It pushed a sharp hiss of breath out of her, an exhalation like she had just been belted in the gut, and she held him all the tighter for it. It could have been unwelcome. She knew that. She knew that better than almost anyone, from watching the way he was with Steve, the way he had been after what had happened in Leipzig, Siberia, the way he moved in Wakanda. He wasn't used to being touched, and certainly not this forcefully, and she had gone and flung herself at him as though - as though she was sure it would be welcome. As though she was entitled to touch him, still.
And now he had gone and told her she had been right.
It had been years. It had been over a decade. But there was his hand, in the same place at the small of her back. And there was his face, tucked into her hair - her hair, God, she still needed to cut her hair, it bothered her now in a way it hadn't for the last five years, seeing all the ways she'd stopped taking care of herself. And it brought something vital in her body back to howling, screaming life. She'd thought she had killed this, thought she had let it go and made her peace with it.
How we fit, he whispered.
"I never forgot," she told him, and it was the truth. She had loved Clint Barton so much that some days it felt like something that was going to drown her, but there was room enough in a heart for more than one hurt, and she had never forgotten this: the first time anyone had fit. The first time anyone had touched her and made her believe that she could be more than a body encapsulating a fantasy. When the Red Room took him away from her, it was when they had lost her, too.
They just hadn't known it yet.
She pulled back just enough to be able to look at him, to cradle his face in her hands, and she could not have stopped smiling for anything. No one looked at the Winter Soldier this way. She knew that. As though he was a source of joy that she could draw endlessly from, as though both of them with their bloody hands had still built something clean and lovely. "Look at you, James," she told him, proudly, even. "I used to want to tell you so many times - look at you. Strongest person I know. Look at you."