Chapter Text
“Are you ready?”
Nat nods, her lip snagged between her teeth and the paper of the exam chair making a light crinkling sound behind her head as she moves it in answer to Bruce’s question.
“Yeah.” She murmurs, and blindly, her hand fumbles into Steve’s.
She feels a little ridiculous in the midst of this nervousness that has begun to wash over her. She wasn’t overly nervous on their way here to this S.H.I.E.L.D. site in Jersey. It’s a small site; used mainly as a backup hideaway as well as a storage facility for S.H.I.E.L.D.’s outdated lab and medical equipment. Things that S.H.I.E.L.D. has replaced over the years with newer models, but the originals are still useful, especially in a pinch.
Things like an ultrasound machine.
Nat breathes out slowly as Bruce squeezes the gel onto her skin, just below her bellybutton. Really, she doesn’t need to be nervous like this. This isn’t last time. Last time, she had laid in the chair in Wakanda and rolled her pants all the way down to her ankles. She had asked Bruce if he could be diligent and use the precision probe that needs to go up inside of her. She had needed too many answers. All she knew was she had been pregnant, and that Thanos had taken that when he took half the universe. The baby was gone, and what she’d needed to know was how it had ever managed to get there in the first place.
This time, she has those answers. She knows it was the traces of Steve’s serum in his DNA combining with her own, and kicking up her healing factor to the point that her body was able to remake what the Red Room took away. It regenerated it perfectly. Sustainably. Functionally.
She squeezes Steve’s hand and offers him a tight smile. He’s hovering over her, smiling back down at her and not once looking away. It’s like the both of them are waiting for Bruce to tell them it’s safe to look at the screen; that they won’t be disappointed.
That they’re right, and when he snapped his fingers, their baby did come back.
Of course it came back. Nat hasn’t been surer of anything in her life. Not only can she never forget the sharp pain of it coming back into her, but her morning sickness picked right back up where it left off. All week she has woken each morning with a queasy churning of her stomach, and looking at food before noon is a force. Thankfully it hasn’t hit her has hard as it did Pepper back when she was pregnant; not yet anyway. Nat can feel her skin growing clammy as she remembers all the late nights she spent sitting with Pepper on the bathroom floor in the compound.
“Ok…” Bruce trails, a smile pulling at the corners of his lips, his free hand starting to reach towards the edge of the screen, as though to turn it, and Nat feels her smile begin to turn real.
She sees that reflected in Steve’s face above her; hope.
Then, Bruce’s face falls completely.
“Shit.” He mutters, using one large finger to tilt the screen away from them. “Shit. I mean-”
“What is it?” Nat starts to ask, squeezing Steve’s hand tighter. It’s a small miracle she doesn’t jump up to grab the screen and look; that she is able to remind herself doing so will lose the visual.
“No, not shit, like that. Nothing bad, I promise.” Bruce stammers to explain, “Sorry. That was bad wording. This is why I’m not this kind of a doctor.”
“Bruce, what is it?” Steve asks, and Bruce continues to stare at the screen with parted lips. He presses the wand down firmer into her flesh; and Nat is afraid to ask whether he is looking for a better visual, or so caught up in whatever he is seeing that he’s momentarily forgetting how much strength he has now.
“Ok.. Uh, first off, again, nothing bad. Everything’s fine. It’s just… Nat, how far along did you think you were?”
Nat blinks, honestly, she’s trying to remember all those conversations. She’d done some research, talked it over with Steve, and a little with that one ER doctor. But they didn’t even know she could get pregnant. She’d felt not-herself for weeks before she took that test just to have the negative. Originally, Bruce said the weird feelings of something being off was probably before she got pregnant. He said that it was likely her body noticing the regeneration of her uterus and other such parts, and the pregnancy came later.
“I… I don’t know.” She stammers, “A few weeks?”
Maybe more, now that she thinks about it, and she begins to assume Bruce was wrong, and she really didn’t notice the regeneration until much later. Five years ago she hadn’t noticed any outward signs of the pregnancy, minus the morning sickness which started days after she took the test. She had felt bloated, but she hadn’t thought much of that. Now though, in the week since the baby came back so suddenly, it’s easier to see that something is happening. Her stomach is firmer than it was a week ago. It’s flatter too, with less of a dip in the space between her actual belly and her crotch. When she’s dressed she would never know, but when she takes off her clothes and looks at herself, she swears she can see it.
“Give me a number?” Bruce asks, and she blinks again.
“Seven or eight?” She guesses more than answers, a fear creeping up in her mind that she might really be wrong. She’s heard stories of women like her – who didn’t think they were capable of pregnancy, for one reason or another – carrying a baby all the way to term without realizing it.
She thinks about all the caffeine she was drinking while they were on the run, how for months she was relying on it to stay awake. Was that all because of the baby? Not to mention she was drinking at least once per week. How long-
“Yeah, that tracks.” Bruce says, and Nat breathes out the biggest sigh of relief yet. “Ok.” Bruce continues, “So, again, I’m not usually this kind of doctor. But, the baby I’m looking at looks to be about ten weeks along.”
Nat tips her head back against the bed and lets the relief fully wash over her. Steve’s grip lightens on her hand as she watches him go through a similar process. His shoulders deflate in the best way, and while she is still waiting for the other shoe to drop, she manages to chuckle at the sheer level of panic Bruce just managed to put them both through.
“It’s ok too.” Bruce goes on, “I’m gonna show you in a second, I swear. I just… there’s another.”
And there’s the other shoe.
This time, her body moving without the heed of warning from her mind, Nat does start to sit up. She only gets as far as leaning up on her elbows when she stops.
“Another?” She asks dumbly, and Bruce nods, probing the wand around on her stomach again as he tries to regain his visual.
“It’s smaller.” He says, and Nat’s heart sinks like a lead weight in her chest as she all but collapses back down.
When she glances up to Steve she finds he is watching Bruce with a stoic, rapt attention. He isn’t swaying on his feet, or turning pale, but Nat can feel the increase of pressure in his grip on her hand, and she could swear she can hear his heart pounding from down here.
“Usually when you see that in twins, it’s because one of them is taking nutrients from the other.” Bruce shifts the wand a little bit, his tongue poking out of his mouth with deep concentration.
Frankly, Nat is still trying to understand the word twins and how he’s just said it as though it is a perfectly ordinary part of a sentence.
“But these guys look like they’re fraternal.” He says, “They have separate sacs. It’s still possible one was just developing stronger than the other. But I think it’s more likely – and definitely get an OB’s opinion on this – but Nat, I think the smaller one has been here.”
“What do you mean?” She asks, trying to force her brain to work and to keep up with what he is saying as he looks at her with so much hesitance.
She thinks she knows. She thinks she understands. But she needs to hear it. She doesn’t think she is going to be able to process it until she hears it.
“I mean, five years ago, I think you were nine weeks pregnant with baby number one here. Now, they’re back. But number two… I don’t think they’re underdeveloped. I think they’re seven weeks. I think you’ve been pregnant for the past seven weeks.”
Even hearing it, she isn’t sure is ever going to be able to process it.
“Is there any chance of that?” Bruce asks, his face only a little uncomfortable as he glances between her and Steve.
Is there any chance she could be – linearly – seven weeks pregnant? In theory, of course there is. She and Steve don’t exactly keep a timeline of when they’re having sex or how often, but it’s enough that she’s sure there is at least one instance which falls right in tune with seven weeks ago.
“Did you get your last period?” Steve asks, his voice soft but surprisingly steady, given the circumstances.
She tries to think. Logically she knows she must have gotten her last period. She would have noticed if she didn’t. Granted, sometimes she runs a little late, but it always comes eventually. She deals with it for a couple of days, and then that’s that.
A couple of days; that’s the key to that question.
“I thought I did.” She answers, thinking back, really thinking. “It only lasted two days, but three is normal for me, so I wasn’t worried. That was last month.”
“How much blood?” Bruce asks, and when Nat looks his way he is narrowly avoiding her eyes with a flush on his green cheeks.
“Not a lot.” She answers, her brow furrowed. “Again, normal. And this month…” She blinks, the timeline starting to slot together in her mind. She runs her free hand up through her hair. “Oh fuck me.”
“What?” Steve asks, and she hesitates a moment, she needs to be sure before she opens her mouth.
“My bad days.”
“What?” Bruce asks, though Nat can see the recognition in Steve’s eyes. “What does that mean, ‘bad days’?”
The way Steve squeezes her hand and looks at her, somehow despite what it is they’re learning here, there is still a question in his eyes; asking if she is ok with telling Bruce about this part of her mental health.
Maybe two weeks ago her answer would have been different. But now her emotions and her care for who sees the darker parts of them are the least of any of her concerns.
“For my first couple of periods, PMS would hit me hard.” She explains, “I’d get depressed, I’d get angry, the whole cliché for anywhere between a day and a week before my period came.” She explains, “Right before Scott showed up, I’d been having a couple days like that.”
She glances up to Steve again, remembering the night before the time heist, how they’d talked, and she’d finally mentioned it but told him she wasn’t sure where it had come from. In hindsight, she isn’t oblivious to her cycle. She knew in the back of her mind that April was almost over, and the last week of the month usually brings her period along with it. It’s been a long time since PMS hit her in the way it used to, but, she supposes that she had been assuming it was at least a contributor to her high emotions that week.
Then, with what came next, she would have been more concerned this week if she did get her period.
“Makes sense.” Bruce shrugs, “It sounds to me like that last period you had was actually this thing they call implantation bleeding. It um, it happens sometimes at the start of pregnancy. The embryo is just starting to develop and as it attaches better to your uterus-”
“I know what it is Bruce.” Nat interrupts him.
She doesn’t want to be rude – he is just trying to help - but she’s ready to be done with this conversation. It’s nothing to do with him; she likes to think they moved well past that awkwardness after the first time she asked him to do this.
But, as she is processing the gravity of this and what it means – and maybe it’s the hormones again – she is starting to feel like a really shitty mother. Obviously she didn’t know, and she can’t fault herself for that. Seven weeks is still so early. If baby number one is ten weeks, that means that counting back, she was eight weeks along when she took that test; and she didn’t expect it to come back positive. She’d noticed that baby at seven weeks, and at six, and even at five. She just didn’t know what to make of the things she was noticing.
She’d noticed this one too, she is realizing, just in different ways. She’d noticed she was moody, and now she’s wondering about the way her head started spinning on Vormir; if that was really elevation sickness, or if it was this.
The clamminess in her skin gets worse and a sweat creeps up on the back of her neck as she thinks about Vormir.
She couldn’t have known. She knows she couldn’t have known. But she fought Clint for the opportunity to die. She lost, but god, if she had won…
“Nat?”
It’s Steve’s voice, but she doesn’t answer him. She can’t. In one violent motion she lets go of his hand and she bolts up to sit; a loud, sickening burp coming from her mouth. She hears him and Bruce either cursing or scrambling around; she isn’t sure who is doing what or even what “what” is. Her head tucks into her chest and she half-whimpers as she dry heaves and tries to lean her body to the side without toppling off the bed in the process. Her eyes are pinched closed when she feels something of flimsy plastic shoved between her bent knees. She is able to peek through her eyelids just enough to see it is a trashcan. She latches her fingers to it immediately all but shoves her face into it.
Her body happily takes the permission she is granting it. The thick, sour sludge of her breakfast from this morning comes surging up and out. It comes so fast that her nostrils burn, and in the few seconds between bouts she takes one hand and wipes droplets from the edges of her nose. She is vaguely aware of a hand skimming gentle fingers over her shoulder blades, but she honestly couldn’t tell you if it were Steve’s hand or two of Bruce’s fingers. By the time she is finally sputtering out the last of her sick the world over the rim of the trashcan feels as though it is a thousand miles away.
She leans back, into a firm, living presence that she recognizes as Steve’s embrace. She is trying to breathe, and she dry heaves again and starts to curl back for the trashcan, but this time, she swallows the wave of sick with a very humiliating whine.
“It’s alright Nat.” Steve’s hushed voice whispers, his fingers skimming light on her shoulder now.
She hums this low, miserable sound. She keeps humming, and eventually it leads to more dry heaving. It’s a cycle; dry heaving, whining or groaning, two more lapses into a much less violent vomit, and back to start. Eventually, slowly but surely, the dry heaving becomes easier to swallow back, and she is able to lean back into Steve’s chest again. It’s at that point she realizes there is some sort of silent conversation happening between him and Bruce off to the side; some version of “what the hell do we do?” coming from Bruce’s eyes, and she can feel in the way Steve is holding her that he doesn’t have much of an answer.
“Mmph, sorry.” She mumbles, closing her eyes as she finally unfurls her fingers from the lip of the trashcan and lets it be held only by her legs.
“It’s ok.” Steve promises, before she feels the light pressure of his lips against her head. “Don’t be sorry.”
She hums, not committing to that in one way or another.
After either minutes or hours – she has no idea which - there is a light touch of a much larger finger on her knee. Bruce.
“You all set with this?” His voice asks, and rather than opening her eyes Nat chooses to trust he has a good enough pinch on the trashcan and simple relaxes her legs.
She feels him pull the trashcan away, and she takes a shuddering breath, but she is determined to not reach out to request it back.
Minutes pass. She keeps her eyes closed and her head lain heavily against Steve. After a bit he gently starts to pull the waistband of her leggings back up from where she’d rolled it low on her hips to allow Bruce access with the ultrasound wand. She grunts, and shifts, finally starting to push herself away from him.
“No.” She murmurs, and while Steve stills his hand, when she finally blinks her eyes open the world is still swimming around ever so slightly.
It doesn’t matter.
“We’re not done.” She insists, and despite her unfocused vision, she can see clear as day how little Steve likes that answer.
“We can be.” Bruce says, and when she looks past Steve and to him, she realizes he is folding up a paper strip of black squares outlined in white; photos. “I saw everything I needed to. You seem healthy, Nat, and the babies are at two different stages of development, but they both look healthy for where they’re at.”
Nat has some sort of retort in mind about her violently puking at the drop of a hat doesn’t paint a picture of health to her, but she is too numb to find the words. Bruce hands Steve the stack of photos face down, and Steve’s hand is shaking when he takes the stack. When he hands it to her, her hand is shaking even more. She glances to Steve’s eyes, and finds him watching her so intently that she actually fumbles as she turns the stack over.
The image she finds herself looking at is the tell-tale grainy grey funnel of an ultrasound, with two black blobs front and center. Her breath catches in her throat as she takes in the image. Each blob has a collection of more grey contained inside of it; the first being so much bigger than the other.
“What happens next?” Steve asks, and Nat drags her head up from the photo just in time to see Bruce turn off the ultrasound machine with a decisive flick of his finger.
“Next you guys find a doctor who knows more about this stuff than I do.” He says, matter-of-factly, before he settles his eyes squarely on her. “An OB will be able to better tell you what it is you’re looking at in terms of risk.”
“Risk like losing one of them?” She asks, her voice hoarse. Still, she needs to ask. Much as she loathes to think about it, there isn’t any point in pretending that isn’t what they’re talking about.
She may not know all the fine details associated with pregnancy and how greatly risk increases when you’re dealing with more than one baby; but she knows that they do increase. And that isn’t even to mention what they’re dealing with here, with one baby already so much smaller than the other.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Nat.” Bruce says, simply, to her surprise. “If you carry the first one to term, that means the second would be born at thirty-seven weeks, which is perfectly safe. The risks I’m talking about is if the first one comes a little bit early, you might want to be prepared for the second to spend a couple days in the NICU. That’s all.”
“What about the serum?” Steve asks, which is better than Nat’s next question; what happens if the first one decides to come a lot early?
She decides to bite her tongue on that one; no sense in talking out every nightmare scenario.
Not yet.
“It can only help them.” Bruce answers Steve with a shrug. “Again, this isn’t my area of expertise.”
“So take everything you say with a grain of salt.” Nat half-teases, and Bruce smirks at her.
With that, it’s suddenly easier for Nat to peel herself away from Steve. She finishes his previously abandoned task of pulling her leggings back into place, and she slides off the bed. She keeps the photos clutched tightly between her fingers while Bruce opens the door. She is sure to thank him again as the three of them leave the facility; Bruce having driven his Jeep here and heading back for New York. She and Steve, on the other hand, had to take a Quinjet to get all the way out here.
The two of them sit silently in their flight seats for a moment, as though they are waiting for the last half-hour to finish washing over them.
“Ok.” Steve finally breathes, toggling the different controls to bring the jet to life. “Let’s get out of here before we’re late for pickup.”