Ooh, Sam/Steve/Nat is just the best ship.
They are three of the best and hottest characters in the MCU.
Every two person combination is also great - samsteve, samnat, and romanogers are all top-tier ships.
They actually spend a lot of time together and care about each other deeply. Don’t get me wrong, I love ships where the two people never speak to each other onscreen as much as the next person (winterhawk my beloved) but there’s just something different about a ship with some actual canon meat on its bones.
Two years as fugitives living out of the quinjet and cramped, sketchy safe houses. It’s like one long “there was only one bed” scenario.
In fairness to the “where’s Bucky” commenters on that fan art, I do think “why is Bucky here?” every time I see something about the cap quartet. Though of course I’m not rude enough to say that on the post.
(P.s. thinking about them makes me regret that we never saw much of the adventures of the Avengers between Age of Ultron and Civil War, because the lineup we saw at the end of AoU [Steve, Nat, Sam, Rhodey, Wanda, and Vision] was amazing.)
I love the smell of fresh, immaculate takes in the morning!
I swear, samstevenat is the only poly relationship I can realistically picture, because they all have such a strong connection with the other two characters.
It’s like a rubik’s cube, but no matter where you turn it the faces come out perfectly solved. You have SamSteve, who have their meet cute + shared life experience and a deep sense of duty; you have SteveNat, who go from ‘coworker I like but don’t fully trust’ to ‘only person I can trust in this line of work and have shared multiple near death experiences with’; and then you have SamNat who sure, have less interactions, but still a relationship is there. Like I’m ready to bet that convo about Redwing in cacw happened more than once. And oh to see their reunion after Steve breaks team cap out of jail… No way Sam didn’t make some kind of remark at Nat betraying them (after all, last time he saw her, she was on the other side, taking away his wings and fighting them).
I can’t think of any other mcu trio that has the same range.
And yes, we do have plenty of evidence that these three are besties, but there’s so much missing time (especially between aou and cacw and cacw and iw) that you basically have free reign over the what the how and the where.
The aou-cacw time skip is perfect for consolidating the relationship/feelings: they live together, they work together, they train together for a whole year!! There is so much that could happen!! Undercover, fake relationship trope! Jumped-in-front-of-a-bullet-for-you-and-now-I’m-not-waking-up trope (Steve, I am looking at you)! Saved from becoming an Avenger pancake by flying Sam trope (for his and his back’s sake I’ll picture Nat in that one).
Also maybe it’s just me, but the movie nights that fandom love so much sound more likely with the Avengers 2.0 roster? Wanda literally uses TV shows to cope, Vision is just curious by nature and does whatever Wanda does, Steve has a long ass list of movies to catch up on… it’s almost inevitable that they spent some down time together watching tv shows or a movie. All it would take is Wanda watching something on her tablet while she cooks in the common room and one or two avengers strolling in and boom. Tradition set.
And then of course there’s the post-cacw, pre-iw time skip which is PRIME for things happening. I mean, these three just came from a pretty big rift, they are on the run for TWO ENTIRE YEARS, the living quarters are small and cramped, you can’t tell me they didn’t catch each other in various states of undress (Sam and/or Steve seeing Nat’s bruises after the events of the black widow movie!!), or that they didn’t have some middle-of-the-night, half-whispered conversations. Maybe Nat even told them about Yelena and her fake family. Maybe Steve told them some things about his life pre-ice.
Also, it’s a shame Sam canonically doesn’t know about Madripoor because it’s the perfect place for something debauched yet revealing of romantic feelings happening. Then again, this is what fanfic is for.
(Still, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t sell my organs for a 9 episode series of Sam, Steve and Nat eluding international surveillance, saving the world and being total badasses…
Plus a post credit scene of t0ny telling friday to delete all footage of the trio while secretly keeping a pic of bearded!cap because apparently he’s canonically that deranged about steve)