Every time Natasha sees Steve over the next few days, he's either jogging around the complex or soaked with sweat from having just jogged around the complex. It's not an insignificant amount of times, either- after three times the day after the wedding, Nat starts to keep an informal tally in her head. She gets to eleven sightings of Steve jogging by dinner on Wednesday.
The two of them are the only ones present for dinner; most of the others who had stayed over for the wedding have done their part in helping drive Tony's various cars back to his garage facility and headed back to their homes. If it weren't for the advanced tech that they all use to keep in touch, Natasha might feel like it's a waste to keep the complex occupied at all. As it is, it weighs on her a little bit, the fact that she and Steve are the only tenants until some of the support staff come back from their vacations.
"Running off some aggression, there, Rogers?" Nat asks him, when he sits down with his food.
Steve scratches his neck, looking bashful. "Yeah, a little. My body's been moving faster than my mind. Trying to wear it out, I guess."
"Running seems like the least fun way to do that, if you ask me," she remarks, offering him a challenging smile.
"Well! Not sure I wanted to move faster than you are, either, truth be told," he says after looking at her speculatively for a while.
"Steve, we're alone here. The point was to be comforting, to blow off steam, to make the shitty parts of existence better, wasn't it?" Privately, Natasha's flooded with unexpected affirmation. If she's reading him right, Steve's basically telling her that he wants her, but thinks he doesn't have the right to come right out and ask. There's no way she would have ever predicted that, but she's not complaining.
"Those are very good points," Steve says carefully.
"So knock on my door sometimes, god," she teases. "It's going to be a slow few weeks, I could go make you an engraved invitation, if that would make things easier." Nat looks down at her plate after catching the keen interest in his eyes. She doesn't want him to be able to correctly recognize the desperate adoration that's probably blazing in hers.
"Thank you, I will," he tells her. His four words are resonant, grateful, and obviously sexually charged. Natasha's drinking when he says it, and her sip of fruit juice goes down the wrong way.
"Turn around, this is not sexy!" she flaps her hands at him as she chokes the words out. Natasha alternately coughs and wipes her eyes, adding, "And don't you dare take it back or I'll never forgive you!"
"That's exactly what I'm worried about," he mutters, but he turns his head and uses his hand to block his view of her while she's in the last throes of persuading her body she's not actually in danger of drowning.
Nat doesn't know whether she wants to address that quietly expressed concern of his now or once she can immediately follow up with something more physically resonant. She decides to choose the latter option; Steve has every right to worry that embarking on a career (whether long or short) of sexual exploits together might cause some trouble between them. Since her very real former career had involved no small number of encounters between herself and people who had trusted her only to find that she was there to do them harm, she recognizes the validity of that worry. The best way to reassure him is to be consistently generous and willing, and she's happy to be both.
Both of them fall silent. Natasha's fork feels wooden in her hand, the food bland and unnecessary. Part of the problem is that she'd been building up her anticipation about time with Steve, intimate time with Steve, while at the same time working on her defenses to prevent him recognizing her feelings. Nat's been basically feeding herself a diet of calming, bland mental food, and now that dietary restriction has been lifted.
"Not hungry?" he asks her, lifting his eyebrows. It had been his turn to cook.
"Not for- not really," she amends, but the damage has been done.
Steve sets his fork down and looks at her, really looks. Natasha's suddenly aware that she's been dressing and grooming herself at the facility like it's a reconnaissance mission, with comfortable clothes, minimal makeup. Not like she is on display, not like she has someone to impress. Sure, her outfits are tight-fitting and attractive, and sure, she knows how to make a lot out of a small amount of cosmetics, but it hasn't been in service of anything. Still, Steve's gaze is approving, just on the edge of captivated. For his part, he's been sweaty and exhausted nearly every time she's seen him lately, and that's just been fuel for a mental image she has genuine, participatory memories she can flesh it out with.
With an expression that's determined but otherwise neutral, Steve stands up and gathers his half-empty plate. He walks around the table and reaches out a hand. Bemused, Natasha hands him her own mostly full plate and watches him walk them into the kitchen. She hears Steve scrape the remaining food into the disposal, running the water to help grind it down and presumably rinse the plates off. The sound of the dishwasher door opening is recognizable.
She has no idea what he's planning to do, and given her particular skill set, that fact is equal parts worrisome and novel.
Steve walks back into the dining room, coming straight over to the opposite end of the table, the one that's closer to the exit. He leans over, resting one palm flat on the table's surface, looking her straight in the eyes. He's focused, with the same demeanor he uses when he's about to lead them all into battle.
Then he stretches his fisted other hand out and knocks on the table, with the same cadence he always uses to request entry.
"Yes," she says, her breath caught in her throat for a second, more pleasant time that day.
"Where?" he asks. It's- it's still his command voice, and she never ever would have guessed he'd do this, blur the lines like this, and it's the worst and best idea ever.
"My room," Natasha says firmly. She doesn't want to make him regret his own space, doesn't want to think about the things she might leave behind, the ways she could alter the way he sees the room. Not when he's been honest about being in love with someone else. Nat might be jealous of that attachment (though it does seem like Steve thinks it's fairly hopeless), but she doesn't want to make his life harder. "I'd offer to race you but all that practice you've had this week might give you an edge," she jokes as she stands up.
Steve walks behind her on the way there. Natasha doesn't let herself examine that, empties her mind of everything but the diamond core of fucking devotion she'd pounded down out of mental sight over the years. By the time that gem had solidified, it had been too late to stop the crystallization process, too late to understand that her minimization of her feelings had simply reduced them into a precious jewel too important, too intrinsic to her personality to throw away.
And now she is going to set it into a piece of jewelry to bind around her heart. She's not even mad. He belongs there, now, inside and out.
Natasha gets to her door, punches in the code, and pushes the door open. She stands to the side so Steve can walk in, and he fills up the room in more ways than one. The most obvious way is his impatience, something she'd never seen manifested in him. Because it's impatience to touch her, to enjoy her, to please her, it's maybe the highest compliment anyone has ever, ever offered. He is barely in the room for three seconds before he pushes the door closed with a heavy hand at the same time that he hooks the other at her hip to drag her over and press her up against it.
"You and your altruistic offer to teach me how to fight dirty, how is that going, do you think?" he asks, seconds before he slides that hand from her hip down to grip her ass. It's a bruising grip, he's a fucking supersoldier, and he knows she can take it because he's fought alongside her for so many years. Natasha just melts against him, molds herself to him, both arms up around his neck. If he's going to use all of his talents right now, then by god, so is she. Steve grinds his hips against hers, adjusts for the height difference by practically propelling her up the door in a combination of movements.
If this were a job, years ago, she'd keep one foot in a position of leverage, with an eye toward self defense. Not today. Steve's the one with leverage, and her self-defense is he has no idea that she's in love with him.
She trusted him to throw her up into the fray at just the right moment to catch a Chitauri speeder. She trusts him to catch her now, as she grabs his shoulders so she can wrap both legs around him.
"After all the crap we went through together after the Accords, I think I've built up a bit of a tolerance. Might have to delve into filthy to get anywhere," she says, right into his ear. His hips rock even closer at that.
"I'm your willing pupil," he promises, and finds her lips.
Where their encounter after the wedding had been desperate, almost reverent, this feels seedy and triumphant. The leash is off, there's no restrictions, nothing to stop him from bracing her against the door and working her shirt open, sliding her bra up so her breasts bulge underneath it, her nipples even more sensitive as a result. Steve's first touch against them makes her jerk in surprise at just how intense it feels, making him pause in the act of scraping his teeth against her neck. He lifts his head, making eye contact with her as he pinches the other nipple.
Natasha can't help it, she gasps, tightening her legs around him in a way that probably would have hurt him if he weren't an enhanced human being. Steve's eyes are dark with desire and something else, a kind of fierce interest, like he is delighted at the idea of learning her limits. He raises his eyebrow just slightly, and Nat does the same, twisting her lips in a sensual challenge. Steve's response is to crush his lips to hers just as he pinches again, with both hands this time. She likes it, but it shakes her whole body, which she's pretty sure was what he was hoping for.
The only coherent part of her brain that's left functioning starts to page through her mental list of things she's always wanted to try, starts making checkboxes on all of them.
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The experience they both have in hiding their grief at the loss of so many good people comes in handy to hide this.
A month after the wedding, Nat notices that the two of them have relaxed into a rapport that's really similar to what they'd had when they were on the run. It's like a bridge between selves. The Natasha she'd been as a Widow before Clint had rescued her had turned into the hero she'd been as an Avenger. She'd had to hide that hero under a persona, change her hair, change the way she held herself, change the way she treated her teammates. Being an Avenger again, fighting Thanos, that had felt wonderful, but it hadn't sat quite right, and that ended up being borne out when they'd lost.
Now, she's melding the two by letting her hair grow out. It's always grown slow as hell, so the blonde she'd made sure to maintain for the wedding is still all she can see for too long, afterwards. The thin line of burnished red against her scalp that finally starts to grow in feels comforting, like she can finally start to be all of herself, not just two separate pieces with Steve as the link between them.
He's her link to sanity, as well, both during the time before her six week purgatory ends and the morning she starts the process of looking for Clint.
It only takes an hour to find where he'd been hiding for the past two months.
The ease with which she finds the man named Bart Cooper at a Sokovian address is embarrassing. So embarrassing that she spends a little more time tracking down his landlord, instead of doing some sneaky shit to conceal that she's looking for him at all. Natasha has a sinking feeling that this was the whole point, and that's confirmed when she makes it through to the landlord and discovers that Bart Cooper had moved out the day before.
Clint had made her promise not to look for him until today.
The man on the line says there is a letter left for a 'Natalie Rushman,' which he'd been instructed to send today. He confirms the address over the phone- which Natasha takes as a clear indication that Clint had always known where to find them. She hangs up and walks straight out of the building and into the woods that surround the property.
She's not numb, and it's a problem. The specter of 'Natalie Rushman' and the time she spent watching over Tony while she pretended that was her name is pretty damned accurate; she feels like she's possessed by the reckless spirit of a Palladium-infused Tony Stark, with all of his destructive tendencies. If she were to go inside right now, well. The trees and shrubs around Natasha aren't man-made, and that makes them the only structures she feels safe being around. Everything else would be at risk of bearing the brunt of her miserable, betrayed, agonized grief.
Steve finds her sometime after her stomach starts to growl.
"Bad?" he asks.
Nat smiles bitterly. "I remember thinking that nothing could be worse than watching people we fought with turn to dust in front of us. Then I went to Clint's homestead and decided that was worse, to be left out of the fight but still have to watch loved ones turn to dust. But this?" She shakes her head, speechless.
He leans up against a tree and angles his head to look at her, clear-eyed and calming. "Tell me."
"I found him. It wasn't hard. He'd stayed in the same place for two months."
Steve's brows furrow, and he shakes his head, uncomprehending.
"Oh, he's gone now. Left yesterday," she sighs, drawing in a painful breath to speak again. Her lungs ache with the effort of not screaming. "'Bart Cooper's' landlord is going to send the letter he left behind for me, addressed to this location, just in case I was worried Clint might not have known we were here this whole time." Her voice is rough, as if she's dragged these truths out of the depths of her soul where they've sunk down and anchored themselves with barbs that rip her raw when they're removed.
"If I understand you correctly, you're saying that Clint stayed in one place, had been in that place for two months straight under an obviously recognizable alias, right up until the day he told you you were allowed to start looking for him?" Steve asks quietly.
Nat looks up at the sky and is pleased to see that the clouds overhead seem burdened with fury, just like she is. It'll storm soon. "Yes."
"And you think that's a bad thing?"
"Fuck you, Steve," she says with real venom.
"Later, if you like," he says good-naturedly.
This prompts a tiny smile, despite her frustration.
"No, listen to me, Nat: what do you think would have happened if you'd have started looking sooner? You would have broken your promise, wouldn't you? You, the person he cares about most in the world, the one person he has left to count on. But you didn't." Steve pushes off from his tree and starts toward her, his hands in his pockets in an obvious attempt to placate her with the knowledge that he's not reaching out with his body, just his words. She wants to feel insulted that he's trying to manipulate her like that, but she can't muster the effort. "It's devastating to need to start from scratch, but you expected that, didn't you?" he asks.
"I don't want to feel better right now."
"Yeah, well, tough. Punish me for it later, like I said," Steve says.
Of all the things she ever thought she'd experience in her life, being in a pseudo-relationship with Steve Rogers and getting the chance to learn that he has a healthy libido with a not-insignificant masochistic streak was not one of them.
"My point is, you've given Clint more than he's given you, but that's what friends are for, isn't it? Don't we all strive to do that?"
Nat puts all of her resistance to listening to him into the word that proves she's doing it anyway. "Yes."
"Tell you what, when that letter gets here, if he asks you to wait again, don't tell me how long, this time?" Steve asks. He's sporting a smile that tells her he thinks he's being clever, but her logical thought processes are ungreased and off kilter, the gears unable to turn. Her sentimentality has rusted the robot they'd trained her to be in the Red Room.
"I don't-"
"You're the one he's telling not to look, right? Just you?"
"Steve," Natasha whispers, overcome, adoring, admonishing, grateful.
"He's my teammate too. I know it killed you not to be able to visit when he was on house arrest. I didn't tell you this at the time, but he contacted me via a secure web portal. Only three times, mind you, but-"
Nat throws herself at him. She's angry, furious that he didn't tell her this before, instead letting her wonder how that precious family of five were doing without having any way to know, but as soon as her clenched fists impact his chest, she loses all desire to hurt him.
"You're a real ass," she offers, flattening her hands out and smoothing them against any sting she might have caused.
"Osmosis," he teases.
They're not able to work out any aggression that evening because the AI Tony left behind to scan unusual activity that might denote an alien presence or evidence of 'enhanced human activity' lights up in Moscow. It seems that an unknown group had brazenly attacked the stronghold of the most feared warlord in the city and killed most of the man's bodyguards before detonating a series of charges that destabilized the whole building, completely destroying it. There hadn't been any warning of an op, no rising tensions among rivals, nothing.
Natasha spends the evening coordinating a group led by Colonel Rhodes to check things out, and by the time she's through with that, she's so exhausted she actually falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.
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Clint's letter does indeed have a time frame. It's a year. Natasha doesn't tell Steve, and Steve doesn't let her know how he plans to search for Clint, only that he'll do it in as 'Cap' a way as possible, to ensure that Barton won't think it's her.
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Right as she's focused on that deadline, a deadline she'd told Bruce about, Banner goes into seclusion to start the integration process. Nat knows it's something he really wants, something he not only thinks will work but that will make him happy.
She spends two weeks wallowing, feeling guilty and resentful. She's certain that Bruce didn't take time to say goodbye before starting it because he knew she didn't want him to do it. Natasha punishes herself, doesn't answer the door when Steve knocks, avoids him for the whole two weeks.
He doesn't stop knocking.
By week three, the knocks feel like a kiss on the cheek.
On day eighteen, she almost gets up for the knock, but instead of saying 'Good night, Natasha' as he usually does, Steve says something else.
"Listen to this, okay?"
What follows is a message. From Bruce. Telling her he was in a rush and didn't mean to neglect saying goodbye. In the message, he very carefully doesn't give a time frame, but he does encourage her to continue her outreach to the rest of their scattered members, and tell her he's so proud to be her teammate. The message is intrinsically Bruce but also has Steve's fingerprints all over it.
She doesn't open the door when it's done playing because she's a snotty, tearful mess, but she does open the door the next evening.
"Thank God," Steve says fervently, seconds before walking her straight over to the bed and giving her the impression that God isn't the only being he worships.
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The one year anniversary of the blip is marked by everyone on Earth except the people who fought Thanos. They know they'll need to spend that week surrounding that day hiding for their own protection, for the most part, and for good reason. The press is clamoring for interviews, or failing that, accountability. Politicians posture, journalists judge, and survivors share their sorrow. It turns out that, yes, everyone loves an underdog, but only if they prevail.
They'd known it was coming, but Steve had suggested everyone try to lay low in their own locations, pointing out that no hotel or vacation destination deserved the extra scrutiny they'd be bringing by staying there. This is when everyone finds out that Pepper is pregnant- Tony lives in the middle of nowhere, in the woods, and at first, it seems like a perfect location to camp out for that week. But Tony's adamant that they stay away, not just for Pepper's sanity, but his own.
"This is it, we've lost them," Natasha murmurs to Steve during the video call, out of earshot of Tony and probably all of the others. They're standing beside each other but as always the two of them are careful. Platonic is the name of their masquerade, and considering how often she chants the reminder that her lover is in love with another woman, it's not hard to keep up that facade. Tonight, though, he throws an arm over her shoulder and squeezes her tightly against him where everyone can see.
As always, it's brilliant. It means more to the two of them, sure (her more than him, she's certain, but that's her lot in life, and it's more fun than the life she could be leading), but it's also a subtle rebuke to Tony, who can see that they're unhappy and hurt, in need of that physical comfort to deal with the choice he's presented them with: letting he and Pepper go.
When they contact Brunhilde and find that New Asgard is probably not a great retreat destination either, it hurts too, but it's like a cut atop a gash.
They decide to camp out in the basement of the facility and sneak up with flashlights to swap which rooms have lights on just to fuck with the press, who are likewise camped out in the parking lot. Both of them treat it like a mission, the swapping, and in between, what else is there to do but make their misery more bearable with pleasure?
By the morning of the fifth day, there's a conspiracy theory going around that the Avengers have a secret weapon that is replicating the conditions that existed the days following the blip, down to which lights were left on at the New Avengers Facility. Because Stark's AI has records detailed enough to show which lights were on or off, Natasha programs the facility to act exactly as the rumors say for the following month.
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She and Steve never talk about feelings. In some ways this makes sense; they've been close as Avengers, been 'die for each other' fighters for years, so there's no mystery there.
They never talk about feelings, but sometimes Natasha wonders if Tony has cameras in the places they've spent quality time together, and what their behavior in those recordings look like to an outside observer. She… doesn't want to give this up, this teammates with benefits thing they have going, so she doesn't go looking for videos (besides, Tony's Tony, so he'd be more likely to snoop around if she tries to hack her way into having access), but that's damning enough, really.
It's an admission that she doesn't care if she's being obvious. Natasha's still trying to conceal how she feels, and she's obviously doing a good enough job, because Steve is absolutely the type of man who would pull back and let her down gently if he guessed.
Nat's going to ride this train as far as the track goes.
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On a cold day in December 2019, Steve comes down to the laundry room and looks uncomfortable in the reflection of the shiny metal of the dryer until she pulls out her earbuds and turns around.
"General Okoye and Colonel Rhodes think they've found something in Hong Kong," he says.
Natasha crosses her arms and leans her weight on one leg, letting the opposite hip jut out a little. Steve's gaze is locked to her face. That combined with the titles he used tell her that he has something serious on his mind, something too important to deviate from. She can respect that.
"Is this team-related, alien activity-related, or something else?" she asks, offering a nod as she speaks, trying to let him know she recognizes the signals he's putting off.
"Alien activity. They've spent the past months tracking a group out of Hong Kong that's systematically collecting every Chitauri artifact or possible one they can get their hands on. Okoye's already established herself as a possible supplier, they've worked with some technicians in Wakanda to embed trackers into the intact gun they're going to sell to the group," Steve tells her. "She and Rhodey need some… how did she put it? 'Enhanced muscle' to help bust them, when the time comes. Government's going to be informed too late to fuck it up, or so Rhodey claims. It's all very highly classified, so-" he makes a gesture near his lips that might actually be a zipper and 'key throwing away' motion, which is too precious for words.
She wants so badly to tease him for tossing in the profanity, but the point is to normalize it, so Nat holds back.
"You'll be there for a while, you're saying. Without being able to stay in contact," she says. It's a question masked as a statement of understanding. Somewhere deep down, a specific flavor of dread starts to stir.
Steve nods apologetically. "Yeah, looks that way. I think we've got some processes in place if things go catastrophically wrong, but then, that'll probably make the news, at that point," he tells her, like that's comforting.
"When?" Nat asks. The steel trusses that form her resolve during a mission start to construct themselves around her limbs to make sure she remains standing. They're not that necessary, really. It's Steve, acting as support to two very capable and inventive fighters, one of whom has one of Tony's suits.
Natasha gasps and spins around, making sure that she starts the dryer, and then pushes past Steve to head toward the special equipment room.
"Nat?"
She doesn't stop until she gets to the place Tony had left the support suits. Clint's is there, and fuck, there's mud obscuring the glow a little. She'd been so wrecked when she'd taken it back from him she hadn't noticed, not even when she'd put it up in its spot. With trembling hands -which is really unconscionable, how did she ever become this soft, this willing to show weakness- Natasha pulls down the suit-reactor that Steve had used to fly to Clint's house.
"Take this. Or else."
His eyebrows shoot up. "Or else?"
"Or else I'll take mine and follow your ass to Hong Kong, set up a reconnaissance mission of my own to keep you three alive. Take one of Tony's suits or take me," she says.
"What if I'd rather take you?" Steve murmurs.
"You can't. Boot up that sense of duty, soldier, we've both gone soft."
She has to bite her lip on the inside to keep from smiling. Like this chivalrous goofball would ever show up in Hong Kong of all places with a red-haired white woman whose presence could likely gum up a mission with this much background work already completed!
"Yes, ma'am," he tells her, and salutes.
"Seriously though, when?" Nat pushes. She's got a second load of laundry to do, mostly towels, and they can wait, if he needs the machine.
"That's the thing, Rhodes said yesterday it would be sometime this week, but it turns out he's managed to get me a flight out of the city in two and a half hours," Steve says, wincing.
It takes just under two hours to drive into New York City.
"You knew about this for a while?"
"I did. We were thinking it would be after Christmas." His voice is careful and kind, and she knows him. He didn't know how to tell her. They don't have time to hash this out right now.
"Well you better go pack! Do you need help?" she tells him, making a shooing motion, the arc reactor suit in one hand. "That means you're taking this."
Natasha walks up and presses the device to his chest, thumbing the switch that affixes it. Steve rests his hand on hers, on top of the glowing reactor, his thumb sliding a caress that speaks volumes of regret and apology. They stand there looking at each other for a few seconds until she tugs her hand free.
They're not in a goodbye kiss kind of relationship.
"Back to the towels then," she says, laughing. It's a forced laugh, and she scrunches up her face at how fake it sounds, turning to make her way back out of the armory.
"Natasha-" Steve calls out, sounding breathless. Nat turns around, her heart in her throat. "The check-ins. Because the three of us won't be able to participate, you're going to have to come up with a story, just in case." Steve looks relieved to have remembered something so vital to the secrecy of their mission. It wasn't emotion that had colored his voice, and it hadn't been about the goodbye at all.
She tells herself she's not disappointed. There's nothing to be disappointed about anyway.
"With Tony incommunicado, it'll be more realistic that the tech is offline and I'm taking a while to fix it," Nat promises him. "Go on. Take care of each other."
"Take care of yourself," Steve admonishes.
"Always."
