AN: I made the mistake of writing this while listening to my steve/nat playlist on 8tracks. If you truly want the angsty experience, listen to Unsteady by X Ambassadors. Do it. Just do it. Be a fledgling masochist. Or, if you're a full-on masochist, just listen to the whole damn playlist. /masseffucked/wrong-business (unashamedly self-advertising)


Natasha could count on one hand the number of times she had been truly, honest-to-god scared.

First: she hadn't been scared after she became an orphan. She was young, not older than the age of five or six, and she had just lost her mother, her only family, but she was not scared. No, at that point, she was just in shock. It hadn't been until after the process of finding her a foster home had been complete and she was being led to the front steps of said home with a cold, bony hand belonging to a social worker wrapped around her own did the terror finally manifest in Natasha's fragile, porcelain body like a poison as fiery as her hair.

But she wasn't scared for a while after that, just a little angry. She didn't like any of the families she had been deposited to like a crate of milk in the morning that lost its value by the end of the day. These families did not care about her. She was just a child with hair that made her look like a cartoon character and a body that would have passed her off as a boy, were it not for the aforementioned hair crowning her head. Later, once she grew up, she came to appreciate her lack of beauty as a child. Maybe if she had developed her looks at an early age, her life would have ended up in a far worse place than it already was, twisted and influenced by the sick hands and minds of potentially-perverted foster fathers that she had luckily passed under the radar, and not as a former KGB turned S.H.I.E.L.D. operative.

Second: when Natasha was around the age of eleven, she escaped the foster system and took to the streets. She wasn't living on them long before she was taken off from the back alleys of Stalingrad and thrown into the experiments of the Red Room. There, the fear harvested instantly. That was without a doubt. She wasn't the only girl there. In fact, there were twenty-eight of them, but that didn't make her feel any more safe; that didn't stop her from crying in terror as she was injected full of liquids of various colors and consistencies that she wasn't sure were meant to enhance or deteriorate her health. She was frightened, eleven, and the only glimpse of normalcy she ever received from the Red Room was her training in ballet in the Bolshoi.

But even that, it seemed, was a lie—artificial memories planted in her head by the scientists working in the Red Room to twist her mentality even more than it already was.

Third: Alexi Shostakov was a handsome Soviet test pilot whom Natasha was arranged to marry at the age of seventeen. He was older, in his early twenties, but he was also youthfully handsome and kind and when he touched her, his hands were so unlike those that poked at her muscles and injected needles into her body and held her down when she fought back. Alexi made Natasha believe in love as an ever-present quality, because she saw it in his eyes when he looked at her and heard it in his voice when he spoke to her. Alexi was her light, her saving grace.

The terror came in the form of a stiff, eight-by-eleven inch paper issued from the government informing her that Alexi had been killed in an explosion of an experimental rocket he was testing. To this day, Natasha could recall the paper fluttering from her fingers as she dropped to her knees, sobbing into her hands at the feet of the two men who had been sent to deliver the letter to her. Neither of them bent to console her; they just waited until she finally ran out of tears before turning and walking away from the home, their boots crunching in the snow.

A few years later, the terror was replaced by anger once she saw that her husband had been, in fact, alive the entire time and serving as Russia's answer to Captain America—the Red Guardian. The terror didn't return once Alexi died for real the next time.

Fourth: the KGB recruited her shortly after Alexi's first death. Even after his second and final demise, she continued working for them. She was ruthless. She was the Black Widow. She killed and seduced and spied and she was never scared.

At least, that was until a certain sniper with a bow-and-arrow hunted her down and barely managed to overpower her—but he overpowered her nonetheless, and that had never happened before—and as he pointed a gun between her eyes, Natasha realized that she was not ready to die. She was going to die, for sure, but she was not ready to; didn't want to. The fear didn't show on her face, but it was there all the same, dissolving her insides to putty as she stared unfalteringly in the assassin's eye and waited for him to pull the trigger. Instead, he holstered the weapon and held out a hand to her, offering her help to her feet as well as an overwhelming feeling of complete and utter relief that washed over her.

A year later, Natasha was a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent working with Clint, her would-be assassin, as her partner.

The fifth instance of fear, it seemed, had been unknowingly saved for the moment she was living through now. Despite being a master at controlling her emotions, Natasha couldn't withhold the look of unreserved horror that flashed across her face as she watched the three helicarriers in the sky start firing on each other, one of which Captain Am—Steve was still on. She could barely hear the crackle of voices from the comm in her ear; the sounds of the explosions were distorting the interference but she could just make out enough for her to be sick to her stomach.

"Steve! Can you hear me?" It was Hill, who was currently observing all of this mess from a S.H.I.E.L.D. surveillance nest. "Cap? You need to get out of there!"

When Steve replied, he sounded as if it was taking all of the strength in his body to breathe out the words, and they sounded wet with something that wasn't just saliva. "I-it's too…too l-late. Leave m-me—"

With that, another explosion boomed from the sky and one of the helicarriers began to tip forward toward the Potomac River below, though Natasha wasn't sure whether that had been the exact one Steve was still on or not. Before she could get a chance to ask Hill, however, the barrel of a gun jammed into her back and reminded her that she was still being held at gunpoint by the soon-to-be former Secretary of Defense.

"Let's go, councilwoman," the old bastard said, jabbing the handgun harshly into her ribcage to get her to turn around from the window. When she looked at him, she could tell he was trying very hard not to completely lose his temper at the sight of his master plan turning to shit just outside the widespread, floor-to-ceiling windows of his office. "You're gonna fly me out of here."

Natasha heard him speak, but she heard the voices crackling in her comm even louder. It was still Steve—thank god—but he sounded terribly winded and exhausted as he spoke with a voice that sounded very submissive and defeated, a voice that Natasha would have never thought she'd ever hear him use.

"You know me," he panted lowly, and then he let out a choked groan as he was presumably attacked, if the muffled crack that filled Natasha's comm was any indication. She could faintly hear someone replying before Steve continued between heaves of breath, "Your name is James…Buchanan…Barnes."

Another crack—or was that Pierce jabbing her with the gun again?

Steve was breathing heavily. "You're my best friend. You've known me your whole life. You…you're—"

Another explosion sounded and Natasha turned her head to find a second helicarrier drifting out of the sky. She was briefly panicked but as Steve continued speaking, she realized that he was still safe—and on the last helicarrier that remained in the air. He didn't have a lot of time left.

And apparently, neither did she. She realized she had been walking; the barrel of Pierce's gun digging between her ribs. Nick was still alive, she knew, as he was talking to Pierce. Something about, "I would've have taken a bullet for you," and Pierce replying, "you already have," and before she knew what she was doing, Natasha pressed the small metal disk she had concealed in her watch and fell to the polished floor, body convulsing with tense, painful energy.

Bang—bang—bang.

She could see Nick firing a weapon from her spot on the ground, and she didn't have to look to know that the Secretary of Defense was no longer among the living.

With a loud boom, the third helicarrier rocked in the sky as it was hit with a powerful blast, and among the chunks of debris falling from the platform was the unmistakable red, white and blue form of Captain America plummeting limply toward the Potomac below.

Right before she blacked out, the comm in her ear crackled with a sound that she later could only compare to having her entire head forcefully submerged underwater, as her hearing muffled, her vision darkened, and she suddenly found it hard to breathe.


Natasha wasn't out for long, though it seemed so as her entire body was numb with panic as she sat in the cabin of the black helicopter that Nick was currently flying erratically around the Triskelion. She could hear him yelling for her, but he sounded like he was miles away. All she could think about was one thing.

Steve.

And he was probably currently at the bottom of the Potomac.

"Romanoff!"

Natasha snapped out of her haze, though she wasn't as collected as she wanted to project herself as. If Nick noticed, which he sure as hell did, he didn't say anything. "W-what?"

"Contact Wilson and get his location!"

Shakily, she nodded and with even shakier hands she held her fingers to her comm and forced her voice out of her body. The words were coming out without her knowledge and soon the helicopter was tipping to the side and a body was barreling towards the door and falling through the cabin and out the other side and—

Natasha lurched forward and wrapped her hand around Sam's wrist at the last second, hauling him up into the chopper before fading back into fear just as quickly. If Sam noticed that she had almost failed to react in time to catch him, he didn't notice, as he was already berating Fury for something that she wasn't paying attention to.

Because all she could think about was Steve. Steve, who, despite the fact could hold his breath for nearly ten minutes, was drowning underneath the weight of the body of water below them.

Sam was looking questioningly between the two S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives, appearing almost as panicked as Natasha felt. "Where's the Cap? He got out okay, didn't he?" When neither of them answered, he looked pointedly at her, his tone edging on panicked agitation. "Where's Steve?"

Natasha couldn't bring herself to look at him. The pit in her stomach was threatening to swallow her hole.

"The Captain, he…he didn't make it," It was Hill again, speaking in all of their comms. Natasha almost lurched and threw up at the finality behind the words. "His comms are cut off, he—"

"No," For a moment, Natasha thought it was Sam talking, but then she realized the shaky, determined voice had come from her. "We can't just leave him. We don't know if he's definitely—" Dead, Natasha? Because everything is pointing to just that, you silly girl, "—we have to be sure!"

"Natasha," Nick was speaking to her now, his tone uncharacteristically soft. "There's no time—"

"Put this chopper down or I will," she practically hissed, leaning forward to glare at her superior and show that she was not bluffing, not even in the slightest. "If you don't respect me enough to do that, then do it for Steve. Respect him."

Nick worked his jaw for a split second that seemed to her like an eternity. Finally, without looking at her, he said in a low voice, "I respect Steve."

Without warning, the helicopter lurched and almost nose-dived towards an empty clearing on the shore running along the Potomac. For a moment, Natasha thought maybe something snapped within the former S.H.I.E.L.D. director and he was going to pull a kamikaze stunt and kill all of them on impact on the sandy shore, but at the last second the helicopter leveled and hovered inches above the ground.

Nick turned to look at Natasha expectantly. "You have ten minutes and if you don't find him by then, we're leaving. I don't care if I have to shoot you to do it," he growled, and as she leapt out of the chopper and ran down the shore, she could hear him yell after her, "And I respect you more than I miss my goddamn eye!"

Natasha's heartbeat thudded in her ears as she ran, scanning every inch of the shore for any sign of Steve and his iconic suit to no avail. It was like she was being presented with yards and yards of grainy white sand that wanted nothing more than to swallow her feet and root her in place. She didn't know how much time had passed since she stepped off of the helicopter. One minute? Two? Eight?

None of that mattered. Fury could shoot her if he wanted—if he thought he could succeed, that is. She wasn't going to leave this goddamn mound of sand until she was sure that Steve was not here and that he was….

She spared one glance toward the Potomac lapping at the shore beside her rapidly moving feet. The water was such a dark shade of dirty green that it almost seemed black, like thinned-out molasses, and she almost flinched as the tainted liquid dared to touch her boots. It hurt to think that Steve could be down there, sinking into a bottomless pit of black, again encased in a body of water though this time he was actually dying and not on his way to freezing for another seventy years. If he was in that water, then this was final. Captain America wasn't going to be there to protect the U.S. anymore; Steve wasn't going to be there with her, for her, kissing her and holding her and loving her a million times more than Alexi ever could.

He wouldn't be hers.

He'd be the Potomac's. It would swallow him whole.

Natasha let out a choked sob as her vision watered and her feet shuffled awkwardly beneath her weight. She couldn't walk anymore. The sand was tiring her out, grabbing at her ankles and holding her back. She felt as if she had circled the island five times already, and Steve was nowhere to be found. He wasn't here. Hill was right, he didn't make it. The self-sacrificing bastard ordered the helicarriers to fire even though he was still on board and now he was gone

The toe of her boot caught on something soft but solid and Natasha tumbled forward, face-first into the sand. It took her a few seconds to gather her bearings before she scrambled upwards and found that she had tripped over a still and seemingly lifeless body.

Not just any body—Steve's body.

She let out a half-frightened, half-relieved gasp and immediately pressed her fingers against Steve's neck. His pulse was there, though it was slow and faint, and his breathing was even hazier. Without wasting a beat, she began speaking rapidly into her comm.

"I found Rogers! We're located somewhere along the northern part of the bank; we need medical evacuation. Steve's barely breathing, he's got"—she nearly sobbed again once she saw the angry, oozing red hole in his abdomen as well as the pool of blood beneath his thigh and the place where he'd obviously been stabbed in the shoulder—"multiple GSWs and a stab wound. He has multiple other lacerations on his face…you need to hurry. I think I'm losing him!"

There was a crackle of response in her ear, something in the affirmative, but she wasn't listening. Instead she pressed her mouth to his and blew before leaning back and heaving on his chest three times, before repeating the process. The CPR wasn't doing much, it seemed, though his breathing cleared in the slightest and he coughed once, making another spurt of blood spill out of his belly. Natasha winced, squeezing her eyes shut against the tears as she leaned forward and pressed her palms against the bullet wound, praying to god that this man lived to see another seventy years to make up for all the time he had lost.

"C'mon, Steve," she rasped, her voice laced with desperation. "Wake up. Steve, I need you to be strong for me. You survived much worse than a gunshot wound, damn it. Don't die on me now. Please—Steve, please!"

Natasha lifted one bloodied hand and cupped his jaw, pressing her forehead into his chest as she pressed all of her body weight on the wound to stop the bleeding. She was crying, hard, and her shoulders jolted with each ugly sob that by the time the tears could come no more, her body was trembling severely. She moved her hand away from his jaw, leaving a bloodied handprint stamped across his face, and pressed her fingers to his pulse again. It wasn't any stronger than it had been before, but it was evident that it also wasn't going to hold up for much longer.

The notion made Natasha sob again, though there weren't any tears nor sound, and all she did was tip her head back and let her mouth drop in a frantic, wordless cry. The Potomac hadn't taken him, but a Soviet slug with no rifling was about to.

"…Nat?"

The voice was weak, but it was unmistakable. It was wet with blood and strained with pain and fatigue, but it was unmistakable.

Natasha jerked up, her hands still clutched desperately on the straps of his suit. "Steve? Steve, can you hear me?"

"Natasha?"

"Don't move," she rasped, struggling to hold him down as he started to stir. He coughed as she pushed him down and the blood was coming out full-force again. Natasha struggled between framing his face in her hands or stopping the blood from the wound, and she wisely chose the latter. "Don't move, okay? Help's on the way. Just stay with me."

His eyes fluttered shut and she momentarily panicked, opening her mouth to try and get him awake again, but then she realized he was just trying to clear his head as best as he could. When he parted his lips again, his eyes were trained on the helicarrier sinking into the river.

"Bucky…he saved me," he paused, and though she was looking at him with a stricken and confused expression on her face, he only elaborated because he needed to get the words out before he passed out again. "He pulled me…out of the w-water." Another cough. "He remembered."

Natasha pressed one hand to his forehead. He was already developing a fever, but a part of her believed that he was telling the truth; that this wasn't just a hallucination that he might have seen because of the state he was in. She opened her mouth to reply, though she didn't get the chance as a barrage of footsteps approached them and a pair of hands wrapped around her upper-arms to heave her away from Steve's damaged body.

She instinctively made a move to hit her attacker in the throat, but then she realized he was just a paramedic trying to move her out of the way so he could tend to Steve. She wanted to stay rooted in the spot—she wasn't going to leave him, not now, not ever—but then Nick appeared beside her and gripped her firmly but affectionately by the shoulder.

The look in his eye told her, "they're gonna make him okay."

Natasha nodded and stood up on shaky legs as the paramedics worked on temporarily bandaging Steve's wounds, though the man in question's eyes never left hers as they pressed gauze to his gunshot wound and checked his pulse and raised him on to a gurney. She held his gaze the entire time, her body trembling ever-so-slightly though no one mentioned anything about it. She watched as the paramedics lifted him and began to move him towards the chopper for evacuation, Steve's eyes still on her. His voice was quiet, nothing above a murmur, but what he said next was as clear as day as the words echoed in her ears.

"You saved me."

Natasha stood still as the paramedics dragged Steve away. Nick was standing in front of her, trying to get her to follow him to the chopper, but a glint from the sun caught her eye and she turned her head to gaze at a cluster of trees a few yards down the shore. It was brief, very brief, but she could just make out a metal arm disappearing into the thick of the brush.

"Romanoff, we gotta go," Nick's voice drew her focus away from the fleeing Winter Soldier, and she fixed her gaze upon her superior expectantly. He was looking at her with concern etched all over his brow. "You okay?"

Natasha glanced one last time down the shore before looking at the paramedics loading Steve into the chopper, and then finally back at Nick.

"I think I will be."


AN: I may or may not add a second part set during Steve's recovery in the hospital and during the graveyard scene. I haven't decided yet but i'm a sucker for these two and I'll probably cave.

Goddamn OTP struggles, for real.