Summary: Natasha wakes up from being dead, but not without serious damage to her body. Clint says Steve went to drop off the Stones and came back with her. Steve's not interested in anything other than Nat's comfort.

Nat woke in the familiar surroundings of the compound's medical wing from a nightmare of cold and the endless feeling of being unable to take a deep breath, into a warm cocoon that was a little too familiar. She was drugged to her fucking eyeballs. She took a careful breath. Under the drugs there was a distant sensation, she could feel the ache of broken ribs, maybe a lot of them. The drugs made it so she could barely tell.

"You awake?" The words sounded wrecked, but she'd know Steve's voice anywhere. Something about that thought niggled at the back of her mind and she tried to follow the thread. The drugs made things slippery, though, impossible to track.

Nat opened her eyes and croaked, "Alive?"

"Yeah," Steve said. He looked terrible, but there was a smile playing at his lips as he said, "Yeah, you've been comatose for about four days, but you're with us. The doctors said you'd wake when your body had recovered from the most extreme amount of damage."

He stood up and gave her an ice chip. She let it melt on her tongue, delicious in the moment. "We win?"

He nodded. There was something he wasn't saying, but he wasn't lying, either. She knew his tells.

Glancing down her body gave her the impression she was being held together by some fishing wire and several rolls of duct tape. "Damage?"

"Three compound fractures, the majority of your ribs are either broken or cracked, a number of dislocations, hypothermia, malnutrition and dehydration."

It was hard to focus. "I—I survived the fall?" That felt wrong.

"No. No, you were dead."

Well. That...wasn't generally how things worked. Infinity Stones aside, evidently. Natasha knew Steve, though. Steve who'd watched Bucky fall. She fought against the sedative pull of the drugs. She shivered, some whisp of cold settling deep inside. "What—what'd you do?"

He leaned over and kissed her forehead, rubbed warm, gentle hands over her shoulders. "Get some rest, Nat. The others are all gonna want to see you."

Trying hard to keep her eyes open, she promised him, "Later, Rogers."

Natasha knew she was in and out for a bit. Steve wasn't always there when she surfaced, but someone was. Clint once, Rhodey another time. The next time she had the ability to focus—she was still incredibly drugged—Shuri and Okoye were chatting in Xhosa. Nat had picked up some here and there from working with Okoye and through her own efforts, enough to be able to confidently say, "Stop talking about me like I'm not in the room."

It involved more croaking than she'd planned on, and Okoye held a cup with a straw to her lips. Nat drank some and said, "Thanks."

Natasha knew Shuri by reputation only, but if she was here, there was only one conclusion to be made. "I was really fucked up, huh?"

Okoye's hand came to rest on a patch of Natasha's skin that wasn't bandaged or plastered, near her neck. The warmth of it was settling. Despite the room being temperate and having blankets, Natasha couldn't seem to shake the feeling of being cold. Shuri said, "As someone who rarely, if ever, doubts the bounds of what science can do, you should not be breathing, let alone talking. Only a combination of Dr. Cho's and Wakandan technology has kept you managing the former long enough to do the latter."

Natasha thought back to how quickly Dr. Cho had healed Clint of his injuries. Right, then. Really, really fucked up. "But seeing as how I am, you can fix the rest of me?"

"If you actually listen to what I tell you and don't fuck up my progress."

Natasha drew in a slow breath, paying attention to the layer of pain beneath the meds. "You explain what you're doing, in a way I can understand, and you have yourself a deal."

Shuri opened her mouth, everything in her body language poised to argue, but Okoye said, "Your Highness."

Shuri's gaze flickered to Okoye. Calmly, Okoye continued, "She's had enough taken from her without having the knowledge necessary to make her own choices taken, too."

Normally Nat would have bristled at hearing her own vulnerabilities laid out like that, probably sparred with Okoye until they were both bleeding and equilibrium had been restored. She was too incapacitated for that, now. If anything, it was a relief the assertion was so accurate.

For a moment, Shuri looked as young as she probably was, although Nat wasn't entirely certain her age, or even how much time had passed for people who had died with the snap. Then the uncanny intelligence settled over her features again and she said, "All right, white girl, terms accepted."

Natasha woke up at some point—time didn't have a ton of meeting just then, even if she noticed they were slowly lowering the amount of painkillers she was on, which was allowing her focus and the need to pursue answers to return—to Clint sitting by her bed, watching This Old House on the television. He flicked it off the moment she shifted, and got the water cup for her. She knew he'd been by her bedside several times when she'd woken before. But up until now it had been hard to do much beyond say, "love you" and drink some water before drifting off again. When she'd had a few sips, she said, "So. Hey."

Clint laughed at her tone. "Believe me, I'd love to be pissed, but all things considered, we'll think of that as a luxury I don't have."

"I'm not sorry." She wasn't.

"I know, Tash. I know."

She watched him for a moment. "You get them back?"

He nodded, swallowing hard.

She said, "Catch me up."

He sat back down. "Anyone told you anything?"

"The sacrifices made weren't for nothing."

"No. No, they weren't. We...brought our world back."

She was awake and working on a crossword with her non-dominant hand, since it was attached to the arm she could move, when Steve showed up again. Natasha stuck the pen in the puzzle book as a marker and set it on the stand next to the bed. "Hi."

Some of the strain in his expression lifted. "You're looking better. How're you feeling?"

"Alive," she said, smiling. The pain was still fairly spectacular, particularly as she'd argued to wean herself off the medication quicker than Shuri and the surgeons would have preferred. The pain she could live with, though. Feeling as if her brain was a gas stove that couldn't seem to light, not so much.

She was still fucking cold, but was pretty certain that was entirely in her head.

He was standing at the foot of the bed. "Shuri says she's going to, uh, rebuild you."

Natasha, because she was starting to get Shuri's strange relationship with Western pop culture, asked, "Did she say 'we have the technology,' in a somewhat weird tone?"

Steve had the expression of someone for whom something was coming together. "I take it that's a reference?"

"Yeah."

"Right. Well, pretty sure she actually does have the technology."

"Seems to be the case. I mean, she fixed Barnes, how complicated can I possibly be?"

Steve looked out the window to her right. After a moment she asked, "Steve?"

He rubbed his face and turned it back to her. "You didn't see yourself, is all. How bad it was. I—I wasn't even sure... You've been in so much pain."

Natasha ran over the words in her head. "You think you might have been wrong to bring me back to you, to Clint, to Wanda, to rain and books and the taste of peanut butter because I'm in a little pain?"

Steve stared at her. "A little pain, she says."

"There is not a world, not a universe, not a time, not an eventuality, where I would not take this pain, not take even more pain than this, to be here. To have more time in a world where we won, a world that is broken and shitty and ugly and still has a million things I love in it."

He closed his eyes and drew in a long breath before opening them. "All right. That's—I'm glad."

"That said, I—Steve. What happened? With—how did you get me back?"

"Clint didn't tell you? He said he caught you up. About the battle." Steve swallowed. "Tony."

Natasha breathed through that pain, which was still fresh, sharp like a cut just beginning to well blood. "Clint caught me up on what he could. He said you went to take the stones back as planned, and came back with me, which wasn't exactly part of the plan, and that was all he knew."

He told her, without hesitation or anything that suggested prevarication, "Doesn't matter. What matters is that I did. You deserved this. Seeing this. Five years of being the only person in the entire world willing to do what it took to keep the shards of what was left together, you—this was your victory."

She narrowed her eyes. "It was a bit of a team effort."

"With you as captain, goal keeper, and cheerleader."

She blinked. "Soccer doesn't have cheerleaders. And since when do you make soccer metaphors?" She wasn't entirely off the pain meds. Forcing herself to focus she said, "Not the point. The point is... Right, the point is, what I deserved or did not deserve is irrelevant. What's relevant is that I was dead and now I'm not, Clint tells me that's due to you, and I'm asking how you did that."

"If I asked you to let it be, would you?"

Natasha took a slow breath through her nose and didn't bother to hide her wince at the flare of pain in her ribs. She cursed herself, because fucking Steve Rogers and her fucking weakness for him, her promise to have his back from the moment he'd verbally extended his trust, her deep need to see him healthy and whole, even when that would mean overriding her own needs. "Yes."

"Nat." He paused. "It's gonna fester, isn't it?"

"I can leave you be when asked, Steve, I can't turn off my own nature."

Nodding slowly, Steve walked around the bed to sit. "The Stone bargains."

"A sacrifice of what you love. A soul for a soul. Steve, what—"

"If you want the Stone, yes. If you have the Stone, and Red Skull wishes to reclaim control over it, despite being unable to wield it, you can make other bargains."

Natasha thought through the implications of that. "Steve. What did you bargain away?"

Steve's tone was somehow calm and yet the most intently sincere she'd ever heard it. "Nothing that meant anything next to getting you back."

She wanted to press. She wouldn't, though, would meet him halfway in this. Reaching out with her good arm, she wiggled her fingers and Steve curled his hand over hers, fingers laced. "I maybe should have told you I love you, at some point."

He huffed. "You did, Nat. A million times. Million and two."

They were talking about the same thing and an entirely different thing all at once, because Natasha had learned from her first steps to hide in plain sight. She was relieved to know he noticed enough to be assured of her basic affection. "Now I've actually said it."

"Love you, too," he said, and squeezed her hand.

And if it wasn't exactly the kind of love she wanted, it was the kind that had resurrected her from the dead and given her a reason to live too many times to regret having it.

Natasha's first bout of physical therapy involved, among other mortifying things, actual tears, and a moment where she was sure she was going to be sick all over the therapist and Shuri from the pain. Instead, she blacked out for a moment. When she came to, the therapist, a man Shuri had recruited, who'd introduced himself only as Fundani, asked, "Remember, about twenty minutes ago, when I mentioned that if the pain went above an eight, I needed to know?"

He had a stillness to him that reminded her of Okoye, but he moved like a civilian. She couldn't guess at his age outside of over fifty, and then, only because of the prodigious laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. The question wasn't condescending, but it was a little edged.

Still coming up from unconsciousness, she admitted, "It's going to take some practice."

Considering that, he asked, "When did we pass ten?"

"Only a couple of minutes ago."

Shuri, having disappeared while Natasha was out, came back with a glass of water, which Natasha took gratefully. She drank slowly, not willing to tempt fate. When she had drunk half, her stomach was settling some. "All right."

"We're done for the day," Fundani said.

Natasha glanced at the clock. There was a solid twenty minutes left in the session. She knew better than to argue. Shuri spent the rest of the time taking readings and mumbling about accelerating cell growth. They'd found a rhythm, though, and Natasha knew Shuri would tell her what the plan was before actually doing anything.

As soon as Shuri released her, she helped Natasha into the Stark-tech enabled wheelchair she was using, as neither of her legs was even near to healed enough to take her weight. Natasha made her way to the quarters she'd been moved to so as to allow her out of the medical wing, but not have her too far from it in case of emergency. When she rounded the corner to the hall where her door was, Steve was there, holding something in his hands and...talking to it?

Steve heard the chair and said, "I thought maybe I could fetch painkillers and a ginger ale, or, I dunno. Otherwise be useful."

"What are you holding?"

"For the record, this was Bucky's idea."

"Over the past month, it's become pretty clear that, severe TBI and PTSD or not, Bucky got all the common sense between the two of you, so that seems promising."

"Keep being mean, I'm not gonna give you your present."

"Lie," Natasha said, and let herself into the room. Steve, as expected, followed.

She was contemplating if she wanted to read a bit or give into the incredibly strong urge to nap when she heard the mewl and looked over at Steve again. Sheepishly, he lowered his cupped hands until she could see the black and grey ball of fluff inside.

"Is that—Bucky told you to get me a kitten? He is aware just going to the bathroom is an uphill climb for me right now, yes?" She was having a hard time not staring, though, thinking about how warm a kitten sleeping on her chest would be.

"Is that an objection, or a concern?"

Natasha gave in to the desire to stare at the kitten. It was a tabby, long-haired from the look of it. Its fur would get everywhere. It managed to climb over Steve's fingers and nearly kamikaze down to the ground, but Steve caught it.

She sighed at the terminal levels of cuteness. "Fuck."

"Nat," he said. "Do you want a kitten?"

"It really doesn't make sense—"

"That wasn't the question. The question was, do you want a kitten?"

"Who the hell doesn't want a kitten, Steve?"

"People who are allergic, dog people, people generally disinclined toward pets."

She granted that with a tilt of her head. "I like kittens."

"I know that. You played with the ones in Clint's barn. The mouser's litter."

People forgot how good Steve was at situational awareness, at knowing the individuals in his command. Natasha normally didn't, but she wouldn't have expected him to file away that fleeting incident as something significant about her. "I'm really not in any condition to take...him?"

"Her," Steve said. "Buck, Wanda, Sam and I are all here full-time, with Rhodey and Shuri being in and out. She'll be fine until you're back up to speed."

With that he slid the kitten onto her lap. It clawed its way up the front of her shirt as if to consider its new perch. Then it yawned widely and tumbled sideways. She smiled up at Steve, the simplicity of her happiness in the moment a bit overwhelming.

Steve's answering expression was soft and warm and terribly representative of him. She made herself look away.

Her nightmares were cold. She knew that shouldn't be possible, but she woke from them shivering, even under the blankets in a perfectly comfortable room. She woke cold and terrified and desperate for the touch of someone else, a reminder of her humanity.

There were people nearby, of course. Natasha could call any of them, ask them to sit with her, breathe with her, talk to her about nothing. But so much of her life right now required assistance, it was hard to even consider asking for more.

Instead, she would generally work to get herself sitting, get as many blankets around her as possible, breathe for a bit, maybe read some. Just as she was about to begin the struggle to right herself, there was a knock at the door. Steve called, "Nat?"

"Um. Yeah, come in?"

Steve poked his head inside. "I—I was passing and you were, uh, I heard a shout."

Huh, well. That was a new one. Before Vormir she'd never made a sound in her sleep. Too much risk; she'd trained herself out of it. She said, "You can actually step inside." He did and closed the door behind him, which prompted her to say, "Were you on a run? It's two in the morning."

He shrugged. "Couldn't sleep. It helps me think."

Natasha felt a fierce surge of envy. She missed being able to disappear into the rhythm of a workout. "You can go try again, the sleeping thing. I'm all right."

He looked off to the side, one of his worst tells. She debated whether to push or wait him out. Before she'd decided, he said, "If you say no, that's fine, but could I crash on your couch?"

Since his bed was only a floor up, she frowned. "Steve, what was keeping you up?"

He smiled, but looked at the floor as he did so. "Oh, you know, dash of PTSD, possibly a pinch of rational but outsized anxiety."

"Steven Grant Rogers."

"I just—having you out of my sight isn't great for me, right now? I'm working on it, swear, but sleeping's been a challenge and I'm." He pressed his lips together.

"Tired," she finished.

"Mm."

Natasha weighed her options, pretending like she didn't already know what she was going to do. "Go get showered and you can share the bed."

"Nat—"

She lifted an eyebrow. "You sassing me, Captain Rogers?"

It did the trick, he turned around and said, "Showering, got it."

It was almost laughably easy to fall asleep with the solid bulk of Steve's body next to hers, her own personal furnace. Natasha awoke to sunshine coming through the windows, having managed to get herself surprisingly intertwined with Steve, given that both legs were still in braces, as was her dominant arm.

He had a hand in her hair, and must have sensed that she'd woken because he started to move it and Natasha said, "No," a little more petulantly than she had intended.

He kept his hand there, though, and said, "'Morning."

"Time izzit?"

"Close to eleven."

"Huh." She hadn't slept past eight while not on sedatives...maybe ever. Definitely within the span of her memory. Six was her normal waking hour.

"Seemed like you needed it."

"Mm," she responded, not really up to complicated thoughts just yet.

He stroked at her hair. "Hungry?"

She was, but, "Not yet." She knew she should just say, "Stay, please," knew he would. He had hauled her back from death. He would stay if she needed it, or even just wanted it. A lifetime of getting what she needed through manipulation was warring with the fact that she had no interest in messing with Steve's head.

He turned said head just enough to kiss her forehead. "Lemme know when you're ready."

Natasha and Bucky were playing with Liho, when she asked, "Do you know what he sacrificed?"

Bucky dangled a piece of string that was getting pretty motley in front of Liho. "Got a pretty good guess."

Liho fell over backward going for the string and rolled right into Natasha's lap. Natasha stroked her with her good hand, and said, "It's...it's not that I don't want to be alive."

"Just that you're afraid he might have given up more than he should have to bring you back," Bucky said softly, knowingly.

She bit the inside of her lip. "Yes."

"The thing is, I think maybe you're the only thing that would be too much for him to give up."

Natasha raised an eyebrow. "Says the man he has risked court martial and international criminal charges for."

"Yeah, so I know a little something about it." Liho managed to get hold of the string and Bucky let her win a round. "Natasha. Steve is a good person, and he's loyal, but he is dumber than a post when it comes to actually seeing and acknowledging what's in front of him, to knowing any truth outside of those that guide his moral compass. It's like his True North fucks up every single other direction in his mind."

"Bucky—"

Bucky shook his head, and poked at Liho's stomach, snatching his hand back before she could latch on with her claws. "Stop worrying about what he gave up. Pay attention to what he gave it up for."

Natasha focused on Liho, since that was about the only thing that didn't make her want to cry just then. "Damaged goods."

"You sacrificed everything again and again and again, for your team, for your friends, for a world that never showed you half as much compassion. Maybe it's your paradigm that's the problem, not his."

She blinked at him. He smiled. "We're all terrible mirrors for ourselves. Or so my therapist tells me."

"Does your therapist know anything about anything?"

"Enough, actually." Bucky threw her an amused glance. "Look, for him, if not for you, okay? Just. I dunno. Maybe try to see in yourself what he sees in you."

She could never stop being surprised at how things that seemed like they should be so small always felt so insurmountable.

The first few days after the braces came off were some of the most uncomfortable of Natasha's life. Shuri explained - just as Natasha had asked - exactly what she was doing in terms of muscle regeneration and nervous system repair. Natasha said, "Don't suppose it could feel less like I turned a hair dryer on in the bathtub?"

Shuri, who'd by now had to watch her scream and swear and otherwise be a mess for weeks in physical therapy, and seemed to have gained a grudging respect for her, made a face and said, "Not if you want it done right."

"Yeah, didn't think so."

When they'd started the treatments, Shuri had offered to put her under, since painkillers would interfere with the nervous responses and might mess things up. Natasha, who'd never liked being unconscious at the mercy of others, and had spent the past several months needing assistance for the most basic of things constantly, had said quietly, "I'd prefer not."

Shuri hadn't pushed the argument. She looked a bit like she wanted to, now. Instead, she went back to work, and Natasha went back to swallowing convulsively and thinking about anything other than what was happening.

Afterward, she was lying on the bed in the med-wing, breathing slowly, when Steve came in and brushed her hair back from her face. "Hey there."

She was exhausted from the pain, cold down to her marrow, and tired of clinical touch. She couldn't have said which caused her to roll onto her side, ball her fists up in his shirt and bury her face in his abdomen. There was a moment of stillness, and then he said, "Got it," and before she was entirely aware of what was happening, he had swept her up in a bridal carry, and was taking her out of the medical wing.

It wasn't a surprise that he took her back to her rooms and settled her in her own bed. Liho came out like a shot from wherever she'd been exploring, and colonized the spot on the pillow directly next to Natasha's head. Natasha mumbled greetings and patted her head.

He asked, "Need anything? Water? Ibuprofen? Extremely amateur but heartfelt massage?"

She giggled at the last offer, making grabby hands at him. "Just you an' sleep."

Steve, having toed off his shoes and stripped to his boxers and t-shirt, curled up behind her. He kissed the back of her head. "You've got me."

The words just barely filtered through the fog of exhaustion, but she filed them away for later consideration, and drifted off.

Natasha woke slowly, something she was becoming more used to, but it still wasn't entirely natural to her. Steve wasn't there, that was immediately evident. The bed hadn't lost its warmth, though, and she could smell coffee. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up, just breathing for a moment. With the braces off, she could walk, but it required a serious expenditure of energy and effort. Also, her arm was still braced, which threw her center off.

The ribs had healed up, though, so she could compensate, which is what she did, making her way slowly toward the TV lounge only a few feet down the hall. Sure enough, Steve was in there, staring at the coffee maker. She leaned her good arm against the doorjamb. "Watching it makes it go neither faster, nor slower, you realize?"

He laughed. "Got kinda mesmerized." Turning toward her, he said, "I was planning on bringing you a cup and seeing what you wanted for breakfast."

She frowned. They'd gone to sleep at around four in the afternoon. "Is it Wednesday?"

"That is still what comes after Tuesday, I have checked multiple times." Then, "You were wiped. I called Shuri, and she basically said it was to be expected and to let you wake up when you were ready."

"You didn't have to stay."

His jaw ticked. She pushed herself away from the door and went to the couch before she had to slide in an undignified pile to the floor. By the time she made it, the coffee was done, and she listened as he prepared it. He brought a mug to her and sat, holding his own in those hands that dwarfed the normal-human-sized mug. He smiled, just a bit, peering at her with his head tilted. "Buck told me that I was being brave in all the stupid ways and none of the useful ones."

Natasha could identify with that. It was so easy to risk one's life, particularly for things that mattered. One's heart was something different altogether. "I'm not sure I'm worth it. Can be worth it. Whatever you gave up."

"You don't have to be sure. I'm sure."

That summed up so much about Steve Rogers that she found herself laughing. He laughed in response. She tucked herself into his side, leaching off his heat, and asked, "You remember the first time we met?"

"Yeah, Nat, strangely enough, that particular series of events has stuck with me."

"You know what stuck with me? Because, really, Steve, other than the fact that Coulson was obsessed with you, I was largely indifferent to your presence. Clint was missing, Bruce scared the shit out of me, I had bigger fish to fry."

"All right, I'll bite. What stuck?" He draped one arm over her shoulder.

"You were wary of Fury and Hill, Tony made your hackles rise just by breathing, you found Thor as alien as he actually was, and you were incredibly aware of the potential powder keg in Bruce, but you reserved judgement for me. At first, I thought maybe it was a gender bias, although you didn't seem to be displaying that toward Hill. Then I thought maybe I just wasn't important enough to be on your radar. But that wasn't it, was it? It was that even knowing the parts of my dossier you'd been read in on, you decided to presume I was trustworthy until I proved otherwise."

Steve took a sip. She continued, "I toyed with the idea that it was naivety. It wasn't, though. It was that you read that file and thought, 'she's chosen the side of the angels, I'll assume she is one until she proves me wrong.'"

"You didn't. Prove me wrong."

"Debatable. Not the point, though. The point is that nobody, literally nobody, had ever done that for me before. Clint knew I could become something more than I was, so did Fury and Coulson, but for them I was someone who needed to prove that I wasn't a threat, rather than the other way around. I'm not saying they were wrong, they weren't. I'm just saying that before you, I'd never met anyone who knew who and what I was and still considered me just plain human."

"Well. No, I actually don't think I ever thought of you as plain anything. You're...very not plain. But that was obviously not an appropriate observation on the part of a colleague, let alone a soldier in arms."

She frowned. "You didn't look at me like that. You've never looked at me like that."

"Nat, your foremost skill is interrogation with a big heaping mound of the ability to read others. I'm honest, not an idiot who goes around announcing all his secrets."

Mulling that over, she decided, "It wouldn't have changed anything. I still would have been as fucking caught off-guard and terrified by what I felt as I was. And perhaps even more unwilling to acknowledge any of those—my—feelings. I'd loved before. Clint, his family, Phil. I knew, by that time, that I was capable. But being in love?" She shook her head. "And knowing it could have actually led to something? I'd probably have been halfway across the fucking planet before the smoke cleared."

"Does—" Steve set his mug down, pressing his warm palm to her cheek. "Does it change anything now?"

It didn't change the fact that she was in love with him. She wasn't sure anything ever would. It didn't change the fact that she was still terrified to try for something more than she already had with him. Nor did it change the fact that he thought she was worth making a sacrifice for, and yet had given her the power to do as she would.

He had always made certain she had that power. She turned her head and kissed his hand. "I don't know that I'm the person you see when you look at me."

"I know I'm not the person you see when you look at me," he told her.

"But I want to keep seeing her. In your eyes." She watched him.

"I won't look away." He leaned over, breaching the space between them to catch her lips with his.

Two nights later, Steve fell out of the bed. Natasha woke to the thud and the sound of him smacking his head against the nightstand and said, "Holy shit. Steve?"

He appeared over the side of the bed, rubbing at his cheek. "I survived."

Natasha blinked down at where she was in the bed, which happened to be firmly in the middle, and felt a stirring of suspicion. "Why didn't you just move me back a little bit?"

"You're still healing," Steve said and shrugged. "I've made it through worse than falls than this. A time or two."

She looked him dead in the eyes and said, "We're gonna need a bigger bed."

"Hey, wait," he said. "I got that reference."

It turned out that while there were rooms in the compound that fit King beds, none of them were intended to be bedrooms. Either they didn't have the proper egress, or they weren't appropriately private, or it meant losing training areas. "Evidently," she said to Pepper, over video, "Tony didn't design this place as a love nest."

"Huh," Pepper said. "How odd."

Natasha closed her eyes against how much she missed the Tower, Pepper, Tony, the last emotion probably one she wasn't even allowed to have when chatting with Pepper. She forced herself to laugh.

"Nat," Pepper said, quietly.

Natasha shook her head. "How's my favorite niece with the last name Stark?"

"Natasha," Pepper said more insistently. "I own this lake. And all the land surrounding it."

"I—I know that."

"It is forty minutes from the training facility, has thirty unused acres at this moment, and I could use a friend. Or two. Nearby."

"Pepp—"

"Build a love-nest, Natasha. On a lake. Have somewhere to go when you're not saving the world that's not a fancy dormitory."

"We could just visit more often, if that's what you need. You don't have to—"

"You know what Tony gave Morgan for her second birthday?"

After a moment, Natasha shook her head.

"A replica of the Tower. Recreated perfectly." Pepper ran a hand over her face. "He missed you. All of you. And I miss you, too. Rhodey's gonna build, I already got him to agree. It'll be a lake community."

"A house, huh?"

"A tent encampment, an underground bunker, I don't care, Nat. Whatever you want."

Natasha laughed again, although this time it wasn't forced. "Yeah, all right. Send me the plot information and the name of someone you actually trust to build this thing?"

Pepper brought up her wrist, flicked her fingers over the surface a bit, and Natasha's email pinged. Somehow, she didn't feel as though she'd been played.

Natasha regained muscle mass slowly, while learning how to frame out what would be their house. She still tired quickly, and spent most afternoons lying in the grass near the lake, Gremlin prowling "the wilds," that was, the tall grass nearby. Steve could go all day, of course. It wasn't exactly a hardship, watching him erect whole walls by himself.

Before they'd begun drafting, Steve had insisted they sit down and talk about everything they'd ever wanted in a house, from childhood until now. She'd laughed and said, "Mostly what I wanted as a kid was a bed and somewhere to hide food. And the fact that I wanted those things was deviance from the program."

Steve had unironically written, "(1) space for king or special-order size bed, (2) hidden compartments for food storage, both refrigerated and dry."

He'd said, "I always wanted lots of windows. Fresh air wasn't a thing in the tenements, but I thought, you know, maybe if it was, my lungs mightn't've been so bad." He added, "(3) those unfolding door-window things that are on the south side of the complex."

She leaned in and kissed him and they lost the plot of house planning for the rest of that day.

After that, it was easier to say, "A reading nook."

By the time they had finished, they had a list that was a mish-mash of the ridiculous, "treadmills from room to room," to the luxurious but reasonable, "in-ground hot tub in back," to the relatively mundane, "double vanity in master bath."

It was exceedingly clear that despite all their time living in Tony's digs on and off, both of them found it to be slightly unreal that they would get to have a house, with their names on the deed, and anything they wanted from it.

On a phone call to Clint, who was still the first person she dialed when she needed to freak out, she said in a frantic whisper, "I am tempting fate. This is going to end badly."

To which Laura said, "One sec, Nat, he's in the barn and forgot his phone, let me give you to him."

So, of course, she had to repeat it to Clint, who said, "And I wasn't tempting fate marrying Laura and having the kids? Unless you think Loki and Thanos and Vormir were all about karma for me trying to be happy."

Every once in a while, it was apparent that Clint was still harboring a tiny grudge. "Don't be a dick."

"Then you listen. Your ledger had been wiped clean well before Thanos. And fuck only knows Steve deserves to rest for half a second. This is good, Nat. The two of you are good, the two of you getting things you want is good, and maybe shit will happen because shit happens, but it won't be because you didn't deserve to have this."

She swallowed. "It's shit. Having so much to lose."

"Yeah," he said.

And it was shit, the fear that lodged in her stomach, the jagged edge of it beneath her heart. But on the third day after they moved in, she found a secret freezing compartment that definitely hadn't been in the house plans the last time she'd checked them over for approval. It was stocked with all her favorite ice creams.

She closed the panel back up and went to find Steve, who had just made it back from his and Bucky's weekly pilgrimage to the Farmers' Market. Both of them would eat just about anything you put in front of them, and at the same time, both of them might literally be willing to die for fresh produce.

She said, "You're my absolute favorite," because it was easier than "everything that's ever happened to me has been worth it for this moment in time, just this single moment with you."

He smiled, unpacking a boat load of summer squash, and said, "How weird, you're my absolute favorite, too."