
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Five
This is the fourth part of a five part series on romantic StuckyNat. It tells the story of the MCU versions of Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, and Natasha Romanoff from the point of view of all three characters as if they were in love with each other. This part covers the beginning of Captain America: Civil War, from the mission in Lagos, Nigeria to Bucky’s arrival and imprisonment in Berlin, Germany. Part five will cover the rest of the movie. The series is canon-compliant.
Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff had worked with their new recruits, Sam Wilson and Wanda Maximoff, intensively for the last year. They’d become a cohesive team. Wanda and Sam had earned the right to call themselves Avengers. With the rest of the Avengers busy with other projects or semiretired, the four of them had begun going out on missions together.
They’d been tracking Brock Rumlow for a few months when they became aware of the Lagos op. Steve and his team gathered what intel they could, then continued surveillance at the probable site. Once Rumlow’s vehicles had been spotted, the team pursued and intercepted the terrorists Rumlow was working with. Everyone remembered and used their training, working together and taking down an organized attack force. But then Rumlow caught Steve off guard, and manipulated him into overlooking a goddamn bomb strapped to Rumlow’s chest. Steve might not ever forgive himself for putting Wanda in the position of having to clean up after him. A position she wasn’t ready for yet, and which had terrible consequences.
The Lagos mission wasn’t a complete disaster, though the rest of the world acted like it was. Steve tried to remind himself of how much of the mission went right, before Rumlow played him so easily by invoking Bucky’s name. They’d worked well as a team, they’d stopped the theft of a bioweapon, and the new maneuvers that combined each person’s unique talents went off without a hitch. If only he hadn’t allowed himself to become distracted at the thought of new information about Bucky, grasping at any possibility, after so long without leads. Now Wanda, and all of the casualties in Lagos, were paying the price for his mistake. As a soldier Steve knew that mistakes were going to happen, you just had to keep going, and try to do the best you could with the situation. It was so much harder to cope with failure as an Avenger in the 21st century than it had been in his time. Now there were cameras everywhere and 24 hour news waiting to pounce and place blame. Somehow the Avengers never really got to tell their side of the story.
Wanda had become like a daughter to him. They had so much in common, with them both being science experiments who had lost their soulmates, homes and families. Training her was a joy that finally brought some of the meaning back to his life that had been missing since Bucky fell. He was damned if he was going to let one accident, something that happened during the course of saving countless lives, be used as an excuse to put her under government control. She was a person first. It was time the world stopped thinking of human beings as weapons. That was no better than thinking of them as property. Wanda, Steve, Bucky, Thor, Bruce, and all of the other enhanced individuals belonged to themselves, not to any government. Bucky had already spent 70 years as property. Enough was enough.
That was his real problem with the Accords. He didn’t like that a government agency was taking control over their activities again, either, but they could negotiate on that. It was Ross’ attitude toward the enhanced, and the way he slanted and twisted his arguments to hide his real motivations, that made up Steve’s mind.
He saw how the sides were falling. The regular humans, and Tony’s creation Vision, on the side of government control. Steve and Wanda, the two enhanced, and Steve’s close, loyal friend Sam on the side of freedom. He was sad to see Natasha side with Tony. Steve understood and agreed with some of her reasoning, but he couldn’t risk what he knew the accords meant for people like himself, Bucky, and Wanda. He’d seen the concentration camps in Germany, and the Japanese internment camps in his own country. He’d seen what had been done to Bucky. Steve just couldn’t allow the potential for that type of abuse of power to become legal again. People’s fear of someone more powerful than them was not a just reason for imprisoning or owning others.
Then Steve got the call that Peggy had died, and every other thought left his head. He knew this was coming, but still, he was devastated. God, he missed Bucky so much. He was desperate to have Bucky by his side to say goodbye to Peg. She was almost his last link to the past. Bucky was the only other person he knew who would remember her, if Bucky even did remember her.
For the 3rd time in his life, he cried until there was nothing left in him. He cried for Peggy, for Bucky, for the future together they’d all lost. Peggy had told him, after he’d woken up in the 21st century to find attitudes about sex and sexualities very different from what he remembered, that she’d always known that he was in love with Bucky, too, and that Bucky was in love with him. She said she knew Steve loved her, and realized that he was probably bisexual. Peggy confessed to being bisexual as well, and having been in love with a woman before she settled down and married her husband. Steve was relieved to hear that Peggy was so accepting of the truth about him and Bucky, and grateful she was willing to share the truth about herself. Then she dropped the biggest bomb of all. Peggy told Steve that she hadn’t wanted to take him away from Bucky. Instead, she had a solution that might have worked for all of them. She and Steve could’ve gotten married, and Bucky could’ve been a 3rd person in their relationship, living with them equally, but appearing to be a roommate who’d never married as far as the rest of the world knew. She hadn’t said anything during the war because it didn’t seem like their relationship was at that point yet. She was waiting for the end of the war, when they could all actually get serious.
This, of course, floored Steve, since he hadn’t even realized he was in love with Bucky at that time. He had no idea how he would have reacted to the idea at first, or what would have happened in the long run, but it sounded like absolute heaven to him now. He was keeping it in the back of his head, should more miracles occur. Maybe he would get Bucky back, and wouldn’t lose Natasha in the argument over the Accords. Having a relationship with both Bucky and Nat would be his dream, if they were both open to it. He didn’t know how he’d even begin to bring it up, but he’d worry about that after those miracles occurred.
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