it's been a long, long time

chapter 1: the mission

Notes:

hello kiddos and welcome to my first ever fic!! I wanted to get better at writing narrative-style and although i really love steve/bucky I've been a capwidow stan since the beginning of time, so here we are! come along for the pain ride, set somewhere after winter soldier but only partly, bc bucky is also healthy and sane. I really fucked with the timelines so this is, like, almost an au. Just go with me on this

this fic is VERY heavily inspired by elsaclack's "i've been sleepwalking too close to the fire", found on ao3. that is probably my favorite fic of all time and is a fic you should all read before you die

all titles, main and chapter, are titles of tracks from different mcu scores, because I love pain
If anyone wants a trigger warning for anything, lmk!!! I'm happy to put 'em

You would think, wouldn't you, that seventy years of pain and heartbreak would warrant some fun once in a while. That after his best friend somehow came back from the dead and then tried to kill him, after his kind-of boss also came back from the dead as some rogue exile, after he spent a day infiltrating the very organization he once worked for with some of his friends just to get shot by his now-evil best friend, fall into a river, and then get dragged out of that river by the aforementioned best friend, all to stop a genocide, he could have some fun. Go to the movies, go out for a nice dinner, that kind of thing.

Instead, Steve Rogers is sitting on his couch, picking at a pack of Starburst, because that's all he has, okay, and he doesn't quite have the energy to even pick up his phone to order dinner, let alone buy groceries.

He's pretty sure God, or SHIELD (what's left of it, anyway), or Nick Fury, or whatever divine being is controlling his life had decided that the past month had been too good to him and that he needed some drama. He'd finally gotten Bucky back, had finally started doing missions that he believed in, and he'd been working so closely with Nat that they'd become extensions of each other's thoughts, one unit moving against the enemies of the earth.

Nat. He can still see her, tense, fists clenched, in Fury's office. He'd stared at her through the window for so long, wondering what Fury could possibly be telling her, that he thinks he'll die with that image burned into the back of his eyelids. After four hours, he decided that there was no logical, sane excuse for standing there and staring through the window for any longer, so he'd packed up reluctantly and headed out after one last glance through the glass. He'd gone straight home, too worried to do much else, and parked it on the couch.

They'd come so far since that conversation in the car, driving away from the Apple store. They'd both been alone, both in that moment and for their whole lives. He'd wanted a friend. Her? Maybe not. Or maybe she had. He hadn't been able to read her, then, back before he'd saved her life and realized that he trusted her to save his too.

After that, things were different. They started getting better. Her attempts to get him dates stopped after they'd kissed undercover a second time for reasons he kept himself from thinking about, but her jokes about his age kept him laughing through every knife fight, every gun battle. She'd started to answer his questions honestly. They'd become friends.

He's in the middle of wishing he had taken the time to figure out how to work an iPhone, because maybe then he'd actually have some pictures of the two of them, when there's a knock on the door.

Nat's there, because of course she is, with two boxes of what looks and smells like Chinese food, and through the hazy cloud of relief Steve is suddenly aware of the acute hunger that is roaring in his stomach.

She holds the bag up by way of saying hello, and Steve steps aside to let her in.

"What did Fury want? I was surprised that he called you in alone, you know, since we've gotten literally every mission briefing together since he got shot and we thought he'd died. And if you wanna grab two plates from the shelf, I can pull up a movie or something. I got a DVD of that one spy movie, I know you always like laughing at how inaccurate they are—" he stops as he turns around and Nat's face, pale like he's never seen it, comes clearly into focus. "Wait, what's wrong?"