Romanogers Oneshots

Send Down a Lifeline

Summary: She wished more than anything she'd followed Steve onto that quinjet instead of burning her bridges at both ends, leaving herself stranded in the middle.

The street running alongside the river was dark and deserted. Natasha cut into it, never slowing her pace, the black water flowing silently past her on her left, a long row of ugly, squat apartments to her right. Her lungs burned in her chest but she dared not slow down. She looked two blocks ahead to the bridge that cut over the street she was on, arching from one side of the river to the other. Her feet hit the ground too loudly; her racing figure echoed and reverberated through the shadows like a drum.

The street was lined with cars, permit stickers in the bottom corner of their windshields, fallen yellow leaves caught in the curves of their wipers. She jumped at a silver sedan, one foot on the hood, which buckled loudly under her weight, the other on the roof, and she jumped and caught the ledge of the bridge in her hands. She hauled herself up, scraping her knees and her shins on the ugly pebble-dashed sides, and started running again, away from the river, the city lights blurred and dancing on the water's rippling surface.

If he hadn't seen her, this was where she would lose him. If he hadn't seen her jump onto the bridge; if he hadn't seen her sprinting back into the shadowy, narrow streets between the apartment buildings. She could lose him in the maze of the alleyways and dead ends; keep her head low until they'd lost her scent. This part of town was a pretzel of bends and curves and arches, streets curving over and under themselves.

She kept running. She had to assume he had see her cut alongside the river; he had made the bridge; he had seen the wet footprint of her shoe on the hood of the parked car and predicted what direction she'd try to take. Part of chasing down a mark was predicting the best way for them to escape, and beating them there.

She cut right again, crossed over the route she had taken five minutes earlier with the shadow chasing her, and kept running north. Her adrenaline kept threatening to stumble her, trip her over her own feet. When she finally stopped, there was a sharp pain hooked in her side, and her lungs burned with the cold night air.

She waited, listening for following footsteps. Then she cautiously doubled back for a couple of blocks, until she was satisfied.

She had lost him.

Natasha slept late, the sun intruding through the plastic venetian blinds and warming the tiny room. Sounds from the street drifted up to the apartment — delivery vans reversing and doors slamming, the jolt and thud of hand trucks carelessly hitting the curb and the edges of doorways, men shouting and laughing.

She pulled the quilt up to her chin and listened to it all, dozing in an effort to catch up on the sleep she'd lost the previous night. She let her mind drift between memories and dreams, trivial little things coming up to the surface to make her heart ache — Tony hijacking the music system at a party, Bruce rubbing the red marks from his glasses off his nose, Steve bent over his sketch book.

She rolled over and rubbed her eyes, staring up at the ceiling. She could feel the aches and scrapes from her narrow escape the night before, and her chest tightened for a moment. Her circle of freedom was getting ever-smaller. The bounty on her head had turned everybody into a potential enemy quickly.

The sad truth of it was, there was little use relying on your status as a superhero when the government had a reward out for your capture. Money talked in ways nothing else did.

She listened to the street outside and wondered if it was safer to stay where she was, or try to get out and establish herself somewhere else. She had fewer safe-houses now than she'd used to, thanks to SHIELD's secrets no longer being secrets.