NOTE:

This is a sequel to "In Extremis Veritas," but while references are made to events in that story, you don't have to have read that to understand this.

As should be obvious, I don't own anything to do with the Avengers, Captain America, etc. All rights belong to Disney/Marvel, and are hereby given to same.

So that's the Black Widow.

Brock Rumlow studied the petite redhead who'd come aboard with Captain Rogers as he nodded a greeting to them. Funny, he would've thought she'd be taller. Then again, his grandma always said that dynamite comes in small packages, and Natasha Romanoff was nothing if not dangerous.

During preflight, Romanoff kept to herself, apparently oblivious to the appreciative looks his team was giving her. He couldn't blame them for looking, though he kept a careful eye on them to make sure nobody crossed from appreciative to leering. Rogers wouldn't like that, and with Project Insight so close to launching, Brock couldn't risk anything that roused Rogers' suspicion about any of his team.

Brock briefed them on the situation aboard the Lemurian Star and Rogers laid out a simple plan of attack. Then they were checking their gear and Brock couldn't help but stare at Romanoff. She moved with a grace he'd never encountered before, and if he didn't know her rep, he'd think she was a dancer.

Idly, he wondered if Rogers was tapping that, but he discarded the thought almost immediately when he heard Romanoff ask if Rogers was doing anything fun Saturday night in a tone a friend would use. Wait – was she trying to set Rogers up on a date?

Brock chuckled to himself. The day Captain America needed help getting laid would be a cold day in hell, indeed.

But if Romanoff wasn't sleeping with Rogers, Brock thought, then maybe he had a chance. It would be a hell of a ride, if nothing else.

Then Rogers was jumping out of the plane – without a parachute, the show-off – and making a play for Romanoff would have to wait. He had missions to complete.

#

When the Triskelion fell, Natasha's first concern was for Captain America. He'd fallen from one of the helicarriers, and she worked with the search teams to find him - and then, once he'd been brought in from the shores of the Potomac, she divided her time between his bedside and various committee hearings. It was while she was visiting Steve one day that she'd found her soulmate.

Sam relieved her from vigil at Steve's bedside, and Natasha found herself reluctant to leave the hospital. Oh, she knew Steve would be all right, eventually - he was Captain America, after all, and that super-serum meant he'd recover. No, she was reluctant to leave because the hospital was the one place the reporters couldn't get at her, the one place she could be alone with her thoughts.

So she wandered the hospital. Odd that a place full of sick, injured, and maybe dying people should be her refuge, but Natasha had long ago accepted "odd" as a normal part of the life she'd chosen.

However much comfort this temporary refuge provided, it couldn't overcome instinct, however, and instinct had her scanning every passing nurse, doctor, patient, or visitor to assess whatever threat they might present. And it wasn't just the people in the corridors that she noticed. It was the staff at the nurses' stations, and the visitors and patients in the rooms.

And then she stopped, dead in the middle of the hallway. Something set her on alert, but what?

Cautiously, she turned back, dodging a tall black man pushing a cart loaded with meal trays, and retraced her steps.

Two rooms back, she paused in the doorway to look inside. It was a semi-private room, but surprisingly the bed nearest the door was occupied. The patient was male, half his head and much of his body swathed in bandages, but even so Natasha could tell that he was fit, with muscles born of fighting and scrapping, not built on vanity at the gym – the kind of man she'd find attractive under normal circumstances.

But these weren't normal circumstances, so she stepped into the room, quickly making certain it was empty except for the man on the bed. It was, and she turned back to study him. Olive complexion, dark hair, sharp cheekbones … he looked familiar.

A glance at the patient's name on the monitor told her why.

Brock Rumlow, leader of SHIELD's STRIKE team, Hydra agent, betrayer of Captain America.

It was that last that bothered Natasha the most. Steve Rogers was a genuinely good person, even when he had to do things he didn't like to do, and there were so few genuinely good people left in the world that consciously betraying one of them was unthinkable.

Or, Natasha's conscience added with uncharacteristic self-knowledge, it was unthinkable to the person she'd become, and she'd only become that person because of Steve Rogers himself. She owed him a debt – not that she'd ever admit that aloud, nor that he'd agree even if she did – and she'd assumed she'd never be able to repay it.

Now, though, fate had given her the chance.

She approached the bed where Rumlow lay. The monitor beeped in quiet time with his pulse, punctuated by the hum of the sphygmomanometer as it inflated to read Rumlow's blood pressure.

Natasha moved quietly to the edge of the bed, a dozen different ways to kill Rumlow without leaving a breath of evidence crossed her mind. She could do it and be gone before the monitor even flatlined. The world would be short one more psychopathic Hydra lackey, and no one would be the wiser as to why.

Except her.

Why should that thought bother her? She'd killed other people for far less personal reasons. Why should she hesitate now?

The answer came in a flash, and it made her sit heavily on the edge of Rumlow's bed. She hesitated because Steve wouldn't approve.

When had that started to matter to her? She was a Black Widow, trained since childhood to carry out missions without question, without regard to what society, or any given member of society, might think. Why should one man's opinion sway her, even if that man was Steve (Captain America) Rogers?

A groan from Rumlow startled her, and for an instant she was torn between dashing for the door and killing him.

Then the one eye not covered by a bandage opened, and he focused on her with surprising speed given the amount of drugs that had to be coursing through his system.

Probably a result of all that Hydra training, Natasha thought. Her own training had been similar.

She could still kill him before he made a sound.

Then he grinned. His voice was dry and raspy when he said, "I always thought we'd be more active when we shared a bed."

Natasha's blood ran as cold as a Siberian winter. That couldn't be right – he couldn't have said the words on her soulmark. They'd been on a mission together. Surely they'd spoken before now?

Her thoughts raced back over that fateful mission on the Lemurian Star. Rumlow had briefed her, Steve, and the STRIKE team on the mission, but he'd never spoken directly to her, nor she to him.

They'd never spoken directly to each other. Which meant it was virtually certain that he was her soulmate.

The Black Widow in her, the person she'd been trained to be, wanted to kill him like her totem namesake would. She'd been indoctrinated, in fact, to do precisely that, and those old instincts rose within her like a cobra preparing to strike.

But she was not that person anymore, or not just that person. She was Natasha Romanoff, and she would not give in.

She would, however, wipe that smirk off his too-handsome face.

One nerve strike later, Rumlow lay unconscious once more. Natasha rose and left the room, wondering just what Fate had against her.