"Put me down. Put me down," she insisted, but she hid her face in his chest, regardless. And she let him hold on, because if he was doing it for himself or he was doing it for her, it hardly mattered. At a certain point, there was no real difference; when you lived inside each other's pockets for long enough, boundaries were a thing that blurred. When Steve was coming from, he and Nat had been living that way for at least five years and for her, it was a solid decade. They were good at meeting each others needs by now, good at doing things for the other person's sake.
It took a few minutes. It did. But eventually, she could breathe again. Eventually, his grip on her wrists loosened up and she set her hands at the sides of his neck, warm and familiar. Grief, yes, God, the grief spilling out of him was a full body blow that she needed to find a way to absorb it. Sorrow, of course, but still - still, there was no judgment in him. There was no anger.
Steve of all people understood what it was like to come to the point where you stood at the top of a mountain and had the slow, creeping realization that there would be only one way off it. The moments that were ticking away would be your last, and how you wanted them to last forever in equal measure to wanting those minutes to hurry up be over with before you had a chance to change your mind. Steve Rogers would not look at her and do her the disservice of pretending in her shoes that he would have ever, for a second, chosen anything different.
She slumped the weight of her body against him in defeat. Acceptance. The same thing. He was still holding her up; she lifted her legs and folded them enough to rest her knees against his hips, helping him to support her even though she knew he didn't need it. It wasn't totally unfamiliar.
"Well, anyway," she said. Quiet now, the fight out of her. "I didn't want to tell you, but we've been quite the pair over the last fifteen years, haven't we? You can read me a little too well for it. Terrible Black Widow behavior, you know, letting somebody close enough to learn all your tells."