Chapter Text
Natasha coughs and holds the strip of card away from her. “Thankyou,” she smiles insincerely at the sales assistant, “but I don’t think it’s for me.”
“It’s Mugler,” Steve murmurs dryly. “What were you expecting?”
Natasha hands him the strip and he raises it to his own nose; he is assailed by a blast of overwhelmingly buttery pie crust. It’s the sort of all-American dessert that would make you feel sick after half a portion; the kind of thing his mother would have loved to bake to feed him up, but never had the money to waste the butter.
“Good lord,” he says.
“Ridiculous, isn’t it?” says Natasha.
As they meander on between the beauty counters Steve finds himself startled by the nose that could produce a scent like that. Is that really what a woman is, to him? He can’t place it between sexless matron and overweight fag hag - but then he supposes that a house as devoted to gourmandises as Mugler is hardly going to reach for femininity’s colder side. Natasha is in conversation with the assistant at the Chanel counter, picking up powder and foundation; Tony is throwing a benefit at the weekend and they will be, as she puts it, on public parade.
“Oh, and do you have a 30ml of No. 5?” Natasha asks.
Really? He thinks, disappointed. Natasha tosses him a glare as if he’d spoken out loud, pays for her purchases and steers him away by the arm.
“You are capitalist vermin and a snob,” she tells him tartly.
She has a point about the snobbery, he supposes. But he refuses to be ashamed of his art.
“You know, if you ever want something a little more… distinctive,” he says, “you only need to ask. It’d be a pleasure to scent you.”
Her face freezes for a split second in a mask of polite amusement. For Natasha, it’s almost the equivalent of fainting where she stands, and he’s not surprised when she makes a beeline for the exit of the store, seeking less crowded air.
“The most important thing is to blend in,” she mutters as they walk, as if they’re on a mission and in danger of being made. “No. 5 is classic, it’s quality and better yet every man there will think of someone else he already screwed.”
“It’s a low-risk event, Nat,” he tries, knowing it won’t make any difference. “Just Tony’s rich-kid friends. And a half dozen Avengers. If anyone tries anything they’ll be hamburger in ten seconds flat.”
She permits herself the minutest shudder. “I’m very flattered,” she says. “But I think I’ll pass.”
Back in the Tower, Steve finds himself staring at the coffee machine in his kitchen for several minutes without switching it on; recognising the symptoms, he heads for his perfume lab. Tony had spent at least sixty-five full seconds laughing at him when he’d asked for the conversion, and then a gleam had come into his mahogany-dark eyes and he’d suddenly started asking about technical perfumery instead. They’d been standing in the kitchen of the communal floor at the time, and Steve had waxed lyrical about the artistry of blending to the point where everyone else except Bruce had wandered away to the couch and put on a movie. Bruce, as he was wont to do, listened quietly. Even Tony only interrupted once a minute.
“Huh,” Tony said at length. “I never thought I’d have something in common with you.”
“You’re into perfumery?” said Steve, surprised.
“No,” said Tony. “I invent with both hands and the untutored seat of my pants.”
Confused, Steve had retreated with a coffee, leaving Tony and Bruce to geek out about aromachemicals in his wake.
His workspace is cluttered, vials and pipettes left scattered from a sudden call to assemble half way through an afternoon. His notebook sits under an empty glass beaker, open to a blank double page on which is written the solitary heading ‘Bucky”.
Steve looks down at it and sighs, then picks it up and sets it to one side before he can be distracted from his muse. Tea, he thinks, and maybe a hint of date or fig, rich and jammy; black samovar tea, sweetened with jam the way they drink it in Russia. But then that’s for the Soviet elite, safe in their power; Natasha had been no comfortable nomenklatura, growing fat on the buttery pie-crusts others had baked. She had been the knife of the USSR; the poison of revolution.
Wormwood, then, and chill and bitterness; perhaps synthetic iris, a flash of the metal in her hidden edge. Something weightier, the leather of her elegant boots underlying it all. The spine of it begins to come together, and he pauses, reaching for his notebook again to sketch out formulas.
Bucky.
The blank page taunts him, guilt making his hand hover with the page half turned. He sighs, and promises tomorrow to Bucky’s ghost.
Of the six blends he comes up with, one is perfection after it has aged. The plum-jam sweetened tea is distant and muted; front and centre is vital, blood-smudged foliage and well-used leather. In Steve’s mind a movie plays out; Natasha’s bright hair flames against snowy pine woods, twin blades slashing and gleaming in her hands. She spins, kicks out, her body the instrument of gods; a choking cry sounds, and blood splashes against the snow.
“And a romantic too,” says Natasha when she smells it. “You are incorrigible, Captain.”
But on his way up to the benefit dinner, the elevator holds a cloud of cypress and plum tea.
*
Two Legs Bad. The name comes to him long after the formula; George Orwell’s pigs, aping their captors and trampling on their peers. And it’s the scent of the world they leave behind them, too: acrid smoke, cold earth, the ashes of herbs. Natasha got out. She got out.
Bucky couldn’t. He had no choice but to be destroyed.