers into a flurry around him before his hands grasp the edge of the mattress and squeeze so hard that his fingernails pop through the fabric.
"Steve." She says it a little louder this time, hoping it's going to catch his attention, holding her breath to gauge the tiniest of whimpers or the loudest of his terrified gasps. Is that her name that he's whispering, the sound kin to those uttered at the grave of a fallen comrade. Her heart jolts in her chest, threatens to break through her ribcage and wake him up itself if she doesn't buck up and just do it.
"Steve!"
There's a jolt that is painful to watch, but it's nothing in comparison to the ache-and that startling shock of disconnect, the painful, unsaid question of where he is, when he is-in his eyes. She can feel it all the way down to her ankles and toes, feel it in the shift and locking of her bones as she switches from foot to foot, not looking at him for fear of embarrassment. On whose behalf she couldn't say. He rubs his face to clear it of the anxiety that leadens his brow and shakes his head as though to apologize. She cuts him off with a hum before he can speak, drawing his gaze up to meet hers.
"You don't have to do this alone, you know." As though she's one that can talk. As if she isn't the poster child for lonely nights spent screaming into her pillow, for workout sessions that leave her breathless and weak-kneed, though fatigue hasn't even set into her muscles. For snark and cynical, cryptic smiles that keep everyone on their toes around her and keep her secrets buried under layers and layers of red tape. She moves to sit beside him, laying a hand on his bared shoulder and brushes off the stray feathers that stuck to the sweat of his body. "We all have problems. You know this, I know this. So it doesn't do any good to keep them bottled up."
"It's not . . ." He cuts himself off with a heavy sigh, shoulders slumping forward as he cracks and buries his face into his hands. She rubs the well defined muscles of his back, feeling the tension roiling just under the fair skin. Wonders how long he's let it stew and wait, pushing it back and back until it became a world of its own upon his back, the gravity of whatever he let torment him breaking vertebrae after vertebrae in his own self imposed solitude.
"So what is it, then?" She prompts.
Death. How simple, she thinks, as the word comes out of his mouth, monosyllabic and crashing on the floor in front of them. Not the death of those he knows and loves, not the supposed death of Bucky, or Peggy's ever tenuous grasp on life. "I'm a soldier. I'm supposed to fight for freedom but how high has my death toll gotten? Why haven't I looked for another angle?" He asked, the words fractals and fragmented as he shuddered beneath her knowing, soft hands. She brought her nails out to scratch her way across his spine, keeping the movements light, short, and he shuddered underneath them. "Why didn't I ever think about-and we're not just talking about outright. How many people have I left incapacitated, crippled, because of my shield?"
There's nothing humorous about the laugh that escapes his lips, or the deadened look in his blue gaze when he finally looks up at her. "It's a fuckin' shield, Natasha. And I've killed with it."
She holds him through the tremors, listens as he recounts the different missions, the different ways he's sure he's messed up, and doesn't make a noise. Her fingers skirt up from his back to play with his hair, tugging him closer to that he's resting it in her lap while her fingers card through his soft hair. It takes a good hour, maybe closer to two, for him to unload it all, and when he does the silence that presses between them is strange, putting her on edge and setting her mind racing to think of something else she could say.
Not like she has much place to talk when it comes to killing.
"When I was in the Room they taught us not to be afraid of death." She murmured. "They taught us that a surrender of our ideals was a far greater dishonor than whatever waited for us after our lives had ended. We starved, were forced to fight one another, and grew stronger in spirit because of it, as fucked up as it was. Any lives that we took were necessary because it furthered our agenda and the agenda of those who nurtured us and made us ready for war. And those who died because you were trying to do the right thing, Steve, would've felt the same way. They wouldn't have stopped to mourn your death, and yet you give their memories the honor of your tears and your nightmares. You're not a monster. You're not a weapon. You're a good man, Steve." Her voice went soft. "You're too good for the shit that you're made to do. That it weighs so heavy in your conscious proves that. It's not a weakness, sparing them, just as it's not a crime to take their lives when they were so willing to give it to a cause that would've resulted in a greater suffering for those who don't deserve it." She has to take a breath, has to pause to consider what she's saying, because Steve's rising up from her lap to look at her, his expression so focused on her that it takes her breath away. She reaches out, cups the side of his face, and cracks a slow, uneven smile. "Their actions were their own, and so the outcome is of their own design. Allow them the respect of their own free-will, just as you are allowed yours for fighting them."
He doesn't say anything for some time, and she can't help but wonder with a pounding heart if she's overstepped their precarious boundaries. She's told him time and again that the state of the world isn't his fault, that what happened to James wasn't his fault, that the debacle with Shield and with Hydra-none of it was because of him, but had she jumped over that invisible line set down between the two of them? She's about to open her mouth, to apologize, when his arms wrap around her and she's pressed tight against his chest. His face buries itself in her shoulder. She doesn't have to wait until the water soaks through the cotton of her shirt to know that he's crying, feeling his tremors as they wrack his body and shake hers with it. It loosens something inside her, something she's denied herself for some time, and tears of her own streak down her face, though she's as silent as he is about it.
The nightmares become fewer and fewer, and he starts talking to Sam about it. She smiles when he tells her this over breakfast half a week later, her hands clasped tight over her hot chocolate and he washing off his plate from the full breakfast he'd made for himself. From where she stands she can lean closer to lay her head against the side of his arm, and she lets it rest there as she listens to his even breathing. He looks good, awake. There's not a tremor underneath his facade anymore, and as she takes a deep breath she notes that her chest feels lighter as well.