Chapter Text
Not once in her life until the moment she entered the new Avengers HQ had Natasha ever expected to possess something as banal and mundane as an office. By its very existence an office implied a desk that she was expected to sit at, and by definition that meant she had a desk job. It suggested a sense of permanence and stability in her life.
It was unfathomable.
And yet here she sat, wading through paperwork. Well, paperless paperwork, thanks to the Stark-designed computer system. Lists and charts and forms and everything bureaucratic that she had never thought she’d have to deal with. Briefings and debriefings, yes. Files with information about her missions and targets, yes. But frigging report cards?
She knew the new team needed to be able to see the data that showed their performance record in training and on missions, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. She knew that, as their trainer, she was the person best qualified to give them that information. She knew that Steve was doing his share of dealing with the red tape as well - Boy Scout that he was, likely he’d finished his reports the same day they’d agreed it needed to be done.
None of that made her any less antsy about the fact that she had an office.
Although to be fair, its existence hadn’t bothered her nearly as much before she and Steve called it quits. Until then, she’d found it oddly comforting to know that her place here was so secure. Now, the idea of being tied down made her skin crawl.
But she couldn’t just abandon the Avengers. Not yet, not until they were ready and truly functioning as a proper team. What she’d do when she left, Natasha wasn’t sure, but she’d find something. She always did. Maybe Fury could use her again.
A knock on the door startled Natasha just as she signed the last of the reports. Glancing at the clock, she raised an eyebrow. It was well past anything that might be considered office hours, if she could even be said to have such a thing. If there was some kind of after-hours problem someone would have called her on the comms, not come to her door looking for her. “Come in,” she said, curious.
To say she was surprised when the door opened to show Peggy standing there would be an understatement. Things had been awkward between them since the revelation about Natasha’s past with Bucky... though not nearly as awkward as Natasha had expected, all things considered. Peggy had taken it remarkably in stride, and didn’t appear to blame Natasha for the falling out with Steve.
Then again, perhaps she was grateful, since by some miracle that night had resulted in the worst-case and best-case scenarios coming to pass. Things had ended horribly between Steve and Natasha, but it had driven Steve to go to Bucky and Peggy after all.
“You worked through dinner again,” Peggy commented as she came through the door. She held up a plastic bag, and Natasha could see the distinctive shape of the cartons inside through the plastic. “At this rate I’m afraid you’re going to starve yourself by accident.”
“I have to do something to keep my weight down, I’ve been so lazy lately,” Natasha replied, her mouth on autopilot as she tried to absorb the fact that Peggy had not only noticed Natasha had been skipping meals, she’d decided to do something to fix it. “I swear my butt gets wider every hour I spend in this damned chair.”
“Be that as it may, wasting away to nothing isn’t a good idea either,” Peggy chuckled as she set the bag on a clear spot on Natasha’s desk. “I brought enough for two... if you don’t mind the company? I miss our meals together. It’s been far too long since we really spoke.”
Frowning, Natasha tried to take the other woman’s measure. Ordinarily she was good at reading people, but Peggy was also an experienced undercover operative. The other woman was better than most at hiding her true thoughts and motives when she wanted to.
At the moment she appeared to be open and genuine, however. Undoubtedly she had an ulterior motive, but whatever it was, Natasha didn’t think her intent was antagonistic. “I didn’t expect you’d really want much to do with me, given everything that’s happened,” Natasha admitted, but gestured for Peggy to take a seat.
Reaching for one of the cartons, Natasha opened it to find her favourite, chicken almond guy ding. There was a surprisingly decent variety of food available on the base, though none of it was five star quality, but Chinese was Natasha’s guilty pleasure.
Peggy passed over a pair of chopsticks, and her smile was rueful. “I know you and Steve are having difficulties, to put it mildly. But I thought you and I had been building a friendship of our own, not just through him. I never had a female friend before you from whom I didn’t have to hide the important half of my life.”
Genuinely touched, Natasha had to struggle for a moment to find words to form a reply. “I’ve never had a lot of friends, period. It’s hard to form attachments when you grow up knowing you could be ordered to kill your best friend at any time.” The Red Room had made a point of forcing the girls who grew close to one another to fight to the death. They all quickly learned not to bother making friends, or even allies.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” Peggy said, reaching for a carton of her own. “Please feel free not to answer, and I don’t mean to dig up bad memories. But that’s not the first time you’ve said something that reminds me of a Russian program I encountered back in the forties, designed to train young girls to become lethal spies. That program was run by an organization called Leviathan, however, and they were shut down before SHIELD was ever founded.”
“Leviathan!” Natasha gave an astonished laugh. “God, there’s a name I haven’t heard since my history lessons. They founded the original Red Room program around the time of the First World War. Later, the KGB picked up the program and continued it. Well, HYDRA did, under the guise of the KGB. In hindsight if Bucky was one of my trainers, HYDRA kind of had to be behind it.”
“So it is the same program. I had wondered - you don’t have any handcuff scars on your wrist.” Peggy gestured with her chopsticks to Natasha’s arm, bared by her short-sleeved shirt.
“Wow, you do know your stuff.” Natasha raised an eyebrow. “They stopped cuffing the girls to the beds as soon as they realized how easily identifiable it made us, and started putting us in tiny individual cells at night instead. Were you part of the group that took down Leviathan?”
“Howard Stark and I both were, among others at the SSR,” Peggy said. “I made some enemies in the process. One of your predecessors made it her personal mission to see me dead, and she nearly succeeded several times.”
“You fought a Red Room graduate and lived to tell the tale? I’m impressed.” She really was. Of course the training methods had come a long way since back in the thirties when Peggy’s adversary would have been raised by the program, but still.
“I wish I could claim luck had less to do with my survival,” Peggy replied. “She was a better fighter than I, but in the end I suppose I was more determined.”
“Determination and the will to succeed and survive count for a lot,” Natasha told her. “Hell, just look at Steve.”
“Oh, I do,” Peggy said, with the faintest hint of a smirk. “As often as I have the opportunity. And I admire the view.” The teasing was hesitant, almost tentative. Probably she was sounding out Natasha’s reaction to what was potentially still a very sore subject.
Not that it was. Natasha’s only regret was that things had become so very awkward between her and Steve. She missed his company and yes, even his friendship, but she was hardly going to be sensitive about the end of her relationship with Steve when it was what she’d been planning all along.
If she kept telling herself that, maybe eventually she’d believe it.
“Well, there certainly is a great deal to admire,” she answered in kind, keeping her tone light and easy, and was rewarded when Peggy relaxed and smiled back.
“Truly, no hard feelings between us?” Peggy asked, tilting her head and giving Natasha a sincerely hopeful look. “I was worried you might feel I’d been... inappropriate, considering how quickly Steve came to us after your fight.”
“None at all,” Natasha promised her, and meant it. “I’m just glad he had you to go to. No problems with Bucky getting jealous?”
“It’s been a bit of a balancing act, with both of them,” Peggy acknowledged with a sigh. “Bucky’s still at least partly convinced that at any moment I’ll realize Steve is so much better for me that I don’t need Bucky after all, and Steve remains uncertain that he’s truly welcome on a long-term basis. And of course, I can’t get either of them to admit that or talk about it, so I have to guess how they’re really feeling.”
“Hang in there,” Natasha said, not unsympathetic. “It doesn’t just take twice as much work to have two partners, it’s exponential. And you’re definitely going to have to be the sensible one, the glue that holds it all together. I have faith in you three. Bucky agreeing in the first place was the biggest initial obstacle.”
“It was his suggestion, actually,” Peggy said, surprising Natasha. “Though it was couched more in terms of ‘fine, if you won’t leave me to be with him, you’re stuck with us both because he needs you right now’.”
“Interesting. Well, I guess that lack of social conditioning he suffers from can have its benefits.” Natasha was glad to hear it, though. She’d gotten Steve accustomed to the idea that relationships didn’t have to be exclusive to be satisfying even before they’d found Peggy, but she hadn’t had the chance to do enough prep work on Peggy and Bucky to be sure they’d accept the idea, too. Although she was less surprised that Peggy had jumped at the chance, since she’d been the one most firmly caught in the middle between the two men.
Natasha did wonder exactly how things had turned out between Steve and Bucky - whether Steve had ever gotten that last bit of his fantasy fulfilled, or if they were just taking turns with Peggy or carefully avoiding contact with each other in bed. For his sake, she hoped it was the first possibility.
Maybe after a while to rebuild her friendship with Peggy, she’d even be able to find out the answer. Natasha’s only comfort in this whole mess was in knowing she’d done right by Steve, so it would be nice to have the extra confirmation that he’d gotten everything he wanted in the end.
“Speaking of Bucky, I hope things haven’t been uncomfortable between the two of you?” Peggy asked. “He hasn’t said anything about it. About any of it, if you’re wondering; just that he feels horrid for his part in what was done to you back then. I think he worries that you blame him.”
That was a bit of a relief. Natasha hadn’t been sure how much Bucky might tell his lovers about his past with her, or how much he even truly remembered. Not that there was much he could tell beyond what had been exposed in that first revelation, since most of the things she especially wanted to keep private were things she’d never shared with him, either.
“I’ll make a point of reassuring him there’re no hard feelings,” Natasha said. “I knew he was hesitant to approach me but I figured it was just awkwardness because of me and Steve.”
“I did notice you’d started calling him Bucky,” Peggy smiled at her. “So I assumed things couldn’t be too bad.”
“He’s been referring to me as Nata ever since that night,” Natasha pointed out. “I was only using Barnes because he refused to call me anything but Romanoff.” In her heart of hearts he would always be Yasha to her, but she couldn’t let herself think of him that way. That wasn’t who he was – it wasn’t ever who he’d truly been.
At least he hadn’t continued using the diminutives. She could live with ‘Nata’, but there was no way she’d put up with anyone else calling her ‘Natashulya’.
“It seems he prefers the distance of family names except with people he cares for, so it’s certainly a good sign that he’s calling you that.” Peggy paused, and when she continued she sounded tentative again. “There is one other question I wanted to ask you.”
Ah-hah. Here it was at last, the real reason Peggy had reached out to her. “You can ask, but I don’t promise to answer,” Natasha shrugged.
“Of course. And I wouldn’t ask at all, it’s truly none of my business, except... well, there’s one thing in particular that seems to be eating at Steve, and he flatly refuses to elaborate.” Peggy’s cheeks were flushed with embarrassment, but she was determined. “He’ll only say that you ‘turned things personal’ towards the end of the fight. What did you say to him?”
Natasha grimaced at the memory. “Nothing I should have. Usually when I get into a fight with someone I’m very calculated about it, but I’m ashamed to admit I was just lashing out at him.”
“Yes, but what was it?” Peggy persisted.
“The usual thing you throw at a man when you’re pissed at him and want to take him down a notch,” Natasha sighed. “I made a barbed comment about his skill in bed.”
Peggy looked shocked and dismayed, which wasn’t anything Natasha hadn’t expected, except the reaction seemed much stronger than was warranted. “Natasha, you didn’t. Of all things.”
“What?” Natasha frowned, tilting her head. “It’s not like I said he was awful, just that he wasn’t so great I was compelled to spill all my secrets to him.”
“First of all, you were the only lover he’d ever had, so your opinion carries quite a bit more weight than it otherwise might,” Peggy said tartly. Natasha winced, because she honestly hadn’t considered that aspect.
Peggy wasn’t finished, though. “More importantly, he’s spent his entire life being compared to Bucky by women, and coming out on the losing side. The miracle is that he never came to resent Bucky for it, but as much as he tries to pretend he’s not, he’s quite sensitive about it.”
“I didn’t compare the two of them,” Natasha protested. “It was just a general jab at Steve.”
“A jab you took immediately after admitting that Bucky was your first love and that you essentially never got over him,” Peggy retorted, exasperated. “You flat out declared you’ve never loved anyone since - which by necessity includes Steve. And then you implied he wasn’t even good enough in bed to be worth caring about at all.”
“I never told Steve that I loved him. Exactly the opposite, I told him from the beginning that it was never going to happen,” Natasha insisted, but her heart felt heavy as she absorbed the weight of what Peggy was saying. She’d intended to hurt Steve, not decimate him.
It did explain why he’d immediately ended the argument and ordered her to get the hell out, though.
“Well, at least now I know what it was, so I can perhaps help him over it,” Peggy sighed and leaned back in her chair. “It sounds like you both lost your tempers. I don’t blame you, I just wish you’d picked any other way to take a stab at him.” She studied Natasha for a moment, and gave her a wry smile. “Steve is right about one thing, though.”
“What’s that?” Natasha wasn’t entirely certain she wanted to hear the answer, with the way Peggy was looking at her.
“You really just can’t bring yourself to admit you’ve done anything wrong at all, can you?” Peggy shook her head.
“I said I shouldn’t have lashed out at him,” Natasha objected.
“Yes but the moment I told you how badly you’d really hurt him, you started deflecting and justifying. You do realize that’s the part of all this that he’s truly angry about? He feels you’re refusing to take responsibility for your own actions.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong as far as the mess with Bucky is concerned,” Natasha insisted, starting to grow angry all over again. Peggy had come to her asking for friendship and effectively declaring a truce, and now she was throwing the same damned arguments in Natasha’s face that Steve had. “He had no right to have expected me to tell him something that painful and private just because it involves someone he knows and cares about. It’s not like doing so would have gained him anything or helped Bucky in any way.”
“Of course he had no right, and I’ve spent the past two weeks battering myself against the brick wall of his abominably thick skull trying to get that through to him,” Peggy replied, startling Natasha. The last thing she’d expected was agreement.
“Whether he had the right or not, he was legitimately hurt by the fact that you felt you couldn’t open up to him about something so important to both of you,” Peggy continued. “Really I think all it would have taken was if you’d started the whole argument off with the words ‘I’m sorry I hurt you, but,’ to acknowledge that. Instead you got his back up, and once that happens there’s just no dealing with him.”
“Truer words,” Natasha agreed fervently. Once Steve got it into his head that someone had done something ‘wrong’ he was like a dog with a bone, worrying at it constantly. He never let go and he never forgot, and arguing with him was a waste of breath. As she’d quite effectively proven.
Peggy chuckled, but sobered again quickly. “While I agree that your relationship with Steve, whatever its depth, does not entitle him to know the painful details of your most private memories when they have no immediate impact on the situation... Natasha, there is one thing you’re not accounting for.”
“Oh?” Natasha wasn’t sure she even wanted to ask.
“You knew all along that eventually Steve would be bringing Bucky back, and once I was found that became an immediate certainty,” Peggy chided her. “You absolutely should have warned Steve that you might well be a trigger for Bucky. You needn’t have gone into extreme personal detail, but what if the flashback Bucky had because of finally remembering you had been a very bad one? We wouldn’t have been prepared, and you potentially put the whole base at risk as a result.”
Thoroughly - and quite rightly - scolded, Natasha looked down at her food carton and chased a grain of rice around the bottom with the tip of her chopsticks. “He never showed any signs of recognizing me any of the other times I’d encountered him since leaving the Red Room, so I knew it was extremely unlikely it would happen right after he got here. I kept putting it off, telling myself there would be enough time after he got more settled. I suppose at some point I convinced myself that it was personal and private between us, so Yasha - Bucky - wouldn’t bring it up in public either, and we could just get it sorted out between the two of us without needing to involve anyone else.”
Glancing up, she saw that Peggy was giving her an impatient look. Natasha sighed. “Yes, all right, I made a mistake,” she forced herself to admit, and Peggy made a ‘finally!’ sort of gesture. “A big one. I knew Steve would feel betrayed that I’d kept it secret so long, and I didn’t want to deal with any of it, so I put my head in the sand. Despite what I try to convince people of, I’m not actually perfect.”
“Nobody is. Not even Steve, for all that a shocking number of people seem to believe he must be.” Peggy rolled her eyes, and Natasha snorted with amusement. It was true, a great many of Steve’s fans appeared to believe he was some kind of paragon of virtue, with no character flaws of any kind.
Then again, there were people who seemed to believe the same thing of Tony, so really there was just no accounting for the sanity of fans.
“He misses you terribly, you know,” Peggy told her softly. “Now that I’ve finally gotten him to admit that he was also in the wrong I think the two of you might be able to sort things out, if you’ll only try.”
It was a tempting thought, but Natasha shook her head. “Not yet. Let him get more settled with the two of you. I would like my friendship with him back, but I don’t want him torn again over where his heart belongs.”
“So you’ll make him miserable to ensure he’s not miserable?” Peggy said dryly. “Why does he need to be torn over it? You’re the one who’s been insisting all along that you’re not interested in exclusivity.”
“You’d be all right with sharing?” Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow. “Long term, for real? It’s a lot harder than you think to avoid getting jealous, you know. Think about how much work you’re already putting into keeping the two of them balanced, and imagine it increasing exponentially again but with your heart as the one on the line. It would crush Steve if he ended up hurting you.”
“Well. Given that I’m insisting they share me with each other, it would be a bit greedy of me to refuse to allow them to have anyone else.” Peggy smiled at her. “Especially if it means Steve will stop dragging around like a whipped puppy, all the while trying to pretend there’s nothing wrong so he won’t ‘bother’ me and Bucky with the fact that he’s hurting.”
Once again Natasha had to fight off temptation, and it was stronger this time. Much stronger. The part of her that was still struggling to get her head above water wanted absolutely nothing more than to jump on the offer, to huddle close to Steve and hoard whatever crumbs of affection she could get from him for as long as she could make it last.
The problem was that he wasn’t offering crumbs. He was offering whole damned bakeries worth of affection – of love. He might claim he was all right with her not loving him back, but he didn’t really mean it, or he wouldn’t forever. She still couldn’t give him what he truly wanted, and it would be unfair to draw him back in only to hurt him all over again in the future. Better to let the wound that had already been dealt continue to heal over, instead of ripping off the partially formed scab.
Especially because if she went back to him now she was going to be forced to admit, at least to herself, that the reason she couldn’t bring herself to stay away was because she was in love with him. This was her last hope of saving herself.
“It’s not just the fight,” she murmured. “I never wanted things to end so badly between us, but there are a lot of other reasons it’s not a good idea for me to open up the possibility of more again.”
“Implying that you did intend for things to end at some point,” Peggy said shrewdly. “You were planning this all along, weren’t you. Was Steve right? Were you just looking for an opportunity to bow out gracefully?”
“Of course. I knew it would end eventually, it had to. We don’t want the same things, long-term.” Natasha shrugged, making certain the gesture was careless, allowing nothing of what she truly felt to show in any way. Bury it, bury it, her old mantra came back to her. In the Red Room, her life had depended more than once on her ability to convince them that nothing mattered to her except survival. “When you turned up it seemed like the perfect chance to at least make certain he wouldn’t be left alone as a result.”
“If you think he’s getting from me what you believe he wants but you can’t provide, how does that change if he’s with us both?” Peggy persisted. “There are things I can’t give him that you can – obviously, or he wouldn’t be hurting so very badly over losing you.”
“He’s hurting because he’s in love with me,” Natasha said. “I let things drag on too long, but he’ll get over me eventually and be better off.”
“Natasha. This is Steve we’re talking about,” Peggy shook her head. “Seventy years later, in love with you, and believing he couldn’t have me because I was with Bucky, he still couldn’t bring himself to let go of his feelings for me. Do you truly think he’ll do any better at letting go of you?”
She had a point, unfortunately. “Do you truly think it will make him happy being with me but knowing I don’t love him back?” Natasha countered.
“Are you so very certain you don’t?” Peggy raised an eyebrow at her, pinning her with a sharp look.
“Yes,” Natasha insisted, even as her heart answered ’No.’ “I’ll admit that what the three of you have is making me reconsider whether love is real at all. There’s no other reason I can think of that Bucky wouldn’t have killed Steve as ordered. But you’re the exception that very much proves the rule, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Is it because you still love him? Bucky?” Peggy asked, gentling her tone like she thought the question would scare Natasha off. “I can’t even imagine how much it must hurt that he hesitated to kill Steve, but never hesitated to hurt you.”
“No, you can’t.” Natasha’s voice sounded pained even to her, and she had to pause to take a breath before she continued. She couldn’t afford to react like that, or Peggy would never let it go. The other woman could be as stubborn as Steve, in her own way.
“I never loved Bucky,” she continued when she was certain she’d give nothing further away. “I didn’t even know Bucky Barnes. The man I thought I knew, Yakov, was a figment of HYDRA’s imagination. They created him to train us, picking and choosing what pieces of him to keep and what pieces to replace, and when they were done with him they erased him. He was never anything more than a ghost.”
“A ghost that you loved.”
“A crush, more like.” This was still such a painful topic for her, and she thought it might never stop being one. It took everything Natasha had to sound unconcerned by the discussion. “I got over it the first time he nearly killed me. Trust me, I’m no threat to you as far as he’s concerned.”
“That’s far from what worries me.” Peggy studied her a moment longer, but Natasha was firmly in control of her emotions now and she let nothing slip through. “May I make a suggestion?”
“You’ve made several without hesitating, why stop now?” Natasha allowed herself a small smile so Peggy would know the words weren’t intended to be as harsh as they sounded.
“Because you’re going to like it even less than the ones I’ve made so far, I suspect,” Peggy answered with a rueful smile of her own. “Talk to Steve. Tell him what it is that makes you so certain things can’t work out between you. Let him decide whether it’s truly a deal breaker for him. Perhaps he’ll surprise you with a reasonable solution – or perhaps knowing that you tried everything you could to make it work will make it easier on you both to let it go without the loss being quite so painful.”
Once again, Peggy had a point. It would be an agonizing conversation for Natasha to have, but it would drive it home to both of them that it could never work out. She didn’t want to leave Steve hurting, after all. And anything that would make it easier for her to pull herself back to the surface could only be an improvement, no matter how painful in the short term.
“I should be going, the boys are going to wonder what I’m up to,” Peggy said, moving to gather up the empty cartons. “I hope we can do this again? I promise it won’t always be such heavy conversation.”
“I’d like that,” Natasha said, and meant it. Peggy was one hell of a dame, as Steve would put it. She and Natasha had a surprising amount in common, for all that they came at life from opposite angles. Perhaps that was why they met in the middle.
“One more thing?” Peggy smiled at her again, a conspiratorial expression this time. “Let Steve be the one to come to you, first. He bloody well owes you that apology.”
Natasha surprised herself with a genuine laugh. “Can I get away with making him grovel a little?”
“Oh, I think so.” Peggy winked at her. “One good thing about Steve; while it very nearly takes an act of god to make him admit he was wrong, once he does admit it he’ll do whatever it takes to set things right.”
In some ways, that was exactly what Natasha was afraid of. What lengths would he go to, in order to ‘set things right’ between them? What if he convinced her it was worth trying the relationship anyway? He could be so damned persuasive when he was passionate about something.
She wasn’t sure her heart could survive losing him again, if she let herself believe it could be possible to have him at all.