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[Home] Steve

Professionalism is a wonderful thing.

A flash of light and Natasha is standing in her office. She's wearing different than when she left, different shoes, different earrings; she's missing her gauntlets.

She's also missing a few hours.

Shit.

-- --

It's hours before she manages to get home. She calls Clint's phone first (and he's back, he's back, thank god, he's back), she calls Steve's phone (no answer, damn) she calls Fury and her SO, she rouses Dr Ishikawa. There are tests to be run.

She calls Clint, again, once she locks her front door. He sounds...strained. But he's in a different city, and tells her to go have a shower and stop being a mother hen. There's nothing she can do here, so she agrees, and then leaves another message on Steve's phone.

Then she has a shower.

(And if she ends up sitting in the tub, clutching her knees to her chest and just letting the hot water hit her back, well.

No one's watching.)

-- --

After, she tries to put herself back together. She pulls on comfort-clothes and carefully, deliberately straightens her hair like nothing is wrong. Dinner is a reheated soup pulled from her massive freezer (she leaves another message on Steve's phone while the microwave hums) and if she was sensible, this is where she'd put on some DVDs. A history on the English language, maybe. A ridiculous b-grade sci-fi show from the '90s which she could play on her laptop while she cooks, but she'd been on the Enterprise.

She finishes her soup. She puts the bowl in the sink to soak. Then she goes to her bedroom, lifts up the secret trap door at the bottom of her closet, unlocks the safe, and pulls out the only photograph she'd been able to find of her husband. Moving over to her couch, Natasha tucks her feet up underneath her, and traces the side of Alexei's face with her finger. She has other people and things that she uses almost as totems to help ground her, but they'd taken Alexei away from her once. If she can remember him, she's fine.

She's in her right mind.

She's fine.

(She'd thank Steve for the nostalgia trip, except their argument is too close at hand and he's not answering his phone and she was on the Enterprise, and she cannot quip about it, even in her head.)

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He arches his eyebrows, barely disguising a look of interest at her 'ambitious' list of baked goods. Sweets still feel like an indulgence to him, even after two years in the modern world, but S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't exactly put out a spread when they're poking and prodding you.

"Nothing wrong with ambitious," he says, and his stomach growling is practically audible. He's grown accustomed to kicking his shoes off before he walks into her place, even accustomed to her street wear (though, once he's finished reading the logo on her shirt, the tic of his eyebrow turns a little more questioning); he still hasn't grown completely accustomed to the familiar touches, though that's mostly his upbringing to blame. His lips twist, hands sliding into his pockets a little awkwardly as her hand slips away and she turns toward the kitchen. He receives the unspoken message, loud and clear. "Is that a trick question?"

She knows how his appetite can be. He tracks after her at a lazy pace, a little more relaxed by the warmth of her apartment and the smell of baked goods -- not to mention visual proof that she's OK. Trademark crooked smile, friendly gestures, movements that don't show injury or distress; it's hard wrapping his head around the idea that she's almost as old as he is, and he's left wondering just how alike they really are now.

He leans against a counter, watching her for a moment. "It's good to see you, Nat. I mean it."

The (many, many) cupcakes are put to one side as she uncovers a loaf of raisin bread and starts to carve slices. Then she grabs some butter from the fridge, two small plates and a butter knife and puts it down in front of Steve. She pauses briefly, then darts around the kitchen again to pull out two glass mugs and a bottle of homemade kvass from a fridge.

"After I vanished for months on a strange spaceship?" She snorts slightly, pouring kvass in both their mugs before picking hers up and taking a drink.

"Well. I'm glad to see you're okay, too. I wouldn't...leave you behind anywhere like that."

He shifts when she sets the plates down and moves off again, carving thin slices of cold butter and patting them into the still-warm bread for both of them. At this stage in their friendship, they're beyond worrying if the other will poison them.

He lets out a soft breath of laughter, and shakes his head. But before he answers with some smart remark, he lets her finish her piece, and softens up a little more.

"I know you wouldn't," he says in all seriousness. No matter what's going on between them, they're still partners. They've had growing pains before. "I'm just glad that you were sent home, and not blinked off onto another planet or spaceship or--"

He sets the butter knife down, and runs his hand through his hair. The normalcy of standing here suddenly feels strange when he starts talking about space. His lips tic, and with a slight shake of his head he reaches for his glass. Kvass is an acquired taste, and one he only indulges in with Natasha, but right now he feels like he needs it. "I'm sorry, I've had a couple more months to think about how we left things than you have, I guess."

Another person would be sympathetic. Or at least, express that sympathy: she's spent hours worrying, not months.

Instead, she slants him a glance as she picks up a slice of bread.

"You brooded. Didn't you."

Edited 2014-12-10 07:36 (UTC)

He looks at her, equal parts surprise and offense splayed across his features.

"I did not," he grumbles. This is an argument they've had before. One he's still trying to figure out how to win. "You're my partner. Things were awkward, and then you and Barton disappeared. I'm allowed to worry."

It's not brooding. It's duty.

Natasha smiles at him. An honest, wide and dimpled smile that says, more than words, I am very fond of you and am glad you're okay and here.

"A little bit of worry. Maybe."

Then she sobers up.

"So. I'm guessing a Get Smart marathon probably isn't on the table. Did you want to talk about the awkward? Or...what happened on the Enterprise once I'd gone?"

(She worried, too. A lot.)

Edited 2014-12-10 08:37 (UTC)

Steve's well-acquainted enough with her various smiles to recognize the one she's giving him now; it's rare, and as far as he can tell, completely sincere. That makes it enough to worm through his sternness, pulling a wan smirk out from his disapproving look. Guess winning this argument isn't on the table today, either.

The mention of Get Smart is the clincher. Half the items in his notebook -- the one filled with things he missed while he was asleep, things he needs to catch up on -- came from her. Half the crossed-out items are also her handiwork. Lazy nights spent on either of their couches just watching television are rare, but they're one of Steve's favorite indulgences.

"Both. And we should probably talk about our evals, too, now that they're over," he nods, reaching for his plate at last. The bread is good, really good, but he didn't expect anything less. "S.H.I.E.L.D. had a lot of questions I couldn't answer. And Nat -- I'm going back. To the Enterprise."

That much he hasn't told anyone else.

She was about to reply - yes, they need to talk about what happened to him once she'd gone, and yes, they need to talk about the 'awkward' as he called it, and yes, probably, talking about the evals is a good idea - but then he keeps on speaking.

He wants to go back.

"You...wanna explain that, Steve?"

He's not sure he can.

His gaze slips away from Natasha's face, landing back on his food. His jaw tenses once, and he shakes his head.

"There are people there who need me," he answers quietly, but firmly. "Nat... I know you've lost people. To war, to the work we do -- can't avoid it. But what if I told you that... that ship, that place, makes it possible to see them again?"

She breathes out, carefully.

Five minutes.

She leaves the boy alone for five minutes, and someone fucks with his head.

Has she lost people? Yes. Yes. Yes, she has. More than she can count. More than she can remember. She doesn't bother listing them: they are gone, far out of her reach. Steve, on the other hand, is here. Here and picking his words so carefully, as if what he is saying might hurt her.

The words don't hurt, they just make her angry because he believes it. He really does.

Which means someone has been fucking around with his head.

"Then...strictly hypothetically, I'd be asking what the catch is," she says after a moment of looking at him with narrowed eyes. She went too still to play it casual, but that's fine.

Even if she believed him, she wouldn't be casual.

He'd half been expecting her to call him on it, tell him he's talking crazy, and suggest he march back to HQ to get a full workup immediately; the narrowed eyes and tense movements don't faze him.

He nods.

"You remember that other me you met? The -- Stephanie Rogers?" he asks, a shallow line forming between his brows. It's still weird to think about. "She came from another, alternate universe, right? Maybe that's what's happening here, I-I don't know. I'm not crazy, Natasha."

He pauses, looking her in the eye with all the seriousness he can muster, before he continues. "But my best friend is on that ship. Bucky Barnes. And I can't leave him, not again."

Not like I did last time.

"I can understand that," Natasha says, and then snorts faintly. Bitterly. "You...I'd say you have no idea how much I'd understand that, but I think you're one of the few who would."

He saw her while Clint had been kidnapped, after all; saw what she would do for the sake of her best friend. Her rage ran more destructive than his, but like could recognize like.

"But I gotta tell you, Steve. From personal experience, it's not a question of not being 'crazy'. Not like how...I think you're imagining it to be. You'd have no idea. Trust me on this.

So I'm not...dismissing what you think. But I gotta ask what happened on that ship after I was taken away."

She's angry. It's a fine line of tension running through her body, a hint of light in her green eyes, but she's angry. Just like she'd been on Helicarrier, until she'd knocked Loki out of Clint's head.

He nods almost imperceptibly, following her train of thought without more ever having to be said. It's both learned shorthand between them and Steve's good observation. A mark could look at her and see poise, passion, promise. All Steve sees is a cobra ready to strike.

"I've considered that," he admits, a slight tension in his voice that betrays months of second-guessing and frustration. He sets his now-empty plate down, and motions over his shoulder to the couch. "There was a planet. The ship went into orbit, and -- it was supposed to be a day trip."

The look he shoots her calls it the usual kind of day trip: the kind that's gonna take a while to explain.

She is relieved to hear that Steve considered the possibility of artificial reality. Not much relieved, but...a little. It's better than blind faith.

When he gestures over to her couch she hesitates, eyes darting to her coffee-table. She'd left her wedding photo out: careless, careless Natashka, but at least the frame was lying on its back. Well. She'd just cross that bridge if he notices.

"'Supposed to be' be the operating words here?" she asks, walking out of her kitchen to take up her customary space on her couch. Legs curled underneath her, flank pressing against the back cushion, elbow propped up on the same as she watches Steve's face as he explains all about Alemar III.

She listens.

Despite her intimidating reputation - both in SHIELD and out in the wider intelligence community - in person, Natasha is a good listener. In part, it's because her silence is more inviting than not. In another part, it's because she can listen to the undercurrents and context of the speaker, piece together the emotions behind the inflections in their voice and the movements of their hands.

Steve speaks and Natasha listens, and more than anything, he reminds her of the man she first met. There was a problem and he could help. But it's only a reminder, not a repeat: this time, with Alemar III, Steve personally gave a damn about the people he was trying to save. It wasn't idealogical, it wasn't the end of the world and his city, it was...people he knew.

Even before he started covering how Bucky had rescued him, Natasha knows that his desire to go back isn't only due to the love of one miraculously returned person.

This, Agent Romanoff notes to herself, is a problem.

This connection, Natasha observes, is what she was trying to get him to develop over the past two years of their partnership.

She's not sure what she feels about that, so she shoves it aside and continues to listen.

He takes note of her living space, which means he notices anything that's out of place. Having been here before, he doesn't recognize the overturned frame on her coffee table, and he can't place it anywhere in the room. But he figures it's face down for a reason.

It takes a while to explain the three days he spent on the planet, though the brunt of his story comes on the third day, with the faces bloodied and sooty. Sinthia's in particular. Just a kid, beat to hell and back by the cave-ins. He stood beside a lot of good fighters, and promised to help a lot of people. When he first arrived on the ship, he didn't know how, wasn't even sure he wanted to; now, he feels like maybe he can do some good there.

"... and he's different. Different than the Bucky I knew," he finishes, dragging his hand through his hair. "But he needs someone to have his back. Someone to watch out for him. Why do I get to come home when so many of them don't?"

And maybe, just maybe, there are some remnants of survivor's guilt in his voice, after years of fighting in a war that took so many. His best friend included. "On the ship, he -- he almost killed Sinthia. I don't know what he'll do to himself, alone."

He makes eye contact. If it echoes with what she told him about Clint not even a few months earlier, at least he'll know she understands where he's coming from.

"You got to come home because that was the roll of the dice, Steve." She smiles, faintly. He knows how old she actually is now; he knows what war she lived through, what battle took place on her city's streets.

"It's nothing more meaningful or sinister than that. Not unless you want it to be. And that you supply yourself."

Then she shrugs. "But that's the topic of a different therapy session. Uh.

You said Bucky was different. How was he different?"

Steve doesn't respond with anything more than a frown for a few long seconds. He's never cared for chance, even if someone could argue that's what made him who he is today. It's also what made him a skinny, sickly kid for the first two decades of his life. Cards, dice, fate, whatever you want to call it may be indiscriminate, but that doesn't make up for the people it overlooks. Good people.

The corner of his mouth tics briefly when she calls this a 'therapy session', and he drops his head just a little, focusing on his hands.

"He's -- guarded, tortured," he begins, as if the words are painful. "He can't remember huge sections of his life. He says they-- they caught him, during the war. Tortured him, turned him into this... I don't know. He has a prosthetic, talks like he's not good for anything but killing. That's not the Bucky I knew. Whatever they did to him..."

The last few words are spat, like a threat is about to follow on their heels. But Steve just shakes his head, looks angry and then emotional, and ends up pulling his hand through his hair again and letting it rest there. He clenches his free hand into a fist.

"He's strong. Too strong. I think they experimented on him, tried to make him into a soldier like me," he eventually says. And then he pauses, dragging his eyes back up to Natasha's face. "Like us."

Natasha's expressive mouth pulls to the side, more bitter than wry.

"Like us," she echoes. For a moment, she looks like she is going to say more, but she swallows it.

"Well. To be objective for a moment, I'd say he sounds...like he's probably suffering too much Post-Traumatic Stress to be an illusion. It'd be too big a gamble on your reaction. Probably.

But I had to ask," she adds, softly.

He watches her. There's something he wants to say, but as she keeps talking his face softens with surprise and then understanding, something akin to appreciation in his eyes for how she tempers her tone.

"I get it," he says. "To be honest, it's -- more reassuring than anything to have you backing me up on the 'not crazy' front."

He smirks lopsidedly, releasing that fist at last. "You know, I said 'like us', but... there's a lot I don't know, Nat. I realize the last time we tried talking didn't go well, but -- you're my partner, and I want to understand."

"I know."

Natasha breathes something that could be a laugh.

"I know, Steve. It's just..." She looks away, as if searching for something to say, when her gaze lands on the photo-frame on her coffee-table. Well. All right.

She hesitates and then leans over to pick it up, keeping the face towards her.

"Let me...explain something. Before we go into the rest.

There was a boy.

He was a bit older than me, but we lived in the same apartment building. When the war came, he enlisted. By the end of the war, well. You heard the stories of what the Eastern Front was like. I thought he was dead, like everyone else.

Moscow, after the war, I was in a park and someone said my name. 'Natalia', it's common. 'Natalia Alianovna' is not. I turned and there he was. Alive. Well. Very dashing in his uniform," she adds, and despite how tense and bitter she's been, here her smile is almost happy. It doesn't last.

"We were married for about ten years before he was killed. Plane crash, into the Pacific. He was the only person I really had left, so I think you know what that would have felt like.

I don't..." Natasha hesitates and then looks up. Her mouth is bitter and her green eyes are shiny with unshed tears. "My point is he," and she turns the photograph around so he can see, "he is not the kind of person you forget."

It is, on the face of it, a very ordinary post-World War II wedding photograph. The groom in his best uniform and still looking a bit nervous, the bride wearing a dark winter coat with her veil almost defiantly in place. The couple are young, and while the bride is more at ease than her new husband (indeed, her smile is only just short of a grin), the sheer closeness of their stance is telling. More than any vow or legal authority, they are determined to stay together, for better or for anything worse than the war they just survived.

Steve listens respectfully, keeping his eyes on her when he feels his attention is needed, dropping them when she needs her space. There's a lot he can identify with, which won't take a super spy to unravel; he smiles when she smiles, looks pensive when she's serious, shows the regret and sympathy clearly for her loss.

He's careful when he reaches for the photograph, taking it like he's just been handed an emblem in church. It's the first time he's seen Natasha like this, evidence that what she's told him is true. Young, couldn't be more than twenty with that face, and the groom beside her barely more than a kid himself. Like so many who fought in that war.

His brows knit together.

"You were married," he begins with the obvious, but there's so much more behind the words. It's understanding, at last. The things she's lost go beyond her service to the Russian government, to the Red Room. "I'm sorry, Nat."

He hands the photo back to her. "How long after was it, before -- ?" He hesitates, and when Natasha looks puzzled he clarifies in the gentlest way possible. "What year were you brought into the Red Room?"

Edited 2014-12-24 08:39 (UTC)

Natasha takes the photo back, holding it close to her chest with as much reference as her father's family would hold a Qu'ran.

I'm sorry, Nat, Steve says and there's a flicker of a smile in response. It means something, coming from him.

"Um. I'm...not great with dates for back then," she replies once he clarifies his question. "But very soon after the war. The academy was in Moscow, Alexei was stationed at the Air Force base close by. We went out while I was studying. We didn't get married until a couple years later, when the Red Room was shut down. Then the Red Room came back, Alexei's plane crashed, and, oh look, I have transfer orders back to Moscow."

Her voice is dry as grave dust, and her thumb runs down the edge of the photo-frame protectively.

"My original point was that the Red Room...at some point, I don't know when, they went into my head, and took everything and everyone I loved out. They replaced it with something pretty and fake. Certainly didn't involve a murdered husband. And sometimes, even now, I wake up. And I can't tell which memories are real."

As soon as the words 'transfer orders' leave Natasha's mouth, Steve tenses in realization. His knuckles go white around his glass of Kvass, the twin lines between his eyebrows deep with anger.

He looks at the back of the photo-frame clutched to her heart for a long, long time.

It isn't until her explanation starts to sink in that he looks at her again, face drawn and open like the words mean something to him personally. What she's describing only makes him think of Bucky again, snatches of conversations rushing through his mind, the memory of Bucky's haunted eyes and pleading expression, the nightmares...

He blinks, letting out a small puff of air, and he does what he can to wipe that look off his face. It could be nothing. At any rate, now's not the time to bring it up.

"So when I talk about my friends coming back from the dead, it hits a nerve," he surmises, eyes on his glass. He tenses his jaw once, twice, and shakes his head. "I'll be honest with you, Natasha. Even right now, I'm not 100% sure that the Enterprise is real. I know that there's something off about it, about the whole situation, and my allegiances haven't shifted. My duty, my responsibility, is always gonna be here. But if there's a chance it's real-- if the possibility exists that I was brought there for a reason, that we both were, that I can do some good ... I can't turn my back on that."

"It hits a nerve," she agrees, quietly. "And it hurts in general to talk about, and I hate doing it. So, I don't."

She huffs out a sigh and listens to him as he continues.

"I know," Natasha says then. "If Alexei was there, or...other people...

I get it. Except. How you planning on getting back, Rogers? You got a wormhole parked out the back?"

Steve glances at Natasha out of the corner of his eye, mouth twitching, but he doesn't laugh (not at first), and he doesn't make her talk about it. He'd like it if she talked to him more, but he understands well enough not to force it. After all, even if he doesn't say as much out loud, it's because he feels the same exact way that he gives her such a hard time when she pushes him to make connections, go out into the world, date. He's come a long way in the last two years, maybe longer than most people give him credit for, but it still hurts. And he doesn't like to talk about it.

He looks at his hands, nodding almost imperceptibly when she peters off. He hasn't even mentioned Peggy yet, or this new guy, Sam, but he figures commentary on what it would be like for Natasha should her dead husband show up wouldn't be appreciated.

The wormhole line is what finally makes him laugh. "Not quite. I met him. Q. He's the one who sent me back, but he made it pretty obvious that it wasn't going to be for good. And I'm OK with that."

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