*** Last chapter folks! Thanks for reading and I really hope you enjoyed it! ***
When his knock came at the door, Hannah was ready for it. She had taken a very long, very hot shower, changed into something soft and baggy and enveloping, and had curled up on the couch with a couple of bottles of beer, and waited. If was just past midnight when he finally arrived. She pulled the front door open and there stood Steve, wearing jeans, a t-shirt and a leather coat, looking painfully Steve-ish. Hannah turned away from the door, leaving it open, and headed towards her living room, knowing he'd follow.
She heard the door close and a moment later he came and sat on the other end of the couch. They were each silent for a couple of minutes. "I want to apologize," he began, his voice low and heavy, but Hannah held a hand up to him.
"No," she said quickly, "Don't." Steve nodded and hung his head. She turned and put a hand on top of one of his, where it rested on the couch. "Steve, you didn't do anything wrong," she told him, "SHIELD did, your so-called friend Clint did, but you didn't," her voice came soft but firm and he finally looked up at her.
"I never should have said anything to him about you," he told her, regret in his voice, "But I knew him longer than the rest of the team, and I thought because he was… well, because we were both Avengers, that maybe I could trust him, just as a regular friend." She pressed her lips together and said nothing. Steve turned the hand that hers was resting on top of, wrapping his fingers all the way around her hand.
"He explained how it would be," she told him flatly, "And I know we're way way too early into any kind of even quasi-relationship to talk long term, but your bosses have forced the issue." He nodded, and his thumb stroked the back of her hand idly. She pulled her hand from his gently. "Steve, I don't want to live like that, and I really wish you didn't have to either," she laid it out simply and baldly, "I know the things I want out of life, and I think maybe you could have been one of those things, but not this way. Not SHIELD's way. I won't live like a bug in a jar, constantly wondering if someone is watching me pee, or listening while we do it."
Steve lifted his head from where it hung and looked over at her, a small rueful smile on his face. "This is part of why I like you, you know," he told her, "You tell it like it is."
"No, I don't," she answered quickly, "Trust me, if I did people would definitely avoid me more often. I just sometimes have moments of clarity." Steve chuckled and climbed to his feet. "So that's it," he said, "It's all over before it really got off the ground?" Hannah climbed to her feet and walked over to him.
"I'm sorry you can't make the choice I'm making, that you can't opt out of the whole SHIELD experience," Hannah told him carefully, "But, we hardly know each other, and given the situation, I really need to look out for myself. I don't want you halfway around the world when our son has his tonsils out, you know?"
Steve made a puzzled face. "What?" He asked. She waved a hand at him. "Talk to your friend Clint," she said distractedly.
"Oh, I'll be talking to him, alright," Steve's voice dropped angrily, and for half a moment Hannah felt bad for Clint, "And he's off my team, getting replaced - I can't work with people I can't trust." His eyes looked past her for a moment as he thought. "Maybe Romanov could step in…" he muttered, before shaking himself a little and looking back at Hannah, seeming to realize that now was not the best time to be thinking of Clint Barton replacements.
"So this is it?" He asked, picking up one of her hands and holding it lightly. She felt her throat catch the slightest bit, but nodded. "I think we would've made a good team," he told her quietly, regretfully. She smiled at him and took a step towards him, kissing his cheek before gently kissing his mouth. They embraced for a moment, the soft kiss going on and on, before he stepped away quickly.
"Goodbye, Hannah," he said, strangely formal. She watched him walk out of the living room and heard him close the front door behind him as he left. "Bye Steve," she mumbled. After a few minutes she went to the front door and locked it again. Then she proceeded to sit on her couch and get very, very drunk. She didn't cry, not even once, her emotions were never really given the chance to attach themselves to Steve. She faintly mourned the loss of the idea of her and Steve, but the reality of her and Steve kept getting in the way, and she only ended up feeling angry and intruded upon.
The next morning she woke-up more hungover than she had been since college and called in sick to work. She spent the day in the house, creeping about and wondering where SHIELD had hid the microphones and cameras. She was too tired to look for them.
The day after that, she returned to work. The entire day was spent pretending like everything was normal and that nothing strange had just finished happening to her. It was hard to fake normal all day, and finally, at the end of it, she was able to leave work and go home. A dissatisfied scowl settled on her face as soon as she left the office and lingered there the entire walk home. People went out of their way to avoid the furious looking blonde woman marching down the center of the sidewalk, but Hannah hardly noticed.
Her apartment was sitting empty, waiting for her, it seemed, and there was a folded note on her coffee table with her name written in unfamiliar hand on the outside. It made her grit her teeth at the obvious intrusion. She stood glaring at the note, her fists clenched at her sides. To her the innocent looking note seemed to be mocking her, SHIELD seemed to be mocking her. Look how easily we can slither inside your life, the note seemed to say, look how easily we can get you, with or without Steve.
After a few minutes of silently loathing the piece of paper from a distance, she walked stiffly over to it and scooped it up. She took a deep breath, preparing herself for a threat, or a warning, or stern directions, before she flipped the note open. Hannah let out a heavy sigh of relief at the message inside. Your apartment is cleaned out. Nobody is watching or listening. – Clint
She read the note three times and then crumpled it up in one hand and dropped it into the garbage in the kitchen. She proceeded to strip naked in her living room and parade confidently from there into her bedroom, a small act of defiance, though she knew in her gut that SHIELD was definitely gone. She still had that odd sense of trust for Clint Barton; he wasn't lying to her in the note, just as he hadn't been lying to her in truck.
A week later, Hannah was retrieving her mail when she noticed that the little 'S. Rogers' that adorned Steve's mailbox was gone. She jogged up the many flights of stairs until she reached the fourth floor, Steve's floor, and saw his apartment door wide open. There was a crew of men inside painting the walls, while others appeared to be replacing the carpet in the living room. A man walked by her, a toilet clutched in his beefy arms.
"Scuze, miss," he mumbled. She muttered an apology and moved out of his way, still staring at the obviously vacated apartment. He really left, she thought, partially torn between dismay and utter relief that she wasn't going to have to awkwardly dance around him.
It hurt to say goodbye to him, to let him go, but she was resolute in the decision. I closed my eyes to the warning signs with Dylan, she told herself sternly, I'm not doing that again. She knew herself and knew that living in hiding was never going to be ok, and having a partner more tied to his secret government agency than he would be to her or their potential children, was never going to be alright.
Hannah went back down the stairs and into her apartment. She undressed from work, and shoved her dinner in the oven and then took a seat at her desk, turning the computer on. She pulled up the SPCA website and began to look for an orange-striped friend.
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2 Years Later
The drive into New Jersey was a long one. Nat kept looking over at Steve. After asking about the kiss, their conversation meandered along for a while, but her own stubborn curiosity would not allow her to stop wondering. If I wasn't the first since 1945, who was it then, Steve? She wondered, her eyes cutting critically over his profile in the passenger seat, as if she might find out just from looking at him.
He was so strangely cryptic about his personal life, both past and present, and she enjoyed bothering him about dating people, but he always swiftly and neatly turned it down and brushed it aside. She commented casually to Clint once that maybe Steve was actually interested in men, but Clint had shaken his head.
"It's none of our damn business either way, Nat," he'd told her, rather brusquely for Clint, "Maybe he just knows how hard it would be have the people he loves in hiding, to fear for them just because of what he is and what he does." Nat had taken in Clint's stiff posture and rigid jaw and realized that Clint might be right, and really, who would know better than Barton about the trials of a hidden family?
Now though, SHIELD was not what they thought it was, and they weren't in contact with anyone, let alone Barton, either because they didn't know who they could trust, couldn't reach the ones they did trust securely, or couldn't waste the time to try and figure out how to do either. Maybe all three, she mused, thinking that she would always trust Barton, but she didn't want to pull him into this mess.
Ever since Steve had tossed Barton off his team two years prior, with no reason and no explanation, and, oddly, no fight from Clint about why he was doing it, Natasha found that had less and less time for Barton. She was pulled into Steve's world, which was work, work, duty, work. He was a hard man to get to know, and kept personal thoughts and feelings quiet and to himself.
She was often guilty of doing the same, or rather, displaying thoughts and feelings that people thought were genuine, but were only part of whichever persona she wished them to see. Steve didn't have her training though, her background, her reasons; she couldn't figure out why he wouldn't trust anyone with the real him.
"I know you're staring at me," Steve said calmly, "Got something on your mind?" Natasha stretched out for a moment, like a cat, and then curled her legs up underneath herself on the seat.
"You are a puzzle, Rogers," she told him, "A terrible liar, yes, but simply not talking about things, isn't lying, is it?" Steve said nothing and Natasha tapped her fingers on the arm rest between them. "I'm dying to know," she said in mock confession, "Who was she?"
"Who was who?" He asked mildly, one eyebrow popping up momentarily before dropping back down calmly. "Don't play coy with me," she admonished him, "The girl, your other kiss, is she still around? Is she why you won't date anyone?"
"I don't need to date anyone, Natasha," Steve responded calmly enough, "Can you just drop it?" She sighed.
"For now, but eventually I'll find out."
"I'm sure you will, but how about first we get through the problem at hand?"
"You're no fun, Rogers."
"Get your feet off the seat."
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Hannah put down the bowl of food she'd been mixing. She had been standing in the entranceway to the kitchen, leaning against the wall, stirring up some sauce for dinner, when the TV in the living room rolled over to its next program, the evening news. It began to show footage from earlier that afternoon.
Captain America, Black Widow, Arrested – the headlines read as they scrolled across the TV. Hannah walked slack jawed into the living room, unable to believe what she was seeing. Steve, the redhead, and another man, were on their knees in the street, hands behind their heads, and masses of armed men were pointing guns at them. The wild-eyed reporter went on about the battle on the causeway involving a lot of high powered weaponry and explosives and reports of a masked man with a metallic arm.
She walked closer to the TV and knelt down near it. Steve looked battered and defeated from the view of the shaky helicopter camera. She put her fingers lightly to the screen for a moment, and then removed them, swallowing hard and shaking her head. Steve popped up in the news every once in a while, a public-interest piece, a 'where are they now' piece, once he visited a children's hospital and the press caught wind of it and she was treated to footage of an annoyed-looking Steve fighting through the crowds when he left. Hannah climbed to her feet and looked around for the TV remote. She didn't want to watch anymore.
Back in the kitchen, the TV now off, Hannah made dinner for herself. She felt a soft rubbing against her ankles and looked down to see her striped, orange cat, Oliver, winding around her feet, mewing plaintively. "I guess you want dinner, too, hey?" She asked him, in the ridiculous tone of voice that she reserved for small furry animals.
The cat pranced around eagerly for the sloppy mess of his wet food, which Hannah scraped out of a can into his bowl, her nose wrinkled just the slightest bit at the offensive fishy odor. She went into her bedroom for a few minutes afterwards, and then returned to the kitchen to grab her dinner when she was satisfied that she had time to eat.
She thought about Steve while she ate. She thought about him more often than she had planned to, naturally. Getting over him, initially, had not been easy. In the couple of months after breaking things off with him, she had thrown herself into her works and made a couple friends. From there, she started dating again. Although that particular practice was brought to a staggering halt not too long after it started.
Oliver came and sat by her feet, cleaning his paws and washing his orange face. "You're not getting any of my food," she told the cat, and he got to his feet and turned away, making his way down the hall towards her bedroom. She watched him go and listened carefully for a few minutes. When she heard nothing, she sighed in relief and washed her dinner dishes. She was just drying her hands when she heard giggling coming from her bedroom.
Not again, she thought in exasperation, I'm turning that cat into mittens. She walked into her bedroom and turned the light on and was greeted by a wide smile and innocent cat-eyes. "Oliver, bad, get out," she shooed the cat away, and watched as the creature lithely jumped out from where he was not supposed to be. Hannah walked over to where the cat had been sitting just a minute ago and stared through the bars at the reason why her dating-life had stopped so abruptly.
Little fingers came through the bars of the crib and grabbed at her nose, pleasant garbled words and happy little chuckles following. "I shouldn't get mad at the cat," she told her son in a dry voice, "We all know you goad poor furball into misbehaving." He climbed to his feet and stood up on his sturdy, chubby little legs, reaching his arms out over the top of the crib towards her.
"Kitty, mama?" He asked her. She couldn't keep the smile from her face as she reached down and picked him up, filling her arms with his warm, chunky, sweetness. Alex, named for her father, reached up and stuck his fingers into her mouth and she pretended to eat them, before carrying him back out to the living room.
She sat on the rocker with him and watched any news channel she could find, looking for more information about Steve and his comrades. Alex moved about restlessly in her arms for a while before slumping heavily against her chest, finally asleep. She held him to herself, rocking gently, running her fingers through the nest of blonde curls atop his head, and re-watched the same footage from earlier, along with other images of Steve in the Battle of New York, and old war-time clips.
Tilting Alex slightly, she stared down at his face, overcome with a wash of love and adoration for her baby son. Almost a toddler now, she thought sadly, stroking a thumb over one chubby cheek, he'll be a year and half in a couple months. She studied his features, so soft and sweet as he slept. She could see herself in him; the slope of his little nose, the arch of his eyebrows, the color of his hair.
There's so much more of Steve though, she thought a little sadly. There were times when she was terrified, afraid that someone would look at Alex and just know. But no one did or had. It had been very hard not to put a father's name on the birth certificate, to pretend that she slept around so much that she had no idea whatsoever who had fathered the child.
It was worth it, she thought, I'll never have to worry about you, no one will ever take you. She'd been about 7 months pregnant and about to risk trying to call Steve when that possibility hit her. Steve was not a normal man. She'd seen the evidence of it, that he'd once been a small man. They'd pumped him full of god-knew-what, and suddenly he was an Adonis, a muscle-bound superhero. She didn't know if it was possible, but she worried some of that stuff might end up in her baby. If that was true, and SHIELD found out, she didn't doubt for a second that they'd take her baby away from her, to study him endlessly, likely locking her up in the process, too.
Hannah walked slowly down the hall to her bedroom and tucked Alex back into his crib. The cat climbed up onto her bed which was directly across from the crib and curled up into a little ball, facing the baby, as if to watch over him. He did it every night. "Thanks, Ollie," she whispered, scratching the cat behind his big ears, "But if you wake him again, I'm dropping you into a cold shower."
She wasn't able to concentrate that night, not very well, she was wrapped up in worry for Steve, and trapped in her old memories and fears. She knew it would all be so much worse if she and Steve had stayed together, and although she had cursed herself for not using protection with Steve that one long, glorious day they'd spent in bed together, she couldn't regret Alex. She would never regret him.
She was grateful to Steve for their son, grateful to Steve for being who he was and treating her so well for so short a time, and she was also grateful that he wasn't in her life right now, because if the images on the TV meant anything, it was that the authority he once worked for had turned against him for whatever reason.
That night, Hannah lay in bed and thought about Steve and listened to their son breathing deeply in his sleep. He might never know his father, but he would always know safety, he would always know a normal life. To Hannah, those things, his safety especially, were most important. She fell asleep hoping Steve made it through this latest Captain America incident safely, and feeling relieved that she and Alex were anonymous and removed from it all.
When she slept, she dreamt of a different life, where the three of them were together and happy, and for now, that was enough.
THE END
***Hope you all enjoyed this little story! Thanks for reading! ***
*** The sequel is now up! It's titled "Not a Secret Anymore" - Enjoy! ***
