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In the beginning, Steve sees Agent Romanov more than the others. They're all around -- well, except for Thor -- and he has an open invitations to visit, but everyone is scattered in places that feel too strange to call home. SHIELD is not exactly familiar territory either, but beneath the wacky technology and dysfunctional family vibe, it's still the military, and he can take comfort in its discipline and rhythm.
Romanov feels the same way, although she doesn't say it. She ventures out between missions, vanishing for a few days at a time, but she never stays gone for long. When she's here, she seems to be everywhere, as much Fury's right hand as Agent Hill is. He always perks up a little when he sees her coming. He's making friends here, getting to know people, but she and Agent Barton are the only ones who've fought beside him. It's a different kind of bond, not a friendship exactly, but somehow more important than knowing who's got a dog and who likes Chinese. So he smiles when he sees her approaching his table in the mess hall, mostly because she's a soldier but also because he's a red-blooded American man, and he can't not be happy to see a beautiful woman walking his way.
"Suit up, Agent. You've got a mission," she says, and he follows her without question, even if he wonders at the smirk playing around the edge of her lips.
She's waiting for him outside his room when he's finished changing, and she walks half a step ahead of him in the corridor, and he appreciates that, even if he doesn't let her stay ahead for long. Usually he's the one in the lead; as strange as he is here, people seem to fall into step behind him. But somehow Romanov gets ahead of him without him even realizing, and when she gets to the door first, she holds it open for him.
"Thank you, ma'am," he says and steps through the door. "Things sure have changed."
"Not everything," she answers, "And my name is Natasha."
She closes the door behind her, leaving him alone to face bright lights, a white backdrop, and a photographer rushing toward him.
"Captain America! What an honor!" the man exclaims, pumping Steve's hand up and down. "I have some fabulous ideas for the new trading cards."
***
"See anything interesting?" she asks, and he feels himself blush. Most people don't catch him doing this, but Natasha's a spy. Of course she notices when she's being watched. He picks up her little container of yogurt and studies the label.
"They didn't have this when I was a kid," he says.
"No?"
"Yogurt was not popularly consumed in the United States until the nineteen fifties," he says. It's weird to know that, and even weirder to say it, but he can't help it sometimes. This world is still so new.
He waits for Natasha to laugh or call him strange -- most people do -- but instead she just tilts her head and asks, "So what else is different?"
No one carries cash gay marriage is a thing the internet computers 3D movies there's an app for that global warming Thai food --
"Women wear tight pants," he says, "and sometimes they save the world."
She quirks an eyebrow. "Are you flirting with me, Steve?"
"No," he says, even though it dawns on him that the answer might be yes. "Just angling for a Black Widow trading card of my own."
Her blush is very, very faint, but he knows she'll make him pay for it later. He has a feeling it might be worth it.
***
Assuming he sees her again, of course. Weeks drag by, and she doesn't come back to base. Tentatively he searches the SHIELD computers for her whereabouts -- he's getting better with them every day -- but if information about her mission exists, his security clearance isn't high enough to see it. He misses her, although he isn't naive enough to believe one flirtatious comment meant anything to her. But she's familiar, and not many people in SHIELD are.
He plays poker with Barton and Tony and Hill one night. They drink beer and eat pizza -- the normal kind with sausages and pepperonis, and none of the weird toppings people order these days, like pineapples and feta cheese. Beer doesn't do anything ot him anymore, but sometimes he pretends it does, and he waits till Tony's in the bathroom and asks Barton, "So...are you and Romanov..."
Hill cocks an eyebrow.
Barton says, "Ask her yourself."
***
"If I asked you how the mission went, would you have to kill me?" he asks. "And more importantly, do the women of the future like ice cream?"
"Only if I told you the truth, and this one likes Rocky Road." She hands him a set of keys. "You drive."
They're in New York City, so driving is hardly the logical option. But then, he'd wager Natasha knows that. Maybe she wants to be on the road, moving down empty highways to some place else. While she's in the bathroom, he calls JARVIS for the name of the best ice cream parlor in upstate New York. Tony had given him a private link after he'd confessed the future was a little disappointing -- no ray guns, no moon colonies, and the SIRI thing everyone seemed to excited about was not as smart as his childhood comic books had led him to believe.
Natasha's quiet in the car, and it occurs to him that she doesn't often let other people take the wheel. He'd feel flattered by this small hint of vulnerability, but a small part of him wonders if she thinks watching him navigate twenty-first century streets will be entertaining. But driving is a thing he can do, and she's not looking at him anyway. He wonders if she misses Agent Barton; he misses Bucky every day, like half of him is gone, and he's not even sure if they were as close as Hawkeye and Black Widow.
"I'm surprised they didn't send you out with Barton this morning," he says, just in case that's the problem.
"We don't always work together." Her face is expressionless, and she doesn't take her eyes off the road.
"Right," he says, and then because he has nothing else to say, he asks what he knows is a stupid question. "Are you and Agent Barton..."
"No." She ducks her head, and when she looks up, Steve's surprised to see that she looks angry.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I didn't mean to ask about a sensitive subject."
Her face is perfectly neutral, but he can see her jaw is clenched. "Not that it's any of your business, but Agent Barton was the first man who didn't try to--"
He holds up a hand. "You don't have to explain. I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"It's alright. Most people don't ask." Her lips curve upward in a tiny smile. "They're afraid I'll kill them."
***
"How cliche," Natasha says. "Will SHIELD also supply 2.5 children and a white picket fence?"
"Shouldn't Barton do this?" Steve asks.
"Don't be stupid," Natasha says. "Barton can't behave in public."
Steve thinks, I can.
"The target is AmeriCare insurance, headquartered in Connecticut," Fury says, ignoring them both. "We have reason to believe they are engaged in an organ trafficking scheme." He hands each of them a tablet. "Agent Romanoff, you have been placed in the legal department. Agent Rogers, you will be her stay-at-home husband. You will be attending art classes at a local college and providing back-up as needed."
Steve is stuck on the part where you can transplant organs from one person's body into another.
"Like science fiction," he mutters, and Natasha and Fury stare. "The, uh, organ transplants, I mean. I didn't know those existed," he says. He reads a lot -- it's practically a second job -- but he misses things.
Hill and Fury exchange glances.
"House husband. Science fiction organ trafficking ring. I'm in," he says.
When he gets home, he's going to Wikipedia the hell out of organ transplants.
***
"They didn't kill me," Natasha says evenly. Her face is unreadable.
"Could they have?" Steve asks because he can't picture it. He still remembers the shock of seeing his own blood in the battle with the Chitauri. Natasha, as far as he could tell, had come out unscathed.
"Yeah," she says, and Steve wonders how much it cost her to admit that. "Do you trust SHIELD?" she asks, and the question catches him off guard even though it shouldn't have.
"I...think I'm fighting for the man standing next to me," he says. He hasn't made up his mind about SHIELD yet, other than to know that he needs them. But he's sure Natasha and Barton and the rest. Natasha especially. In the battle and everything that had come before it, she had been calm, selfless, level-headed, unafraid to say the difficult things. And she wasn't a soldier, but she'd fought anyway. Yeah, he'd fight for her or with her any day.
***
His voice echoes a little in the empty halls. He turns to Natasha and asks, "Can we get a dog?"
She shrugs her shoulders. "Fits the cover," she says, and tears open one of the SHIELD-provided moving boxes. Inside are pillows and sheets, and she carries them up to the big bedroom at the top of the stairs. Steve rummages through the pile, finds an extra pillow and a thin blanket, and sets off toward the sofa in the living room.
"Michael. Where are you going?" Natasha asks. It takes Steve a minute to remember that's his name now.
"Downstairs." He shrugs. "I go to bed early."
Natasha tilts her head to the side, looking oddly plaintive. "Are you mad at me? Was it something I said?"
"Stop," he hisses. He feels the fake life and the fake house closing in on him, and now she's a part of it too. Yesterday she'd been his friend.
Natasha's fingers circle his wrist, the grip surprisingly hard. "It's the mission," she says, face close too his chest. "We pretend. You sleep here."
***
"I didn't know you know how to cook," he says because if Natasha's his wife, he ought to start learning what she likes to do.
"I was trained."
"You went to culinary school?" he asks. He can't picture it, but then, he can't picture the way anyone came to SHIELD. They can't all have been frozen in time like him.
"No," she says, and even her voice is rolling its eyes at him. "I've been assigned to marry targets before. I'm not the kind of person you should have illusions about, Steve."
He figures that's meant to drive him away, so he steps up to the cutting board and starts slicing the carrots instead. If pretending to be married to targets is how Natasha serves her country, he can handle it. It's the orders he questions, not the person who follows them.
"You can have illusions about me if you want," he says. "I'll live up to them."
***
He shouldn't be surprised when Natasha rolls over and turns on her iPod at full blast. Still, he jumps. He wasn't asleep, but he'd thought she was.
"You've barely slept this week," she says, leaning close to him. She's wearing a pink silk nightie and her hair is falling around her face in rumpled curls. It's like a scene from a TV show about the fifties, the life he should have had after the war.
Steve opens and closes his mouth because he doesn't know if this is part of the game or not -- if he's supposed to be himself, or Michael the fake husband with a fake reason for fake insomnia.
Something in Natasha's face softens infinitesimally, and suddenly she's herself again. "The music's on," she says. "If the house is bugged, they can't hear us."
"Right," Steve says, abashed. Undercover work had never been his specialty. "This is weird. Too weird."
Natasha's lips quirk. "For me it's normal. But only half of what I do is a lie. If you can keep half of yourself real, you can keep your feet on the ground."
"I bet you'd like me to ask which half is true," he says, smiling back in the dark.
Natasha shakes her head. "No. You already know." She rolls over so that her back is to him, close enough that they're almost spooning. He can't see her face anymore.
"Tomorrow I'm going to get sick," she says. "That's what happened to the other agents. They slipped. Then they got sick, they went to the ER, there was an accident with their medication. And they vanished. Your job is to find me before I disappear."
Steve frowns. There's something dead in Natasha's voice, and he doesn't like it. He thinks of Loki, threatening to kill her in all the ways she fears, and he wonders if disappearing is the thing she's most afraid of.
"I could be the one to get sick," he says.
"Doesn't work that way. The medication won't affect you. They'll know you're a plant." Natasha rolls over to face him again. "Anyway, I'm the one who's getting poison coffee tomorrow morning. Just find me in time."
"I will," he says, and searches for a way to say it better before he realizes that Natasha wouldn't do this at all if she didn't trust him completely. Tonight, when she sleeps against him, it's not weird anymore -- they're just two soldiers, fighting for their lives in a different kind of fox hole.
***
"I feel like an ass, acting like that mission was all mine," he says when he finds her in the locker room.
Natasha shakes her head. "We're not all superheroes," she says.
"You could be." He's heard the rumors about her past, but it's not enough to erase his memory of her vaulting from his SHIELD to hijack a Chitauri speeder.
"Some of us are meant to serve in the shadows, Steve."
He smiles. "However you choose to serve is fine by me."
A moment of silence passes between them. He could let her make some excuse about where she's supposed to be, and they could go on the way they have been -- friends and comrades at arms, nothing more. But he reckons he got a second chance at life they day they pulled him out of the ice, and he doesn't intend to waste it.
"You know, my grandmother taught me how to cook too," he says. "I'd like to make you dinner this weekend."
"I'd like that," she says, and he knows she really means it because she lets him see the softness in her eyes and hear the hesitation in her voice.