The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 59

Upstate New York, USA

Spring 2015

The conversation—confrontation? Nadine wasn't even entirely sure—with Rogers had both gone far better than she'd anticipated, but also hadn't gone quite so well as she'd hoped. Not that she'd honestly known what she'd even expected.

She certainly hadn't expected it to be quite so...personal for him. Well, she had but she also hadn't. But his reaction when he'd found out about her and Barnes—God, it still felt so strange to think she could actually refer to him by name now—certainly made far more sense in hindsight, that was for sure.

Not that knowing the whys exactly made her feel the least bit better. If anything, it just left her feeling worse. She couldn't help but think that she'd understand if he wanted nothing more to do with her.

Instead, he'd asked her to find him. She still couldn't quite wrap her head around that one either. Well, on one hand, she could—she was the best, after all—but she also couldn't. If their positions had been reversed? If it had been Natasha instead of Bucky? Best or not, she wasn't sure she'd want him anywhere near her sister ever again, even if he was her best chance of finding her. But of course, he was a far better person than she was...

No, she hadn't been exaggerating on the Helicarrier; had their positions been reversed, she would have killed him without hesitation.

Yet, for some baffling, inexplicable reason, he was willing to let her stick around. He was trusting her to find Barnes even if he wasn't quite up to trusting her; she very much doubted he genuinely trusted her. It was far more likely that it was just for Barnes and Nina's sake. She was certain that whatever trust had been growing between her and the Captain had been fractured irreparably after Seoul.

But that was beside the point. It really shouldn't matter. Even if, the more she thought about it, to harder it was to deny that part of her was still willing to learn to trust the man. Just as she had been coming to before what happened on the Quinjet. But his actions on the jet had stung, shaking her growing trust in Rogers. Yet she couldn't say definitively that it had felt like a betrayal, either. At the time, yes, but now? Now that she knew about Barnes? Now that she understood the whys? She could understand his obvious interpretation that she had been at fault. She couldn't fully blame him for his reaction. Not when she was at fault. So on her end, at least, no matter that part of her rebelled at the very thought, she could recognize that she hadn't been burned so badly as she imagined he had. And it left her the tentative trust in him from before Seoul weakened, but not shattered.

His trust in her, on the other hand...

She was fairly sure it was over, that his trust in her had been broken beyond repair. The hope of trust or friendship between them that she'd seen at the Barton farm seemed well beyond reach, now. A small part of her was—against her better judgement—hopeful that that wasn't the case. But she very much doubted it. So why get her hopes up.

So she wasn't even allowing herself to hope that things would revert to the way they'd been before Ultron had spilled the first of her secrets. Not in the slightest. And in that she had certainly been proven correct in her expectations. While things admittedly weren't as bad as she'd anticipated initially, they weren't exactly great either. Rogers was perceptibly distant with her now, even if it wasn't quite so obvious as during those first few days in the new Avengers Compound. He'd barely even looked to her as they'd all disembarked from the Helicarrier. And now? That was even more confusing. One minute he seemed to be keeping his distance, leaving the room when she entered, while in another he seemed to be trying to make up for it, being almost overly polite and civil. She could only guess that his treatment of her was fuelled by a lingering resentment on his friend's behalf and a distinct note of guilt over that resentment and what had happened because of it. Not that she really had a great deal of interaction to base her assessment on. She'd spent almost every waking moment near Nina since arriving at the Compound, only seeing the Captain when he stopped by to check on her and the Maximoff boy. He would just look in from outside the room, his face virtually unreadable save for concern and posture tense.