Blink Twice

by FireSoul

Summary:

On the run from Shield, Natasha and Steve have gotten close. Close enough that they've gotten into the habit of sometimes sharing a motel bed. Neither of them ever thought it could have the typical consequences, yet here they are. Nat might be pregnant, and not only should that be impossible, but it is probably a really bad idea given their situation.

But, they've faced the impossible before.

Chapter 1

There isn’t a lot these days – nor has there ever been – much in this life which Natasha feels ever really, truly stuns her. She’s seen everything from magic to secret military technology. She has fought side-by-side with an actual God, and fought tooth and nail against another. For all that she has seen and done, she likes to think she has remained largely unflappable. She’s rolled with the punches and shrugged off the unimaginable. Nothing, she likes to think, has ever truly stopped her in her tracks.

Not until right now.

She stares with wide eyes at the two pink lines staring back up at her. Two bright pink lines; telling her in no uncertain terms that the little stick sitting on the sink edge before her must be faulty.

But the lines are so damn bright.

Something is wrong with her. Something has been wrong with her for weeks now. She’s been chalking it up to being nothing more than the toll that being on the run takes on a body. Greasy food, shitty hotel beds, and late nights driving into new towns, followed moving on in the early mornings. That isn’t even to mention the ungodly amounts of coffee and energy drinks she’s been relying on to keep up with it all. Her heart sinks with the thought of all that, because if this test isn’t a faulty… if it’s true, then God she’s already gone and fucked it up.

She breathes in. She leans her hands against the counter of the sink and tries to steady herself.

She thought she was just getting older. She thought she got too complacent living in New York. That it’s just been too long since she last went into hiding and her body was fighting the transience; telling her she is too old for this shit and she would be better off turning herself in for a deal like Clint and Scott.

She took the test just to have the negative in her back pocket. In case things got worse and she had to walk into an emergency room or a clinic; easier to tell them she took a test that came back negative than to try and explain the forced hysterectomy.

“Nat?”

The motel room door opening and her name being called breaks through the heavy silence of the bathroom. It’s Steve’s voice, and she can hear Sam closing the door behind him and the shuffling of grocery bags.

“In here.” She calls back to them, “One second.”

It’s a figure of speech, but she feels like that is all the time which she has to make a decision.

She runs the sink to hopefully buy herself another half a second, and as she turns the dial to off she snatches up the test and shoves it into her back pocket. She makes up her mind about what she’s doing as she is marching out the bathroom door. She pushes past Sam and seizes Steve by the forearm, dragging him out into the motel parking lot while Sam splutters something in the background about dinner, and where are they going?

She doesn’t care. She couldn’t care if she tried. The last thing she has the energy for right now is Sam Wilson and the answers that he is going to be asking for when she and Steve inevitably go filing back into the motel room with their tales between their legs.

“Nat? What-?”

She doesn’t let him finish. In the true spirit of ripping off the Band-Aid, Nat drags him to the side of their latest “liberated” car parked in the third spot in the lot, and she whips the test from her back pocket; shoving it into his hands with one blunt growl.

“I don’t know.”

“What? What do you mean you don’t…” He trails off, and Nat would assume that is because his hands have stopped fumbling and he is now blinking down at the stick she’s shoved into his grasp.

He knows what it is. For all the grief they like to give him and Bucky for being a hundred years old, the reality is that the two of them are mostly caught up on modernity by now. Nat can see the recognition light up in his eyes before his brow furrows, and he looks up at her for an explanation she has already made clear she doesn’t have.

He just stares at her. His eyes rake her from head to toe, and while Nat has never allowed herself to be one to feel self-conscious, she stands there with her arms crossed tightly over herself; her fingers pressing firmly against her ribs as though she could literally hold herself together.

When he starts to breathe heavier, and she sees genuine worry etch into his eyes, she finally says something.

“You know they say if a guy gets that result it means he’s dying?” She asks, going for levity, which falls flat, but she keeps at it anyway. “Cancer, specifically. It would really suck if it’s that.”

A beat. A long, long beat of him breathing heavy, and watching her as though she has lost her mind.

Frankly, she hasn’t ruled that out.

“Nat.”

“If we’re lucky that one’s a dud.” She excuses, “I’ll get another one, maybe two, and when they both come back negative we can laugh about how I scared the crap out of you with this.”

“Nat.” He says her name more as a plea this time, with just the tiniest tilt of his head that just makes her want to punch the pity out of him before crumpling into his arms and crying out how scared she is because, seriously, what the fuck is happening?

“Problem is I still don’t know what’s wrong with me.” She manages to keep her voice indifferent, almost casual.

He is having none of it.

“Nat.”

“I’ve been tired.” She confesses at his breathlessness. “Like, really tired.” She leans against the back of the car, her folded arms coming in contact squarely against her chest.

She doesn’t show it on her face the slight sting which zaps through her at the contact.

“I’ve never had a period.” She bluntly admits, before Steve can open his mouth and try getting her to be reasonable; or whatever he has been attempting to do thus far.

“Every once in a while I’ll spot.” She says with a shrug. “Not often, but scar tissue isn’t immune to getting inflamed after bad injuries.”

He takes a half step closer to her this time, and thank God he doesn’t say her name again. He simply watches and waits her out.

“The last time was a couple months ago. After we… blew off some steam.”

It hangs in the air; the unspoken – potential - explanation. It is the only way she can think of in which this could ever make sense. If… If the super serum that courses through him extends that far, and if it survives through the - for lack of a better term - through the release, during the coping mechanism they’ve taken up in the last year, then maybe there is a chance this isn’t some shared delusion or a death sentence.

Of course, that would mean it’s real.

“And… when you say a couple of months?”

She shrugs, but she knows what he’s thinking, so while she can’t bring herself to look at him just yet, she manages to shake her head.

“I don’t think it’s an indicator.” She says, “That’s my point. I don’t have anything to count back from to figure out when this could have happened.”

As he steps closer, leaning against the car with her, she keeps her eyes locked firmly on the motel pool in the distance. She brings her thumb to her teeth, and tears at some of the skin fraying around her cuticles. It’s a bad habit, she knows. But, desperate times.

“You must have some kind of an indicator.” Steve says, a gentle version of prying for information.

Her first instinct is to remind him that no, she doesn’t, but that isn’t true. Of course she has some version of an indicator; people who are supposed to be barren don’t take pregnancy tests just because they’ve been tired for a couple days.

“I feel like I’m peeing more.” She says, finally daring to look at him, and the raised eyebrow she is met with almost makes this easier.

Almost.

“I don’t know.” She says, biting at her nail again. “I feel… off, I guess. So I took the test just to be able to show a clinic the negative if things got worse and I had to go in somewhere.”

He nods to her. What might have been a smirk starting to pull at his lips after her comment about her pee is now returning to a concerned frown. He folds his arms, and when he looks off into the distance she follows his lead. There isn’t anyone swimming in the motel pool. Perhaps there hasn’t been anyone swimming in it in ages.

“Is this something you would want?”

She scoffs at his question.

“You realize it’s more likely that I’m dying?” She asks, even if… Even if she is smirking when he looks at her with the fear that maybe she’s serious. Even if she isn’t serious, when she should be, because the idea that the test actually picked up some kind of cancer eating away at her – while far more plausible – it feels even further away then they idea that the test could be right. That she could – somehow – be pregnant.

“Assume you’re not dying?” Steve asks, evidently picking up on how un-committed she is to the idea of dying. “Assume the test is right.” He pauses, and looks down at the test again, running his thumb over it as though it is something to revere and not something she held between her legs and peed on. “Do you want it?”

“Do I want the tiny plastic stick?”

For the first time in this conversation, he might be growing legitimately frustrated with her.

She sees that she’s testing her luck; he’s getting fed up with her deflections to the point that if she tries again, he might either walk away or – worse – look her in the eyes and calmly ask for a straight answer from her.

She licks her lips, and unfolds her arms and settles her hands into her jacket pockets as she leans further back against the car.

“What I want and what I can have are two different things.”

It’s an answer; the best she has at least. For one thing, they are literally wanted fugitives living out of a stolen car and hopping from dusty motel to even dustier motel. Now even setting that aside, that still leaves the very true fact that she shouldn’t be able to get pregnant. So – for arguments sake – say that against all odds, she did. That doesn’t mean she is capable of staying that way. She could easily wake up in a pool of blood on any given night, and what if they aren’t close to a hospital? They can sew up bullet and stab wounds in a motel room, but they can’t do much about it if she starts to lose too much blood from a miscarriage.

It's a real possibility, enough so that Natasha swallows thickly and tips her head back solidly against the car. She closes her eyes and tries to focus on nothing but the solid aluminum behind her head and back. She can all but hear Steve thinking; if she had to guess, he is trying to decide between the want to comfort her and tell her she is allowed to want this all to be real, and the reality that he would be a fool to not see the danger.

“I know you don’t get a period.” He reiterates, “But, you said you’ve been feeling off. How far along do you think you are?”

Natasha scrunches her brows together, not yet opening her eyes. She doesn’t need to think too hard on it; it’s been running through her head non-stop for the last ten days at least.

“Seven or eight weeks?” She ventures, cracking one eye open to see him looking at her with mild surprise. “Give or take.”

It’s a sufficient enough answer, it would seem. Enough that she is able to watch him mull his next words over in his head.

“Still early.” He muses, “But you’re still alive.”

She manages a chuckle, even if there is some fear still simmering under her skin.

“What do you think?” He asks, “You want to hit an ER now? Or give it another day to wrap your head around?”

Her lips part, but the words don’t come yet. The smart thing to do would be to go to an ER right now and worry about skipping town earlier than they’ve planned, once they have their answer. She’s tempted, though, to give it another day. Just one day to get her head on straight and really think this through.

Her thoughts are interrupted by the door to their room swinging open, and Nat doesn’t need to crane her head around the car to know Sam it’s Sam stalking out.

So, she doesn’t. Steve does, but Nat waits until the third member of their little fugitive gang has rounded the corner and is standing indignantly at her side; looking her and Steve up and down and assessing what level of sarcasm is appropriate here.

She’s never been more confident that he’ll get it wrong.

“If you two are getting divorced, you’re gonna have to be that really pissed off, broke couple that still lives together. I’m not splitting time.”

Nat laughs, while Steve simply rolls his eyes.

“That would suck.” Nat says, rolling her head towards Steve. “You wouldn’t divorce a dying woman, would you?”

Steve rolls his eyes even harder at her playing along, even if Sam definitely isn’t playing anymore. She can practically hear him standing straighter behind her.

“You’re not dying.” Steve insists, pushing off the car. “Now do you want to go in and eat? Or do you want to go somewhere to confirm that?”

She doesn’t think on it long. They’re both staring at her, and she knows that Sam’s patience with being out of the loop is only going to last so long. So, she too pushes herself off the car, and starts walking around for the passenger seat.

Chapter 2

Notes:

So I wrote this chapter, didn't like it, rewrote 3/4ths of it, and then threw the chapter count out the window.

Sam cracks exactly one joke between being caught up on the reason they’re going to an emergency room, and the reason it constitutes as an emergency. He feels like a complete ass for it too, which is why he drops Steve and Nat at the door and then decides he may as well make himself useful. He takes the car back to the motel and he starts packing up their stuff with no further questions asked.

They’re going to have to move on the second Nat and Steve get out, and figure everything else out from there. It’s funny, drifting from town to town has become second-nature these last two years. But suddenly, Sam isn’t sure where the hell they’re supposed to start.

He’s got a feeling this is all gonna come back that Nat’s pregnant, and that’s something a person has actually got to sit down and deal with. The three of them can’t be on the run with a baby. It would call too much attention. Of course, one could argue it’s actually the perfect cover. Nobody chasing after their asses is out there looking for a pregnant woman, much less a pregnant ex-avenger.

“That’s low.” He whispers to himself, criticizing himself for thinking about a baby in terms of tactical advantage vs disadvantage.

Not just any baby. Steve and Nat’s baby.

Trying not to get too caught up in his thoughts again, he loads their three backpacks and what had been the groceries for dinner into the car. Then, he goes and settles up with the college kid running the lobby. In the time it takes him to do that, Sam decides that he isn’t going to be able to keep himself from thinking and planning. So, he makes a deal with himself. He is allowed to plan, but it’s not his place to be weighing options, so any plans he makes have no business coming out of his mouth until either Nat or Steve asks for them.

He's glad he makes this deal with himself, because he ends up sitting in the ER parking lot for over an hour waiting, and his crossword book sure isn’t holding his attention.

They could go way, way off the grid. They could hide out somewhere in the mountains, or maybe in the desert. Crossing borders is a no-go without cashing in any favors. But, they could find some backwoods little town miles from the nearest truck stop. Somewhere where The Avengers are nothing but fairytale, and there is nowhere and everywhere to run if the authorities come knocking. They could drum up a cover story about Nat and Steve being a couple wanting to raise their kid away from the city, and Sam can tell anybody who asks that he followed his friends out to the middle of nowhere because rent in the city is a pain in the ass.

He's still working through this story when Nat and Steve finally come out; the two of them looking like they lost weeks of sleep in the span of the few hours they were in there.

They climb into the car with no ceremony. Nat hops into the back, and Steve up with him in the front. Sam gives them a few seconds, watching from the side of his eye as neither of them relaxes, nor seems to be willing to break the silence.

Fine.

“So what’s the verdict?” He asks, and from behind him comes an exhausted huff.

“The verdict is I hate hospitals.” Nat sighs, and then she leans forward, so that her arms can rest on the center console between the two front seats and she can properly converse. “They couldn’t tell us anything.”

“What?”

“They couldn’t clear anything up.” Steve amends. “They ran a blood pregnancy test; it came back positive. But thanks to budget cuts they don’t have an ultrasound machine in the emergency department. So in order to do an ultrasound and confirm the pregnancy they would have to admit her to the hospital.”

“Which is obviously not an option.” Nat interjects, “They advised me to see my regular gynecologist. Which is also, obviously, not an option.”

“Ok.” Sam says, not liking the lack of options. “Dare I ask where that leaves us?”

Steve and Nat look to each other, and Sam will take that to mean no, he shouldn’t dare ask.

---

Steve isn’t sure how to answer Sam’s question.

For the duration of the drive into their next town, they don’t talk about the hospital or what their next move should be regarding Nat definitely being pregnant. With his kid. While they’re running from most of the world’s governments.

Steve scrubs a hand over his face. He dares one glance over his shoulder to Nat after about an hour of driving, when he hears the rustling of the grocery bag. He finds that Nat has the hood of her grey sweatshirt drawn up, which is her usual for when they drive. It’s to block the view of her face from any nosy passengers in the cars they pass by.

Right now, Steve can’t help but wonder if she is trying to hide herself from the world for more reasons than one.

Anyhow, she’s raided the grocery bag and currently has the package of open and two slices balanced across her lap, and the package of bologna held in her hand.

“Want one?” She asks, flicking her eyes to him. There is a certain steeliness to her gaze, daring him to say anything that is not an answer to her question.

“Please.” He accepts, and she nods, and finishes making the sandwich in her lap before handing it to him.

“Don’t hold out on me.” Sam chimes, and in the rearview mirror Steve catches sight of Nat snickering to herself before she makes another sandwich and passes it to Sam, then finally starts on one to keep for herself.

So, they eat their dinner of bologna sandwiches, and after another two hours they pull off the main highway and onto a local one, and then it’s another twenty minutes before they find a motel with vacancy.

Checking in and unpacking is their usual routine. Or, a version of it, at least. Sam is the one who approaches the desk and handles telling the clerk they need a room, preferably one with two beds. But, this time, once they’re in the room and they see there are – in fact – two queen sized beds, he doesn’t murmur any sort of “thank God”.

Their usual night routines are done in silence. Nat grabs her pajamas and heads into the bathroom, and once they hear the shower turn on Sam begins to change for sleep, all while Steve puts away any food they have that needs to go in the fridge.

Steve gets the feeling that if he were to bring it up, Sam would listen to him talk about the elephant on the room. Maybe tomorrow, he decides. But tonight it’s just too much.

Usually on their first night in a new room, the three of them will allow themselves a little time to decompress. They’ll sit around a small table if the room has one, or just on their beds, and compare notes on different restaurants or cafes they happened to notice on their drive into town. They’ll agree on one for breakfast tomorrow, and then they’ll play a round of cards or something.

Not tonight.

Tonight they settle in early. Sam stretches out on one of the beds and starts channel surfing on the room’s boxy TV. Steve is sitting on the edge of the second bed, debating for the first time in months sleeping on the floor, when Nat comes and crawls into the space next to him.

He leans back against the headboard of the bed for now, but he doesn’t crawl under the covers yet. He’ll make up his mind in a few minutes, but right now, committing to either the bed or the floor feels like it would be too bold a statement.

“What is this?” He asks when the two main characters of the movie Sam has settled on hit a deer with their car.

“Tommy Boy.” Sam answers, “I would’ve told you to put it on your list, but it’s not worth it.”

Next to him, Nat hums in agreement, and that’s that.

Despite the movie not being anything great, Sam never changes the channel. It’s a mindless movie, with jokes that really aren’t Steve’s sense of humor on a normal day – nor Sam or Nat’s. But, for right now, he pays mild attention and cracks a smile when the deer the two characters hit, killed, and stuffed in the back of their car turns out to still be alive and wakes up as they’re driving.

Eventually, Nat starts to move from sitting to lying down in her space next to him, and so as she moves the covers around to get settled Steve slides his legs under the sheets.

Nat seems content enough with his decision. She settles onto her back reaches one arm up behind her head to serve as an extra pillow so that she can still watch the movie. Her other arm is limp along her side, her hand resting on her thigh. Each time he looks her way, Steve is careful not to let his eyes linger on her mid-section, nor to call attention to the fact that she has positioned herself so that her hands don’t cross it.

---

When morning comes the three of them still aren’t talking much, and specifically nothing about it. But, they’ve been traveling together long enough that they don’t need many words to get through a morning.

Sam and Steve go on their morning run as usual and, when they get back, Nat gets the distinct impression that they didn’t tear the Band-Aid off without her.

After the two of them have taken their turns showering and changing, they all head to the nearest local diner they could fine for breakfast. This one is cleaner than some of what they’ve seen. The walls are painted an inviting sky blue with a large chalkboard hanging over the counter and advertising the daily specials. Being that it’s early morning on a Wednesday it isn’t overly crowded, and the three of them have no trouble procuring a booth over by the far window.

Nat slides into the booth seat opposite of Steve, which isn’t unusual, but once Sam is sitting at his side she suddenly thinks it might have been a mistake to put herself in a prime position for the two of them to scrutinize her every move.

Oh well.

“Morning guys.” A cheerful voice interrupts her thoughts, as a girl who can’t be older than twenty starts to lay menus out in front of them. “Anyone doing coffee?”

“Please.” Sam answers, and Steve flicks his eyes to her, hesitating slightly, before he echoes Sam’s answer.

“Is there any way I could do half regular, half decaf?” Nat asks the woman, and she very pointedly ignores the gazes lingering on her from across the table.

“Absolutely.” The girl replies without batting an eye, “Be right back.”

Thankfully, by the time she comes back and fills their mugs, Steve and Sam have distracted themselves from her by looking at the menus.

They spend breakfast like they usually do. Steve picked up a map and a local paper from the motel lobby this morning, so they spread the two of those out and discuss their options for the next few days.

They discuss things like help wanted section; anything that is a one- or two-day job, and pays cash. They discuss the nearby towns, where they are going to go next, how they are going to split up the tasks of surviving where they are now.

Most importantly, they don’t talk about how this would all look with a baby along for the ride.

Today, Nat draws the straw of heading to the local library. It isn’t hard to find, and it’s a large building but no more populated than the diner. She finds the computers quickly, and after choosing one at the end of the table, she begins to catch up on world affairs.

She doesn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Climate change, North Korea being North Korea, and some new protests against the U.S.’s current actions towards immigration. No new bounties on the heads of former Avengers, and nothing boasting the capture of Wanda and/or Vision. There is nothing which Nat would flag as a sign of a God of Mischief or one of Tony’s inventions rising up against humanity.

She slumps back in the wooden library chair, her foot knocking idly against the table leg. She looks down at her lap and a frown pulls at her lips. She isn’t going to lie and say she hasn’t been feeling bloated lately along with everything else. It isn’t so bad that her pants have felt tighter, or her jacket has clung to her differently after she’s zipped it. But it’s enough that she’s noticed and assumed it was a result of living off greasy take out and pre-packed corner store snacks. You know, the natural consequence of all that to any normal person.

She tips her head back with a tired sigh, thinking that “any normal person” should have been her first clue something was wrong.

It’s with no small effort that Nat forces her head upright again and drags her attention back to the computer. Sooner or later the three of them are going to have to talk about this, and she suspects that before that happens, she and Steve are going to have to discuss it in private. She needs to have a plan in place for when that happens.

She starts with the basics. She looks up pregnancy symptoms by the week, which – much to her frustration – gives her more questions than answers. According to the chart, she could be anywhere between four and twelve weeks along. She’s felt only a fraction of the symptoms, to the point that she starts to look into other causes of false positives in women. She disregards the possibility of a faulty test, no matter how much she would like for that to be the answer. Her one drugstore test she could believe, but it’s harder to argue with a blood test from a hospital.

After that there are only two distinct possibilities: either she is dying, or she was pregnant, and if she was pregnant then that is a whole other problem because it means she still might be dying.

After a little more research she shoves that possibility aside; as everything tells her that if she had miscarried without knowing it she wouldn’t have likely survived to this point. In the event that she did, she would at least be in a lot more pain and have seen a lot more blood.

So, that leaves her with pregnant - which is impossible - and this time when she sinks back in the chair and looks down at herself she does something which she knows is very, very dangerous.

She starts to think.

She imagines her stomach rounded out a bit. She loses herself in a daydream of sitting in some other town library doing her usual routine of recon, only she has to pull the keyboard closer to the edge of the table and type with one hand, because there is something nudging her insides in a demand for her attention.

She knows she is crossing the line into torturing herself, but Nat allows the daydream to go on for a bit. She imagines a small hand grabbing at the hem of her shirt. She wonders what it might be like to have the warm weight of a sleeping infant on her chest, and how brightly Steve would smile when a little voice called him “dada” in speech so garbled that she wouldn’t be sure it even counts.

She goes further. Let’s herself think about more than lying in a motel bed with Steve and his legs tangled with hers. More than his hands holding securely at her hips, then falling lazily over her stomach as the two of them drift off to sleep. It’s a terrible idea, but Nat decides she will allow herself one minute here to long for more.

She imagines kissing him in public for more than hiding from Hydra agents. She imagines a reality where they’re able to patch things up with Shield and with Tony and go back to New York. They already work together like a well-oiled machine in combat, but now she pictures something more. She can feel him at her back, some ex-Hydra goon under her foot, and while a projectile bounces off his shield she reminds him that they need to sign a school permission slip for the kid when they get home.

Home.

Nat sighs, that one word yanking her from her idealism like one of those cartoon shepherd’s canes.

She blinks her focus back to the computer screen. She’s staring at a list of symptoms; some of which she’s felt, and many that she hasn’t. Enough daydreaming and self-rationalizing. She needs answers and a plan.

She clears the search bar, and she starts again.

Chapter 3

Notes:

Buckle in for a long chapter!

Steve is a little distracted throughout the day.

While Nat heads to the library and Sam opts to take a walk through downtown and get a feel for the local atmosphere, he responds to an ad placed in the paper by an elderly woman looking for someone to mow her lawn.

He’s slower in finding the address than he usually is when he’s following up on a job. These help wanted ads can be hit or miss, and half the time the job has already been done by the time he gets to the address. So, usually, he tries his best to find the houses as quicky as possible. But today he’s lost in his thoughts.

How could he not be?

Personally, Steve would like to get Nat to another hospital or clinic ASAP. He understands they shouldn’t show their faces in too many emergency rooms and risk being looked into, but he is right at the point of not caring.

He and Nat talked about pregnancy the first time they slept together, however briefly, and surmise to say this is not a situation which they thought they would find themselves in.

---

“Wait.” He had said, and Nat frowned underneath him, her fingers still curled under the hem of his t-shirt as she stopped trying to pull it up and off. “We don’t have any of those condoms.”

“I don’t have any diseases, Rogers.” She’d said, and bunched his shirt up a little more. “Do you?”

“No, but-”

“Then we’re fine.” She had insisted, “The Red Room took care of everything else.”

He’d blinked at her. She said it so plainly, but there was still a guarded flicker in her eyes. It warned him not to ask any further questions, and screamed that she didn’t want his pity.

He had settled for leaning in closer, his hands gently curling over hers and reaffirming her grip on his shirt. As she hiked his shirt up further he’d brushed his nose against hers, his lips only ghosting hers in a plea for access. It wasn’t until his shirt was over his head and she’d started kissing him that he reciprocated the effort.

He waited until her hands reached for his belt before he dared to touch hers. He brushed her short and freshly dyed blonde hair from her face to ensure she would only need to open her eyes to see anything and everything that he was doing.

Whatever she had endured that left her to say pregnancy was “taken care of” he couldn’t change. But, he could do everything in his power to show her that no one will ever lay a hand on her like that again.

---

He does his best to push that all from his mind for the time being. Right now he needs to focus on finding the house for this ad, and returning to the motel tonight with something to show for his day. As he turns the corner and starts counting house numbers, he focuses on how it’s a street of small and slightly run-down two-story homes. Still, many of the homes seem well cared for. There are small patches of flowers underneath windowsills, and lawn ornaments such as ceramic gnomes guarding front doors.

For all the hardships that have come with being on the run, Steve has found in their travels that he prefers the small towns of the Midwest to the hustling city of New York. Back when was still being rejected by the army at every turn – before he ever heard the words Captain America and back before the ice – he never gave any thought to a life in the suburbs. In fact, the suburbs didn’t even exist for him to think about. The only other kind of living was the farms upstate, and that wasn’t the direction he was running in.

But now - in this day and age – he can see the appeal. Out here there is room to breathe without choking on smog, you can see the stars in the night sky, and some people even still listen to the baseball game on the radio.

He’s thinking about what it might be like to fall off the grid forever in a place like this - to leave the door closed on Shield for good and settle down - when he finds the house number he’s been searching for. He shakes the thoughts of retirement and a quiet life away from his mind. It wouldn’t be that simple anyway.

---

By dinner, Nat is seriously regretting allowing herself to think.

Thinking led to research, which led to phone calls made from her burner, which has led to her sitting around the room’s small table with Sam and Steve eating from a pizza box and working up the courage to tell them what she did with her day.

She swallows down a lump of hamburger and washes it down with some water. She isn’t exactly looking for an opening in the conversation, because that would mean there is actually a conversation to provide her an opening. Apart from deciding on the kind of pizza to get and how they need more paper towels the next time they’re at a store, the three of them haven’t said much yet.

“I’m going back to finish that lawn mowing job tomorrow.” Steve says, just as Nat was starting to think she might finally break. “Sweet old lady didn’t realize she needed a part for her lawnmower. She sent me to the hardware store.”

“How old?” Sam asks around a mouthful of pizza, and Steve shrugs.

“I don’t know, probably a few years younger than me.” He answers, and Sam chuckles, and for five seconds the air around their trio doesn’t feel quite so heavy.

Nat hates to ruin the moment, but it’s necessary.

“You should see if she has any other jobs for you to do.” She suggests, and she clears her throat when her words come out a bit thicker than she’d intended. “I um… I’d like to stay here a week, if that’s ok with you guys. I found a Planned Parenthood and called, but I couldn’t get in until Thursday.”

So, not quite a week. Five days, which they’ve stayed in a town for that length of time before, and she knows it won’t be an issue because – as the resident spy who has done this before - she is generally in charge of their schedule anyway.

But, doable as it is, she’s never asked them to stay put for any reason that was not purely tactical before.

“We can do that.” Steve answers, “Do um… Do you want me to go with you?”

She shrugs, “Up to you.” She answers, her eyes focused firmly on her pizza as she lifts it to her mouth.

She takes a bite, chewing slowly at first, and then a little faster when she realizes both Steve as well as Sam are still staring at her and likely trying to figure out what her plan is exactly.

She would love an answer as much as they would.

“It’s just to confirm there’s something there.” She explains, swallowing what’s in her mouth. “Like, anything.” She specifies, “Last I knew I was missing all those parts. So if something’s growing I would love to know where it came from and what the hell it’s latched onto.”

Her voice cracks again, more noticeable this time. She brings her water bottle to her lips and takes a long drink as she tries to disguise it, and she doesn’t think she is fooling either of them for a second.

“I can go for a walk.” Sam says, pushing away his plate and starting to stand.

“You don’t have to.” She insists, all but pleading with him to stay, which maybe isn’t the wisest idea because she and Steve do need to talk alone.

She just… She doesn’t ask for much, and now she is asking that they stay until Thursday, and Thursday is exactly the next time she would like to next think about this. She knows that isn’t possible. So, if he could be so kind, she would settle for dinner. Just finish dinner. If the three of them could just eat, and talk about Steve’s lawnmowing job, current events, and just be their version of normal for another five minutes, she would appreciate it greatly.

“Finish your pizza.” She adds, definitely pleading this time.

He and Steve share a look over her head. She wants to be angry about it – offended at the very least. But, they’re worried, and why shouldn’t they be? She’s worried.

“Fine.” Sam finally agrees, sitting back down. “But after I finish my pizza, you two are walking to the store and getting the paper towels.”

Nat nods in relief, and it isn’t lost on her that it’s the first time in twenty-four hours that she’s felt such a feeling.

“And maybe some ice cream.” Sam adds, and she almost able to laugh.

---

Steve is going to have to to get Sam a thank you card for his keen ability to read a room.

After a rocky start, dinner seemed to sweep away the tension the three of them have been surrounded in since yesterday. Giving Nat a time, a place, and most importantly an objective to be met alongside with the conversation he and her very much need to have was a stroke of genius. It helped them all to breathe and to talk about normal things. Well, what counts as normal for them, at least. Nat had nothing to report on the front of them being tracked, and it turns out that Sam’s day feeling out the locals helped him get a new plate for their car. Steve doesn’t have much to add to the conversation himself, only that he fixed the old lady’s lawnmower but hadn’t yet started on her yard before the sun had gone down and he’d left her house.

Eventually, they finish dinner, and the tension settles in again. They clean up the table and all it takes is one look shared with Nat for Steve to know they can’t avoid this forever. So, a deal’s a deal.

“What kind of ice cream do you want?” He asks Sam, just before his friend can close himself in the bathroom.

“Doesn’t matter.” He says, but then just before the door closes he stops and pokes his head back out. “Mint chip would be nice.”

As she ties up her shoe, Nat chuckles, and it’s such a small and guarded sound, but it gives Steve hope that they might be able to get through this after all.

Once they’ve left the motel, however, he is starting to have his doubts.

They walk a few blocks in silence. On their way they pass four different places where they could have bought paper towels and ice cream, but they’ll make the stop on the way back. First, one of them needs to work up the courage to say something.

“The things I need to tell you about me…” Nat eventually sighs, her eyes focused out ahead, and her hands balled into fists in the pockets of the vest she’d zipped up over her fleece. “Only two people know every detail of it. One of them is Barton.”

Steve nods, not surprised in the least by that.

Well, not by Barton.

“Can I ask who the other is?”

If he had to guess, he would put his money on Fury, who probably got it all from her file. He supposes it could also be Bruce. The two of them were never official - and he’s never known Nat to trust like this quickly – but still, he won’t make assumptions about how far their relationship went, nor how deep.

“My sister.”

Well, that’s a bet he would have lost.

“You have a sister.” He says, not asks.

“I do.” She agrees, her voice a drawl. “Her name is Yelena. We aren’t biologically related but I’ll explain all that later. Before I came and found you, and we broke Sam out of prison, I was with her. I was helping her take down The Red Room.”

Steve can taste bile in his mouth at the heaviness in her voice. They’ve barely begun, but it’s obvious that this isn’t a conversation she is ready to have.

“Nat, if you don’t want to talk about this-”

“Then what, I don’t have to?” She asks, her words sharp. “Tell me Steve, does that help either of us?”

He sighs, and he debates asking her the same question, because he wants to at least try and be fair to her. But, nothing about this situation is fair. This isn’t how this kind of thing is supposed to go, and he has a sinking feeling that she knows that even better than he does.

“Ok. So can we start with The Red Room?” He asks, “You’ve mentioned it before, and I still don’t know what it is.”

“It’s where Yelena and I were trained.” She answers, her voice dipping low.

“That’s where you met her?” He asks, both trying for more information as well as trying to maybe make this a little more personal and less like she is about to bare her soul to him out of necessity.

“Sort of.” She answers, “We met when we were assigned to the same mission.”

He nods, and debates asking for more details about that mission.

“The Red Room…” She starts, and she swallows down a gulp of air.

Steve watches her. He watches her start to avoid his eyes again and plow her hands even deeper into the pockets of her vest. She licks her lips, and overall she just seems so unlike herself that he wants to plead with her to stop. Moreover, he wants to wrap his arm around her shoulders and pull her into him. If he could shield her away from the dark and bloody shadows of her past, he would do so in a heartbeat.

But, Nat is a person with whom it’s best to precede with caution.

“They have a graduation ceremony.” She starts to explain, her words slow and assured; like she is falling back on a script. “At the end of your training, they sterilize you. They make sure nothing will ever be more important to you than a mission.”

“Christ.” He breathes, scrubbing a hand over his face. “So what you said back at the motel, you weren’t exaggerating?”

“Not even a little.” She answers, her expression stoic. “They took out my uterus, my ovaries, fallopian tubes… Everything. The only explanation I can think of for me being pregnant-”

“Is me.” He finishes for her, and she nods.

“I was modified with a version of your super serum.” She continues, although that detail about her he already knows. “The Soviet’s replication of it, anyway. Both before and after my graduation.”

“Ok.” Steve sighs, and it feels like his head and his heart are racing faster than what even his body can keep up with. “So what? My serum and your serum… What? Teamed up and regenerated your reproductive system?”

“Best guess.” She answers with a shrug, as if this whole thing isn’t insane. “No guarantee it did it right.”

All of a sudden, it crashes over him like a ton of bricks why she was so insistent yesterday that she could be dying.

He wants to throw up at the thought. Throw up, and then go and get his hands on the people who did this to her in the first place.

“You said you and Yelena took The Red Room down?”

She nods again, with barely a hum of verbal acknowledgement. Steve thinks she is looking a little pale as well, though it’s hard to tell under the rusty luminescent of the streetlights.

At least The Red Room is gone. That assurance clears his mind just a little bit. Enough, at least, at he is able to bring himself back to the matter at hand.

“So… What you want, and what you can have?” He carefully asks, echoing her from last night, and in reply she closes her eyes and sighs.

They come to a stop. They’re walking now away from downtown, and there is what is likely the last of bus stops within the city limits just ahead of them. Steve nods to the bench, and Nat follows. The two of them sit down and Nat finally pulls her hands from her pockets.

She starts to tear at the corner of her thumbnail with her teeth. It’s something Steve has noticed her doing only over the past few weeks, and it makes him wonder just how long she’s been dealing with all this uncertainty.

---

Nat sinks into the space next to Steve on the bench.

She tries to ground herself in the feeling of the cool iron slats on her back, but it does little good. Instead she brings a hand out of her pocket and immediately busies herself by biting away a frayed edge of hangnail which she left behind earlier.

It hurt too much this morning when it first broke, and it had started to bleed. But, after a day of her doing absolutely nothing to it, it’s withered away from her and died.

She hears the faint snap as her teeth tear it away, and she wonders if Steve hears it too with his enhanced senses.

She also tells herself that doesn’t matter.

She breathes. She tries to calm her racing heart, and tells herself it doesn’t matter if Steve can hear that either.

She also doesn’t let herself dwell on how bad stress is supposed to be for a baby, and so if she is pregnant she is doing a really shitty job right now of keeping it safe.

No, none of that matters right now. Not just yet. In a few minutes, maybe.

First, Steve asked her a question.

What she wants, and what she can have.

“This is the part only Clint and Yelena know about.” She forewarns him, shifting slightly as to bring her heels up on the bench, knees close to her chest. “I’ve never actually told either of them, but they know.”

She can’t even remember the last time she said it aloud to herself, if she is being honest. It’s something that exists right alongside the notion of her mother, and even her father. A far away dream of another life that she sometimes thinks about. Something she might have had if things had gone differently… if only someone had protected her.

“Ok.” Steve drawls, and Nat closes her eyes before she forces herself to look at him.

It takes everything she has in her to bring herself to speak. His deep blue eyes are staring into her very soul, the lines of his face etched with concern, and for a moment a thought flits through her mind unbidden; a thought of something so impossible and yet so tangible she finds herself straddling an edge worse than that of the thinking she allowed herself this morning.

For all of three seconds, Nat imagines a fair skinned little baby with blue eyes every bit as intense as Steve’s – it’s father’s - staring at her just like this for whatever it may have. For all of two seconds, she believes such a baby could be real. Then – most dangerous of all – for one second her hand slips from atop her bent knee, and her fingers make the briefest of contact against her stomach before she thinks better of herself and reposition her hand to its previous spot.

“If it’s safe…” She begins her answer, trying to choose her words carefully. “Yes, I would want it.”

It feels like a weight off her chest. It’s terrifying, but it’s also freeing. It feels like all of the weirdness which has surrounded them in the past twenty-four hours has evaporated up into the night sky. Now, she’s just watching Steve. The ball is in his court and his face is thoughtful.

He settles in deeper on the bench, rather than running away from her. That has to be a good sign.

“When you say ‘safe’?” He asks, looking to her to fill in the blank.

“Not the world.” She confirms for him, “That’s always a mess no matter what.”

He chuckles, tipping his head back to look up at the stars.

“But, we still go on.” She says, sliding her legs down and scooting the tiniest bit closer to him.

She props her elbow up on the back of the bench, turning herself sideways as so to watch his profile as he considers her.

“We hold each other together. People have families and, you know, sometimes it sucks. But sometimes it’s really great.”

He’s closed his eyes by this point, but he cracks one open as she leans over him. At this angle, in the pale glow of the streetlight, Nat feels like she can see just how much two years on the run has hardened him. It’s more than the darkness of his hair and beard as he’s grown it out; the golden blonde she used to associate with him now a distant memory. There is now a different sharpness around his eyes, carved there from always looking over his shoulder. He is still in his top condition, of course. The serum does it’s part in ensuring that, and most of the odd jobs he finds are physically demanding enough. Still, sitting here like this, it’s more apparent that his t-shirt has some extra fabric when he is slouched back. If she looks long enough, she can start to see that there really was once a scrawny kid from Brooklyn standing in his army surplus work boots.

She wonders if his child would inherit those pre-Captain America parts of him. Probably not; any baby of his – and especially one which could defy the odds and come from her – would likely inherit his serum. It would be athletically adept by nature, and possibly have his strength, which would be something to deal with.

She shakes her head; she is getting ahead of herself.

“I mean physically safe.” She clarifies her answer to him. “If… If I am pregnant, and it’s alive, and the odds are decent that both it and me will stay that way, then I don’t think I have it in me to get rid of it.”

---

Steve won’t lie and say he has loved Nat from the moment he first saw her. He also won’t lie and say that he has pictured anything like this moment before.

He also won’t lie and say that this right now isn’t up there in the top three most terrifying moments of his life.

But God he wouldn’t trade it for anything.

It’s all still a lot for him to wrap his head around. He wasn’t brought up this way. Back in his day if you got a girl pregnant – and his mom made sure before she died that he knew she would come haunting him if that ever happened– you married her. He knows things are different now. Families are different, and people are more understanding. Communities are less religious and the political scene has changed the public view of marriage quite a bit. Now, with all that being said, looking up at Nat right now and the way that despite all her reservations, she can’t quite seem to keep herself from smiling just a little, Steve thinks he would marry her in a heartbeat if she’d let him.

Maybe someday down this line he’ll find the courage to tell her that.

For the time being he settles for reaching for her hand. She allows him to take it, which is more than she usually grants him outside of the bedroom. He knows it’s just the moment and he is pushing his luck too, because he can hear the faint echo of her heart hammering wildly inside her and see the slight tick in her jaw. Still, her pupils are wide and watching him with interest, so he doesn’t think the intrusion is completely unwelcome.

“Guess I should expect my mom’s ghost to come haunting me.” He says aloud, and she laughs outright. “She promised she would if I ever got a girl pregnant.”

“Don’t go thinking we’re getting married, Rogers.” She teases, like she can read his mind, so he shoots her a half-serious look.

“It was literally her dying wish.” He comments, though frankly, it was more of a “last few days” warning.

Nat laughs again, and now she stands, still holding his hand.

“Come on.” She says, pulling him up to his feet. “We promised Sam ice cream.”

He chuckles, and when she starts to relax her grip on his hand and walk away Steve makes the split-second decision to pull her back.

“Hey.” He says as she turns back, surprise written on her face. It’s a risk, but he lightly tugs on her hand, pulling her to him, and when she closes her eyes as he leans in he presses a chaste kiss to her lips. “We’re having a baby.”

She hums, rolling her lips as he pulls back, her fingers still locked loosely with his.

“Tell me again after Thursday.” She says, “Then I might believe you.”

“Thursday.” He promises her, “It’s a date.”

She snorts a laugh, and this time when she turns to lead him back towards town he releases her hand and follows her.

Chapter 4

Nat is doing her best to keep in mind that five days isn’t really a lot of time. She has survived far worse in her life than five days of uncertainty. She can do this.

She manages to convince herself of this fact midway through Sunday, which is only day one, so she would call that a strong start. She knows she is going to get her answers on Thursday and then she can stress and plan accordingly from there. In the meantime, she has to work with what she knows, easy.

So, Sunday is uneventful. Steve finishes mowing the little old lady’s lawn, as well as does some work on her car for her. Monday almost feels normal. They lay low, spend a little more time in the library, and at night they play a game of blackjack. The only difference Nat finds herself making in the routine is her newfound request for half-calf coffee, and at night she has a bottle of water in her hands as she studies her cards as opposed to beer. Other than that, all is normal.

Tuesday is when normal flies out the window.

She wakes up feeling nauseous. Not sick per-say, but queasy. She is hoping it will go away on its own but that hope is fading when they sit down at the diner and she is only feeling worse. She’s debating passing on her usual order of over easy eggs and bacon in favor of just a side of toast when the waitress comes and asks about coffee.

“Half regular, half decaf please.” She requests, even if coffee doesn’t sound overly appealing right now.

Within a few minutes the waitress comes back with their coffees and takes their orders for food. Immediately the smell of the coffee hits her, and not in a good way. Her voice is strained as she orders a plate of French toast; deciding that is a good compromise between real food and something to keep her nausea at bay.

The waitress leaves to go put their orders in and Steve and Sam start talking about something or other. Vaguely, Nat is aware they are discussing Wanda, and the fact that she was due to call them a week ago and assure them she is still alive. The details, however, she isn’t listening to. Something about Vision hasn’t made any headlines lately, which means he is probably still with Wanda and she is fine.

Nat, however, is the opposite of fine.

In what may be the worst descion she has ever made she silently convinces herself the coffee – despite how wretched it smells – will make her feel better. She picks up her mug and raises it to her lips, and immediately she regrets her decision.

“Excuse me.” She says, calmly, and then she gets up without further explanation. Her stomach feels like it is flipping over itself as she walks between closely set tables to the door of chipping white paint and a silhouette of a woman hung at its front.

She stumbles inside the door, finding it is a single room of a toilet and sink, just barely large enough for her to close the door all the way as she crumples to her knees and begins retching up last night’s peanut butter sandwich.

The vomit splashes into the toilet bowl in heavy, sour-smelling chunks. The outpouring of it fills her senses and makes the whole ordeal so much worse. Tears are pricking at the corners of her eyes by the time she is able to gasp for a breathe, and Nat grimaces as she looks down into the bowl.

She tastes the ends of her short hair in her mouth, and when she goes to move them it proves useless. She gets sick all over again. The bile burns at her throat and through her nostrils as she violently heaves out her dinner from last night.

The next time she is able to catch her breathe she is careful to keep her eyes closed and her gasping to a minimum; lest she want to smell her own sick again and go for round three.

“Nat?” Steve’s voice calls to her, following a light knock on the door. “Nat, are you ok in there?”

She groans, loud enough for him to hear, and without picking her head up off the seat of the toilet.

“Ok, Nat, I’m coming in.”

Of course he is.

She doesn’t bother trying to argue with him or pretend like everything is fine. Instead, she musters up the strength to pillow her head properly on her elbow and tilt slightly to the side so that she can at least look at him.

The door only opens a crack with her feet blocking it. There really isn’t room for two people in here – at all – but Steve manages to slip in anyway and closed the door behind him.

---

Nat has seemed a little off all morning.

Steve first noticed her color seemed pale as they were leaving the motel. For the first minute or two, he had chalked it up to the morning light. But she’s been so quiet and clearly in her head. He has been trying to work out if it’s stress, planning, or potentially morning sickness.

That last one still seems surreal to consider, and yet he is the most suspicious of it.

“I can’t tell if this goes in the ‘pregnant’ or ‘dying’ category.” She croaks, bringing him back to the moment.

He does his best to smile for her. Currently, she is kneeling in a sweaty heap before him on the floor of a diner’s ladies’ room. Her head is propped lazily in the crook of her elbow on the seat of the toilet, with her hair falling over her forearm and dangling over the bowl.

“Is there an answer that doesn’t make it my fault?” He asks, and she huffs, like she is trying to laugh.

Any hope of that, however, is unfortunately lost when she starts to pick up her head. Her hair falls against her cheek and she grimaces as the bile caked into the tips slides against her face.

“Here, let me help.” He more instructs as opposed to offers, but she doesn’t argue with him.

He crouches down, and thanks to the close quarters of the room that is all he has to do in order to get her situated between his knees.

“Can I borrow this?” He asks, his fingers gently prodding at the hair tie she keeps secured around her wrist.

“Go for it.” She says, holding her hand up for him.

He takes the hair tie, and as he works on gathering the upper layers of her hair back into a topknot she reaches her arm up to flush the toilet.

“You know this is the women’s room, right Rogers?” She asks as he finishes tying her hair up.

“You know you were turning green walking in here?” He asks in return, “Believe me, the waitress isn’t worried about me.”

She groans, and rather than flopping her head forward against the toilet she leans herself back against his chest.

He moves with her, his arms circling her, and it isn’t on purpose, but one of his hands slides palm flat over her belly, and at that point he can’t bring himself to pull away.

There isn’t anything there to feel yet, especially not underneath her sweatshirt zipped over a t-shirt, and the denim of her jeans still as snuggly secured around her waist as ever. Yet, he knows that hidden beneath all the normal, their child is beginning to grow.

He presses his hand a touch more firmly against her, just long enough to keep her attention as he presses a kiss to her temple.

“Come on.” He whispers to her, and he slides his hand to her hip, beginning to nudge her up. “Sam’s getting the food to go. We’ll go back to the motel and you can lay down.”

---

Nat hasn’t taken a lot of sick days in her lifetime; they don’t tend to be one of her employment benefits. But, technically, she is off the clock right now, so maybe everything balances out.

Anyway, she feels a lot better once she is out of the diner and into the fresh air. Her stomach is still a little uneasy, so before they arrive back at the motel she convinces the boys to stop in at a gas station where she picks up one bottle of water and one bottle of Gatorade, along with a box of mini saltine crackers.

She’s glad they stopped, because it turns out her body doesn’t want to hold down anything more than that today.

She puts her leftovers from the diner in the fridge until lunchtime, at which point she passes them over in favor of eating two handfuls of crackers. By dinner she knows she needs to at least try eating some real food, so when Steve suggests ordering Chinese she asks for some soup, and promises she will be ok waiting here for him and Sam to get back.

She probably would have been too, had she not opened up her container from the diner to try and test one bite of something other than crackers before she winds up regretting the soup.

So now she is kneeling on the tile of the motel bathroom floor, curling in more and more on herself by the minute. She flushes the toilet with one hand and pushes with the other at the strands of hair which have fallen from the tie Steve did for her earlier.

She whines shamelessly as she eases down from her knees and onto her side. She pillows her head with one arm as she sucks in deep breathes, and the other hand she slides over her stomach much like Steve had earlier at the restaurant.

She’s been careful, up until this morning, to keep her distance from… it.

It sounds ridiculous, because for one thing it is literally inside of her. For another, she hasn’t exactly been doing a standout job of emotional distance keeping. She keeps daring to hope, to imagine, and then earlier when Steve placed his hand over the surface of her stomach she thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world that it actually made her feel a little better; like the thing inside of her might be real, and if it’s real, it somehow knew Steve was there.

She breathes in through a wave of tears and nausea. She presses her hand against her belly with a little more pressure, cupping her flesh and grounding herself somewhere between the moment and the fantasy.

“You in there kid?” She murmurs, her voice thick and raspy from vomiting. “Hm?”

She slips her fingers under the black denim of her waistband, stroking lightly over her flesh even though it is far too early for a baby to feel any kind of touch.

Still, she can’t seem to stop daydreaming.

“I think you’re in there.” She finally admits aloud, “The question is, are you where you’re supposed to be?”

Because that would be her luck. She and Steve have been sleeping together in the fun way for about seven months now, but she can’t say for sure when their combined serums started regenerating anything. With her luck, she only has part of a uterus, or just her ovaries and a fallopian tube, or some other incomplete combination of parts. She can already see the horror on the ultrasound tech’s face on Thursday. They will press that wand down on her stomach and tell her the pregnancy isn’t viable. They will tell her they are so sorry, but the only course of action now is to abort what’s there before it progresses any further and kills her.

She slides her hand still against her skin in an attempt to will away the nightmare. She tries to bring back a little bit of the daydream; the fantasy that she will go in on Thursday and everything will be ok.

“Everything will be ok.” She whispers the words aloud, as though speaking them will somehow make it true. “Everything will be ok, baby. We’re ok.”

“Nat?” Steve calling her name and the door opening out in the main room is the best answer her prayers are going to get.

“In here.” She calls back, swallowing down more bile and more pleas. “Out in a minute.”

Chapter 5

Wednesday it’s pouring rain out, so the three of them are confined to the motel room.

Nat is just fine with that, personally. She wakes up queasy yet again and drags her feet on eating anything other than her crackers.

“We can get you more soup.” Steve offers at one point. She had managed to hold down the wonton soup from the Chinese place last night; she even finished her bowl.

She cranes her head up to better let him see the crinkle of her nose, because as tempting as the offer of more soup is, she isn’t in love with the idea of moving into an upright position; let alone venturing out into the rain.

He would probably go alone, maybe take Sam with him. Leaving her here curled up on their bed whilst he braves the storm for her is probably his intention, and she doesn’t know exactly how to feel about that.

“Maybe later.” She says, and promptly flops her head back down, “I just got comfy.”

It isn’t a lie. Later she might be itching to move after having been cooped up all day, and venturing out to get her own food would be the perfect remedy. But for now her stomach is finally starting to settle. The sounds of rain pattering down outside, and the news playing on a low volume on the TV make the small motel room feel cozy rather than cramped.

She’d finally concede to the need to lay down about half an hour ago. Steve was already sitting on his side of their shared bed, flipping through a novel he’d picked up somewhere in their travels. She flopped down her on her side next to him with her head at the foot of the bed and her bare feet tucked up under her pillow for warmth. She is curled around her box of saltines like a snake coiled around a treasure, and when he emerges from the shower Sam shoots her a look of pity and soon drops her Gatorade into her snack space.

Steve frowns at her as Sam moves on. She knows he is likely still debating clarifying who exactly he is volunteering to get her soup. She’s grateful he doesn’t end up saying anything, and rather, he shifts his book into one hand and sets the other on her thigh.

Nat could fall asleep right here and now. Between the lulling atmosphere of the room, the lack of caffeine in her system, and Steve’s hand rubbing gentle on her leg, Nat can’t stop her eyes from fluttering closed. She could drift off and not be surprised in the least if she weren’t to wake until late tonight. The idea is so appealing-

“Shit.”

Her eyes snap open at Sam’s whispered curse.

She props herself up on her elbow and crawls up on her hands and knees. Steve leans forward next to her, his eyes equally glued to the television as he sets aside his book and Sam turns up the volume.

“The ship appears to be extra-terrestrial in origin, and much of the Greenwich Village neighborhood has already been destroyed. Witnesses have reported a sighting of Spider-Man…”

The broadcast floods every one of Nat’s senses. She can’t tear her eyes away from the images of a shining red and gold suit being thrown past the camera, and parts of what were once buildings and cars being hurled as weaponry by these giant mechanical tentacles. The words hammer against her eardrums like sirens. This isn’t just Tony; the damn kid is in the fray.

A new wave of nausea swirls in her stomach, her skin feels clammy, and suddenly the room smells stale and suffocating as a horrible realization hits her over the head.

It’s time to go back.

Nat closes her eyes and sits back on her haunches. She gives the nausea and whatever other feelings of panic flooding through her right now exactly five seconds to settle, and when she opens her eyes again there is a dull buzzing growing louder under the sound of the broadcast. Steve is the culprit; now on his feet and pulling his old phone from his pocket.

He should have gotten rid of that thing a long time ago. She has – in fact - told him that many times. But he’s always brushed her off. He’s said it hasn’t brought him trouble yet, and if it ever does, he will fight his way out and deal with it then.

He’s kept it for this moment. Whether he’s admitted it or not, he has kept it knowing that somehow, in some world-ending way, today would come.

He flips it open, and it feels like the final nail in the coffin.

“Tony.” He says, and then it’s a beat, his brow furrowing in a confused way that Nat wasn’t expecting. Then.. “Bruce.”

Talk about unexpected.

She glances to Sam, who is equally surprised; enough so he’s frozen with the car keys in his hand and is returning her look. The two of them come to a silent agreement whilst Steve listens to whatever Bruce is saying on the other end; whatever this is, it is very, very bad.

“Vision?” Steve asks, and this time when Nat and Sam look his way he acknowledges them. He has this crease in his forehead and an impatience ticking in the way he shuffles on his feet. He knows they’re trying to put together their next moves, and knows he is going to have to explain.

Speaking of explaining, Nat gets the feeling that is what Bruce is trying to do at this point. Steve looks more and more confused by the second, and it’s longer this time before he speaks again.

“I might.” He finally says, his voice and his glance to her and Sam indicating he’s wrapping up. “We’ll check it out. Thanks Bruce, bye.”

He sighs as he hangs up, and spends a moment staring down at the phone. Nat gets up to her feet, snagging her Gatorade with her, just in case.

She isn’t blind to the way Steve’s eyes linger on her. She swallows, but inclines her head. They can’t… They can’t ignore the fact that she’s pregnant – most likely pregnant, at least – but, they also can’t ignore whatever was on the other end of that phone.

---

Steve is starting to think he should have been listening to Nat all these months and thrown away that cell phone.

In the blink of an eye, the three of them have gone from a rainy day in the room, to packing up their things and driving through the storm, boarding the Quinjet Nat and some old friend from some old mission have stashed away up in the mountains, to Scotland, to make sure Wanda and Vision are still alive.

To make matters worse, the answer they find to that question, would be ‘barely’.

“Why do I know that is them?” Sam asks as he pilots the jet into the air territory of Edinburg, and already they can see four neon bright laser beams cutting through the night sky.

“Because of course it is.” Steve answers, heading from his seat to the back of the jet. “We’re gonna want to come at them from all angles. Drop me first, then catch up.”

“Aye-aye Cap.”

Walking out of the main cockpit of the jet, Steve is still shaking his head. He really, really should have thrown away that phone.

Of course, he still would have seen the news this morning. By now reports are circulating that Tony Stark has disappeared; not-so-coincidentally in the aftermath of that fight. Loath as he is to accept it; that phone doesn’t make a difference. They would still be here right now had he not gotten that call. This is still the people they are, and the lives they lead.

The quiet life just isn’t what they have.

Nat is already in the back of the jet when he arrives. She is securing the straps of her tactical vest. Laid out on the bench next to her she has a chest plate ready to go, with two slots for a pair of tonfa at the back.

Her eyes flit up to him. There is no guardedness or challenge in them; she knows he trusts her judgement and her abilities to keep herself safe. Yet, it’s like the very air is demanding they acknowledge their new situation in some way.

“I think we’re going to miss that appointment.” He says, picking up the chest plate and handing it to her.

“Looks like it.” She agrees in a soft voice, and she accepts the armor from him.

He watches as she secures that to herself, and then pulls a set of arm plates from the storage case at her left. She lays the first plate over her bicep and holds it in place with her middle and ring fingers while her thumb and other fingers grab at the strap and bring it around to snap with practiced ease. She moves on to the forearm plate next, and then her other bicep, and by the time she is snapping the clasps of her right forearm she is giving him an amused little grin and he realizes just how intensely he’s been staring.

“I’m a realist, Rogers.” She says, “Sometimes a pessimist. But I’m not reckless.”

He nods, and over the jet’s engines he thinks he hears the sounds of a battle. They’re getting closer, and so he goes and takes his place across from her as to be ready when Sam drops the landing bay door.

Well, semi-ready. They likely still have another few minutes, so he stands slouched against the wall and returns to watching Nat.

“What if I just want to ask how you’re doing?”

She pauses on her final strap and cuts her eyes up at him in warning. Her emotions are not an aspect of this which she wants to get into right before the mission.

“I haven’t thrown up since we first got in the air.” She remarks, shifting the conversation back towards the hard facts. “That’s good.”

He chuckles, and after she loads her tonfas into their sheathes she grabs ahold of the security handle by the door. She’s right to; Sam will be opening the hatch any second. So, Steve grabs hold of the handle on his side.

They lock eyes from across the hanger, and despite the fact that they are about to jump into battle, this little grin tugs at the corner of her mouth.

It’s the real answer to his question, she realizes. They may not technically know for sure that she is pregnant, but the evidence is overwhelmingly pointing that way. She’s already told him she would want the baby so long as the confirmation comes back that the pregnancy is safe for her to carry. But this little grin, it’s the hint of happiness; of hope she hasn’t found the words for yet.

Steve isn’t sure how it is that despite everything she’s been through - all the torture, the abuse, and combat that she never asked to see – she has managed to keep the light inside of her.

However she’s managed it, her resilience is by far one of the things he admires most about her. It’s something he suddenly realizes he would hope their child would never need, but would inherit from her all the same. Along with her resilience he would hope the baby gets her kind heart, her smile – especially when she thinks nobody is looking -, and the fire which ignites in her eyes whenever someone dares to threaten her or somebody she loves.

The bay door drops, and Steve shoves all those thoughts of the baby away to be examined later. For now he spots a train passing over a bridge below, and he makes that his landing target.

---

Nat hangs back with Sam to land the jet after Steve jumps. They find a spot on the roof of a warehouse to land, and Steve rides the train all the way into the station where the lights from the fight have disappeared into.

She and Sam end up less than a minute behind Steve, which is a good thing, because Vision already has a massive tear down his chest that would have killed him already if he were human.

It’s a hard fight. The kind Nat hasn’t fought in a long, long time. It takes the combined efforts of herself, Steve, and Sam to subdue the two alien creatures who have beaten Vision within an inch of his life. Then, the fight is over as quickly as it started. The creatures are extracted away in a tractor beam, leaving the five of them behind to lick their wounds.

“I thought we had a deal.” Nat chides as she watches the bay door close as they take off. “Stay close, check in, don’t take any chances.”

“Sorry.” Wanda doesn’t exactly sound sincere in her apology, “We just wanted time.”

She wouldn’t have expected it, but the excuse strikes a bit of a nerve in Nat. Enough that she marches right past Wanda and Vision, and Steve, on her way to her seat and sits down telling herself that snapping at Wanda isn’t going to do any good. They all want time. They all want that little bubble they have been living in for the past two years. They have all been watching the clock counting down, not sure exactly when it is going to hit zero, but knowing their bubble will be gone when it does.

They all want that bubble to be real.

She thinks back to this morning. Back to pretending everything could be easier. She thinks about all the mornings she’s woken with an arm slung over Steve, or his over her. Back to all the late-night drives, and early morning coffee runs. All the time’s Sam has joked with motel clerks, waitresses, and barflies about her and Steve being a married couple, and at some point they stopped giving him more argument than an eyeroll. She thinks about the other night at the bus stop, the words “we’re having a baby” coming off his lips like this could be no different for them than it is for any other couple; for any real couple.

Her stomach flips and brings her back to the present. She reaches down for her Gatorade and takes a sip, and that seems to be enough to keep her lunch where it belongs. Still, she tips her head back, closes her eyes, and begins to count the hours until they land back in New York.

Chapter 6

Notes:

Warning: (Non-graphic) descriptions of miscarriage (of sorts) ahead! If miscarriage is a trigger for you PLEASE proceed with caution. This will be an important part of the plot and it will come up again in future chapters, and it will have a huge impact on the plot. So, if this is as far as you go with this story, I completely understand and I thank you greatly for reading this far. It has been an honor.

If miscarriage is a trigger for you but you wish to continue on reading, be forewarned that it will come into play after T'Challa's line "Up, General, up! This is no place to die." So, right when you see that, just know what is coming. There will also be a summary posted at the end of the chapter, giving a brief and light-detailed breakdown of what happened, so if at any point you wish to stop reading this chapter but still want to try continuing with the story in the next one, feel free to read that instead of the chapter and you will be all caught up!

Tags for the story have been updated accordingly! I wanted to wait until this chapter was up to put in the tags because - though this direction has been my plan from the start - sometimes I adjust plots as I am writing and I wanted to be SURE I was going to commit to this before I put up such serious tags.

If there are any tags which anyone feels I missed, please let me know!

Ok, that is all I have for notes, strap in for angst!

Nat closes her eyes and tucks her chin, just barely managing to keep her head from smashing against the ground as she lands harshly on her back. All around her pillars of earth shoot up and quickly block out the light, the last thing she sees is Groot plowing his fists into the Earth. One pillar erects itself between her right arm and her side, while on her left the earth squeezes her arm in and crowds her leg so that her knee is awkwardly bent over it. For a moment, she thinks this might be the end. She is being buried alive and Thanos’ next move is going to be to open up the ground underneath her, and she will sink so deep that the lava at the Earth’s core will burn her up.

Maybe she is more pessimistic than she likes to admit.

Fortunately for her, her imprisonment stops at the entombment.

She coughs away crumbs of dirt as they fall onto her face. Outside her tent, she can still hear that sounds of what can barely be considered a battle. Thanos has swatted them each away like flies. A team comprised of enhanced soldiers, master strategists, whatever Groot is, and some of the most advanced technology on the planet, and he has discarded them all with the wave of his hand.

Nat manages to wriggle one of her arms up to her face to wipe more dirt from her eyes. She breathes steadily, and assesses her confinement. She rolls one ankle with success, and the other is stopped by one of the pillars, but she would rather that than a burst of pain. She already has her left arm, and her right she tries to raise but gets maybe an inch before her hand taps the face of another pillar.

“Ok.” She breathes, looking around at the few holes in the earth tent’s structure. Patches of sunlight are few and far between, but they’re enough that her eyes can trace the outline of the pillars.

She rolls her ankles again in experiment. The left is the one with more freedom, but also is attached to her knee bent up at that odd angle. Her right leg is pinned pretty tight at the calf, but she has almost full use of that arm.

Small movements are going to be her friends here.

She kicks lightly on her right, slowly inching her leg higher and closer to freedom. On her left, she digs her heel in until she can make this small hopping motion onto her foot. She grunts and struggles, and rolls her body as sideways to her right as she can. With her hands on either side of one pillar she digs her fingers into the earth until she has carved herself some handholds. She is inching herself up, slowly but surely dragging herself out, and trying to gauge how far her leg can go like this when everything outside suddenly goes quiet.

Too quiet.

Her panting breaths echo off the walls of her tent, and she just barely manages to claw her way closer to one of the cracks between the pillars as she hears T’Challa’s voice.

“Up, General, up! This is no place to die.”

She sees him, hurrying towards someone on the ground, then… he’s gone in a cloud of dust, leaving a stunned Okoye gaping at where he just was.

Defeat begins to sink into Nat’s chest. Confusion and understanding are at war in her mind as more dust billows past her peephole.

Then, her heart truly sinks.

It’s like a gust of nothing inside of her. No blood, no pain, just a mildly irritating sensation of more dirt on her skin but this time it’s seeped between her thighs, and then that’s gone too.

Her eyes blow wide with terror and fury in equal measures. She begins clawing at the pillars keeping her trapped here with a renewed urgency. She kicks with both her legs until the pillar finally gives and she tumbles out of her tomb. Ahead of her, Okoye has just barely gotten to her feet herself. She is still standing and staring around in shock, and Nat pays her no mind.

She runs.

Her feet hammer hard against the earth. She tears around the bend of trees to another side of the clearing. This can’t be true, it can’t be real, she must have missed something trapped underneath that pile of dirt and unable to see whatever truly happened.

When she sees Steve crouched on the ground, she stumbles to a stop.

Vaguely, she is aware of Bruce in the mech suit behind her. Him and Rhodes, and Thor, and this anthropomorphic racoon sitting on a log with its head hung and tears in its eyes. But, all she sees is Steve.

Steve, kneeling over Vision’s grey, lifeless body on a bed of dust on the forest floor. Her hand goes to her stomach automatically as a disgusted nausea swirls there; far too different than what she has felt the last few days.

All of the “wrong” she has felt for the past few weeks suddenly isn’t there. She feels like herself again, and it is the most sickening feeling she has ever felt.

Just as Rhodes asks aloud what is happening, Steve collapses onto his ass, and Nat feels hot tears prick at the corners of her eyes.

God no. Her mind’s eye shows her this nightmare scenario where he keeps falling onto his back. Where he would look up at her as he too fades away into dust, and she would have to stand there and watch him go, until there would be nothing left of him and her knees would finally buckle. She’d sink there in the pile of dust, fingers of one hand skimming it, the other still pressed to her belly.

Thankfully, Steve doesn’t dissipate away. He stays solidly sat in front of her, catching his breath, as reality dawns over them all.

“Oh God.” He whispers, and for a long moment, those words hang in the still air as the last spoken.

Eventually, Okoye comes limping into the clearing. She is still looking about wildly, distraught, and Nat can’t say she doesn’t share the sentiment. The others start to look and move around too, calling out for the likes of Sam and some of the Wakandan soldiers who followed them this far into the battlefield.

Steve, however, turns over his shoulder and looks up at her.

His eyes rake her over, and Nat has to bite her lip to keep her tears from spilling when his gaze lands on the hand she still has pressed over herself and she sees his own ragged breath before he looks to her to assuage his fears.

She wishes more than anything that she could give him that.

She offers him her other hand. He stares at it a minute, still sitting there catching his breath, like he isn’t ready yet to move from the pit of defeat. But eventually he takes her hand and lets her pull him to his feet. She doesn’t waste any time. She helps him up and immediately wraps her arms around his shoulders.

She doesn’t worry about the others. They don’t know the details of the last two years, and that is what she is counting on. All the others know is that she and Steve were the only two to evade the authorities completely in the last two years, and that they went to retrieve Wanda and Vision as a trio with Sam. They know that the two of them have traveled and only had each other to confide in for some length of time in the past two years. They know they have always been friends. They won’t question this display as Nat stands up on her toes to bury her face in Steve’s shoulder, or the way his arms wrap around her waist in a tight hold.

“It’s gone.” She whispers to him, too quiet for anyone else to hear.

His already ragged breath stutters in her ear. He pulls back, his hands remaining firm on her side and on her hip as his eyes search her for a hint of uncertainty.

God she wishes she were uncertain.

---

“It’s gone.”

Nat whispers those two words into his ear, and Steve would consider it a miracle he doesn’t collapse back to the ground.

He pulls back from her. There is a glassiness to her eyes, one which she blinks away quickly, and Steve forces himself to do the same.

He drops his hands from her side, and as she steps back from him he gives her fingers a partial squeeze before he faces the others.

Those who are still here haven’t wandered far. Most of them are too caught up in stumbling about and scanning for survivors to have witnessed this small moment between himself and Nat. Bruce is the only one obviously diverting his attention; pretending to be frustrated by the damage the battle caused to his Iron Mech suit.

“Come on.” Steve says, “Let’s get back to the palace. Take stock.”

He has no idea how they are supposed to do that, but on the trek back they begin to adopt of a system of keeping their eyes and ears peeled, and collecting disoriented Wakandan soldiers as they go.

For every survivor who joins their caravan, they also find themselves marking a body. That is the hardest pill to swallow. Thanos turned a countless number of living beings to dust with a snap of his fingers, but there are still bodies. So far they have counted one hundred and nine soldiers who gave their lives before Thanos snapped his fingers. One hundred and nine who had to feel the pain of dying, and for what?

Steve stops and watches as Nat crouches and tags another body. She hasn’t spoken a work since the clearing, and he doesn’t blame her. Overall, very few of them have said much. It’s been a somber walk, the only real conversation coming from Bruce or Rhodes whenever another found soldier asks what happened.

“I should’ve asked if you’re ok to walk.” He says as Nat stands up, not a hint of pain on her face nor in her body language.

Even if it isn’t physical, he’s sure the pain is there.

The hard part is going to be getting her to talk about it.

“I’m fine.” She answers, falling into step beside him. “It’s like it was never there.”

Steve has to swallow down the threat of bile, as well as the urge to reach out and grab her hand.

“It was Thanos.” She says, her eyes locked on the palace in the distance. “I know I didn’t specify.”

Steve squints against the evening sun, and how the light glints off the shattered edges of what was one the palace’s large windows.

“I know it was.”

As they trek on in silence, Steve can’t help but to play the battle back in his mind.

Okoye landed hard on the ground, large beams of dirt shot up from the earth and pinned Nat between them. Groot slammed his fists into the ground and when the earth moved at his command Steve slid right under Thanos. He got in a grand total of three hits. One to Thanos’ knee, one to his side, and one good uppercut. Then, Thanos moved to grab him, to throw him away like he had all the others.

And Steve grabbed on.

It took two hands and all his strength just to keep Thanos’ hand inches from his chest, but he managed. He dug in his heels. He knew Wanda and Vision were right behind him. They were out of time. Vision knew they were out of time and Steve could feel the runoff of Wanda’s magic as she was destroying the stone. He couldn’t let Thanos touch them. He couldn’t let this go any further.

Then, he was out cold.

He should have seen that coming. How could he have been so stupid he didn’t see that coming? One punch; that was all it took for Thanos to take him down. He should have been smarter than that.

He should have been stronger than that.

---

When they reach the palace and start comparing notes Nat does the only thing she knows how to do. She puts her shit aside, and she plays her part.

She finds a few computers in the war room that weren’t destroyed in the fight, and she turns on different news outlets from all over the world. Understandably, the world is even more confused than they are here in the center of Wakanda. Every monitor shows her reports of grief and hysteria. In addition to the lives Thanos took, there is a climbing tally of other deaths caused by his actions. Car accidents, plane crashes, surgeons and other doctors vanishing mid-procedure, house fires, the list goes on and on.

In addition to monitoring the media, Nat compares notes with Nakia and Rhodes, who have found themselves in charge of verifying the survivors within Wakanda and they’re own team respectfully.

“I haven’t been able to get ahold of Clint.” Rhodes tells her solemnly. “I’ll try again. I’m still trying to reach Scott Lang too. And Tony…”

He can’t bring himself to say it, and Nat nods in understanding. Tony is still M.I.A., and considering he disappeared after a battle with aliens and their fleeing ship, it’s safe to say they are going to continue struggling to get ahold of him.

If he’s even still out there.

“Sounds like a plan.” She says, “I can try them too, if you want.”

He gives her this small, grateful smile, like he would want for nothing more. She can only imagine the calls he has made today. She knows the first was to Pepper. She knows Pepper answered on the first ring and in a fit of hysterics, and she and Happy are fielding the chaos back at The Avengers Compound in New York right now. Despite it being good news that those two are still here, Nat knows it wasn’t an easy call. She can only imagine how awfully similar the other answered calls he’s made have been.

“There’s just one thing I need to take care of first.”

“Take your time.” Rhodes says, “I’ll let you know if I hear from them in the meantime.”

Nat makes sure to smile gratefully as he leaves her be, but once she is alone, she suddenly feels as though she might stop breathing at any moment.

She has never felt much in the way of anxiety. There isn’t any room for it in the lives she’s lead, and there never has been. But she has always had a thorough understanding of her own body, and that has been essential to her survival.

It was essential even in the Red Room. The procedures and injections which she and the other widows were subjected to were all done without consent, but not without explanation. Whether it came beforehand or after the fact, everything was always laid out for them in great detail. Dreykov always made sure they knew exactly what they were capable of.

Now, even knowing with upmost certainty the baby is gone, not knowing what she is left with is quickly eating her alive.

She ducks out of the war room and heads to the laboratory. The palace has been such a flurry of activity these past few hours that no one questions her. In fact, the only questions she gets come from a handful of palace staff, asking if she has seen Okoye or Queen Ramonda, and she gives whatever answers she has.

The laboratory is significantly quieter than anything upstairs. Since Shuri was dusted away with Thanos’ snap Bruce is the only one left around here who understands the majority of the equipment, and so anyone who had initially followed him down has since left him to his own devices and gone to make themselves useful elsewhere.

“Bruce?” Nat calls as she steps out of the elevator.

“In here.”

She follows his call, her steps slow as her eyes wander in awe around the high-tech equipment.

“This place blows Tony’s lab out of the water.” She remarks as she wanders into the small side-room where Bruce is hovering by a computer desk.

“I know.” He says, “You know before I was hoping he’s still alive just based on principle. Now, I want him alive so I can see his face when he sees this.”

Nat manages a chuckle, because if nothing else, that certainly would be a sight. She looks around a bit more before broaching the subject of what she came in here for. She is trying to figure out the different types of equipment. Most of it she isn’t entirely sure what it is she’s looking at, but she thinks she pick out which ones are specially designed by Shuri, and what are more standard issue around the globe.

“Shuri has medical equipment down here, right?”

“Yeah.” Bruce answers, immediately looking at her with worried eyes over the top of his computer. “Why? Did you get hit?”

She wants to scoff, but it’s a valid question. It’s been hours since the battle, but she would get stabbed or shot and wait this long to bring it up, given the circumstances.

“No, I didn’t get hit.” She says, wrapping her arms around herself as she tries to will herself to have this conversation.

“Ok…” Bruce trails when she has been quiet for too long. “Did someone else get hit?”

She shakes her head, “No.” She says, and to hell with it, this is going to be an awkward conversation no matter what. “I um… I need you to check on something for me.”

“Check on what?”

Nat sighs, and honestly, right now, a part of her wishes she could have just been one of the dust victims.

“For a couple months now, while we’ve been hiding out, Steve and I have been kind of… a thing.”

It is the lamest, most pathetic explanation which she has ever given for anything in her life. A thing? She doesn’t even know what “a thing” means. But, she doesn’t know what she and Steve are either; not really. They’re friends, she knows that much. Saying they’re “fuck buddies” seems a little brash, but “friends with benefits” isn’t something she wants to say out loud. Not to Bruce, at least.

“Oh, yeah.” Bruce says, sounding only marginally dejected. “I was wondering about that earlier. You know, with you guys hugging and all.”

Great, so maybe that wasn’t as excusable as she’d thought.

“Anyway, what’s that got to do with anything medical?” He asks, “I mean it’s not like you can…”

Whether it is the look she is sending his way or if he is just realizing that his trail of thinking really is the only explanation, he gets it. She sees happiness and despair fighting for dominance in his expression, and she knows he understands what’s happened to her.

A portion of it, at least.

“We think the super serum in Steve’s DNA combined with mine at some point, and the healing factors regenerated some things.”

“Things like… Just so I’m clear, we’re talking about your… You know-”

“My reproductive system?” She asks, taking pity on him and his stammering. “Yeah. Two pink lines on the pregnancy test were a pretty big tip off.”

He gasps, and she thinks it’s a happy sound, and that only makes her dig her fingers even deeper into her sides.

“That part doesn’t matter now.” She warns him, before he can get one congratulating word out. “We didn’t get a chance to have it confirmed, but I felt it turn to dust when Thanos snapped his fingers.”

“What?” He whispers, nearly tripping as he comes out from behind his desk. “Nat-”

“I just need you to tell me what is there.” She says, steeling her features, daring him with her tone to try again at telling her how sorry he is. “Any baby that was there is gone. But I need to know what exactly regenerated. If any of it is still missing or if it’s all intact, or if Thanos somehow took away whatever I had and I’m back where I started.”

She can practically see him shoving his pity and his condolences away in a little emotional box. She feels a little bad, because maybe the graceful thing to do would have been to hear out his apology and pretend it was of any comfort. But, sue her, she doesn’t have that kind of energy right now.

“Of course.” He says, “Come on, let’s see what Shuri has laying around here.”

Notes:

Summary: We have concluded Infinity War (The chapter begins with the final Thanos battle) and the baby is - unfortunately - a victim of the snap. Nat can tell this right away, but I promise you there is no blood or pain for Nat, the baby was dusted just like all the other victims. Nat has informed Steve that the baby was dusted and Steve has not processed his feelings yet, but there is a hint that he blames himself for Thanos having won. The chapter ends with Nat asking Bruce to use Shuri's equipment to give her an ultrasound to check that - despite the baby being gone - her reproductive system really is back and is in tact. Bruce agrees, and that is where the chapter ends, the ultrasound is not shown (yet!)

Thank you all so much for reading and I really hope you can forgive me for this angst I am putting our characters through!

Chapter 7

In most cases, asking your ex to put a probe up your vagina and examine your insides – with your current “friend with benefits” present – probably isn’t the best idea. But, these are extenuating circumstances. For one thing, they’re all adults, who have problems bigger than a petty dating history. For another, Nat trusts Bruce, and she would rather him be doing this than anyone else they know.

“Ok.” Bruce says, turning his screen out so that she and Steve can see.

She called Steve down here once she and Bruce found the ultrasound machine. She had debated not, but it felt wrong doing this without him. Even if they never got to see it, it was his baby too. He deserves the confirmation it’s gone and the answers as to what its original chances of survival may have been just as much as she does.

Then there was this little voice she couldn’t quite silence in the back of her mind. What if… Just what if she’s wrong, and somehow, it’s still there?

“So, this is your uterus Nat.” Bruce says, and he shifts the prob a bit, and Nat squeezes her hand on the cushion of the exam table when he does, though it’s more due to nerves than the actual pressure of the probe.

It won’t be there. She needs to remember that. The baby won’t be there, and it is ridiculous that something in her is hoping otherwise.

Steve places his hand on her arm, because of course he does, and she really wishes she could relax under his touch.

“There are your ovaries, your fallopian tubes. I don’t see any cysts or scars. No baby, but, I know you were expecting that.”

She was, but it still hurts.

“So my body regenerated a whole set of organs, and I didn’t notice?” She asks, because frankly, the more she has been thinking about it, the more unsettling that has been.

“Actually, I think you did notice.” Bruce says, “You said you’d been feeling bloated?”

“And tired.” Nat reiterates, “But, I was pregnant.”

“Right.” Bruce says with a nod, “But, far as you knew, that wasn’t possible.”

He waits a beat, gives her a chance to answer, but she doesn’t. She’s too busy hanging on to his every conclusion, and finally he turns his attention fully from the screen and to her.

“Nat, I’m not going to assume anything.” He says, “But if I had to guess, you probably got pregnant not long after your uterus regenerated. You said you had been experiencing some of your symptoms for weeks. I think at least at the start, some of what you were seeing was from the hormonal shift of the regeneration.”

“What if that’s all this was?”

Nat tilts her head up at Steve’s question. She is fully prepared to demand he spell that question out; to suggest in no uncertain terms that she may never have been pregnant to begin with. That she didn’t feel their baby dissipate inside of her today. Go ahead, say that in those exact words.

But she stops when she sees the sadness still etched into every line of his face. Like somehow, the idea that it was never there at all is even worse for him than the fact that they lost it.

“I don’t think so.” Bruce’s voice is equally sad, and he moves the probe around again, returning to the visual of her uterus. “I’m not a gynecologist, but from what I can tell her uterine lining is thicker than what’s normal. Definitely something an embryo could have survived on.”

With that he turns off the machine and begins sanitizing the probe, and Nat does her best to put the word “survived” into the back of her mind. She scoots up on the table and maneuvers her feet out of the stirrups. She also rolls her eyes when she realizes that her peeling off the towel they had covered her lap with has resulted in Steve turning and watching the closed door, as though he thinks someone is going to come bursting in. That, and Bruce is very pointedly hunched over that sanitizing equipment.

She doesn’t bother making a joke about how little modesty matters to her right now. She just goes along with it, and waits until she’s pulled her pants back into place before she says anything.

“Thank you Bruce, for doing this.”

Suddenly cautious, Bruce peeks at her over his shoulder. When he realizes she is standing and fully dressed the tension in his shoulders seems to ease a bit.

“Of course.” He says, “Look, I don’t know if the baby was good or bad news for you guys or what. But Nat, everything in there looks like it should function normally. You should expect to start getting a period soon. Other than that…. Well, uh, I think… I think you guys should talk.”

Nat nods, and in her peripherals she notes that Steve does too. With that, Bruce tosses his gloves into the trash and then excuses himself from the room. He shuffles past her and Steve, and when he closes the door behind him, and it feels like he took all the air in the room with him.

---

The minute Bruce suggests that they should talk Steve feels like he is watching walls rise from the earth and consume Nat all over again.

He’s brought back to that motel parking lot. All over again he is holding that pregnancy test in his hands while Nat’s insistence that she must be dying grows by the minute. He can see so many possibilities suddenly before them, and before he can so much try and process any of them, Nat has grabbed onto the bleakest one and is digging in her heels. First, she had to be dying. Then - after entertaining the idea of the pregnancy - it had to be the thing which was killing her. She couldn’t believe in their baby until after Thursday, not out loud.

Christ, it’s Thursday.

That fact was not lost on Steve when he walked in here. It was all he could think about when Nat texted him, and all he could see as he watched that screen and kept one hand steady on the back of the exam chair, and the other on her arm; for his own comfort as much as hers.

It was all he could think of as he prayed that maybe, just maybe, “it’s gone” was rooted in fear. Maybe they would be lucky, and Bruce would find a resilient pea-sized baby still hanging on.

But, they aren’t so lucky, and now he is watching the walls rise up in Nat’s eyes.

“I don’t know what he expects us to talk about.” She says, hooking her thumbs into her pants pockets as she tries to be casual about this.

“Maybe he expects you to explain condoms to me.”

She chuckles, even if the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. Still, it’s something.
“Hey Nat-”

“I’m fine Steve.” She cuts him off, though he can see that even she knows she’s just given herself away; “Steve” is usually reserved for when she is either mad at him, or distinctly not fine. “What about you?”

He sighs, but he’ll roll with it for now. He takes a step back in order to give her some space, and winds up sitting on the edge of the exam bed.

“I think it’s going to hit me later.” He admits, “We lost a lot of people today.”

“Too many to count.” She agrees, and he nods.

They’re quiet for a minute. Maybe they’re trying to let it hit them here, while they have some privacy, and each other, but the fact of the matter is they did lose too many people to count today. Bucky, T’Challa, Wanda, Vision,… Sam.

Steve scrubs a hand over his face. Sam was the only other person who knew. It might be selfish, but he can’t help but to wonder what Sam would say if he were here right now. He’d probably be keeping everyone from looking for them. He’d keep coming up with things for Rhodes to check, or would be running triage with the wounded Wakandan soldiers.

Steve wonders what might have happened if he had dissipated away instead of Sam. He supposes Sam would be the one sitting here, and not him. He wouldn’t have let Nat do this alone. Sam would have stood by her side and he would still be sitting here now, asking her how she’s doing, and he would know as well as Steve does that the answer is not “I’m fine.”

Steve doesn’t want to imagine the sorrowful look Sam would be giving him had Nat been the one dusted away.

“If it’s all the same to you,” Nat’s voice pulls him from his thoughts, “I know I said I would want it if the pregnancy was safe, but given what happened today, I’d rather not go trying again anytime soon.”

For a moment, he feels like he has whiplash. He hadn’t even considered that.

“No.” He says, still unable to really imagine such a thing. “Me either.”

Maybe once upon a time, in another life, a simple life, the idea of him and Nat together and trying for a baby could feel like the right thing to do. But not right now. Maybe not ever. Not… Not after today.

He feels like he is being punched by Thanos all over again. They didn’t just lose some sort of possibility today. They lost something real, and living, and theirs.

“Nat.” He says, just as she is starting to look towards the door.

“Hm?” She hums, turning back to him, and he gives it a minute, trying to work out exactly what he wants to say to her.

“When this hits you, promise me you won’t go through it alone. Ok?”

She blinks away something. Maybe it’s a tear, or maybe it’s an argument. At this point Steve thinks she could go either way and – frankly – so could he.

“Ok.” She agrees, “Promise me the same?”

He nods, “Deal.”

She nods, satisfied, and that’s that.

---

Nat doesn’t have the heart to tell Steve she isn’t expecting this to “hit her” in the way it will eventually hit him.

She understands his point. She gets why he is expecting to grieve this loss as if it were something real. It wassomething real. She felt it dissipate, so it was real enough to do that. It was real enough that it counted. Thanos eradicated half of all living things, and the little thing inside of her fell victim. It was alive enough to do that.

That thought is bitter and it invades her waking thoughts and to drives her to doubling up on the coffee she is once again able to drink. She’d rather not be left alone with that thought at night, when it becomes so much harder to remember that it doesn’t matter if it was alive enough to count or not. For one thing, just because her uterus and other reproductive organs are intact, it doesn’t mean nothing would have gone wrong. Things very easily could have gone south. She doesn’t even know how far along she was, only that it had to have been early. Serum or not, with her history, she probably would have lost the baby regardless.

Kids were never in the cards for her. Even before her graduation, she had heard the rumors of the ceremony. Ohio was the last place she may have dared to dream that – somehow – she might be spared her fate, and even back then she knew it was a fantasy.

So, while Steve is expecting to grieve something which was real, Nat doesn’t see much of a point in grieving something she never should have had.

They spend a week in Wakanda. They run triage, and help Queen Ramonda address the masses of her country. Now she is someone who has lost everything. How is it fair that both T’Challa and Shuri were victims of Thanos? When Ramonda doesn’t even have T’Chaka to lean on in the aftermath? And she is expected to step forward and bring her country back from shambles in this time. She is expected to be the pillar of hope when so many are grieving. She stands before her people with her head held high, and her hands steady as she picks up the pieces of her government.

The people know what she’s lost, and that is the part Nat is truly in awe of. When she stands at the head of the tribal council the people all know the depths of her pain. They know her children are gone, and she acknowledges this to them, and then speaks of moving forward; how it is the only thing left for the world to do.

After the week, The Avengers head back to New York. Turns out Ross was among those who turned to dust, so he isn’t a problem they have to push through in order to get back into their old residences.

Not exactly how Nat wanted to avoid fighting him, but, it is what it is.

The first week back in New York Nat feels like she never sleeps. The fact of the matter is they’re spread too thin. They’re fielding calls and meetings from various diplomats left and right. They’re dispatching what is left of S.H.I.E.L.D. to nations which seem to have been devastated more than others, which are incredibly hard distinctions to make. They’re running in circles looking for their allies, and drowning trying to keep those they’ve found from spiraling over the edge of despair. Thor isn’t speaking. In fact, Nat isn’t sure that he’s eating. They’ve declared Scott a vanishing victim along with his partner, and Clint hasn’t answered one phone call despite the daily voicemails they’ve been leaving.

The only reason Nat knows he’s alive is because Happy told her so. Apparently the day after the battle, Clint showed up at the compound, demanding answers. His whole family were victims, and the news of that is nearly enough to finally break her. The mental images of Laura, Cooper, Lila, and Nathanial dissipating away is not a nightmare which she is looking forward to seeing. So, she does what she can to avoid it, and continues to work late into the night.

At five minutes to midnight Nat is cracking open her second Red Bull. They’ve turned the compound living room into a war room of sorts. The holo-table is running a constant loop of rising death tolls, and the computer at the desk has become a black hole of blaming emails and cries for help. Somebody has to answer those things, and Nat needs a break from the aimless research in the lab with Bruce and Rhodes.

Another few minutes and she gets up to go to the bathroom. Despite the confirmation that she is no longer pregnant, she still feels like she is peeing every hour of the day. Bruce says her hormones are still resetting, though personally, she thinks it’s more to do with her return to a diet of mainly caffeine.

Anyway, the nearest bathroom is technically a “men’s” bathroom. The distinction doesn’t mean much to her around here, and it never has. They only bothered labeling the bathrooms when Wanda moved in. She was young and traumatized as it was, they didn’t want to add the awkwardness of sharing a bathroom with mostly grown men.

So, she could go in there. But, she bypasses it anyway and walks the extra five feet to the women’s room, and upon walking in she immediately forgets urgency.

Pepper is slumped on the floor of the first stall. The door is hanging open and allowing Nat a clear view of her friend with her back against the wall, sweat clinging to her skin, and her long hair tied back in a haphazard braid.

“Stress or food poisoning?” Nat asks after it seems like she and Pepper have been staring at one another for too long without speaking.

Pepper closes her eyes and breathes in a deep sigh.

“Tony wanted a kid.” She answers, her voice strained.

Nat blinks, and immediately she takes in the scene before her with new eyes. This was her only two weeks ago. Something in the back of her mind whispers that she should be bothered by this. This should be what breaks her.

But how could it?

Pepper is her friend, and in the midst of all this death – in the midst of Tony still missing – she suddenly has this tiny promise of life which needs her attention and her energy.

If there is one thing Nat learned in her week of knowingly being pregnant, it’s that a baby forces you to consider the future; and the future hasn’t been something which has seemed real lately. She can’t imagine trying to think about a baby in Pepper’s circumstances, let alone long for it.

So, Nat sinks down next to Pepper. Back against the wall, knees bent, and Pepper bows her head in sadness.

“I hear saltines help with morning sickness.” Nat offers after a minute. “And Gatorade.”

Despite the tears in her eyes, Pepper chuckles. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They sit in more silence, for several minutes. Eventually Pepper begins to explain that before the fight with Thanos’ minions, she and Tony were out jogging, and Tony mentioned he’d dreamed that they had a kid. Then, the story is broken by Pepper dry heaving, and eventually real-heaving. She vomits up mostly bile, and when that’s done the two of them settle against the wall once again.

“I don’t even know why I took the test.” Pepper confesses, sniffling. “I wasn’t even late yet. But, Tony said that, and usually I feel cramps beforehand and I hadn’t, and he just got in my head.”

Nat hums, the next thing she knows Pepper is sick again. So, they deal with that, and this time when they slump against the wall in the aftermath Pepper sags into her side.

Nat wants to promise her that they will find Tony, but she can’t bring herself to make such a hollow promise. So, she does what she knows isn’t enough, but it’s all she can do. She flushes the toilet, and she fixes Pepper’s braid, and when Pepper thanks her for sitting here with her, she smiles and tells her it’s the least she could do.

Chapter 8

“This is a nightmare.”

It’s the only thing Steve can think to say anymore. They’ve been back in New York a little over a week, and the global death tolls are still climbing by the second.

Most of them are only sleeping an hour or so at a time, and usually on couches. It’s under the guise that they can be found and woken quickly and easily if they’re needed, but really, it’s more so that they won’t wake up alone. For Steve, it’s been two days since his last shower. Frankly, he always thought that if they ever came out of hiding, the first thing he would do would be to cut his hair again and shave off this beard. But the idea of doing those things feels wrong now. It feels like pretending this isn’t happening, and that everything is normal.

“I’ve had better nightmares.” Nat murmurs, her eyes glued to the holographic display of rising death tolls.

He doesn’t doubt that. He’s shared enough motel beds with her to know she rarely has pleasant dreams.

“Hey.” Rhode’s voice calls for them before Steve can think any further on how much he would rather be living in one of Nat’s nightmares right now. “So that thing just stopped doing whatever the hell it was doing.”

They don’t know what they’re walking into, but he and Nat abandon the holo-table and follow Rhodes down to the lab. “That thing” is a pager which was found on the streets of Manhattan. Specifically, it was next to Fury’s car. No sign of Fury, so they’re operating under the assumption that he vanished.

The idea that Fury disintegrated away into nothing is one of the worst parts of this nightmare. Ever since the attack in his apartment, Steve has learned that Nick Fury is like a cat with nine lives. If he’s gone, then maybe the world really is lost.

Turns out, the pager was a distress signal to a Carol Danvers. She shows up not thirty seconds after he and Nat take their look at the pager, and she doesn’t set off a single security measure on her way in.

She gives them what Steve thinks is an abridged rundown of her past, and she also helps them locate Fury’s personnel files on her to back up her claims. She was an Air Force pilot in the 80’s, and then she was exposed to the Tesseract while on a mission. Between the Tesseract and having been experimented on by aliens, she came out the other side with a whole slew of superhuman powers.

By the end of the night, Steve still isn’t decided on whether he trusts her or not. But it isn’t like they can be picky with their allies right now, and it helps that Rocket recognizes her reputation. He calls her “that light-up vigilante”, and frankly, her story isn’t any less trustworthy than Bucky’s. So, they tell her what happened. They’ve recounted the story so many times Steve could tell you the whole process by heart. Bruce starts, Nat picks up when he gets to Edinburg, then it’s his turn as soon as they get to the battle in Wakanda, and Thor makes himself scarce before they get to the end. Rhodes takes on the answering of whatever questions are thrown their way; God bless him for that.

At least Carol doesn’t have too many questions. She’s heard of Thanos and his plans for the universe before. She’s even run into his followers laying waste to different worlds or searching for the Infinity Stones.

She never thought he’d really pull it off.

Steve wants to be angry at her over that. If she’s faced Thanos’ minions before then maybe there was something she could have done differently. She could have stopped this all before it started.

He has to remind himself how low the chances of that really are. Even with the powers she possesses, she is just one person.

It isn’t fair to put their failure on her.

She doesn’t seem to share that sentiment.

She takes out a good deal of her anger on the trees outside of the compound. After she has properly vented, Rocket adapts some space-communication thing that she has so it will work with their computers. She is insistent on going back out there; maybe put together some allies to help her with the welfare of other planets.

It’s easy to see the thirst for vengeance still simmering under her skin. Steve only hopes one of these allies she plans to find will be able to keep her in check out there, before she gets herself killed.

A part of him almost hopes she won’t be so lucky. She seems like the type who if she dies, she is taking her enemy down with her.

That isn’t a part of himself he wants to admit exists.

“Wait.” Nat says to Carol just before she leaves.

When Carol turns, Nat walks towards her, and she walks her out the front door of the compound. Steve hangs back, still caught up in his thoughts of self-loathing.

A few minutes later the doors swoosh open again, and Nat returns alone. Steve inclines his head to her, letting her know he’ll walk back with her to the living room, and they can continue watching the death tolls as they were before.

“I asked her to keep an eye out for Tony.” Nat says as she falls into step beside him.

“Good.” Steve says, and he presses the button for the elevator.

They step inside, the doors close, the elevator starts to rise, and Nat reaches forward and stops it.

“Pepper’s pregnant.” She blurts out, before he has a chance to get the words out and question her actions.

For a moment, he doesn’t process what it is she’s said. She hasn’t told him she is pregnant. She hasn’t said Bruce was wrong, that she took another test because she just couldn’t believe the baby is gone, and it came back pregnant. She hasn’t said that scan was wrong. She hasn’t said that she is pregnant.

“Sorry, what?” He asks after a minute.

“I found her sick in the bathroom the other night.” She explains, and finally he remembers that she said Pepper. “Morning sickness doesn’t only happen in the mornings.”

“And… she’s sure?” He stammers, not sure what else to say.

“She said she took a test.” Nat shrugs, “She seemed sure. She said Rhodey knows, and she asked me to tell you. She doesn’t want to drag us all into one room and tell us like it’s some big announcement. She said that would feel too weird right now. Especially without Tony here.”

“Ok…” Steve drawls, still processing, and trying to figure out what part of this he is supposed to react to. “And how did you do? Finding her like that?”

“I was fine.” She says, her voice steady and hard to argue with. “I don’t think I was much help, but, I don’t know what would have been.”

“Did you tell her?”

“About before Thanos?” She asks, “No, I didn’t. I don’t want her to feel guilty.”

Steve hums. To Nat’s credit, she does sound “fine”. She is looking him in the eye when she needs to and casually watching the doors otherwise. Her voice is steady, her eyes are dry, and when they arrive on the main living floor there is a smile tugging at her lips as they step out of the elevator.

“I’m happy for her.” She confesses, her voice low so they aren’t overheard, but otherwise light, which is something none of them have been since before the fight.

Before Thanos.

She didn’t say she didn’t tell Pepper “about the baby”. She didn’t use the words “about losing the baby”. Not even “about me being pregnant.”

It was “Before Thanos.”

Those were her words, and Steve sees them for what they are.

He almost broaches the subject, but Rocket emerges from the lab and crosses their path before he has the chance.

---

Nat rubs at her eyes as she settles onto her bed. She is going to sleep tonight, she swears it. She just has a few things to take care of first.

She opens up her laptop and checks her inboxes. At this point, there really isn’t a purpose behind her VPNs or her coded subject lines for her emails. But, old habits die hard. Besides, there may be no point in her hiding her business, but the same can’t be said for the people she is trying to reach.

If any of them are still alive.

So far, she has reached out to Rick Mason, as well as another contractor she has gone through before, and neither has contacted her back. She has also sent various emails and letters to addresses Yelena, Alexei, and Melina might answer. She’s even tried getting ahold of some other ex-widows or contacts in and around Russia, hoping that someone can get back to her with the fate of her family.

So far, nothing.

She types out another email. This one, she writes both in Russian and in code. She’s tried reaching Yelena this way before, and while it hasn’t worked yet, she tries again. Then, she tries Alexei. Then, Melina.

Once she has sent the last email, refreshed her inbox, searched up the latest death notices from Russia, refreshed her inbox again, and then repeated the process, Nat finally closes her laptop.

She needs to go to sleep. At the very least she needs to change into some pajamas and make the effort to convince herself she will get real sleep tonight. She just… There are too many horrors to face in the real world. The idea sleeping long enough to see what’s waiting in her nightmares is a daunting one.

For a moment, one bitter thought slips through her defenses; it might not be so bad if she weren’t facing it alone.

At that, she forces herself to her feet with a groan. She didn’t mean to get used to sharing a bed with Steve while they were on the run. It just happened. Before they broke Sam out of prison it was just the two of them hiding out in a shared motel room. Sometimes there were two beds, but sometimes there was only one. Then Sam was a part of their group, and suddenly two beds still meant somebody had to share.

---

“So, how do we do this?” Sam had asked as the door shut behind the three of them.

It’d been a long day to say the least. After weeks of careful planning, they had finally broken him out of prison early this morning. They flew off in the Quinjet, and then while Steve and Sam took off in one direction on foot, Nat went in another. She handed the keys to the jet off to another former widow – Mila - as well as apologized for the trouble which might come her way traveling in the jet.

“Makes for more fun.” Mila had said with a shrug. “If it’s still in one piece when I’m done, you know where to go.”

Nat had nodded, as well as warned Mila the jet better be in one piece the next time she calls for the keys.

After sending Mila on her way, Nat had walked to the nearest town and found the boys at a Goodwill getting Sam a change of clothes.

Then, after a full day of losing federal heat, they’d made it to a motel.

“You’ve had a rough time on prison mattresses.” She had said, walking deeper into the room and dropping her backpack onto the first bed.

She had looked at Steve, “We’ve shared before.”

They had - here and there. In about three out of ten motel rooms that they had stayed in. They’d slept casually side-by-side, when they’d needed to.

“Wait, are you guys some kind of couple now?” Sam had asked as Steve accepted her invitation and came to set his own bag at the foot of the bed she’d claimed for them.

“Of course not.” He’d said, sitting on the bed and facing Sam. “But, sometimes we can only get a place with one-bed.” He’d looked to her then, as he reminded her “You know I’m comfortable on the floor.”

“We have enough problems.” She’d reminded him, rolling her eyes all the way to Sam. “No reason to add a bad back to the list.”

“A super soldier with a bad back.” Sam had mumbled with a snort, shaking his head as he accepted their explanation and made his way to the second bed. “Sure.”

---

Nat heard the call of bullshit in Sam’s tone that day, but she’d only rolled her eyes and smirked. There was nothing going on between her and Steve at that point. It was just Sam being Sam, and it was nice to have him back.

In retrospect, she wonders if he knew something they didn’t. At some point with her and Steve, things shifted. Sharing a bed became sleeping together; in more respects than one. At some point, Steve began to roll over in his sleep, and the two of them would wake up closer than when they went to bed. Sometimes, Nat would wake on her right side, with her head in the crook of Steve’s shoulder, or an arm thrown out over him.

At some point, Nat went from waking up and immediately rising for coffee, to lying there and watching the way Steve’s hair brushed over his forehead while he slept. At some point, she began counting the freckles on his face which are hardly noticeable during the day. At some point, if she awoke earlier than she’d planned, she would let her eyes close again and she would drift back off to the sounds of his soft snoring.

At some point during all her musings, Nat realizes she is standing with one hand resting flat against her belly.

She knows it’s a dangerous thing, but she allows herself to stay like that for a moment. She strokes her finger back once. The fabric of her t-shirt is rough under her touch,, so she slips her hand up under it to rest against her bare skin.

She isn’t so delusional as to get lost in a field of hope. She is coming up on the end – hopefully – of her first ever period; which has been an experience in and of itself. The cramps made themselves known before the first sign of blood, neither of which was pleasant. It’s been more blood than what she would have been expecting, but given what Bruce said during her ultrasound about her uterus looking survivable, she isn’t going to worry about it this month. At this point she isn’t feeling the cramps at all, and the blood is light enough she is debating taking this stupid pad out and just letting what’s left stain her underwear.

It's enough to ground her in reality. Underneath her hand is nothing but an emptiness. It should be a comfort that at least it’s a functioning emptiness. It’s more than what she had before. She could… She could decide now, if she wants. If she could ever find herself in a position again to have a child… she has that choice now.

She takes her hand from her belly and swipes at her eyes with her thumb. She sniffs and puts away the tears, and she begins to pull some old sweats and a t-shirt from her dresser drawer to change for bed the mirror of her vanity begins to tremble, and she hears the rumbling of something overhead of the compound.

Chapter 9

When Carol returns after only a little over a week with a burnt-out spaceship in tow, Steve realizes he hadn’t been expecting for her to return of her own accord at all.

Not unless she found Tony.

It’s hard to read her expression as the ramp of the ship descends. She looks sorry, and as two figures appear at the top of the ramp he understands why. One of the figures is definitely Tony, but he is leaning heavily on this blue humanoid cyborg for support. Steve rushes forward and grabs onto Tony’s other arm just as the two are reaching the bottom of the stairs, and he almost freezes in place as he realizes how much of his friend’s weight he is taking; and how little of it there is.

“I couldn’t stop him.” Tony says as the two of them step off the ramp and onto the ground. He is practically drowning in a borrowed leather jacket, his face is gaunt, and Steve knows that were he to let go right now he would crumple to the ground.

Yet the first words out of his mouth are of self-loathing.

“Neither could I.” Steve says, trying his best to cushion the blow.

None of them could. Now having Tony here – emaciated and still blaming himself – it’s easier for Steve to see that fact than it was before. They did everything they could, but even with all their power, they just couldn’t stop Thanos.

Tony manages to stand straight for a moment, and to look him in the eye.

“I lost the kid.”

Steve swallows. He’s been wondering about Peter; they all have. There’s been no answer at his apartment, and when Happy drove out there the day after Thanos, he reported the place looked as lived in as ever, but there was no sign of May or Peter. He said he staked it out for hours, before Pepper finally came and dragged him back to The Compound.

“Tony we lost.” Steve says, because he is sorry, but it seems like Tony isn’t grasping the scope of what happened.

It was more than him and the kid. They all lost so much. So many teammates, and friends. Family. The world – the whole universe - lost so much and is losing more every day.

Plain and simple; they lost.

Tony starts breathing rapidly again, working up the strength to speak, and for a moment Steve worries he is going to be sick.

“Is… Is um…”

That’s when Steve catches sight of Pepper bounding up to them. He’d almost forgotten she had led the charge out here.

“Oh my God.”  She gasps, tears in her voice as well as in her eyes. She wraps her arms around Tony, and Steve relinquishes his hold on his arm and lets Pepper take over supporting him.

He takes a step back, and watching the two of them cling to one another, something inside of him turns sour.

Steve clenches his teeth to keep himself from shuttering, or maybe it’s shouting. He can’t watch as Tony presses a kiss to Pepper’s cheek, but he can’t leave the two of them there for Pepper to help Tony limp back into the compound. He feels like if he were to do that, the others would see his bitterness. So, he stands resolute whilst the two of them reunite, and in doing so he catches Nat’s eyes. She is standing not fifteen feet away, with her thumbs hooked into her jacket pockets, and she inclines her head to him when she catches him looking her way.

---

Even from partway across the compound’s field at ten o’clock at night, Nat can see the tension in Steve’s jaw as Tony clings on to Pepper. She nods to him in silent invitation, and so later on, after they’ve recapped for Tony everything that happened in the battle and what has been happening on Earth in the three weeks since, she isn’t surprised in the least when he knocks on her door.

She opens it quickly. He’s finally shaved off his beard, and one would think that would help him to look less ragged, but instead it only serves to pronounce how sunken and wet his eyes are.

He hasn’t changed into any pajamas yet, and for a moment a pang of disappointment flares in her chest. It’s ridiculous, because she very purposely didn’t change either. She isn’t so delusional as to think he came in here to crawl into bed with her, nor is that why she invited him.

She just… Well, it doesn’t matter right now.

What matters is the hitch of his breath and the way he scrubs a hand over his face as she gestures for him to come in and he does. What matters is the way he paces left and then right as she closes the door, his eyes flitting from her bed, to the chair at her desk, and still he paces a small circle around her floor.

Nat crosses her arms as she watches him. It’s like all this pent-up energy is radiating from him with nowhere to go. She’s seen him angry before when things don’t go his way. She has seen when he so badly wants to hit something, but there is nothing suitable to take the brunt of his strength.

“Do you want to take this to the training room?” She suggests, and when he looks at her he practically deflates before her eyes.

There are tears already spilling onto his cheeks, and immediately she surges forward. She wraps him in her arms. She stands on her toes and wraps her arms tight around his shoulders. She winds up pulling him down a bit, trying her best to bridge the height gap between them so that he can bury his head into her shoulder as he clings desperately to her shoulders and his breath starts to hitch, and the shuttering sobs begin to make their way out.

“It’s ok.” She promises him in a whisper. “It’s ok.”

She decides that walking the two of them to the bed is going to be her best option. She steps back, but doesn’t let go or loosen her grip on him. He stumbles along with her, and after she guides him down to sit on the edge of the bed he lets out a particularly unfiltered cry.

At this much better angle, Steve lays his head against her shoulder, with his arms still wrapped around her in a hold he doesn’t seem intent on breaking anytime soon. She brings one of her hands to the back of his head. Her fingers disappear almost completely as she begins to comb through his hair. She wonders if he was planning to cut it tonight after he’d shaved, but then Tony’s return got in the way. Or maybe he isn’t planning to cut it at all. She thinks back to that night at the bus stop, and how she had studied him in the pale glow of the streetlight as they sat. She was able to stretch ever-so-slightly over him on that bench, and to note all the changes time on the run had brought in him.

She feels like they have changed more in these last three weeks than they ever could have in those two years.

Well aware there are no words which can help, Nat continues to card her fingers through his hair. With her other hand she reaches over and rests it on his forearm, her thumb moving in gentle strokes. She goes so far as to press a kiss to the crown of his head. She all but curls herself against him, bending a leg up and behind him so that he may as well be in her lap, and she rocks the two of them back and forth ever-so-lightly.

Eventually – with trembling shoulders - he begins to will himself into calming down.

“I’m sorry.” He sniffs, pulling his head off her.

“Don’t be.” She tells him, chasing his face with her hand as he tries to straighten his posture and compose himself, and so she unfurls her leg and rights herself as well.

Still, she lays her hand on his cheek. It feels strange under her fingers now without his beard. She strokes her thumb over his skin, getting used to the new texture. It’s damp from his tears, and for a moment Nat envisions herself leaning closer and kissing that moisture away. The heat of his skin, brought on by the tears. She wonders what he might think if she did that; if she crossed that threshold here at the compound.

She sighs and chases that thought away. She settles for bringing her other hand up so that she can frame his face properly. She wipes his tears away with her thumbs and her forefingers, and in response he breathes evenly for the first time since he came in here.

He closes his eyes and leans forward until his head rests against hers. Nat doesn’t dare breath or move too sharply. She is careful to follow his lead and not step an inch further. She closes her eyes against much like him, and moves one hand to scratch lightly at the base of his scalp.

“It’s hitting you?” She asks, though she knows the answer.

“I think so.” He confesses in a whisper. “Worse than I thought it would.”

She opens her eyes, and finds his cast down in sadness.

“How so?”

He shutters at her question, and so she buries her fingers deeper into his hair. He drags his head up as so to look at her properly, and Nat finds herself looking into two walls of glassy tears. She suddenly finds it impossible to ignore the burning behind her own eyes, but she does it anyway. As for him, she moves her thumb to brush away the tears threatening to spill from his eyes and back onto his cheeks.

This time, however, he intercepts her hand.

His hand is much larger than hers. It seems impossible he is so gentle as he intertwines their fingers and guides their joined hands to rest in his lap.

“I thought I’d be sad.” He murmurs his confession. “And I am. But, I didn’t think I would be this angry.”

Nat quirks her eyebrow; both at his words, as well as the furious tremor in his voice.

“At Thanos?” She asks, even if she knows it’s the wrong answer. Angry is the weakest of words for how they are all feeling towards Thanos. Better options would be furious, livid, homicidal… the list could go on and on.

But it’s the best guess she has. Even in the darkest parts of her mind, she can’t imagine he means he is angry at her. For all the scenarios in which losing their baby could have been either her fault or the fault of her past, this isn’t one of them. This is - in fact - the one scenario she can come up with in which she is in no way the reason the baby is gone. They couldn’t beat Thanos, and that isn’t on any one of them alone. He was the one who snapped his fingers and destroyed everything. They threw everything they had at him and then some. The fact that it wasn’t enough and what their failure took from them isn’t you can blame on only one person.

“No.” Steve says, swallowing thickly. “Tony.”

In an instant, he’s pulled away from her. The wild look he’d entered with is back in his eyes, and as he rises to his feet Nat allows him the space to go. Her hand falls from his hair, and her other one detangles from his fingers as he moves to lean against her desk.

For a moment, he just stands there. He keeps his eyes trained on her cream-colored area rug. He has his arms crossed and tension is practically wafting off his shoulders, and she can easily hear the unsteady, slowly drawn breathes coming from his lips.

Nat scoots a hair closer to the edge of the mattress, but otherwise she remains where she is. She listens carefully for a change in his breathing; a sign that he may need her to help him compose himself before he is ready to explain his anger any further.

“I know we all lost different people.” He very slowly manages to say. “And I know that kid was important to Tony. And I’m sorry he was one of the ones we lost.”

He looks up at her then. It’s like he needs her to see the earnestness he feels before he can say anything more; like it’s a warning he is about to contradict it all.

She nods, and he breathes out a deep breath.

“But Tony got to come back here tonight.” He says softly. “To Pepper still here, and their baby still here.”

It’s quiet; deadly so. What is she supposed to say to that?

“It isn’t like he knows.” She manages around a lump which she can feel forming in her throat.

“I know.” Steve agrees, “And don’t worry, I’m not going to tell them.”

It should make her feel better, but instead Nat’s shoulders and heart sink as she realizes she hadn’t considered until now that he might say anything, to anyone.

She told Bruce about the pregnancy because she didn’t have any other choice. She had needed to confirm the loss more urgently than she’d needed to confirm its existence in the first place, before her mind could creep to fears of sepsis and drive her insane. Besides, she told Bruce the details of her damaged past years ago. She didn’t think that continuing on as normal after the fact of asking for his help would be an issue.

She was wrong.

Ever since her ultrasound, Bruce looks at her in much the same way Steve does; like he is just waiting for her to fall apart.

His eyes linger on her with this sorrowful gleam every time she walks into a room. He does it to Steve too. Then, to make matters worse, he looks at the two of them together like they are an equation that he can’t solve. He doesn’t know what their history is, only that they have one, and it is infuriating her more and more every day. It feels like it is only a matter of time before someone else notices and starts asking questions.

Most days, she wonders who and when it will be, and how much time she has before the rest of the team learns exactly how broken she is.

“Do you want to say something?” She asks, the lump in her throat that much harder now to speak through. She never considered Steve might tell someone; that it might help him to have someone else who knows what she and him lost.

How is she supposed to stand in his way is that’s what he needs?

She can’t describe how big a relief it is when he shakes his head.

“No.” He says, “You didn’t tell Pepper, and you’re right; there’s no point in making them feel guilty.”

She nods in agreement, though she feels like that wasn’t exactly an answer, and the relief she is feeling starts to fade.

“I’m sorry.” Steve says through a sigh, cutting off her train of thought as he scrubs a hand over his face. “I didn’t mean to dump this on you. How are you doing?”

“I’m fine.” She says, furrowing her brow, if only because she thought they already talked about how she is handling Pepper’s pregnancy.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” She answers, maybe a touch more forcefully than what is necessary, but in her defense, they have had this conversation before. More than once. “Why?

He frowns, his teeth grit like he is debating whether or not he really wants to pick this battle.

“It hasn’t hit you yet?”

Evidently he does.

With a sigh Nat gets to her feet. There is a part of her which wants to reach out and wrap her arms up and around his shoulders again. She would really love to just hug him, and promise him that no, it hasn’t hit her the way it’s hit him, and it never will. But that’s ok, and if he needs to fall apart some more, then go on ahead. She can handle that.

Another part of her thinks it might be better to settle for taking his hand and promising him all that. But, then it would be all too easy to intertwine their fingers, and that – right now – feels like it’s crossing a line into something which the two of them really are not.

In the end, she settles for leaning beside him; her back against the desk, and her arms crossed in a mirror of his posture.

“I was never supposed to have a baby.” She reminds him, “Even when I was kid, I knew what was waiting for me.”

“Nat-” He says her name with so much heartache, she can’t stand it.

“Please let me finish.”

He swallows, and nods for her to continues.

“I know it was real.” She says, through a sigh. “But it wasn’t supposed to be. I hadn’t adjusted to that yet.”

“I understand that.”

“I don’t think you do.”

The words are out before she can really think them through, and Steve is looking at her with eyes so hurt, all she wants to do is splutter her way through an apology and forget this whole part of the conversation ever happened.

But, she never has been good at sorry.

“It’s getting late.” Steve finally says, after what feels like hours of the two of them standing there, those five words hanging in the air. “I should go.”

She doesn’t say anything, apart from an exchange of murmured goodnights as he leaves, and it’s only after he’s gone that the first of her tears finally slips past her lashes.