updates are gonna continue to be sporadic. real life never comes with a schedule, you know?

anyway, enjoy!

"Oh, just spit it out already, Steve," Natasha says in exasperation. She doesn't look up from her task of typing on the tablet held in her hand. Just what it is that she's typing, Steve isn't sure. It's not like they have work to do here in the afterlife...

"What?" he replies, trying for an air of innocence even though he knows Natasha will see right through it. Truthfully, he's been trying to find a tactful way to ask the question that had popped into his head the day before, when he'd been regaling some of his buddies from the Howling Commandos with stories of how they'd taken down Hydra and SHIELD.

Nat still doesn't look up, but he knows she'd rolled her eyes. "I swear I can hear the question grinding the gears in your head. Just ask already."

He sighs quietly, steeling himself to ask the question. "When Bucky shot you—"

"Which time?" she interrupts, this time looking up and meeting his gaze. Her expression is neutral, but he swears he can see the tiniest beginning of a smirk at the corner of her mouth.

Of course she's amused by this, he thinks wryly. Still, Steve winces. "Uh, before the whole Hydra and SHIELD thing," he clarifies, hating that he has to clarify it at all. The fact that Bucky had shot her once was bad enough; the fact that he'd tried to kill her on multiple occasions... Well that was a whole other kind of awful. But Nat had never seemed to hold a grudge. Then again, she had never made an effort to talk to Bucky either...but her indifference was still something that baffled Steve a little.

"Uh-huh," she prompts him, tablet having now been turned off and placed on the coffee table between them, her task apparently done for the moment.

"I know the doctor said there was quite a bit of damage to that shoulder," he says with a vague gesture to her left side.

"Still haven't heard a question," she teases him lightly, reaching for the mug Steve hadn't noticed when he'd sat down across from her. More fancy coffee, he guesses silently. Nat had always favoured "proper European coffee" and had carried that habit with her into her life after death. Though now she was making it a point to sample all different kinds of coffee that she'd never had to chance to try while alive.

"Well, obviously I wasn't there, but Sam said you grabbed him outta the air from the helicopter with your left arm. That was less than a day after you got it patched up."

He watches as she tucks her legs underneath her, wraps both hands around her mug, leans back, and finally brings the coffee up to her mouth. She holds it in front of her mouth for just a moment before she takes a drink. Then she meets his gaze once more and juts her chin out in a silent prompt for him to continue and get to his question.

"I just, uh— " He stumbles as he tries to wind his way to the actual question. He doesn't know what's driving his worry — it's just Nat after all. She's one of his best friends, and has always been exceedingly patient with him. She had teased him often, yes, but had never been cruel. Whether it came to teaching him new fighting techniques or answering his questions about the modern world, she'd always been patient and kind to him. He takes a breath and continues as he exhales. "Well, I don't quite understand how you managed that."

A smile curls on her lips as she shakes her head, a twinkle of amusement in her eyes. "Always underestimating us women, huh, Rogers?"

"You know that's not what I meant," he accuses, brow furrowing in disapproval of her insinuation.

She is, predictably, undeterred though. "You still haven't asked a question," she teases.

His frown deepens, and he shoots her another look of disappointment for a moment before he gets to his question. "How is that possible? How did you do that?" he asks. He cringes a little inside when he realizes how accusing his tone was.

"Short answer?" His eyebrows raise in a silent reply. "I don't know." His brow furrows back into a frown, and he opens his mouth to respond, but she beats him to the punch by pressing on. "There's a lot about the Red Room that I don't remember. Some because I was very young, some I'm sure I just blocked out altogether, and some because…" she trails off as she shrugs and sighs. "Well, you saw what Hydra did to Barnes. It's not inconceivable to imagine some of that technology making the leap to the Red Room."

"Are you— You mean they did that to you too?" he replies, stumbling over his words as he tries to wrap his mind around what she'd said. Of all the answers he had considered might give, this possibility hadn't come up. He'd always just assumed he and Bucky were the only ones with any enhancements.

"I don't know," Nat repeats swiftly with a shake of her head. "Maybe," she adds. She's quiet for a beat and then tilts her head and shrugs with one arm as she sighs. "There were always gaps in my memory, times I can't remember anything from. But it could've just been my mind protecting itself from that trauma. I don't know." She is quiet for a beat again, as though collecting her thoughts before she continues. "I have no way to know for sure, but I think they experimented on some of us. I was never really sick as an adult, and I healed faster than most. Nothing compared to you of course, but still faster than the average woman. And in cases of extreme injury, things seemed to…stitch together enough so I could continue to function."

Steve's eyes are still wide and he blinks a few times, still trying to wrap his brain around this new information. "You've got a serum?" he says in disbelief. He thinks back to how painful the procedure of administering the serum had been. To think she'd been subjected to that along with the rest of the horrors in her childhood...

"Well, had. We are dead, after all," she corrects with a smirk playing on her lips and tone a little cheeky despite the subject. She sobers back to a more serious tone quickly, though. "It's the best explanation I could come up with anyway. SHIELD found some…anomalies in their medical tests after I defected, but Fury shut it down before they could figure anything out."

"He did?" Steve says in disbelief, remembering the weapons he'd directed SHIELD to make after studying the tesseract. Fury didn't strike him as the type to close an avenue of potential so quickly.

"At my request. Well, at Coulson's request, probably. I had warned them that I didn't want to be a lab rat being poked and prodded in the name of 'science.' Coulson had told me they treated people humanely at SHIELD and that he would make sure that my request was honoured."

"Oh," he says, unable to form any other coherent reply. He recovers quickly enough though. "You weren't curious?"

She shrugs. "What would it have changed? Look how many people have gotten killed chasing after your blood and chasing that same endgame. I didn't want to have to guard myself against that. But like I said, no way for me to know with any degree of certainty that I had a serum. I don't remember a lot from back then. It could have been something else entirely. Or maybe I was born with it. The Red Room took me because of my genetic potential, so maybe they picked up something when I was an infant."

"I'm sorry," he offers, not knowing what else to say. He'd known a little about her upbringing, but to think she'd been taken from a family that surely would have loved and doted on her... It breaks his heart.

"Thanks," she says with a sad smile.

"Were there side effects for you?" he asks, shifting them away from what he assumes is a more painful topic for her. "I mean, you know I was basically always hungry, and couldn't get drunk on normal alcohol."

"Aside from the healing and general health, not that I really noticed. I suppose I was probably more fit than most, but I had to work to keep that up, so maybe it didn't impact that."

Steve is quiet for a beat as he takes it all in. "Well shit," he says finally, unable to find any meaningful response.

Nat laughs then, and it's a welcomed sound that soothes a bit of his worry. He hadn't meant to tread onto such a delicate topic. "Don't get worked up about it, Steve. I let it go a very long time ago."

He runs a hand through his hair as he leans back in his seat. "I can't believe I never asked you this while we were alive."

"I can. It's a very personal thing, and you weren't generally one to pry."

"You could have told me, Nat."

She smiles at him softly. "I know. But it was something I didn't like to think about, let alone talk about. It was a lasting reminder that I'd been raised with only one purpose — to kill people and serve them."

"Nat," he sighs sadly. He's had this conversation too many times for him to count. But before he can build up any steam for a rousing speech reminding her of how worthy of the title of 'hero' that she is, she smiles and shakes her head, holding up a hand to stop him.

"I know, Steve," she says with a smile. "I know I did good with the skills they gave me. You can shelve whatever motivational speech you had planned because I've accepted I was more than what they made me."

"Good," he says emphatically.

"Do you think it would have changed anything if I had told you?" she asks, tacking it on as though it were an afterthought.

He pauses to consider it and then tilts his head to one side as he answers. "Well, I probably would have felt less bad about hurting you while training," he offers with a grin.

"No you wouldn't," she counters immediately with an arched brow and the beginnings of a knowing grin of her own.

"No, I probably wouldn't have," he admits honestly. It seems there was a part of him that would always feel bad about hurting people, even if it was in training and something for which they had volunteered . Steve is quiet as he tries to think if he would have treated her differently, or if it would have changed anything. "I don't know," he says finally, giving up on trying to figure it out. There were just too many variables to consider. "Maybe. It's hard to say."

"Yeah," she agrees, "I guess."

"Did you tell anyone about it?"

"Maria Hill."

He blinks in surprise. He'd expected Clint, not Maria. "Not Clint?"

She shakes her head. "I decided that if he asked me outright, I would tell him, but he never asked. I told Maria because she asked after a particularly nasty cut I got on an op we ran together healed pretty quickly."

"You two were good friends, huh?" he comments, remembering all the times he'd found the two of them chuckling over coffee at the Compound in those early days.

She shrugs. "We were two women in a male-dominated organization, and we interacted quite a bit since she oversaw a bunch of the high-level ops I was on. It was sort of inevitable."

"But you didn't have to become friends," he counters. "You could've just been colleagues that got along well."

Nat nods, conceding he had a point. "She was good people," she offers by way of an explanation. "You know?"

He nods because he does know. Maria Hill had always been courteous and kind to him, and had even eventually grown to crack jokes around him too. "Yeah, she was."

"Did you see her at all before you died?"

"She and Fury came to the Compound the day after the battle. I had to tell them about you," he explains, a touch of sadness flashing on his face. He remembers their expressions when he told them what Natasha had done. "They were both sad to hear it," he offers. Nat just nods. "I bumped into Maria a few weeks later at the memorial we put up for you. I purposely stayed far enough away to not hear whatever she was saying, but once she stopped talking, I made my way there."

He sees her flash a bittersweet smile. It's bittersweet, he knows, because Nat is trying to reconcile the guilt from causing pain to someone she loved with the warmth that blooms in your chest at realizing how much they had cared and loved you.

"I miss her," she declares finally, and he nods in understanding. Before he can reply, she pushes on. "Want to grab some coffee?"

He grins, taking her conversation shift in stride. "What's that in that your hands?" he quips, nodding to her mug.

"An empty mug," she answers easily. "But maybe you're right. I could go for some coffee gelato though."

He chuckles. "Yeah, alright. Let's swing by Tony's and see if he want to join us."

"It's Tony," she says, tilting her head and rolling her eyes, "he always wants gelato."

we veered off of canon (obviously, haha) for this one, but one I firmly believe in because you cannot convince me Natasha survived everything she did over the course of her life without having been enhanced in some way.

as always, love to see what you all think. comments welcomed.

more to come.

(also p.s. for those interested, I posted a follow-up to my Phone Calls one-shot today as well...check it out if it's your jam)