"Never mind how I got hurt, it's not relevant to any of this," Natasha said, making a concerted effort to bring her voice, her posture, her whole self back under control. Her entire existence was predicated around the fact that she didn't - feel things like this. That she could become whoever she needed to be in any given situation in order to play through it, to survive it, because comparatively, it was never so bad as it could have been. And lately, that had all been thrown off balance, rattled in places that she hadn't even realized that she'd kept safeguarded.
This was the price for being stupid, then, for doing one stupid thing after another, it was a collapsing domino effect. Everything snowballed until she was left on her knees in front of a door, smashing a knob into her eye because that was the fastest route towards getting things back on track with no real damage left in her wake. Self-inflicted bruises, those didn't count.
"Listen, your concern is - sweet, I guess," she said, because she would give him that, at least. Steve wasn't ill-intentioned and he never had been, that had never been his style, but it was grating on her nonetheless, his barely restrained fury, his concern. He didn't even like her; it was entirely misplaced. "I've been doing this since I was sixteen and I can handle myself. You wouldn't have been able to, and you know that as well as I do."