To Find Love: Romanogers One-Shots

those that take captives

Summary: Natasha has nightmares and Steve is brutally aware of them even if he never goes to her room to help her through them. After a particularly rough night, he decides to finally check on Natasha only to discover she hadn't truly left everything from the Red Room behind.

Steve hated this. He hated lying wide awake in his bed with no hope of sleeping again. The Compound was silent, but he could hear soft whimpers coming from Natasha's room right beside him thanks to his super hearing. The worst part about the routine nightmares is that every time he woke up in the middle of the night, he had fifteen minutes of silence before he started hearing Natasha. No one else seemed to notice, but that was probably because Natasha was always quiet enough he could only hear her if nothing else was going on in the Compound.

He never went to her. He knew when she woke up that she would cry for a while then either give up on sleeping entirely or fall back to sleep a couple hours later. It probably depended on how bad her nightmare was, but again, Steve never went to check on her. Tonight, however, he couldn't help himself.

Throwing his blankets off, Steve walked to his dresser to grab a shirt before slipping out his door and moving next door to Natasha's room. He was her only neighbour as she was at the end of the hall, but he knew she'd probably requested that from Tony herself.

Steve knew their rooms were all very well soundproofed, but he hadn't realised just how well it was until he walked into Natasha's room to her crying loudly and what sounded like metal clinking. He couldn't tell what was making the metal sound, but he could see Natasha writhing on her bed, visibly trying to disappear from whatever was haunting her mind. She was muttering something he couldn't understand and whether it was in a different language or just too jumbled for him to make out, he didn't know. Instead, he hurried to the side of the bed and gently put a hand on her shoulder to wake her up.

While Natasha usually woke up to even the slightest change around her, nothing happened when he touched her. She flinched hard, pulling away from him entirely, but she didn't wake up. Beside her, the metal sound was louder, but he was more concerned about her than the sound at the moment.

"Natasha, wake up," he said, reaching for her again.

She gasped and tried to pull away, but couldn't. Steve frowned, wondering why she had stopped so abruptly. A second later, she curled in on herself and whimpered again, clawing at her arm hidden under her pillow.

When Steve reached for her again, she cried out as if she were in pain. She continued to claw mercilessly at her arm, so Steve tried to prevent her from hurting herself. When he gently grabbed her arm under her pillow, he felt cool metal latched around her wrist as well as sticky, hot flesh. Just as he expected, she tried to claw at her arm again only to rake her nails down his arm instead of her own.

"Come on, Nat, wake up," Steve demanded, putting his free hand on her shoulder and shaking her harshly.

With a sharp intake of breath, Natasha's eyes flew open and she pushed Steve away hard enough he actually fell back. He righted himself to see her sitting up in bed, one hand still tucked under her pillow as she frantically looked around the room. She seemed to subconsciously relax at the sight of him. He took that as a sign he was okay to return to her side and promptly did so.

"Hey, you're okay," he said softly, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. She melted against him but still didn't move her hand from underneath the pillow.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, her voice uneven as she wiped at her face with her free hand.

"I heard you," Steve admitted, hugging her tighter. "I figured tonight I could at least try to help."