Heat Wave ➣Romanogers

Eight

Shame wasn’t an emotion with which Natasha was terribly familiar.  She’d felt it before, of course, but it was a rare thing.  Shame required the presence of a conscience, of knowing one had fundamentally done something wrong, something to hurt someone else.  Shame was akin to embarrassment, to guilt, and Natasha had been trained to not suffer either.  She didn’t acknowledge it, never let it pierce her resolve or compromise her objectives.  The Red Room had trained her to be the perfect assassin, the perfect spy, the perfect murderer, and her time in SHIELD had tempered some of that conditioning with compassion, but not much.  Guilt was weakness.  Shame was weakness.  Feeling anything other than cold determination was weakness.  Even when the prickling discomfort of it struck her in the past, she’d simply ignored it.

This, however, she couldn’t just ignore, no matter how much she wanted to.

Steve Rogers wore his heart on his sleeve.  She’d noticed that the minute she’d met him.  That should have put her at ease; people who were so open and easily interpreted were even easier to manipulate.  But it hadn’t made her comfortable then, and it didn’t now.  In fact, it was much the opposite; something about him made her feel… off-balanced.  Disarmed, in a way.  And she’d have to be blind to not see how she’d hurt him that night.  Maybe he thought he was doing an adequate job at hiding it, sitting stiffly as he was on the other side of the quinjet like he was trying to put as much distance between them as possible for her benefit.  Maybe he thought he was keeping it contained.  But he wasn’t.  He’d taken off his helmet, revealing mussed blond hair that he didn’t bother to smooth back into place, and his shield was braced between his knees.  His head was tipped back slightly, braced into the cargo netting behind the bench, and his eyes were empty and distant, a million miles away.  He wasn’t frowning, not entirely, but everything about his posture screamed defeat.  That more than anything told her that he was being entirely truthful (of course he was) about how much he wanted this to work.  Logically it wasn’t just about her.  The echo of his shout before, about how this wasn’t what he wanted either…  It was sticking with her.  She got the impression that he was the sort who didn’t like to burden other people with his problems.  He had to be, to get back up and rejoin the world as quickly as he was after all he’d lost.  She couldn’t fathom what that must have been like, waking up here and now with everyone he knew old and or dead.  Being thrust into a world he didn’t recognize.  Just thinking about it made that twinge of shame that much sharper.

Fury had told her to help him learn, to get him back on his feet and integrated with society.  And all she’d done so far was shove him away.  It was petty and childish.  Really.  She should have been better than this.  This arrangement wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t right of her to take it out on him.  What had happened to Clint wasn’this fault.  She was letting her insecurities dictate her actions.  And she shouldn’t been projecting her own frustrations and anger over Clint’s situation.  And her own guilt.  This shame she’d felt right away, and it was hard to ignore, like a thorn in her foot or a splinter in her palm.  She was leaving Clint behind, against her will and under orders maybe, but she was doing it all the same.  What had happened to him was terrible, and she was walking away, leaving him to wade through the aftermath of being brainwashed alone.  She was moving on without him.  It was wrong.

None of that wasn’t Rogers’ fault.  She knew that.  But admitting it to herself and admitting it to him were two entirely different things.  She watched him as the quinjet shuddered through some turbulence.  They were flying south along the Atlantic coast of Africa, heading to rendezvous with the helicarrier where it was aloft over the Indian Ocean.  The night was thick and dark, heavy with clouds.  In a matter of another hour they’d be landing.  She’d deliver the 084 to Fury and put in her request to transfer.  She’d run solo for a while, at least until Clint was reinstated.  She’d go to bat for him, just as he had for her.  Talk to whoever she needed to.  Go in front of the damn Council herself if necessary.  She wasn’t going to let them sideline him like this.  And Rogers would be fine.  Fury could find him someone else, a partner more suited.  Harsh.  She tried to ignore the whisper in the back of her mind.  She took in anew the slump of his shoulders, the way his eyes were looking everywhere but her.  You didn’t even give him a chance.

She made herself remember how angry she’d been when he’d busted into that office like God’s patriotic gift to women in distress everywhere.  Like she’d ever been in danger, ever not been entirely in control of the situation.  Rego touched and kissed exactly what she had let him.  Clint would have never done that, never come swooping in to save her.  The countless operations they’d run together, mission after mission after mission, and he’d never once doubted her ability to extract what needed extracting or kill what needed killing.  He’d never interfered.  Any other SHIELD agent would have done the same as well.  Not Rogers, though.  She had a feeling that no matter how hard she tried to teach him, he’d never learn to stifle his disgustingly persistent need to do the right thing.  That’s why this isn’t going to work.  Maybe Rogers had skills that SHIELD could use, but those skills weren’t complementary to her own.  He was never going to be comfortable with what she did, so she was really doing him a favor by ending this now.  Keep telling yourself that.

Tense silences didn’t usually bother her, but this one was.  She wanted to say something to him, but she didn’t know what.  A vague feeling that she should apologize flitted across her thoughts, but it wasn’t potent enough to make her actually want to do it.  And why should she apologize, at any rate?  She hadn’t been the one to nearly blow the op.  He didn’t blow the op.  And if you’d given him a heads up, he wouldn’t have done what he did.  She didn’t want to think about that, why she’d gone in there without letting him know what she’d been planning.  Part of it was certainly grounded in anger; she’d never needed to do that with Clint, and it had been part of an effort to prove that Clint was better equipped to be her partner.  Prove it to him and to herself, as if there could be any doubt.  But part of it…  It was wrong on so many levels, but she’d wanted to toy with him.  She’d wanted to scare him away.  It was mean and a tad cruel and even somewhat evil.  Hence how hard it was to keep looking at him like this, seeing how dejected he was.  Like she’d pulled the rug out from under him.  Like she was leaving him with nothing.  How much hope had he put into making this work?  That awful, aching feeling in the pit of her stomach –the shame – twisted until she could hardly stand it.

Say something to him.

She never got a chance.

An alarm wailed, breaking the endless silence.  Natasha immediately looked to the cockpit where Cox was flipping switches and frantically grabbing the flight stick.  “Hang on!” he cried.  The quinjet dove suddenly, so unexpectedly and harshly that Rogers was scrambling to get a grip on something to steady himself.  Natasha flailed, grabbing the netting behind her.  She knew that blaring warning, knew what it meant.  Someone was shooting at them.

“SHIELD Alpha-one, this is SHIELD three-eight-five.  We’re under enemy fire!”  The jet banked wildly to the left and then the right, continuing in its rapid descent.  “SHIELD Alpha-one, come in!”  Cox was trying to out-maneuver the missiles pursuing them, launching chaff to disrupt their guidance systems, but it was too late.  The shrill scream of the instruments was the only warning they had before the missile made its mark.

The entire front of the jet exploded.

The air was sucked right out of Natasha’s lungs.  She had no time to think, to breathe, to move or brace herself.  Heat and pain blasted over her, driving her back into the fuselage.  She smacked into the rear of the jet, her head banging into something as she fell.  Ugly pain jolted over her skull like lightning.  Everything spun and tipped wildly.  She blinked, struggling to gather her senses, and looked up to see the sky above and fire raining down.  Wind was rushing inside.  The cockpit was gone.  Clouds and flames.  They were falling. Falling.