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The first time Natasha Romanoff meets Steve Rogers, bullets are flying over their heads.
“I’m Agent Romanoff, nice to meet you,” she shouts over the din of the battle.
“I don’t think this is the best time for introductions,” he shouts back.
Natasha wrinkles her nose. He seems like a hardass. Not much fun. And Natasha likes people who know how to have fun. Steve Rogers has blonde hair and perfect blue eyes and a douche-y outfit on and he is so not her type, but she can't get him out of her head.
“It’s not you, Tasha, but Laura and I are trying again and I think it’s time to slow down.”
Natasha understands as much as a sterile, single, spy could understand family matters. Clint is being reassigned to desk duty. For his kids. She smiles, kisses his cheek, tells him to stay safe. It’s a good idea. She’s proud of him for putting the important things first, even though ‘important things’ don’t include her. After years of having each other’s backs, Natasha would never move to a different department without Clint. But seriously, she understands.
Two days later, which seems like a hell of a turnaround time, she gets a new partner. One that really isn’t her type. One with blue eyes and blonde hair and a new uniform that doesn’t make him look like quite as much of an asshole. Navy blue and crimson look better than primary colors, and he’s gotten rid of that stupid helmet. He sticks out his hand, but Natasha doesn’t shake it.
She’s busy. That’s all. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to eat, she just doesn’t have enough time. She doesn’t have enough time for a lot of things now. She hasn’t gotten a haircut in forever, so she wears it longer and pretends she likes it that way. She misses Clint’s jokes (however annoying). Steve hardly talks on their missions. Natasha always thought she was the quiet one.
It’s fine, though, soon Clint will come to his senses, beg Natasha to take him back, and everything will go back to normal. Soldiers and spies don’t work well together, it’s just a bad combination. Fury didn’t think that was a good enough reason to have them reassigned. So here they are, in a hotel in Venezuela, surrounded by silence you could cut with a fucking knife.
“Read any good books lately?”
“Well, I’ve been looking through old death records trying to find out what happened to all my friends. You know, from the last century. Does that count?”
“Sounds like a good time,” Natasha mutters. She takes over surveillance and he takes a shower. He doesn’t say a word for the next two days.
Steve shows up at her door in the middle of the night and kisses her like she’s the air he breathes. He slams the door shut and they stumble to her bedroom, clothes coming off before they can reach the bed. He pulls her shorts off and stands back, surveying her body.
Natasha has never been self-conscious before. She doesn’t understand why he’s looking at her like this, like she’s wounded. Like she’s sick. She’s lost some weight, and maybe she doesn’t look so much like an hourglass anymore, but she’s still hot. Scars decorate her chest and stomach, but he’s covered in them too. Is she too pale? Too muscled?
He must see the confusion on her face, because he says, “You’ve lost weight. That’s all,” and kisses her again.
Being partners with Steve isn’t as bad after that. She can hold a conversation with him for five minutes and twelve seconds (her record), and the sex is amazing. He even spends the night sometimes, which is a good sign. His eyes are still perfectly, beautifully, blue, and she loves his blonde hair even more now that it’s hers to run her hands through. He’s really not her type. So why does she like him so much?
A red line falls across his wrist. Natasha kisses the hurt away, bandages it up. He promises it won’t happen again. They aren’t much for emotions, so the event hangs in the air between them, untouched.
He is her new normal. Everything else is changing.
The weight drops off. She can’t help it. She’s really just too busy, and everything she does she does running. There’s no time to slow down when the world is going to hell.
She lays in bed, naked, moonlight streaming through the window. Steve touches her reverently, so lightly it feels like he’s not touching her at all. Some days, more and more lately, he acts like she’s made of glass.
“You’re too thin, Nat,” he whispers. He speaks like she’ll scare away. She’s not a stray dog.
“I’m not too anything.”
“I’m serious.”
Natasha looks at him, peering through the shadows. “I’m fine.”
“You don’t eat enough.”
“I eat plenty,” She says. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
And it isn’t. They aren’t a couple. They aren’t friends. They’re partners who sleep together. It’s none of his business, and she hasn’t even lost much weight.
It’s none of his business.
When she throws up for the first time in a long time, she’s had too much to drink at Tony’s party. She’s moved into one of the units downstairs. It feels good to be closer to her team, and Wanda needs another girl in the building. One who’s more accustomed to their lifestyle, that is. Pepper is great, she’s amazing, but she’s a different type of superhero. The type of superhero who stays sober so her husband won’t do anything idiotic.
She’s closer to Steve now, too. Not that that’s why she moved. Her old apartment was getting boring. But it’s a nice plus.
So she’s on a balcony, freezing her ass off in a red dress that’s too short and too tight, and she’s just thrown up over the railing. It isn’t a good look on her. It feels good, though, to just get everything out of her stomach. She feels a lot better. Bruce slips an arm around her waist and guides her inside. She waves him off. Stumbles to Steve and throws herself on him. He can’t get drunk, but she’s wasted enough for the both of them.
No one knows about them, whatever them means (god fucking forbid they put a label on it), but Natasha kisses him anyway, and the crowd goes wild. Steve carries her to his room. Those blue eyes look her over, head to toe, before he pushes her against the wall and fucks her so hard she’s screaming his name.
The next morning, she stumbles into the kitchen in one of his t-shirts.
“Nice outfit,” Sam says with a smirk. Tony smacks his shoulder, but Natasha is too hungover to do anything but make coffee.
It isn’t supposed to be a regular thing, but it’s almost like she’s found a loophole. She can eat without really eating, and isn’t that perfect? Why doesn’t everyone vomit after they eat? It’s so easy, so horrifyingly easy, that Natasha forgets the only reason she wasn’t eating was that she’s too busy. This feels better. It’s satisfying. She can’t control anything else, but she can control this.
Pepper finds her with her fingers down her throat and tears running down her cheeks.
Natasha sobs, “I can’t do this anymore.”
Pepper wraps her in a hug that feels almost like a mother’s. It’s the kind of hug that makes you feel like everything is going to be okay.
Steve’s blood splatters across their sink every night, now, even though he promised last time was the last time. Natasha had been naive enough to believe it. She wraps his arms and holds him while he falls asleep. He never cries. Natasha wonders how. One day, he’s going to break. A crack will form in his impenetrable facade, and everything will come flooding out. And maybe she won’t feel so alone anymore.
He’s practically moved into her apartment.
She doesn’t want to face the truth, face the fact that he’s only sticking around to make sure she doesn’t do something terrible. Like she’s the one people should be worrying about. If he wasn’t super-fucking-human, they would see his scars, and he would be on trial. Not her.
She’s getting tired of this. Even if no one says anything. You don’t need to use words to get your paralyzingly, infuriatingly, intense concern across. She sees it in their eyes. They don’t take their eyes off her. As if they don’t have their demons, too.
Fury sends her away. She’s a liability, apparently, but she knows he’s just worried. She runs away to Clint’s farm. She plays with the kids. Laura is pregnant again. If it’s a girl, they’re going to name her Natasha. It makes her feel terminal, because naming babies after people is something you do when those people are dead. She isn’t dead.
The farm is quiet. Natasha takes the dog on a run every morning. She can never make it very far down the gravel road before she feels too tired to go on. Honestly, she’s feeling too tired to go on doing a lot of things these days. She doesn’t touch her food. She’s too tired to go on pretending. Clint knows. Laura knows. Why hide a fundamental truth? She’s disgusting. Sick. Broken. Fix me.
It’s been a month. She packs her bags. On the porch, Clint crushes her in a hug so tight it hurts.
“We’re not gonna let you go, Tasha.”
“I never asked you too.”
“If you won’t fight this, I will.”
“There’s nothing to fight, Clint. Everything is fine.”
He looks at her like she’s from outer space.
Steve takes her to the Hamptons. The sea is the color of his eyes, and the sand is the color of his skin. They spend two days basking in the sun, wishing it would make everything better. By the end of the trip, it’s hard to see anything but him. Now her favorite color is blue. Blue like his eyes. Blue like the ocean.
“I can’t do this, Natasha, I can’t do this anymore,” Steve says. “I can’t deal with this.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re dying. I can’t-I don’t know what to do. I can’t keep doing this.”
Is he seriously dumping her?
“So that’s it? You’re the only one allowed to have problems?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you can bleed all fucking day long if you want.”
“Natasha, you know what I mean.”
“No, Steve, I don’t.” She’ll make him say it. She will. He doesn’t get to do this the easy way.
“I can’t deal with your…disease anymore. Every morning I wake up and brace myself to wake up with a corpse.”
“I’m fine.” You’re the sick one, you’ve always been the sick one.
“You’re delusional.”
Days pass like shadows on the wall. She’s tired. She’s cold. Even in the dead of summer, she’s cold. They take a trip to the beach in late July. Natasha wears a red bikini. It used to make her ass look good and her boobs look better, but now it practically hangs off her emaciated body. She looks in the mirror. She’s hideous.
It wasn’t supposed to go this far.
She has Tony stop at a mall on the way so she can buy a swimsuit in extra small. Even that is too big. She’s ashamed. Humiliated. Exhausted.
She’s the first out of the car, and she runs to the water. She wades in until the ocean meets her waist and the waves wash over her. Maybe she can sink to the bottom. Or start swimming and never stop. She struggles farther into the surf. If she just keeps going, if she just keeps reaching, she’ll find an answer. A solution to all this pain.
Her arms feel like lead. She keeps swimming. The surf is so loud she can’t hear her friends screaming her name. It’s a long time before Steve reaches her, drags her back to the shore. She feels waterlogged. She feels like a brick. She’s gasping for air even though he’s the one swimming. He drops her on the sand, where she rolls on her back.
Then he’s yelling, “What the hell were you thinking, Romanoff?”
“Cap, maybe you should give her a minute,” Sam suggests.
“You could have drowned, is that what you want? Do you want to die? Because if you keep going on like this-”
“Seriously, give her a minute.”
“Why don’t you just kill yourself? Put everyone out of their misery?”
“Shut up,” Tony hisses.
Natasha’s ears are ringing. She feels sick.
She’s just too tired to fight back.
She’s tired of being brave.
It’s October. Yellow leaves cover the ground. Skeletons of what they used to be. Just like her. The symbolism is cliche and totally corny, but isn’t it true? Seasons change. People don’t. Steve moves to DC. She doesn’t even know until she knocks on his door one night, in desperation, only to find his rooms empty. Sliding down the wall to the floor, she weeps. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like this.
She goes to California for Christmas. She needs a change of scenery.
The beaches are whiter, there, and the sun shines all year round. Natasha has an ice cream from a cart on the Santa Monica Pier, and wonders halfheartedly when the last time she had an ice cream was.
It’s warm here.
It’s full of life.
It’s everything Natasha isn’t.
California is a good place for endings.