No new messages. Natasha's phone blinked softly in the darkness as she slid it back into her pocket. Three weeks had passed since she bid Steve, Sam, and Fury adieu at the Director's headstone. Those few weeks had been a constant dance in and out of the press's gaze, trying to stay out of the limelight.

Three weeks of hell.

She was used to this kind of misery –mindless trudging through shouts and misplaced anger thrown in your face with reckless abandon. People scare easily and the public was still reeling in shock at the thought that their best bet for protection against things that go bump in the night had been infiltrated by, well, things that went bump in the night. Blaming the sheep for being startled by wolves wouldn't get anything accomplished.

It would have been nice if they had been a little less scared. Natasha had been forced to pick up no less than four cover IDs in an attempt to stay remotely under the radar. The fakes got her a few days of quiet – you only needed a driver's license and a bogus social to get enough credit to pay for dinner and some fresh clothes - but her face was still on national news and that wasn't something she could just throw money at to go away.

In the end, she'd retreated to a remote corner of New York, taking a night bus to bring her out of Rochester and into some tiny-ass town near a state forest. Her methods weren't entirely random though, and she hoped her hunch had been correct. Running away from her international acclaim by finding some random cabin in the woods wasn't Natasha's goal. She was searching out a safe house that she hadn't used before, one that couldn't possibly have been in SHEILD's database when she released it into the wild of the internet.

Hopes and hunches weren't the Widow's preferred currency. This entire trip ate at her nerves, a continuous bubble of unease sitting in her stomach. Idly, the spy wondered when she had gotten so comfortable that being undercover was effecting her at all.

Since DC, since New York, Stark Industries, Budapest… Her time at SHIELD had mellowed her, taken her away from her true nature. She frowned, glancing at her reflection in the mirror. Complacency and comfort. The sudden change from a dependable – though still dangerous – lifestyle to one on the road shouldn't have shaken her, yet here she was, nerves jangling in her stomach.

Natasha Romanoff swallowed hard, working through long-memorized mental tricks to throttle her anxiety into submission.

The bus lurched to a stop. Time to get out and go on the move. Natasha patted her pockets quickly, verifying that everything was still readily accessible. Wryly, she wished for the n-th time in these past three weeks that she had some backup. Slinging her rucksack onto her shoulder, Natasha slunk off the bus and onto the street, ignoring the driver's grunt to "Git home safe."

A black widow has no home, only a place to recover and recuperate before jettisoning back into some mission. That was her destination, no more, no less.

A/N: This has kind of been floating around in my mind for a while, so I decided after seeing Civil War that I would try to actually get it out into words. I've got such an appreciation for Natasha's character both in the comics and in the films, as well as an adoration for Bucky that cannot be contained. Naturally, I've been sucked into Buckynat hell and wanted to play around in this kick-ass ship.

Let me know what you think :3