Except You
Steve watched Natasha leave the room, following out the strange new character in their lives. He didn’t know how he felt about Nadia yet. He knew she was a part of Natasha’s old life-- her life in Russia, with the KGB, with Bucky. He wondered if Bucky would recognize Nadia. They must have met. He wondered if they had been friends.
It was hard to think about Natasha back then, to put it all in perspective. He was twenty-two when he first enlisted, when he first saw combat, when he was first given the serum. Natasha was twelve. She was eighteen when she met Bucky, who was-- technically-- eighty-four. Physically, probably twenty-seven or so, but who was to say how often they brought him out, how much he aged. Who was to say if any of them even aged. Steve certainly hadn’t noticed it-- not from him, not from Natasha.
And while they were together, he was buried in the ice, his body in a deep hibernation, just trying to stay functional enough to keep him alive.
It was weird.
He laughed to himself. ‘Weird’ was one way to describe it.
His mind kept drifting over to Natasha, to the conversation she must have been having with Nadia. Would she try to convince her to take up the assassin's life again? Would she have a location for Natasha’s sister? Could they even trust her?
He could picture it then, the exact path that would lead her away from him once more. A secret location, a successful mission, a new life rescuing all the girls she had left behind. He couldn’t fault her for it, he knew he would do the same thing if he was in her shoes. She wanted her family, her sister, that perfect life that she had never gotten.
All he wanted was her.
Steve pushed himself out of bed, knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep without her. He wandered down the hall, down a few flights of stairs, to Tony’s personal lab. Old iterations of the Iron Man suit were displayed in large cases against the wall, a large window outlining the New York skyline across the room. It was clearly a very nice lab-- even Steve could say that-- and had once been very well organized.
Now, however, it was a wreck.
Tony sat at his desk, head bent over a rudimentary circuit board that he was soldering. He squinted at it, took a long pull from the drink next to him, and then threw the board over his shoulder. His head fell down to his hands.
“Tony?” Steve called. Tony looked up, surprised to see the soldier in his door frame.
“What are you doing here, Uncle Sam? Isn’t it past your bedtime?” His sarcastic comment fell short, a lazy attempt at distracting Steve from the state of things.
Steve took in Tony’s messed hair and bloodshot eyes, the mess of papers around his desk, the various robotic limbs that seemed to frame him in the room. Reasonably, Steve knew it was because Tony had tossed them away while sitting at this desk, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had taken his anger out on one of his many robots.
“I thought you were working in the lab with the others?”
“They kicked me out,” Stark said, shaking his head. “Ms. Neil Degrasse and the Jolly Green Giant pretty much have me cornered on astrophysics and radiation monitoring. I wasn’t adding anything.”
“Is that the only reason?” Steve asked, disbelieving. Tony had a habit of pissing people off when he was stressed. They had seen it on the helicarrier before New York. It was not the environment they wanted to put Bruce in.
“That’s the reason they gave me.”
“So you came downstairs?”
Tony looked at Steve, truly looked at him, for the first time since he had come into his lab. Steve looked back, staring down the man in front of him, the one who had for so much of their time together left him angry and frustrated, and for the first time saw him for who he truly was.
A regular guy, with the world on his shoulders.
“You know it’s not going to end with Strucker, right?” Tony asked. His voice was low, serious, missing the usual tease that he hid behind.
Steve nodded, gritting his teeth. “I know.”
Tony took another sip of his drink. He looked older than his years, strung out. So different from the grinning philanthropist from earlier that night. Steve had never really appreciated just how much Tony kept hidden. It was one of the many reasons they fought so often.
Two men bound by the same responsibility, with fundamentally opposing ideas on how to uphold it.
“When Coulson came to collect me three years ago I didn’t know what I was signing onto.”
Steve laughed, but it was flat. “I don’t think any of us did.”
“You know Pepper wants to get married?” he asked, pursing his lips. Steve looked shocked, shook his head. “And I want to marry her. Was thinking about asking her tonight--,” he popped a small velvet box out of his pocket and tossed it to Steve. Inside was a small note, an IOU, so Pepper could pick the ring out herself. “But the timing has never quite been right. I figured now we were probably in a good enough place, but it never ends.”
Steve had never seen Tony like this. Defeated. He was usually ready with an insane plan, a quip, an ironclad opinion on whatever situation they were in. But now he looked-- he looked like he was ready to give up.
“We just have to take it one day at a time, Tony,” Steve said, but even he wasn’t quite sure he believed it. “Learn to live with this new version of normal.”
“I wish it didn’t have to be us. I wish there was someone else who could protect the world from it all.”
Steve swallowed. “Yeah, me too. But there isn’t, not yet.”
Tony stared at his desk, tracing a word over and over again with his pointer finger. He was drunk, clearly so. Steve prayed, for the sake of his dignity, that he didn’t remember this conversation the next morning. “Not yet.”
Steve was uncomfortable with their situation, so unused to seeing this side of Tony. He was a man typically guided by anxiety, fueled by a nervous energy that urged him along in life and left everyone in his path feeling like they were being swept along in a storm. Now, it seemed like that same stress had him strapped to his desk, so overcome by it that he couldn’t even work.
“We’ll do it, Tony. Like we always do. Together.”
Tony nodded, still not meeting his eyes. “We have to. We don’t have a choice.”
Steve left the lab shortly after that, Tony face down on his desk, snoring deeply, and replayed their conversation in his mind. He was right, they didn’t have any other choice. The world that they lived in, the one that they had fought so hard to save, it was in danger again. They had no other options, no one else to go to.
He didn’t have a choice anymore, couldn’t spend anymore time in this weird limbo, this unnerving purgatory, where he got to have Natasha but was still kept at arm’s length, where he got to run missions with Sam that had no consequences other than driving him further and further into madness. He had to shape up, to be the Captain again.
The thought utterly terrified Steve.
Natasha got back to their room only a few minutes after he did. Her cheeks were stained with tears, her face stricken in the soft glow of the light out their window. Snow was falling over New York City, not the thick kind they had gotten in Ohio, but the small, harsh flakes that whipped into your skin and accompanied the kind of cold that people used to die from. The moon was hidden behind the clouds, but their room was alight with the city buzz, just enough that he could clearly make out where her hands had rubbed her eyes just moments before walking in.
“Hi,” she said. She took a seat on the bed, a few feet away from him. He wanted to reach out and hold her right then and there, to pull her into his arms, but he didn’t. They needed to talk, seriously talk, and he didn’t trust himself to be real with her if she was lying on his chest.
“Hi,” he replied. “How was your talk with Nadia?”
She smiled placatingly, in a way that enraged him. Now that he had seen the real her, her true smile, he never wanted the fake one directed at him again. “She basically told me to get a grip.”
Steve raised an eyebrow. “And you took that?”
Natasha swallowed, staring at where her hands were coiled in her lap. When she looked up at him, her eyes were guarded behind that coy look she had given him when they first met. “She told me the world needs me-- us-- and that Yelena will manage. She said the time ‘wasn’t right.’”
“And you’re going to listen?” He couldn’t tell what he wanted the answer to be.
“I don’t think I have another option. Strucker isn’t going to stop, not unless we stop him, and after that…”
“It’s not going to end with him,” he said. She pursed her lips, nodded. She looked so unnatural, he was met with the same unease he had when he saw Tony just moments earlier. Her face was red where it shouldn’t have been, pale where there should have been color.
“So we don’t have another option.”
“I’m scared, Steve,” she whispered, like it was time for confession and she was a devout. “I don’t-- I don’t want everything to change. I was just starting to make progress looking for Yelena, towards finding my family. I don’t--,”
“You have a family here, Nat,” he said. It came out harsher than he meant it to and he nodded his head slightly. “Me, Clint. Maybe even the others. And we’re all terrified too. But we’ll be here, through it all.”
She pursed her lips in a way that told him she was fighting back tears, still not looking at him. “I just didn’t think I would get pulled back into it all so soon. I didn’t think it would be over so-- so quickly.”
“Who says it’s over?”
‘I’m not done with you yet.’
She huffed out a humorless laugh, which quickly devolved into what might have been a sob. “Just about everyone I’ve spoken to tonight.”
He hated seeing her like this, wanted to reassure her that everything would be okay, even if it wasn’t. Her fear made him strong, brought out the side of himself that wanted to protect her, to make everything alright. Even though he didn’t really believe it, he said, “This isn’t the end, Romanoff. It’s just-- it’s just a pause. We’ll find them-- Yelena, Bucky. They’re self sufficient. When they’re ready for us to find them, we will.”
“You sound like Nadia,” she said. Her accent poked through when she said her name, the same way it did when she spoke of her sister. “I just wish it wasn’t on us. I wish it wasn’t our responsibility.”
“And you sound like Stark,” he replied. He reached out and took her hand for a moment, offering her a reassuring squeeze. “I know we didn’t sign up for this life, but we’ll get through it.”
“Together,” she added. “Right?”
His eyes burned. “Of course. Together.”
“I’m scared that it will change things,” she said. “Between us. Everything I wanted to fix, all my mistakes, everything with James-- it’s far from over.”
“I think I can live with that,” he said. Finally, the subtext of their conversation was becoming overt. He no longer had to dance around what her decision really meant. “You’re trapped right now, Natasha. Between your old life and your new one. But your new one needs you more.”
A look of surprise crossed her face at his words, followed by a few more emotions that he couldn’t quite place. “Nadia said the exact same thing.”
“I’m starting to like her,” he said. She laughed, and he could see she was starting to cheer up.
“I’m just so afraid that I’ll ruin things,” she whispered. Her fingers drummed against his palm nervously. “Or I’ll mess something up and end up losing you.”
“If it’s too much for you,” he began, even though he could feel his heart being ripped out as he said it, “I can just be your friend. I’ll always be here for you, Natasha. In whatever capacity you need me to be.”
The offer hung in the air like an escape hatch, a small space, a final out, that Natasha could slip through if she was still unsure. For a moment, neither said anything, just stared at each other. He waited for her to answer, physically restraining himself from tacking on any caveats, from back tracking on anything he had just told her.
Finally, she spoke. “Do you remember what I told you at Sam’s house? After New Jersey?”
The conversation-- and all that had happened after-- were forever burned into his head. “You told me you weren’t sure of anything anymore.”
She nodded, her teary eyes meeting his. “I was telling the truth. Even now, everything is still so confusing, but-- but I’m sure about you. I want this, Steve. I want you. Not as a friend, not ever again.”
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, squeezing her hand once more.
She leaned forward and kissed him, pulling her into the atmosphere of her smell with a gentle press of their lips. It was different than before, a promise. They sat a foot apart still, leaning over to reach each other.
“I love you, Romanoff,” he said, pulling away from her lips slightly. “I always will.”
She pressed her lips to his again. “I love you, too.”