Love Like Ghost

my tears ricochet

And I can go anywhere I want
Anywhere I want, just not home

~

I stared down at the polaroid in my hand. His beautiful face tucked away into mine as I smiled beside him. I wasn't ready, to go back in time. Fear settled into my bones at the opportunity to mess this all up, to lose him once more when I was so close. It made me want to lock myself away until they returned, so I didn't screw it all up with blind determination.

Because I had been blind and irrational, driven by my own emotions.

He was coming back. He had to. And it was the only thing that consumed my brain.

I needed to know warmth again. I hadn't known it since we were separated. Since the cruelty of fate had separated us once again. I wanted to breathe again. I think it had stalled; halted in a suspended moment waiting for him to fill my lungs once more. I wish I was with him. Quiet and peaceful, resting while waiting for them to bring us back, instead of whatever this was.

I traced his face. I wanted him to exist again, exist beside me.

"You look like a baby." Nat chuckled over my shoulder down at the picture.

I sighed contently down at him. "Seems like a lifetime ago." I tucked the photo away, "Where do you rate our success?"

She shook her head at me. "I'm not playing this game with you." Then she smiled, "I think if everyone sticks to their plans we have a good shot at this."

I glanced around at everyone moving around me. "You know..." I met her gaze, "I've been so busy being sad and angry about what happened. I hadn't even thought about what comes after." My vision glazed over, "What if it's too much for him...what I did?"

"We've all done bad things." She reminded me. "I have seen the way you and Barnes look at each other, moved around each other. The way your souls are visibly so intwined. It's like you burn together." Her hand squeezed my bicep, "A love like that is rare, and hard to come between. No matter what either of you did; it never mattered. And it's still not going to matter. We aren't the sum of all our bad deeds." She moved closer. "We'll get him back."

I looked at her, and her at me. And maybe in a different point in our time she would have made a jest about how I should let Barnes go, take what was in front of me. To choose Steve. But whatever quip she would have made died in that moment. Things had changed, things were different. I wasn't the same person I was years ago. I wasn't the girl with a frozen beast in her basement. I wasn't the nurse who defrosted a WWII solider.

I was something else now. Something different.

But my love for him never wavered, never changed.

"I don't know what I'll do if we don't."

She was quick to take my face in her hands; hands too soft for a trained assassin. She forced me to look into her eyes, her fierce piercing gaze of furious determination. Hope was the backbone of all her features and she was willing them onto me letting them seep into my skin through her soft, warm hands. "We'll get him back. We'll get them all back." I nodded, my voice, my breath stuck in the middle of my throat as she held me up with her two hands. Natasha was grounding me. The only support keeping me upright where I wanted to fall under the immense weight of uncertainty. "Whatever it takes."

My hands came up to her hands as I tried to smile at her, letting her know I was alright. Well, that I would be alright to continue on. "Maybe...maybe," my voice seemed so small. "We'll find someone for you too." It came out more as a suggestive question.

She snorted dropping her hands from me. "Not likely."

"Alright we're all ready." Bruce called out.

"There's someone." An attempt at a joke.