“Someone shot Captain America!”
The yells and screams were all that she could hear as she ran out of the courthouse from the stand that she had been occupying just for fighting for what was right. Steve was to be brought in after her. No one expected this to happen. She pushed her way through masses of people to look down at Steve’s bleeding body, lifeless on the courthouse steps.
“Steve . . .” Natasha barely breathed, kneeling down next to him and picking his head up, cradling it in her lap, brushing the hair out of his face, a single trail of blood dripping from his mouth. His whole body was rigged and pale, his hand cupping his side where blood spilled through his fingers. “Steve, come on. They’re expecting you. You have to go in there . . . Make Tony look like the idiot he is . . .”
He did not move. He could not move. People flooded around them, everyone straining to see what had happened, mothers covering their children’s eyes and pulling them away from the silent madness. Emergency response personnel worked a haphazard crowd control. Someone came up to Natasha and put his hand over hers. She immediately looked up at him, eyes wide, but somewhat clouded over with confusion and hatred, a feeling she had not felt in a while. Gently, they pulled him from her as she started to really grasp what had happened. Once she felt that he was no longer in her arms, she looked around, yelling, “No! Wait!”
“Natasha!”
She looked around, hearing her name.
“Natasha, wake up!”
Her eyes flew open and she sat up immediately, grabbing the wrist of the person atop of her and flipping him, pinning his wrist above his head. “Steve?” Underneath her, lay the tired super soldier with his wrist above his head.
“Natasha?”
Shaking, she let go of his wrist and rolled off of him, almost falling off of the bed, but at the last second, she caught herself, gripping onto the bed, stifling any noise that may escape from her mouth. She felt his hand on her shoulder and stiffened at his touch. Closing her eyes, she felt him easily pick her up and set her in his lap. His arms wrapped around her small figure as he leaned back onto the headboard, burying his face in her mess of red curls which were even more a mess because of the amount of tossing that she had been doing prior to Steve waking her.
“Shhhh . . . It’s okay, Nat, it was just a dream.” Steve had not seen Natasha this tense in a while, but the dreams were becoming more frequent, and neither of them were sleeping that much. For some reason, Steve could not sleep. He had become pale and tired. Natasha had started to notice. That is when the dreams started. She did not know why, but something had happened when the dreams started. Steve seemed different. “It was just a dream. I’m here.”
The assassin sat there in silence and focused on Steve—his sound, his grip, his smell. His smell. Her eyes opened and she realized she could not smell him. “Steve?”
There was a loud ringing noise and she sat up, looking around, the sheets cold. She looked over at her clock.
5:30 a.m.
Her alarm had woken her up.
Her eyes scanned the room and stopped on Steve’s shield propped up on a triangularly folded American Flag, set on a chair. She looked down at her lap as a single tear slipped out from the corner of her eye.
He was gone, and he was not coming back.