AU Ask 10

[arukou]

(From Reioka: Natasha HATES watching Steve and Tony bicker. She knows it's just their personalities, and they love each other underneath it all, but dear GOD is it annoying listening to them snipe at each other and inevitably hit too close to home and then they stop talking to each other but both start talking to her until they work it out. It's very tiring. Just because she helped them get together doesn't mean she's their relationship's nursemaid. So when Bucky and Sam get together she screams bloody murder)    

(Oh no. Oh no. I have sad ideas about this. Sad ahoy!)

Tony Stark and Steve Rogers have never heard Natasha Romanov yell ever. Not in the five years of knowing her. Not when the world was ending or when a villain was getting away or when the quinjet was about to crash. At most, Natasha would give a slightly louder grunt or command. Not yelling. So when she slammed her coffee cup down on the kitchen table and shouted, “ENOUGH!” they both shut the hell up. And waited. In her bathrobe, shoulders hunched, hot coffee splattered over her hands and the table, she looked less like an assassin and more like a sitcom housewife. And yet there was something in the line of her body, the way her hair fell down to curtain her eyes, that made everyone in the kitchen suddenly and immensely afraid to breathe.

“You,” she hissed finally, pointing at Tony. “You are a coward. You have someone, someone you love. He’s standing right there. And he loves you, too. And all you can do is doubt him and push him away because you’re afraid.” She spits the word like a curse.

“And you!” Steve flinched as she rounded on him. “You hide everything from everyone. You stare at us and keep it in and keep it in and keep it in until it explodes with monumental stupidity.” It was like being slapped in the face, the way she spat her words at him. “You are lucky to have each other, so why don’t you grow up and act like it.”

It would have been better if she’d stomped out, but she was silent as an owl sweeping away, and in her wake, Tony and Steve felt smaller, younger, and stupider than they’d felt in a long time. Even Clint, sitting on a bar stool and uninvolved with the argument, felt himself shrinking inward. After a painful silence which stretched so long Tony thought he’d seen the morning shadows move, Clint rose and poured out a coffee refill and a fresh mug. “She’s never told me much about it. Just enough that I know there was someone. Someone she cared about. And she lost them. Never got to tell them.”

He left with the mugs, and Tony and Steve remained, cowed and ashamed.

“I do love you, Steve. I…I know I don’t say it enough.”

“Shut up,” Steve hissed, stepping in close to sweep Tony into a hug. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

 

 

 

(Nat is never as worried about Sam and Bucky. Their words are like gentle friendly elbowing, good-natured and carefully meted. When one or the other is hurting, they’re better about protecting each other, not digging in with precision strikes. They’re still annoying as hell, though, and she separates them on the quinjet, because otherwise it’s like listening to toddlers argue in the back seat.)