Let Me Help
Steve Rogers x Natasha Romanoff
Summary: In the aftermath of a little rogue outing gone wrong, Natasha is forced to accept some help from Steve, something that she still has trouble doing. As much as she hates to admit it, sometimes allowing people to lend a helping hand isn't the worst thing in the world.
Warnings: 18+, hurt/comfort, mentions of injuries, pining, light angst
Word Count: 2.6k
A/N: I wrote this as a pinch-hit for an exchange and I'm so excited to finally be able to share it here! My first time writing Steve and Nat like this and I really enjoyed it, so I hope you do to! xo
MCU Taglist: @garbinge @artemiseamoon (If you want to be added to any of my taglists, please let me know!)
Steve could hear Natasha grumbling and cursing to herself on the other side of the bathroom door. The motel they were holed up in was far from the worst one that they had ever stayed in, but the cheap, flimsy walls provided no real privacy. He’d heard her same complaints over the sound of the shower running a few minutes before.
He knew why she was so frustrated, and he couldn’t say that he blamed her. He was more than willing to help, but he also knew that if he offered, she was going to say no off the principle of it. She had to be the one to come to him. He admired her stubbornness the same way he admired most things about her, but moments like that made him wish that she would just let him in without so much of a fight.
When the room became silent, that was when Steve started to feel actual nerves creeping up on him. He stood up from the bed he’d been sitting on the edge of and walked over to the bathroom. He pressed his ear to the door to see if he could hear anything but was met with more silence.
Knowing he was setting himself up to be on the receiving end of her annoyance and sarcasm, he knocked lightly against the door. “All good in there?”
“Sorry,” Natasha grit out through clenched teeth, “can’t talk. Too busy climbing out the window.”
Steve chuckled softly at her response, resting his forehead against the door as he shook his head. “Wouldn’t want to interrupt that.” He paused. “Climbing out the window with only one good arm is probably tough. Want some help?”
He was ready to be met with another snide comment, but instead, he heard her sigh in defeat. He heard the sound of her footsteps on the other side and he barely pulled his head away in time as she opened the door.
She looked exhausted, and in pain, and pissed off. She held a hairbrush in one hand, her other arm pinned against her stomach just below her chest. She had on a t-shirt and sweatpants, but her hair was still dripping wet. Steve was sure that the entirety of the upper back of her shirt was going to be a few shades darker than the rest of it.
He was about to say something about it when he realized that the shirt she was wearing wasn’t hers at all--it was his. He wanted to make a joke about it, but the truth was he didn’t mind it in the slightest. She could keep it long after their self-imposed mission, their unplanned trip, was over. He’d prefer it, really.
“I need help,” she said bitterly as she stood in the doorway.
“With the window?” he asked with a small grin. “Or something else?”
She rolled her eyes but despite her pain and frustration, there was a tiny lift to the ends of her mouth as she spoke. “Very funny.”
He moved to the side so that she could walk by him. “I’ll grab a towel.”
When he came back out to the main part of the room, Natasha was sitting on the bed opposite the one that he had been on. When they showed up needing a room, they just asked for one that was cheap, and apparently, that meant it was one with two beds. They’d shared before, neither of them a stranger to close-quarters situations, but for some reason, the fact that she sat on a different bed felt deliberate.
She still looked pained and angry, but as she sat by herself on the bed, she also looked small in a way that Steve wasn’t used to seeing. Their little rogue excursion had taken a lot out of both of them and gone poorly on top of that. It left her too tired to fight against the spiral of the stress and loss of the last few years. It all seemed to be settling on Natasha’s shoulders, and her freshly-injured arm.
Steve would’ve held her if he thought she would let him. He’d like nothing more, but he knew it wasn’t going to happen. It’d take more than an injured arm and wet hair for her to allow herself something like that. He took what he could get, whatever modicum of closeness.
With the towel draped over one arm, Steve grabbed the pillows from the head of the bed and stacked them on the floor, one on top of the other, at the foot of Natasha’s bed. “It’ll be easier if you sit on those.”
She didn’t say anything, just nodding as she got up off the bed and sat down on the stack of cushions he’d just fashioned for her. Bending her legs, she looped her good arm around them and rested her forehead against her knees. In the silent room, Steve could hear the deep sigh she let out. There was a slight frown on his face and he wished that there was more he could do.
Grabbing the remote off the nightstand between the two beds, he stepped forward and tapped her lightly on her good shoulder with it. It got her to pull her face from the fabric of her sweatpants and turn to look back at him.
He held it out to her without saying anything, but the gesture still got her to crack a small smile. She took it in her good hand before turning back to face the television that was in front of them. “Want me to see if there’s anything good on the three channels they have here?”
He chuckled, feeling a small sense of relief as he sat down on the edge of the bed. “Might as well. It’s three more stations than we usually get when we’re, you know…” his voice trailed off a little.
“Going rogue?” Natasha filled in the blank for him, her tone having a layer of amusement to it.
His head dropped, chin touching his chest for a moment as he laughed at her response. “Yea, that.”
For a few seconds, he didn’t move, instead just watching as Natasha leaned back against the bed a little more, letting it support her. She propped her chin on top of her knees this time as she turned on the television and started to figure out what the television situation was. It wasn’t as though either of them was really going to be paying much attention to it anyway--it was more just so that there would be some background noise.
Snapping back to the situation at hand, Steve shook his head at himself as he moved toward the foot of the bed. He sat with his legs hanging off the end of it, one foot planted on either side of Natasha so that she was situated between his legs. She didn’t say anything or make any move at all that led Steve to think that she wasn’t okay with it. He took a slow, deep breath before taking the towel and starting to slowly and gently wring the water out of her hair.
Even though his eyes were focused on Natasha, Steve was passively listening to the TV as she flipped through what few channels they had access to. He was running the towel over the ends of her hair, right where it was turning from red to blonde, when he heard a laugh track coming from the television speakers.
He spared a glance up and stilled his hands as he did so, causing Natasha to chuckle and tilt her head back slightly to look at him. “Did you watch this in your Time Capsule Catch-Up?”
Steve gave her a soft smile and shook his head. “Did you watch this when it was actually airing?” He didn’t exactly have Natasha pegged as the sitcom-watching type.
“I’d catch reruns in the middle of the night if I had the TV on. Kinda like this.”
He nodded. “Right.” There was a pause as she returned her attention to the TV and he returned his attention to her hair. He looked at the large damp spot on the shirt she was wearing that took up most of her upper back and let out a small chuckle. “If you want a dry shirt when I’m done, you can have one.” A smirk started curling the end of his lips and he was glad that she wasn’t looking at him. “Don’t have to steal the next one.”
“Not stealing,” she said as she shook her head, still not looking at him. “Just borrowing.”
“Oh, so you were gonna give it back,” he said with a soft laugh. “Right. Of course you were.”
They fell back into silence once more as he continued the process of getting more of the water out of her hair. Natasha couldn’t pretend that she wasn’t surprised at how gentle he was, how thorough. It wasn’t out of character for him, per se, but she had just never thought of him in a scenario like this. Carrying people off the battlefield to safety? Sure. Giving someone a stern You Need To Be Careful And Take Care Of Yourself talking-to? She’d been on the receiving end of that enough times to have it memorized. But this was different, something so small and intimate in a way that she hadn’t really allowed herself to think about. Not just with Steve, but with anyone. It didn’t feel the way she thought it would. It felt nice, or rather, it felt as nice as it could given the circumstances.
When he was done, Steve tossed the now-damp towel over onto the end of his bed. He waited a moment before reaching over Natasha’s shoulder, his hand open with the palm facing upwards. The silent request got a small hum of amusement out of Natasha as she placed the hairbrush into his hand.
Out of sheer force of habit, Steve said, “Let me know if it hurts,” as he started to brush out the ends of her hair.
Natasha laughed quietly at that. “I think I’ll be alright.”
Steve shook his head at her, not that she could see it anyway. But there was still a smile on his face as he did so. It grew quiet between them again, but comfortably so. The only people talking were the ones on the television and the occasional person who walked by their motel room door.
Despite the fact that there were voices and laughter coming from the TV speakers, Steve felt like he hardly heard any of it as he focused on the task at hand. He carefully, repeatedly, ran the brush through her damp hair. It was the longest that it had been in a while. She’d let it grow out enough, and gotten it trimmed enough times that there was only a little bit of blonde left at the ends. Steve liked the look, though. Of all the looks and changes Natasha had gone through in the time that he knew her, none of them had ever looked bad. He liked this the best, though, the way it had its own change within itself. Or maybe he only thought that because he was currently running a brush and his fingers through it.
“This is like,” Natasha spoke, her voice lower than usual showing how tired she was, but also that she was finally starting to relax, “the saddest slumber party ever.”
Steve chuckled at that. “If this was a slumber party, you would be doing my hair next. And I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
“I mean I could ,” she said, “but I don’t think it would come out very good.”
“You’ll just owe me one, then.” He paused. “Do you want it back in a braid?”
She turned so that she could look at him. “Do you know how to braid?”
He offered a small, warm smile. “I think I can figure it out.”
Natasha laughed quietly, giving what she could of a shrug before realizing it was more pain than it was worth. “Sure, Steve.”
She rested her chin back on top of her knees, letting Steve set about the process of braiding her hair. There were no hesitations in his movements as he separated her hair out. Natasha might’ve been looking at the TV, but her attention was almost completely focused on Steve now, the way his fingers moved through her hair and along her scalp. The annoyance and anger that had been plaguing her before were slowly starting to fade as she shifted her focus. She was more curious now than anything else. A few joking comments crossed her mind, wanting to ask Steve if he got good at braiding from practicing on Bucky’s hair during their slumber parties, but she refrained. Instead, for once, she allowed herself to be genuinely interested and show it.
“Can I ask when you got so good at French braiding?”
Steve chuckled. “You wouldn’t believe me if I said I’ve never done this before?” They both laughed quietly at that for a moment before he continued. “Towards the end, um, my mom needed…needed help with a lot of stuff.” There was a pang in his chest that he hadn’t felt in a long time. It was a part of his life that he didn’t really talk about anymore--there usually wasn’t a reason to. “She always said that no one could ever get her hair done the way she liked it. So I tried to figure it out.”
“Tried?” Natasha asked.
He let out a small laugh at the thought of it all. “It was a lot of trial and error. I didn’t know what I was doing. I learned all the different styles that she didn’t like,” his hands worked effortlessly as he laid one lock of Natasha’s hair over the others, “including French braids.”
“Giving me a reject style?” she asked, trying to keep it as light-hearted as she could. She could hear the tiniest bit of a waver in his voice as he spoke. It was a different pain than what she’d been dealing with for the last few hours.
“It’s not a reject style--you wear it all the time.” It felt silly to admit that he noticed something like that, but it was too late to take it back now.
Natasha had a small smile on her face, a warmth in her chest that she could never admit to as she said, “You saying I have bad taste?”
Steve laughed. “ I didn’t say that, no.” He paused. “You have a hair tie?”
Natasha wordlessly held up her good arm, a black hair tie sitting around her wrist. Reaching forward, Steve deftly pulled it off her wrist and over her hand, stretching it over his own for a moment before wrapping it around the end of the braid he’d just done. He let it go, the braid falling and resting square in the middle of Natasha’s back.
“Better?” he asked now that he was done.
Natasha nodded. “Yea.” Leaning to the side, she let her head rest against the side of Steve’s leg. “Thank you.”
Steve’s breath got caught in his throat for a moment as he stared down at her. Taking a deep breath, he finally forced himself to say, “Of course.”
Now that it was done, Steve was expecting Natasha to immediately pull away from him, maybe crawl into her own bed and wordlessly tell Steve that he should get into his own bed as well. But she didn’t. She relaxed against the side of his leg, reaching with her good arm to rest her hand on his knee. Steve could see the movement of her shoulders as she took a deep breath. He tried not to feed too much into the feeling in his chest as he reached forward, softly resting his hand on Natasha’s good shoulder and giving it a light, reassuring squeeze. She returned the gesture, her grip tightening for a split second on his knee before she relaxed against him again.
