They'd been living together for a few months now. If you could call it that. Him, Natasha and Bucky. The super soldier, the super spy and the super assasin. God, it sounded so cheesy. But it wasn't. Not with them. They fixed each other. They saw past the names, the aliases, the personas that everyone else saw. They looked at each other and saw right to their souls. They helped each other feel and patched up each other's battle scars, the ones you could see and the ones that lay deeper. And slowly, they began to heal. It didn't happen all at once and would take years, but they started. Bucky still froze out sometimes, he still forgot everyone's names sometimes, including his own. And they brought him back and slowly reminded him and he slowly remembered. He still couldn't take it every so often. The constant happenings. How everything happened so fast and it was so easy to be left behind. It was so easy to want to be left behind. And they brought him back. They watched old movies that weren't so old to him and them watched new ones that made him feel so old and yet still so alive. Natasha still wasn't ready; she still lost it sometimes in her own way and desperately searched for a way to wipe away the years of blood. And they still brought her back and reminded her of all the lives they've saved. That she has saved. All the sacrifices she has made. They reminded her that what she truly deserved was peace.
It worked for them- their screwed up little lives, and when Natasha left as she always did, it almost felt like the good old days. Back before Bucky had gone and buried himself in the ice. They joked and they teased each other and, at night, when it all became too much. Too real. They lay together and they talked. Not about anything real, but about things that weren't. Empty words that had no meaning but somehow helped. And they held each other, they held each other so tightly, Steve could feel every scar across Bucky's back, the cold metal of his arm and the helpless feeling of tears that never fell. They held each other and they felt so much, but when he woke up Bucky was always gone. Nothing was ever said. He told himself it was what they needed right now, that it would pass and inside he secretly hoped it wouldn't. That one day Bucky would be there when he woke up. That it wouldn't just be something that happened at night.