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After being released from government custody (a euphemism, if she’s ever used one), Sharon does exactly what Aunt Peggy instructed her to do if she were to ever be detained in government custody and have to go to ground one day, which is to return to her Berlin apartment, pack all of her concealed shock-baton sets into a black go-bag, set off a localised EMP to disable the bugs that the CIA had undoubtedly already set up, and duck out into her neighbour’s apartment to make use of their window, thus effectively evading the security detail (read: babysitters) that are already stationed outside of her door, and disappear into the cold night to head to one the various Carter family safe-houses dotted around the globe.
She picks London, partly because it was her last known location before Berlin and the CIA is just dumb enough to think that because she was in London before now then there is no way that she’ll return there, partly because MI6 is so fucking territorial that the minute the CIA tried to jostle in with a foreign operation they’d kick up the biggest fuss and give her enough time to hike it in the other direction, and partly because she’s still sad over Aunt Peggy’s death and, in a way, London is as close as she can get to her aunt, now.
She’s sentimental like that.
So she goes to London, and it takes six days, four trains, two buses, a light cargo plane flown by a moustachioed Albanian named, of all things, Egzon Tost (she wants to believe that this is a fake name, but any lingering doubt is erased by hour four of the six-hour journey), and a whole lot of walking before she reaches the back of the block of flats wherein the London Carter safe-house is situated. She’s ready to drop dead into the skip full of construction waste that’s parked in front of the next street over, but even in her state of manic exhaustion she feels that would be too Barton a move and she tries to distance herself from that sort of behaviour whenever possible, so she soldiers on.
Scaling up the external pipe to the fourth floor would usually be a lot easier than it turns out to be, but she hasn’t slept more than six hours in the past week and her forearms hurt like a bitch (thank you, CIA) and it’s pretty much pitch-black apart from a sliver of moonlight because streetlights in London are shit, so she figures she can be forgiven for the fact that she accidentally drops the go-bag when she gets to the first floor and has to shimmy back down to pick it up again. Nobody is around to see it, anyway (she hopes).
She makes it up to the fourth floor this time, go-bag accounted for, and carefully manoeuvres herself onto the window ledge. Pressing up against the frame forces the window upwards with barely a squeak of protesting wood, and bless Aunt Peggy for finding the one window in the goddamned world that doesn’t creak when it’s being forced open. She slides it up just far enough for her to duck through, and from there it’s a simple matter of stepping off the windowsill, onto the couch, and then onto the rug on the floor.
She stands there for a moment, inhaling as deeply as she can, the sweet rot of old lilies permeating the musty staleness hanging in the air. This place hasn’t been used in awhile, she knows, because Yasmin’s too high-profile now, Cecily’s still stuck in super-max, Edmund’s been deep since 2003 with no hint of surfacing just yet, Jacques has naturalised with the DGSE and only speaks to them all at Christmas, and the rest of the cousins are civilians (she thinks; she doesn’t actually know, because with the Carter family you can never be too sure).
She kneels down on the rug and feels under the edge of the coffee table – and there’s the flower she’d carved into the wood last time she was here, the latest in a long line of identifying symbols left here by the safe-house’s previous occupants, next to Yasmin’s butterfly and, further down, Jacques’ moon. Childlike identifiers, chosen when they were all just kids playing at espionage, unaware of the paths they’d follow in the future.
She lets her hand drop into her lap and lets her eyes slip closed, swaying a little with the sudden wave of tiredness that hits her. She jerks herself back to awareness a second later – she hasn’t even cleared the flat. God, she’s losing her touch. Her hand drops to the bottom of the couch behind her, feeling for the handgun she knows is concealed there. Tugging it out, she checks that it’s still fully loaded (it is), and rises smoothly to her feet. The go-bag she leaves on the couch.
The rug muffles her footsteps, so if someone heard her enter then at least they’re not going to get any hint of where she’s coming from, and she rolls through her feet when she passes off the rug and onto the bare hardwood floor for the last few steps to the kitchen door. She presses her back to the wall, gun at eye-level, and slows her breathing to calm her heartbeat.
She counts, one, two, three –
When she steps around the corner there’s already a gun pointed at her head, the shadowy figure sitting in the dark at the kitchen table.
She freezes, her own gun held steady though she’s freaking out on the inside. Nobody is supposed to know about this place, nobody outside of the family, and none of them would have given up this location on pain of death so how the hell is there someone already here, how the hell does somebody know to come here, unless…unless –
“Sloppy,” the figure in the dark chides, dark and amused, clucking their tongue.
Sharon sags in relief, tension dropping from her body all at once. “Fucking hell, Nat,” she curses vehemently, letting the handgun drop to sit loosely in her grip against her thigh.
Nat puts her own gun down, swiftly dissembling it and placing the pieces on the table.
“Happy to see me?” she asks, her tone carefully neutral, as if she isn’t mostly sure of the answer already.
Sharon scoffs. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She’s abruptly hit with another wave of tiredness, and she has to reach out to put her gun on the table next to Nat’s to stop herself from dropping it. She feels Nat’s eyes linger on the slight bulging under her sleeves as much as she sees it, assessing and forming conclusions. It’s tiring, like everything else right now, so she mentally shakes herself awake and offers a distraction:
“Tea?”
Nat’s mouth tightens momentarily; the only hint of irritation. She’s all smiles the next minute, her brows creasing up into an expression that can almost be called grateful. “Yes, thanks. Just black.”
Sharon knows she’s too easy to read right now, and she really should be keeping her guard up more around Nat, but she’s just too tired to care. What does it matter, really, if Nat sees a bit more than Sharon usually lets her? What’s she going to do with it? It’s not that important, at the moment, so she lets herself sigh in relief at the distraction and turns her back on Nat to walk to the bench.
The kettle she fills to maximum with water from the sink, slightly musty from disused pipes, but it’s all going to boil away anyway, and she knows that Nat’s had far worse in her life than murky tea water. Not that this excuses it, but – well. Who fucking cares. She places it down on the stove and cranks the dial up to full, flicking on the stove light, then busies herself with opening and closing the cupboards until she finds where the mugs are kept.
She pauses with the cupboard open when she finds them.
Aunt Peggy always had these mugs, these fine china mugs with their stupid little floral designs, as English as all hell, and she refused to drink tea out of anything else. Jesus, she has to take a moment to compose herself and convince herself that she isn’t going to cry, because crying seems all too easy because she’s so goddamned exhausted, but she’s not going to cry over some stupid mugs –
“Hey,” Nat says softly, her voice suddenly at Sharon’s shoulder.
Sharon flinches so hard she bangs her hand on the bench, but she’s already whipping around to backhand the person behind her in the face –
Nat catches her wrist easily before it makes contact with her face, and Sharon closes her eyes and inhales deeply, searching for some goddamned control. She exhales and opens her eyes, and Nat is staring at her almost pityingly, and normally Sharon would bristle but right now she just accepts that she’s feeling so pathetic that it’s making the Black Widow sympathetic (she should get a fucking medal).
“Sorry,” she says, and slides her wrist from Nat’s grip so that she can close her eyes and pinch at the bridge of her nose, “Jesus, sorry. I don’t even fucking know.”
Nat huffs out a little laugh. “You’re cute when you’re tired.”
“Fuck off,” Sharon shoots back, dragging her hand down her face. “I haven’t slept in a week.”
“It shows.”
“Thank you, so very much. God, you’re such an asshole. Who taught you that, the Russians?” Sharon shoulders past Nat and unzips her jacket, laying it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. She shakes her shoulders out a little bit, leans her neck from side to side to crack it and release a little bit of the tension.
“Barton, actually,” Nat replies, and Sharon snorts. Of course it was fucking Barton. But then, abruptly, she feels horribly awful for even asking, because Nat wasn’t really a person before she met Barton and she wasn’t an asshole then because she wasn’t really anything except a bundle of terrible impulse control, an under-developed moral compass and layers and layers of pain and emotional suppression, all wrapped up in a terrifyingly competent robotic murder-child. Jesus. Alright.
Sharon sighs again (she should fucking stop, it’s getting ridiculous), and turns around to lean her ass against the table and look back at Nat, who’s still standing next to the stove, watching her. Under the yellowed stove light, it’s difficult for Sharon to ignore the way the angles of Nat’s cheekbones cast longer shadows than usual, the way her collarbones jut out from he collar of her thin, oversized sweater, the way her hair hangs in a plait down her back to hide how limp it is. Nat’s tired too, tired of running, tired of fighting. They all are.
Nat’s eyes glitter, bright green as ever, though. “See something you like?”
And Sharon automatically shoots back, “Yeah, that shirt you’re wearing, can I borrow it? I’m really loving the whole reclaimed heroin-chic thing you’ve got going on.”
“Bitch,” Nat proclaims, without any real heat. She pinches the hem of her shirt between two fingers, rubbing at the material. It looks soft, well-worn. Sharon wonders who it used to belong to, several possibilities running through her mind like a slideshow: Barton, Wilson, Steve (Steve). Nat could have picked it up from any number of places, out of a goddamned Laundromat for all she knew, but Sharon knows Nat well enough by now to recognise the patterns she doesn’t bother to conceal from those she trusts, and stealing clothes is one of them.
Sharon doesn’t blame her; she’d give anything for a big sweater to wrap herself in and disappear for a week or so. Cocoon herself in and bundle down for a long nap, only waking up when all of this has blown over and everyone likes each other again. But she doesn’t have that luxury, so she contents herself with being vaguely jealous, and folds her arms across her chest.
“So what brings you here?” she asks, and she’s genuinely interested in the answer she might receive. If Nat wanted to lie low, get off the grid, she could have gone anywhere in the world. Sharon doesn’t know the true extent of Nat’s network of safe-houses and hidden bases (and she doubts anybody ever will), but she knows enough to know that Nat could have picked a place on a whim and disappeared for a few years without anybody being able to find her ever again.
Yet she came here. Here, to a safe-house that isn’t her own, one she isn’t familiar with, to one that she knew, or at least considered to be of a high possibility, that Sharon might go to ground in. It could be chalked up to paranoia; Ross is on a fucking witch-hunt, and who knows what unsavoury elements he might be able to sway to his side in his quest for superhuman justice, and maybe Nat is feeling a bit suspicious of anybody she considered friend enough to trust them at some point.
But, then again, she wouldn’t be here with Sharon if that were the case, would she?
Nat narrows her eyes at Sharon, letting her know that she knows precisely what Sharon is doing, but in the next second her face smooths out into a blank sort of contemplation.
“Certain events have led me to conclude I am no longer welcome in general society,” she murmurs, but then grimaces. “I may have made some questionable decisions.”
Sharon hums neutrally. Nat doesn’t really admit to making mistakes that often – mostly because she doesn’t make mistakes all that often, but also because she likes to be mysterious and give off the vibe that she knows everything and that she’d totally expected whatever it was that’d gone wrong to happen (because she’s an asshole). So whatever it is she’s done, or thinks that she’s done…it must be pretty big.
But then Nat’s face creases into a crooked smile, genuinely happy. “I figured tasing the panther-king of Wakanda was a good enough reason to go to ground, not even counting Ross’ witch-hunt. T’Challa really didn’t appreciate that.”
Sharon chokes on her own spit, eyebrows shooting up to the roof. “You did what?”
Nat seems pleased by her reaction. “It was more than once, too. Very deliberate.”
“Oh my god. You’re something else, Romanoff, you know that.” Sharon shakes her head, incredulous. Sharon has only ever seen T’Challa briefly, from a distance, but she’s seen enough to know that he is one of the most intimidating men she is ever going to encounter – and one of the most attractive. She’d kill to spar with him, to go head-to-head with that coiled strength, that certainty of power, to fight until he knocks her down and looms over her with those beautiful muscles and –
God, she’s tired.
The kettle starts to whistle, and she kicks off the table to go and take it off the heat, because Nat is useless and decides to ignore it for long enough that Sharon knows she isn’t going to grab it. It’s Russian, Sharon thinks, that if someone offers you tea then you let them do all the tea-related things, and you don’t lift a finger. Something about guests and hosts and courtesy. But sometimes, like now, it’s mildly annoying enough that she brushes past Nat to get to the stove and doesn’t apologise out of pettiness.
So the kettle comes off the stove and the teabags go into the mugs and the water goes in on top of them, and Nat just watches it all happen in front of her with barely-concealed amusement because she knows exactly how much it pisses Sharon off, they’ve fought about it many times before, and now they’re back on being an asshole and who taught her that, and sad Soviet girls with no free will and Sharon has made herself sad again.
“So you tased a king,” Sharon reiterates, still vaguely impressed, picking up the mugs and carrying them over to the table. Nat follows like a small kitten who knows it’s meal-time. They settle into the chairs with Sharon at the head of the table and Nat diagonally across from her to the left, and old habits die really fucking hard because Sharon has picked the chair with the best sightlines to the front door and bedroom, and Nat has picked the one with the best sightlines back into the lounge room, and only now can they both really relax and comfortably drink their tea.
“You tased a king, and then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t bullshit me. Given that you and T’Challa were at least nominally on the same side, if you can call it that, in this goddamned shit-show of a pissing contest, I assume something happened to make you change your mind, and he didn’t take kindly to that. Great, fine. No problem. He’s coming after you, you need to disappear, I get that. But the thing I don’t get, Nat, is that you could have gone anywhere. Why come here? Why come to me?”
Nat is quiet for a long time. Sharon doesn’t lower her eyes, instead watching her carefully. Nat’s eyes are downcast, and she scratches at a chip in the side of the mug with a broken fingernail. A few curls have escaped her plait to float around her face, curling up against her neck. It softens the harshness of her cheekbones and jaw, making her look younger than usual.
“Maybe I just needed a friend,” she says quietly, to the table.
Sharon exhales; she hadn’t even realised she’d been holding her breath. She tilts her head to the side, allowing herself a soft smile.
“Tell you what,” she offers gently, “Knock off the ‘maybe’ and you might be in luck.”
Nat’s eyes flick up to hers, and for a moment they’re impossibly grateful, appreciative in a way that Sharon has never seen before, before that abruptly disappears behind a more neutral expression of warmth. Sharon’s caught bit off-kilter, to be honest, because all this vulnerability is probably bad for her health as she’s too tired to properly process everything.
She picks up her tea and blows on it before carefully sipping, wary of burning her tongue (the absolute worst thing, worse than getting stabbed, she is not joking). It’s strong, this black tea, because Aunt Peggy had never quite managed to let go of the vile concoctions the British had labelled ‘tea’ during the war, and she’d ensured that every safe-house had its own stockpile should there ever be a global disaster and she couldn’t buy it from the supermarket anymore. Sharon’s chest twinges a little bit, but this is a good memory, so it doesn’t hurt so much as ache, and she aches all over right now anyway. It just sort of fades in with the rest.
Nat has gulped down half her tea already, because apparently Russians don’t have pain receptors in their mouths or throats (this explains, among other things, the vodka and the prevalence of choking kink), and she sets her mug down to draw her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them and resting her chin on top like a little kid. It’s incredibly endearing, and Sharon just wants to give her a big hug despite knowing exactly how uninvited hugs go down with Nat (read: not very well). So she holds herself back with great difficulty (she’s very cute and very sad, and that’s kind of Sharon’s thing at the moment) and sips at her tea again, waiting for Nat to continue.
“What do you know?” is the unexpected question, sharp and cutting, and Sharon raises her eyebrows at the directness.
“About this – whatever this is – between Steve and Tony?”
Nat makes a noise of affirmation in the back of her throat.
Sharon sighs and puts her mug down. “I know that Tony wanted the Accords and Steve disagreed with them. I know the Winter Soldier –”
“Barnes,” Nat interrupts unexpectedly. Sharon stares. Nat grimaces, but repeats, “Call him Barnes.”
Sharon shoots her a look, implications weighing heavy, but carries on. “I know Barnes complicated things. I know Tony followed Steve and Barnes to Siberia, that they fought over something, and then suddenly I’m being interrogated over their whereabouts because Tony drags himself into HQ half-dead and raging about vengeance and justice and – Jesus Christ, he’s gone mad, Nat, and I don’t mean in the usual way.”
Nat hums, but it’s not a happy hum. “I know you care about Tony,” she begins, “and I know you care about Steve –” Sharon resolutely does not blush, “- but I’m going to, right here and now, declare them both complete idiots.”
“We knew that already,” Sharon points out.
“Yes, but this is a whole different level of idiocy. Because – and this is the biggest mistake I will probably ever make in my entire life – I assumed something had happened that turned out to not have happened. Blyat.” She buries her face into her knees, still pulled up to her chest, before lifting her eyes to the roof, presumably to beg some higher power to shoot her in the face. Sharon knows the feeling.
“What happened?” Sharon asks, more hesitant than she usually would be because, for Nat, this is practically an emotional breakdown. There are far too many feelings happening.
“What happened is – and I’m guessing here because I haven’t spoken to either of them since before Tony left, but I’m ninety-nine percent sure this is what happened – so Barnes killed Tony’s parents, right?”
Sharon blinks. “I did not know that.” And then her over-tired brain somehow manages to pull deductive reasoning out of some hidden crevice that hadn’t seen the light of day since last Monday, because her stomach sinks and her chest feels like it caves in, hollow and empty.
“Oh my god,” she says, looking at Nat with wide eyes. “Oh…my god.”
Because if Barnes killed Tony’s parents, and Tony didn’t know, then if he suddenly found out that the guy that Steve has been so desperately trying to track down like a golden retriever spending years sitting at the grave of its dead owner, the guy that Steve is trying to protect from the world even though it was this guy who shaped the world with blood and violence and sheer brutality, he wouldn’t even stop to think about the fact that Barnes was tortured into doing all of that. He wouldn’t even stop to think about the fact that Barnes had no choice, that he had all free will taken away from him.
He would have attacked Barnes without thinking about it, because if there’s a subtitle to the novel called Tony Stark, it’s daddy issues. Coupled with a side of terrible impulse control.
Nat watches her come to the conclusion on her own, but even as Sharon’s mouth is dropping open in horrified realisation, Nat’s already shaking her head and sighing.
“It gets worse. Finding out alone wouldn’t have set him off like this. I think – I know – that something else happened. Something to do with Steve. And it could only have been one thing, because it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Nat pauses here, winces. “When Steve and I were trying to track down Fury’s killer, uncovering the HYDRA debacle, we happened upon a rudimentary AI shut up in an underground bunker beneath Camp Lehigh. The AI – showed us the extent of the poison, how far HYDRA had sunk their claws into the world. How they’d orchestrated events to produce chaotic outcomes. And one of those events that they orchestrated –”
“The Stark assassination.”
Nat inclines her head. “HYDRA killed the Starks, and it was an assassination. And we weren’t sure, but it was pretty obvious what the AI was implying – which was that HYDRA used the Winter Soldier to assassinate them.”
“Oh, no,” Sharon says faintly.
“We weren’t sure, is the thing,” Nat says, but she’s not even trying to justify her decision, “And Steve has a massive blind-spot when it comes to Barnes, and the possibility that Barnes had hurt someone he considered a friend, Tony, was so abhorrent that I think he just blocked it out. But fuck, Sharon, I thought Steve told him. I thought Steve told him what went down, and that’s why I never said anything. Because I thought it was better coming from Steve than me, but –”
Nat breaks off, uncharacteristically affected, but seems to shake herself and push on. “I misread the situation,” she admits in a monotone. “Steve hadn’t told Tony anything. This is the only thing I can think of that would cause such a rift between them, that could set Tony off like this: the realisation that Barnes killed his parents and Steve knew about it.”
Her words hang heavily in the air between them, a weight that sinks into Sharon’s chest like lead. She doesn’t want this to be true, but she can see how Nat’s come to this conclusion and god, it’s exactly like something Steve would do. He’d see not telling Tony as protecting him, but it’s not really Tony he’s protecting, it’s Barnes, and Tony doesn’t like to share. He would have seen it as Steve making a choice, Barnes over him, and Tony has never dealt well with abandonment, especially not after Pepper leaving.
And then Steve wouldn’t have even thought before jumping between Barnes and Tony, the way he’s jumped in front of Barnes to protect him from everything coming down on him this entire time, because Steve can only see a victim where everyone else sees a perpetrator, and this is where all of this stems from, isn’t it? A lack of goddamned communication.
“Fuck,” Sharon says. “I hate them both; is that unreasonable?”
Nat frowns at her. “I just told you, I didn’t tell –”
“Oh, get over yourself,” Sharon snipes harshly, picking up her mug and taking another sip. She swallows and fixes Nat with her patented Carter glare. “All of this that’s happened, it’s not your fucking fault. So what, you didn’t tell Tony something because you thought Steve had already told him. That doesn’t lead to Tony trying to kill Barnes and Steve trying to kill Tony for trying to kill Barnes, that’s a goddamned honest mistake and it could have been resolved if everyone had just fucking talked to each other.”
Nat blinks at her, slightly taken aback by the vehemence in her tone. Sharon doesn’t blame her – she’s slightly surprised too, because where the fuck is her exhausted brain getting this from? She can barely control her mouth and doesn’t know what else she’s going to say if she leaves it too long, so she gulps down a mouthful of tea to prevent any more vitriolic word-vomit. Even if she means every word.
Because, damn it, she’s sick of Nat blaming herself for everything because something goes wrong because she neglected to consider an outcome when thinking everything through. Sharon knows it’s a product of her upbringing, where she was punished if she missed the slightest little detail, but Jesus Christ this is not Soviet Russia and shit happens that you can’t foresee, that you can’t plan for, and somehow, as smart as she supposedly is, this is a fact of life that Nat fails to grasp.
“I take it back,” she says before she can stop herself, “You’re as much an idiot as either of those idiots.” Nat looks slightly mollified, at least until Sharon continues, “Blaming yourself for their pissing contest is beneath you, and deep down you know that. Now, I don’t know if this is some kind of penance, or repressed Catholic guilt -”
“Oh, shut up,” Nat groans, burying her face in her hands, because Sharon knows Nat regrets ever telling her about Daredevil (who has one-night stands with vigilantes, anyway?), but Sharon can hear the smile in her muffled voice and she knows that she’s gotten through to Nat, at least a little bit.
“- or another example of Barton’s terrible influence, because that man is a human disaster if I ever saw one –”
“He’s really not that bad.”
“- but you cannot possibly blame yourself for this shit-storm. This is all on Steve, on his ridiculously wide and patriotic shoulders, because he is an idiot and he should have told Tony before he had to find out like this, and he should have mitigated it by giving Tony the Winter Soldier file – don’t think I don’t know about that, by the way, because who the fuck takes a month-long vacation to Kiev in the middle of winter, and I’m totally mad that you didn’t invite me along – because then Tony might have calmed down after his higher brain function kicked back in, and everything would be happiness and rainbows. What?”
Nat is staring at her like she’s grown a second head, or possibly come up with something Nat hasn’t thought of before (both rare miracles). “The file.”
“What about it.”
“Tony needs perspective, Sharon, and I can’t believe I never thought of it before, but he needs to read that file.”
There’s a beat, and then Sharon asks, “Where is it, exactly?”
Nat frowns. “I actually don’t know. My bet would be on Sam.”
She picks at the sleeve of her oversized sweater, and there’s the answer to the question of who it belongs to. Sharon is only slightly mollified, because while it isn’t Steve’s she’s still jealous of the clothes-sharing. It’s petty and ridiculous, but she’s exhausted, alright? Cut her some fucking slack.
“And Sam is currently buried in the middle of the fucking ocean in an impenetrable super-prison, guarded round-the-clock by Ross’ collection of fanatics,” Sharon muses. “Great. Fantastic.”
They’d threatened to lock her up there, too, when they were trying to convince her to give up Steve and Barnes’ location. But she apparently knew too much about how the Raft operated, and locking her up in there was thrown out as a security risk, apparently. She’d been quietly pleased that they thought enough of her to find it highly possible that she would manage to break out of the Raft, because she knows that it’s impossible unless you have someone on the outside –
She looks up and locks eyes with Nat. “We have to break him out.”
Nat looks back at her, assessing. Sharon holds her gaze, steady and direct, because she’s absolutely fucking serious about this. She knows the Raft, knows what it was designed and built for and knows far too much about the questionable processes and procedures that take place there, and she wouldn’t wish it upon her worst enemy (well, she would, but she doesn’t really have a worst enemy and she’s a strong believer in second chances, so…) let alone the Avengers who are locked up in there over an ideological difference.
It fills her, suddenly, this new-found purpose. It soothes the ache left by Aunt Peggy’s death, by the loss of her job and professional credibility, that has been a constant void in her chest. She hasn’t realised up to now, probably because she’d up and left Berlin and hasn’t stopped since to think, but this is what she’d been running from: a lack of purpose. But now a new mission is forming in her mind, and there’s the dawning feeling of righteousness and justice that she’s been missing for such a long time.
“Ok,” Nat agrees smoothly, unfolding her legs and sitting back on the chair normally. She reaches for her mug and drinks a bit of the tea left in there. It’s probably gone cold; Sharon’s is lukewarm now. “Ok,” she says again. “But we need a few days to prepare. And a base of operations. Somewhere to plan this op.”
Sharon looks exaggeratedly around the kitchen. “Why, look at this wonderful safe-house that has everything we could possibly need to plan a prison break. It’s almost like this is a good place to start.”
Her tone is sardonic, but she knows what Nat isn’t asking. Because no matter how many years they’ve known each other, there’s still a part of Nat that feels unwelcome, untrusted, even when it’s beyond doubt. It’s not normally so obvious, and Nat has gotten really good at acting like she owns every single place she finds herself in, but Sharon can’t help but consider that this rift that’s torn the Avengers apart has really affected Nat. That the break-up of those people she’d called her teammates, her family, has cut her really deeply. And yeah, maybe Sharon can be a bit sympathetic for that.
So she says, softer, “You’re always welcome here, you know that.”
Nat drops her eyes to the table. “Yeah, I know,” she says, a hint of bitterness creeping into her tone.
Sharon gets that urge to hug her again, and Jesus Christ can this stop? She counters it by crossing her arms over her chest, but the motion jostles the bandages on her forearms and she winces involuntarily, hissing with pain as she shakes out her arms.
Nat’s eyes narrow, and that distraction Sharon was so thankful for before really needs to make another miraculous appearance. There’s a moment where Nat looks at Sharon and Sharon looks and Nat and Sharon tries to communicate exactly how much she doesn’t want to talk about it, and Nat acknowledges that Sharon doesn’t want to talk about it but also completely disregards Sharon’s feelings on the matter, because Nat can see that Sharon is hurt and she would very much like to know why, for purposes of future vengeance.
It’s a very long moment.
Sharon breaks first, because there’s no fucking way she’s going to out-manoeuvre Nat when she wants to know something. She sighs, heavily like she’s put-upon, and says, “Do your worst.”
Nat’s lips curl into a pleased smirk. “So,” she starts neutrally, sipping at the rim of her mug to stop the liquid from spilling over, as if she’d ever be that clumsy, “What have you been up to lately?”
“Oh, you know, the usual,” Sharon says flippantly, tossing her hair over her shoulder in a gesture that matches her tone, “Arrested for aiding and abetting known international criminals, enhanced interrogation, threats of being permanently disappeared, a whole lot of waiting around for someone to make up their goddamned mind, and then release into restricted duty and round-the-clock observation.”
Nat’s mouth thins into a displeased line, but she doesn’t look surprised. Well, to be fair, Sharon wasn’t particularly surprised, either. She’d known what she was doing, helping Steve and Wilson to get to Barnes and then stealing their requisitioned equipment from the CIA. She’d known what they were going to do to her, but pride is her biggest goddamned weakness and she’d figured that she was going to have to face the consequences of her actions sooner or later.
Nat parses her answer for a second, then raises one eyebrow. “Did they get anything from you?” she asks evenly.
“Not even close,” Sharon shoots back immediately, and they both laugh.
“Hurt like a bitch, though, and you’re not getting me anywhere tropical for a few months.” She shucks her sleeves up to her elbows, peeling back the bandages to show Nat her forearms.
“Ooh,” Nat coos, leaning over the table to take a closer look, “That’s gonna scar.”
“You think?”
“Is it going to slow you down?”
Sharon scoffs. “Please.”
Nat smiles, seemingly pleased with Sharon’s answer. “Good. I’d hate to drag around deadweight.”
“Excuse me,” Sharon starts, mockingly offended, but she’s so tired that she finds it too funny and bursts into giggles halfway through her sentence. The laughing fit slows after about ten seconds, and when she can open her eyes again she catches Nat looking at her almost fondly. It’s incongruous enough with Nat’s normal range of expressions that Sharon feels almost guilty, like she’s wormed her way into Nat’s circle of trusted friends without permission, but she realises that’s probably ridiculous and she just really needs to sleep because nothing is making sense right now.
“Hey,” she says, “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to collapse onto this table. Sleep now, planning tomorrow?”
Nat checks to see if her mug is empty. “Sounds good to me. You’re sleeping on the couch, right?”
Sharon rolls her eyes so hard it actually hurts. “The bed is plenty big enough for both of us,” she says, and at catching the contemplative gleam in Nat’s eyes she quickly interjects before Nat can say anything, “For sleeping only. I’m about to keel over.”
“We’ll see,” Nat says ominously, playfully, but Sharon can’t find it in herself to even think about anything other than sleep at the moment. She’s feeling every inch of exhaustion, like it had been holding back until she’d found something to focus her energy on, to quiet her mind. She sways slightly in the chair, taken aback by heavy she suddenly feels.
Nat stands up, walks around the table and offers her hand. “Come on. Time for bed.”
“Yeah,” Sharon agrees senselessly, and takes her hand.
They’ll sleep now, but tomorrow is a new day.