Summary: Steve has splinters in his hands. They don’t hurt much. Not so much that he can’t ignore it.
Rating: T
Characters: Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff
Link: FanFiction.net, AO3
Author’s Note: This is a little gap-filler for Age of Ultron. It takes place after the team goes to Clint’s farm but before they have their little meeting with Fury. As requested, this one explores Steve’s (not at all happy) feelings about Bruce/Natasha. And when I mean not happy, I mean not happy. I seriously pulled this one out of a huge pile of Steve-angst. It’s been so long since I’ve written something like this between Steve and Nat, and we’ll be back to them being crazy in love with each other after this. Still, be prepared: this is not a fix-it. It’s just not quite one-sided, not–entirely-but-mostly unrequited Romanogers. Poor baby. Someone give that boy a hug and a kiss, for crying out loud.
        Finally she sighed.  Obviously she’d been expecting something from him, and when he hadn’t been willing to give it, she decided to take matters into her own hands. “You want to talk about it?”
        She wasn’t specific, but he knew what she was asking.  And he couldn’t help that the bitterness exploded out of him.  A harsh laugh, a dismissive thing.  She didn’t take offense.  He thought she should have.  Instead she pressed closer still until her hip was against his, like there was anything between them other than the meaningless flirting he’d tried to convince himself was something more than just flirting. Her voice dropped down softer, like she was trying to seem nonthreatening.  “What did she show–”
        “Don’t,” he warned.
        Now she was rebuffed.  And hurt.  “What?”
        “It doesn’t work that way.  I asked you if you were okay, if you wanted to talk about it, two or three times on our way here, and you completely ignored me.”
        She shook her head, anger in her eyes that simultaneously shamed him and made him feel vindicated.  But she didn’t act on it.  Instead she looked away like she was the one who was ashamed, and that gnawed at his composure like the splinters biting into his skin.  She stared out into the falling shadows like she wanted to climb into them, the same desperate desire to run that he’d felt before abruptly bright in her eyes.  “I couldn’t tell you,” she finally admitted.
        This was even worse.  “But you could tell him.”
        Immediately he wanted to take the words back.  He’d never been so obvious about how he felt before. Jealous.  It was pathetic and petty.  Natasha wasn’t his.  She had never asked to be.  She never had been.  In truth, despite the harrowing ordeal they’d shared when they’d been hunted by SHIELD and the Winter Soldier, she wasn’t anything more than his friend, and not even a friend he understood very well.  They’d gone their separate ways, him to look for Bucky (unsuccessfully) and her to build a new identity since Black Widow lay exposed and in shambles.  They’d reunited months later, both changed but not enough to forget whatever this thing was between them.  It was amorphous and ill-defined and troublesome.  Their working relationship had suffered for it. And he wasn’t even sure if she knew there was something between them at all or if he’d imagined it all (or subconsciously fabricated it just to have something to plug the holes in his heart).  When they’d met again, all of the easy camaraderie and sweet flirting and tentative friendship that had been between them for months before SHIELD had fallen apart had completely vanished.  She’d come back as someone else.  So had he, hardened and not quite the optimist he had been (or the one he’d been trying to be).  He never called that nurse.  She hadn’t asked about it.
        He couldn’t read her.  He never could.  He wanted to now.  He needed to now.  He’d never felt more alone than he did at this moment, surrounded by his team and Barton’s nice family and nice home, and he needed to know if it was too late. “Does he make you happy?”
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