it's been a long, long time

chapter 4: it begins

Notes:

like i said, these chapters are gonna come fast until this is caught up with the version on ao3, lol. if you want, you can always read it there! same title (it's been a long, long time), author stolethekey. otherwise, sorry for inundating you! 

Natasha Romanoff is no stranger to going undercover.

She's done it plenty of times before, both with the KGB and SHIELD, and she's become good at it. Slipping into a separate personality, a new character, has become almost second nature for her. The people she'd worked with had never quite been able to conceal their real identities like she could; her undercover personas completely and utterly obscured her real one. She had become so accustomed to fake identities that she kept the real one very, very close to her heart. On an undercover mission, discovery of her true identity meant pain and death, and she (perhaps unwillingly) had brought that philosophy into her non-undercover life. For decades, no one except Natasha Romanoff knew who Natasha Romanoff really was.

Enter: Steve Rogers.

It's not that he was the first to truly know her; that title belongs to Clint, who will always be her best and oldest friend. But opening up to Clint had been a conscious, deliberate, decision; he had saved her, both literally and spiritually, when nobody else would have, and she figured that it was the least she could do.

Steve, on the other hand, had slowly pried away the walls she had spent her entire life building without her even noticing. With every battle, every car chase, he'd gotten closer and closer to her until suddenly she'd realized that he knew more about her than anyone else, that he'd somehow broken through her defenses without triggering a single alarm. Maybe, subconsciously, she had let him in.

At first, she'd been turned off by his red, white, and blue suit and his glaring shield. How could someone with an outfit and weapon of choice that screamed, "Here I come now!! Everyone hide!!" work covert missions at all? She'd hated the brashness of it all, and the way his physical and spiritual prominence announced his presence whenever he walked into a meeting (or a dark engine room that they were supposed to sneak into, damn it) had caused her to grind her teeth so much that she'd had to start wearing a mouth guard.

After a while, though, she'd come to discover that there was a method to his madness. She'd seen his strength in action, seen the shield defeat more enemies than she could count. His presence commanded a certain respect that nobody else could earn quite as quickly, and his outfit had quickly become a rallying point, a symbol of unification that people took to immediately. He inspired a sort of hope in people, a sort of pride. She supposes there was some benefit to his bold demeanor, even though she still rolls her eyes thinking about the time he allowed a puny human man to bait him into a five-minute fistfight that could have been ended with one swipe of a shield. And he had the nerve to tell her she was wasting time transferring data onto a hard drive. Men. And their damn egos.

In most ways, however, he'd ended up becoming the perfect partner. His work style became the perfect counterbalance to hers: his strength paired well with her agility, his bold leadership with her stealth and quiet dexterity, his straightforward combat style with her strategic craftiness. They elevated each other's strengths and covered each other's weaknesses with an ease that she had yet to find with anyone else.

It's a shame, she thinks, that they hadn't had time to explore that partnership on a more personal level.

Nat sinks down into her couch with a sigh, staring at the wall across from her. She knows it's shared with her neighbor, a low-level drug dealer by the name of Matthew Murdock. Or, if she plays her cards right, her ticket in.