Special thanks to Grimnar, rashene, Ana, Christine-Danielle and LoneWolfOneill for reviewing. Also, thank you to all the follows and likes! - R :)
I don't have Marvel rights.
"We're not going to the subway," said the Captain as they pulled over for gas once again. Natasha nodded in agreement. "They'll be there ready for you. We're not going in an ambush again." The big man was devouring a burger.
"We have to move somewhere, though. Fury's probably already looking."
"Do you think he knows it?"
"Yeah, but I don't think he's on their side. He's probably there to oversee everything that happens to sabotage whatever it is the agency's trying to do." She sighed, drinking from her bottle as she leans on the motorcycle. "He gave me this," she said, pulling out a tablet. It was thinner than the phones he's seen. "He's probably going to get us into another safe house soon."
"We're gonna need to move," he said, taking the nozzle out of the bike.
"Alright, give me a second," she said, tossing all the wrappers of her finished food. Before Steve hopped on the bike, she checked every single part of it, making sure that there was nothing on there that could tail them. "Shit," she said that the soldier faintly heard.
"What is it?" He went around to where she was. She turned and pulled out something tiny. It was a small bulb, probably the height of a quarter if it was flat. It emitted light and he saw that she had pulled it from something attached to the bike as the wires connected to it sparked, clearly broken.
"We have to go," she said quickly, as they both put their helmets on. Then shots fired from all directions.
Steve hopped on the bike to get away from the station, almost turning them upside down as he revved the bike too quickly, making them rely on the back wheel. "Focus on the road," she said calmly. Steve felt a string wrap around him. The spy was wrapping her grappling hook around his stomach, just below where his side wound was. He felt her turn and now their backs were on each other. She wrapped herself with the grappling hook, too, then tied both its ends to her belt so that she was stable as Steve drove. Shots were being fired, and he saw from his side mirrors that there were two bikes on both his flanks, inching closer and closer. He revs to make the bike reach its max. There was a helicopter trailing them, too. The soldier started driving in a zig-zag pattern as people from the chopper fired. They were in the middle of nowhere, putting the two rogue agents at ease knowing that no one's going to get hurt.
Shots were firing, hitting almost all of the bike and none of the people on it. "Natasha I'm gonna need you to take out that chopper, leave the bikes up to me." He suddenly slows the bike, allowing the other motorcycles to abruptly catch his pace. Without turning his head, only looking at the side mirrors, he activated his left shield and punched the cyclist before he could engage his gun. The shield ended up piercing through his side, eventually causing him to fall off the bike. At almost the same time, he kicked the bike of the guy on the right. He was able to recover. He fired shots but the soldier grabbed his wrists to the divert the bullets past him. Twisting his arm, he heard a groan come out from the hostile. The soldier still hadn't turned his head and watched his movements through the side mirror in order for him to continue driving straight. He felt Natasha firing at the chopper. The soldier almost fully braked as he held onto the wrist of his perpetrator, causing the bike he was using to come out from under him. Steve sped the bike up again, dragging the man through the ground and eventually stepped on his face, leaving him unconscious. He began driving in a zig zag pattern again as the chopper kept firing, the spy was able to stall by wounding one of them.
Natasha sees two heads out of both sides of the chopper, the hostiles carrying machine guns. She almost had one on lock, but Steve's sudden changes in direction caused her to miss. "I'm going up there," she said. She expected him to refute and when he tried, she spoke over him. "Vantage point is terrible down here," she said. He sighed. "You keep going, you'll find me jumping out when I'm done with these assholes," she said, getting a small laugh out of the soldier. He felt the string around him unravel and their back-to-back connection severed. The woman used that same grappling hook to fire it up at the helicopter. She swiftly pulled her legs up to jump from the bike and use the momentum to land on one of the chopper's landing bars. She then threw one of her small discs to the hostile on the left side, electrocuting him. She took her helmet off and tossed it to his face so that he would fall over into the helicopter. It allowed for her to hang without getting shot at. Swinging, she jumped into the helicopter like an acrobat. The guy from the other side was waiting for her, landing a punch on the left side of her face. "Ouch," she said, out of humor, not pain. She snatched one of her batons and hit him in the knee, making him fall and her knee jerked up to his face and her elbow hitting his back simultaneously.
Someone else came from the cockpit. He missed a shot when the woman ducked, punching him three times in the stomach to no avail. A wolf spider, she thought. He landed a hook to her side, jostling her as the helicopter jostled with them. She ended up catching the side of the door, now dangling with one arm. With momentum, before he could gather his gun, she pushed herself back in with her feet first, kicking him in the chest and causing the gun to fly out of the chopper. She took her gun to shoot him, but he averted it by holding her wrist. He was about to knife her when she spun around in his hold and wrapped her knees around his neck. He fell and in a swift motion, her wrist made it to his neck and shocked him at the cuffs' max. It would kill a normal person, but all she knows was that he was unconscious. Then there was a blow to her head and she saw that the chopper was on autopilot. She ducked, pulled her legs out and spun through his feet, tripping him. Two shots made it through the man, one on the chest and one to the head for assurance measures. Gotta make sure he's dead dead. And then she caught a glimpse of what he looked like. He was a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. They've sparred a few times, but never really talked. Natasha shook her head, expressionless. What a waste. She shot the transmission and the dashboard to kill the chopper. The whole thing started to fall. She grabbed her bike helmet and took the device that she created in it, the comm, and put it in her ear.
"Rogers I'm gonna need you to catch me," she said.
"On it," she heard over the intercom. Almost at the exact moment that the helicopter hit the ground, she jumped out of the door and landed on top of the soldier, literally right on his arms. He winced, probably from the shoulder injury.
"Sorry," she apologized, moving around him like a spider and taking her seat in the back.
"We're off the grid now," said Natasha, lifting the blinds to see through the window. The soldier nodded, wincing as he took his jacket off, along with everything else on him that weren't his shirt or pants.
"Whose house?" He asked.
"Fury's," the woman said, doing the same and undressing herself of all her weapons. "He doesn't come here often. And if he wanted to find me he knows I'll be here."
"You trust him?" He asks, wiping his face off from all the dirt.
"This is the only place people other than him wouldn't expect us to be," said Natasha. "And, yes. There's too much that Fury has built on good faith. To just jeopardize everything for the sake of trying to kill me?" She scoffed. "He would've killed me, himself. He's old, but he'll still take me."
Steve laughed. "Can he?"
She shrugged. "I don't know. Never tried."
There was a moment of silence. He set all of his weapons on the couch and organized Natasha's gauntlets also. She walked outside for a short minute, alarming the soldier. Natasha came back with two apples in her hands and the zinc spray she packed in the back of the bike. She tossed the apple and the can to him, earning a confused look from the soldier. "There's an apple tree outside," she said with a small laugh. The spy sat next to him, still on edge from the last incident but allowing herself to relax a little. The other remained alert.
"Why does Red Room want you?" He finally mustered up the courage to ask. For the world's bravest man, there still lingers the lack of ability to talk to women.
"Because I'm from there," she said. That was something he already put together. Clint told him about her time with the KGB and with the amount of times he's heard "Red Room" and her name in a sentence, it wasn't a wasted assumption.
"Yeah, but," he swallowed large amounts of apple. "Why were you there?"
She was silent, like she didn't want to talk about it. He didn't push it, the soldier sensing a lot of resistance. She ended up giving him a little bit, though.
"I became their greatest prodigy at just eleven," she said, looking down at her food in shame of her past self. "I was a great ballerina, too, by the way." Natasha laughed humorlessly, trying to lighten the conversation. "But...yeah. How do you make a deadly assassin at fifteen? Train her at five. Raise her to be a psychopath. Take away her ability to empathize and desensitize her from weakness and violence and pain—her own pain and the pain of others."
He glanced at her, the woman still looking down to avoid eye contact. "That doesn't apply to you anymore, though," he reassured. She still didn't answer his question. He's sure that she probably doesn't know why they were after her. He also sensed that she didn't really care why.
"Does it?"
"I've known you for two weeks," he said, gulping down the last piece of apple. "And the things you've done for others in the past two days alone, make up for the past decades you've lived."
"I don't think it works like that," she said, shifting in her seat.
"You're right," he said. "It doesn't. I don't think there's an equation. It's not "doing one good thing erases one bad thing"." He looked at her with sincerity. Steve knows that she doesn't believe it but he felt a sense of urgency to try. "It's the things that you change about yourself. If you know that that's not who you are anymore, you deserve some forgiveness from yourself, even if you don't get it from others."
She nodded. He knows that he didn't get through to her and that she was placating him, just so that the conversation won't become too argumentative. "People are always harder on their own selves. It's human nature."
"I've defied the laws of human nature already," he chuckled, talking about his going from scrawny boy to muscled giant. From his asthmatic lungs to being able to run thirteen miles in thirty minutes. From aging to suspending against time. "And you can't really call us normal."
She knew he was right. The Black Widow has greater ability to withstand torture. Her acrobatic skills and strength were unparalleled. Natasha was in the top 1% of the greatest fighters in the world. Both of them shouldn't really be in conversation of normal people or the perceived notion of human nature. Her psychological capacity to see violence, or to feel it, is not with the customs of human nature. And there was more about her and her specialness that she didn't let Steve know. But, like all other people, there's only so much about her ability to compartmentalize. The biggest part of her past is the thing that she uses to define her. No amount of emotional restraint or rational perspective can change her, even if those things came from her own brain. She was too far gone, drowning in her guilt to ever rise above it.
So instead of responding, she let the silence take over. She felt Steve looking at her, hoping that she continue the conversation or hoping that it stopped because he succeeded in changing her mind. He wanted to get to know her and she felt it, but like all other people she's put herself with, the idea of professional relationships took over. She can't let him know more than he already does. Though she trusts him, she knows that he can compromise her. She didn't really know in what way, but in some way, he could. The soldier was good at that.
They let a week pass. There wasn't anything too alarming in that week that forced them to leave. They were in the middle of nowhere and the next house was thirty miles south. The pair decided to recuperate. Steve's wounds were healed, Natasha's were almost there. He was very skeptical of that, and she knew that she couldn't really hide it. Well, she could if she just acted it out, but she didn't feel particularly fond of having to wince and groan and act like she was in pain if she didn't need to. Natasha was alright if the man assumed things about her, she just knows that she'll never disclose them with him even if he asked. She just decided to leave him in the dark and in his own assumptions. It may or may not ruin his trust with her, but at this point, she didn't really care. They only had each other now. And maybe Clint and Fury. But in the literal now, in the physical sense, they only had each other, so it didn't do him good to not trust the one person who got him out of death.
"I don't know how long I can last eating canned food," she said, pouring the can's contents in a bowl and putting it in a microwave.
He laughed. "One time," he started, "my team and I were forced to camp in Kaliningrad. We had just finished a mission on the Schnellzug." The spy raised a brow as she put a spoonful of nasty soup in her mouth. Her back was leaning against the counter as she faced the soldier who sat on the other side of the island. "It's this train that HYDRA made to get around. We destroyed it but not until after we figured out where it led to. It brought us all the way to the Eastern Front and we were met with an ambush." She noticed his eyes gloss over at the memory. Natasha wasn't really aware of the fact that it was only like remembering something that happened to him last month. His perception of time was different considering that he spent more than half of his life in suspension. His memories were very fresh despite them being seventy years old to the people of now. "My best friend, uhm," he tried to keep it together. "He had died on the train, so there were only six of us left. And in the end there were four of us, but we had enough MREs, so we ate them every day for three months, freezing up at Kaliningrad before we were able to hop back over the Eastern Front and go home. These canned food taste even worse than them," he said, making a disgusted face to lighten the mood. It got a small laugh out of the spy.
"Was that where you learned Russian?"
He shook his head, no. "I had already known it then. I was stationed at Stalingrad for six months, a year before all of that happened." Natasha knew that now that he brought it up. She saw that in his museum.
"Have you been to The Smithsonian?"
"Bucky said he brought a date there once," he said somberly. "But I never got that chance to."
"You have an exhibit there," she said as he smiled. It was lacking the sort of pride she expected from any other person. He was just…happy? It reminded Steve more of Peggy and Howard than anything else. They really left a mark on the world, something he knew they were already capable of. The magnitude of their achievements were expected, he just didn't know that a majority of their projects were around him.
"I know that Stark Industries paid for it," he said. "Howie was a good man." The spy smiled at that, liking his way of talking about historical characters as people part of his life. It's like referring to Thomas Jefferson as Tommy or Martin Luther King Jr. as Marty. Well, to him they weren't historical figures, they were family.
A week passed by and it was seven days of a learning curve for Steve. Natasha spent the time teaching him everything new in the century. They lounged in the couch, put their feet up on the coffee table and talked about celebrities, computers, and new movies. The topics ranged from Star Trek and comics.
"I owned a few editions of Superman comics," he said, surprising the spy.
"Don't tell anyone I told you this but Agent Coulson has a crap ton of Captain America comics," she said in a hushed tone.
The man chuckled remembering back to his old days of performing. He told her about how he had to tour the nation trying to sell war bonds as scientists tried to reverse-engineer the serum. "It worked, I guess," he said with a sigh, pertaining to the new Wolf Spiders.
"Not nearly in its perfection with you," she said. He took that as a compliment even though it wasn't really about him and more about Dr. Erskine's work. The compliment just accompanied him.
"He didn't want to fall into the wrong hands," Steve started.
"And that's why he died for it," a new voice echoed the room, causing the spy to grab one of her electric discs from the table and Steve taking a Glock. "Relax, it's just me," he said, as Nick Fury walked into the room.