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“This is what you will be fighting against,” the instructor declared, rapping his wooden pointer against the projection screen with a sharp crack.
Natalia didn’t startle but rolled her eyes at the antiquated film that was playing. Even at eight years old, she was already inured to this kind of patriotic drivel. It was typical American propaganda that she had seen many times before while practicing her accent, though this was not as well-produced as many of the films they had previously watched for training purposes. There were scantily clad women singing this time, possibly live in some kind of peep show for the decadent Americans. She could immediately see it wasn’t terribly well choreographed, although her own ballet training was still at a disappointingly amateur level, due to her age and other training commitments. Her attention wandered to picking some small metal fragments from a healing wound on her arm as the performance went on.
“Pay attention!” the instructor shouted, again hitting the screen with an audible thwack. “You are seeing America’s greatest soldier!”
She cocked her head as a man in tasteless red, white and blue pajamas that offered no semblance of battlefield camouflage strutted between the dancing women. After posing for the cheering crowd of capitalist sheep, he pretended to knock out a poor facsimile of Adolph Hitler with a clumsy roundhouse that clearly didn’t connect. Natalia judged him to be fitter than average with impressive musculature and more elegance and balance than his fake punch would indicate, but if this was truly America’s greatest soldier, why was behaving as a parody?
“Американская свинья!” Oksana cried out and made a hooting sound of derision at the screen. It was about all the dull girl was capable of, now that her superior height and weight had been superseded by their skills in training. Brute force could only get you so far. The instructor was as unimpressed as the rest of the girls, calling for silence.
The film went on for a few seconds, most of which involved the soldier asking for money – what kind of nation lowered itself to begging its citizens to fund its war efforts? – before the instructor interrupted, “This is what was shown to the American masses during the Great Patriotic War, while this was the reality!”
There was a moment of garbled images while the film changed over to a gritty black and white depiction of the same soldier in battle. The awkwardness was gone, replaced by the confidence of movement Natalia had suspected he was suppressing. He was both graceful and violent at once, blending focused strength, purpose and will into his attack on masked Nazi soldiers. Even she could see his technique was imperfect, but he was so powerful that his strikes were nearly always effective. His ridiculous shield even seemed like a perfect weapon as he threw and caught it with remarkable precision. She found herself mesmerized as the footage progressed.
“This film is from 1945. Nineteen! Forty! Five!” A sharp snap of the instructor’s wooden pointer against the desk of a girl in the front row punctuated his emphasis of the date, causing several of the girls to jump, though not Natalia. She was still transfixed by the film. “Imagine what the Americans have accomplished in the forty years since then! Could any of you defeat even this one soldier? Could you?”
“Not yet,” Natalia hissed under her breath, still watching the American move on the screen. It was a shame he had been dead for so long…
She wasn’t sure in her young mind exactly why she wanted to meet him so badly, but she thought it had something to do with the victory that forcing his surrender would be. Or would have been, if it were possible.
Natalia was sixteen and far too old and experienced to be supervising young recruits in what she could sense was a collapsing program. The new girls were painfully slow in their development, inferior even to stupid Oksana from her class, who had been killed in a training ‘accident’ five years ago. If not for the shoulder injury suffered two weeks before, Natalia would be in the field right now serving her Motherland, rather than intimidating her inferiors without effort.
She casually tossed the last girl in the group of small attackers aside like a sack of potatoes as she glanced at the clock. “Get to lecture!” she shouted, waving them out of the gym and toward the classroom door. “Hopefully you are not as intellectually pathetic as you are physically! Or are you all American spies, hm? I suppose that would explain your weakness.” She was pleased to note the indignation present on several of the girls’ faces, though she didn’t break her glare as they left.
She wasn’t overly fond of this assignment, which basically amounted to bullying children, but she was relieved to find out that it was almost complete when the doctor declared her fit for light duty in the field during her checkup later that day. Pleased that the afternoon’s training session with the girls would be her last, she slipped into the classroom as their lesson was reaching its conclusion.
To her surprise, she remembered this exact lecture. Although Ivan Fydorovich was no longer the instructor – rumors of his defection angered and saddened her – the substance was the same. Captain America was waltzing across a stage in his ridiculous uniform and…
Natalia felt her mouth go dry as she watched the his fake punch, because the poor technique was easy to ignore when his muscles were flexing under that stretchy woolen outfit. She was old enough and experienced enough now to appreciate an attractive partner and he was exceptional. She noted his broad shoulders and narrow waist as he delivered his final appeal for money, the usual reflex of mocking a capitalist system barely flitting through her head.
Her impression was only strengthened when the film switched to the combat reel. Her sexual experience had been extensive but limited to assigned educational partners thus far – KGB agents, Spetznaz commandos, fellow girls in the Red Room. She knew instinctively that those passionless encounters would be blown away by a man like Captain America. His power and combat prowess would translate into unbridled desire. Desire for her. She squeezed her thighs together tightly as he flattened another Nazi.
This was ridiculous. She was lusting after a dead man. It was impossible. She barked at the girls to get to the gym the moment the lights came on, hanging back to make sure they were all on the way and certainly not to gaze at the paused image of Captain America still on the screen.
The quinjet powered down and lowered its ramp, prompting Natasha to speed up her stroll across the helicarrier deck in what she hoped was a nonchalant way. She would likely be excused for sprinting to Coulson given the situation with Clint, but she wanted a chance to catch her breath just in case…
Yes. Walking slowly had been the right choice. Coulson stepped down the ramp with him and introduced him as Captain Rogers. He called her ma’am. She barely managed to say hi before delivering her message to Coulson. For some reason, she immediately fell back on her default discomfort-diffusing conversation when she was with Clint – lovingly lampooning Coulson. Rogers didn’t seem particularly inclined to the game, instead greeting Dr. Banner with far more enthusiasm than he’d shown her. Natasha tried not to take it personally. It wasn’t as if Captain America knew she’d been thinking about him in various ways since she’d first become aware of his existence twenty years ago or that she’d been fighting an internal battle to stop herself from demanding Fury introduce her to him as soon as he was unfrozen. She had instead spent far more time than Coulson had expected listening to him wax poetic about the Captain, living vicariously through Coulson’s hero-worship.
She was also impressed that Rogers had jumped back into an unfamiliar world so readily, reading the SHIELD briefing packet and volunteering to find the tesseract. Sense of duty was something she could really get behind. Speaking of behinds…
Rogers needed better pants. Pants that didn’t leave so much to the imagination. Did they make yoga pants for men?
She bit the inside of her cheek to refocus herself. It was stupid, really. So what if Captain America was her secret childhood crush? If a psychiatrist ever got her to talk about it, which had even longer odds than finding Rogers alive and frozen in the Arctic, she’d probably be informed that idolizing him was a subconscious way of rebelling against her restrictive training or some other nonsense like that. So what if a former Russian agent had been harboring feelings for an American hero? It wasn’t as if she was about to act on them, no matter how good he looked in his distressed leather jacket and old man clothes. God, she needed to get it together.
She concentrated on being the totally cool master spy she absolutely was and dropped a hint about the helicarrier preparing to take off that both Rogers and Banner immediately misinterpreted. Dorks.
Natasha noticed early on that Captain America in the everyday flesh was much different than the image of Captain America that had been projected to the world. For one thing, it was much harder to think of Steve Rogers, who tended to hunch his shoulders so he looked smaller when he was in civilian clothes in public, as the larger than life hero from the history books and the films of her Red Room education. Hell, she had watched him gleefully eat three huge banana splits in a single sitting a few days ago when she’d taken him to a local ice cream shop after he’d mentioned he hadn’t had one since he’d woken up and had a craving.
She was not at all preoccupied by the fact that she’d taken Steve on an ice cream date. Not. At. All.
Rather than getting outwardly flustered, she carefully adjusted her black leather jacket to ensure it was concealing the slight bump her holstered weapon made on her left hip. Steve’s gaze remained straight ahead as they walked down Independence Avenue from where she’d parked her car. “Are you nervous about your exhibit?”
“No. Not nervous.” His honesty was both refreshing and disconcerting. His jaw tightened as they drew even with the Air and Space Museum. “I just…they’re calling it ‘Captain America, the Legendary Symbol of Courage or something like that. It shouldn’t just be about me, y’know? I mean, I wouldn’t have accomplished anything without my whole unit, and even we wouldn’t have gotten much done without the rest of the Army and our allies and the resistance…”
“Hey,” she interrupted, grasping his arm to stop him before they got to the entrance. He was never going to be happy about the attention, but maybe if she refocused him… “Remember when you met those vets at the World War II Memorial last month?”
He seemed confused by the question, but still nodded eagerly. “Yeah, they were amazing.”
“And you remember the whole ceremony that was happening?”
“The people in ‘40s uniforms and stuff were great.”
“Uh-huh. They do that all the time. There’s a whole network in place that flies veterans to DC to see the memorials and celebrate their accomplishments.” She hadn’t actually known about the Honor Flight program until Fury had assigned her to ‘protect’ Steve during an event, but she wasn’t above using any and all information she had to…make Steve feel better? Weird. She internally shook off the feeling and continued, “Think of this as one more thing the vets can visit and be proud of. You were their hero, right?”
He rubbed the back of his neck where the color was creeping up toward his face. “It wasn’t like that…”
“History never happened the way we present it. Just give this a chance, okay? The curator did invite you to have a look before it opens to the public to offer constructive criticism, right?” She reached into her pocket to produce a small notepad and pen, which she’d taken to carrying since seeing Steve scribbling down his list and absolutely did not use to record the things that he didn’t write down but she thought he might like. “I’ll even be your secretary and take notes for you.”
“Secretary, huh?” He gave her a once-over that was simultaneously shy and lascivious. The latter may have just been her imagination, but…damn, if her knees didn’t go just a little weak. His low chuckle didn’t help the situation as he added, “Can’t say I’ve ever pictured you as a secretary.”
“Guess you haven’t had a long talk with Tony Stark then,” she muttered, remembering that they were supposed to be keeping an appointment and not flirting outside the museum. “We should probably get in there.”
“Yeah.” He rushed up the steps to open the door for her. As she nodded in acknowledgement of his chivalry, his shy smile was back. “And…thanks, Nat.”
She smiled back rather than punching him, as she’d have normally done to anyone other than Clint for calling her ‘Nat.’
The Smithsonian exhibit had proven equal parts endearing and arousing from Natasha’s point of view. On one hand, she had watched Steve’s emotional expressions as he’d seen old photographs and artifacts from his childhood and adolescence in Brooklyn, his unsuppressed delight when he saw the Howling Commandos uniform display as the focal point of the exhibit. She’d even passed him a wrinkled but clean tissue as he stared at the tribute to his friend Bucky Barnes.
Her own response to the old movies and uniforms had been distinctly different, if predictable considering her original image of Captain America. She was almost happy when he suggested they skip lunch and she just drop him at his apartment because he had something he needed to do. The fact that she hadn’t asked what didn’t bother her until she was halfway home.
Steve’s stealth suit was incredibly attractive in its own way, but it didn’t affect Natasha the way the stars and stripes did. It was probably for the best. He hadn’t responded to even her most obvious attempts to get him into her bed, so she’d accepted that it just wasn’t going to happen. That was probably healthy. She didn’t need to be stuck in the past like that and she certainly didn’t need the distraction in the field.
He was an excellent partner and friend. That was fine. More than she deserved, even. So why did she still want more?
Following this particular post-mission debrief, she took out her physical frustration on a training dummy in the SHIELD gym. The rubber didn’t have the same give as human flesh and she hadn’t decided if that was a good or bad thing. Running through the mission in her head, she struck the dummy every time she remembered focusing too hard on Steve.
That was for the hit to the ribs she’d taken when she’d seen him go down when he’d been struck by a hatchback; he’d gotten right back up, of course, but there had been a moment when she’d been ready to lift that Volkswagen Golf over her head if he needed rescuing.
The dummy bounced back to a neutral position, expression never changing.
That was for needing a block from his shield to avoid a hail of bullets she should have seen coming. That was for smiling at her when she’d jutted her chin at him in thanks for the block. That was for asking if she was okay. That was for making her feel like he cared about her. That was for honestly caring about her. That was for…
“How are you not tired?” a familiar voice called across the gym.
She ceased her assault on the dummy, though she maintained her fighting stance. “Gotta keep up my fitness, Rogers. We’re not all super soldiers.”
“True, but I was out there with you a few hours ago.” Steve, freshly showered and changed into jeans and a t-shirt, walked across the mats to where she was bouncing on the balls of her feet, ready to strike. “You’re not exactly slacking off. Don’t know anyone else who could do that, um, knife…thing.”
Her movements paused. She hadn’t realized he’d been watching when she’d flung her vintage Ka-Bar into a man’s chest, unexpectedly slicing another’s left carotid artery as it passed – that had been a neat little bonus. “Well…I keep it sharper than regulation.”
“Marine fighting knife, right?”
“Yeah.” She pulled it from the sheath on her thigh. She had retrieved it after the throw and carefully cleaned it on the quinjet. “I got this from an instructor where…where I was trained.” The story of the knife came flooding back to her, just as Ivan Fydorovich had told her – traded in Tokyo by an American who had served on Guadalcanal to a Russian officer there to witness the surrender, the very Fyodor of Ivan’s patronym. Ivan had given it to her when she was fourteen, just before his disappearance. There was no reason for her to have kept it, for her to have relied on it for so long, but there were so few things for her to hold onto… She jammed it back into the sheath as she breathed out, “He showed me your movies.”
“What?”
She instantly knew she’d revealed too much. She ducked away from the inquiry, dodging between the training dummies in a futile attempt to escape from Captain America. She should never have tried to work with him, befriend him. What the hell was she thinking? She didn’t make friends! Clint excluded. And Fury, sort of. Maybe Maria Hill. Tony Stark in an absolute dire emergency.
But Steve? Steve was off limits. No go. DMZ. He was also currently blocking her escape route.
Not even winded from the sprint he’d have to have made to reach this spot before her, he grasped her upper arms. “Hey. Are you okay?”
“Fine,” she replied automatically. “Never better. I could probably use a shower, but…”
“You said something about movies. My movies.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You’re struggling to get away from me. That’s not nothing.”
She took a deep breath. He wasn’t letting her go and she couldn’t compete in a contest of pure strength, although she doubted he’d refuse if she demanded he release her. She decided on a rare moment of honesty. “We studied you in the Red Room, okay? They were trying to tell us that the Americans had super soldiers as far back as World War II so we had to make ourselves better than that and…I just…you made an impression, okay?”
“Um…okay?” He suddenly let got of her shoulders. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I was…I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that. That’s all.”
This Goddamn all-American son of a… Her lips crashed against his. He seemed just as surprised as she was at the turn of events. Neither backed away. This was…wow. This was a really, really good kiss. She hadn’t expected him to reciprocate, much less lick the seam of her lips as his fingers tangled in her hair. Where had he learned to do this? The image of a woman on the film from the Smithsonian exhibit flashed through Natasha’s mind before she remembered that she was making out with Captain America in the SHIELD gym. She suddenly pulled back.
“Steve…”
He was two steps away from her in an instant. “Natasha, I didn’t mean…I shouldn’t have…”
“Probably not,” she replied, pushing him against the doorframe and kissing him again. It was so much better than any of her fantasies, his coffee-tinged flavor and solid frame and muscles everywhere… They really needed to find somewhere private before this got out of control.
He seemed to have the same thought as he pulled away this time. “Natasha, I…please don’t be mad for me asking, but…can we…can I…take you to dinner?”
The yes regarding his expected suggestion to go home with him (or to bed or a convenient broom closet) died on her lips, but it was quickly replaced by a snort of mirth, followed by a fit of giggles. She was soon wracked by uncontainable laughter that had her doubled over. It was a totally accidental form of stress relief, but it did the job better than any of the punches she’d landed on the dummy.
When she finally managed to get herself under control, Steve was looking positively miffed. “You could have just said no.”
“Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean… Just so we’re clear, you’re asking me on a date, right?”
“Yeah, but I don’t see why that’s so funny.”
“It’s only funny in a cosmic sort of way.” She forced herself to calm down in order to rescue the moment. “I would really like to go out with you, Steve.”
His expression shifted from peeved to elated. “Great! I…are you busy now? After your shower or whatever. Or we can do another time if…”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby in half an hour,” she interrupted. Her sense of giddiness continued into their date, the following night and every subsequent day of their lives.