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“This must suck for you.”
Natasha peeked at Steve over the edge of the book she was not reading. He flipped the top of his newspaper down like Ward Cleaver and licked his lips, forming his bemused, anticipating smile before her very eyes.
“What?”
She wiggled her toes in fluffy wool socks and took them off the coffee table where she had had them propped for the better part of 20 minutes. Somehow looking at the tangles of red fibers helped her keep her tone light.
“Peggy’s here. Bucky’s here. Somewhere.” Natasha shrugged. “But you can’t go to them.”
They had been surviving for two weeks on the adrenaline rush of action and subterfuge, Steve limping and pretending -- albeit badly -- to be a discharged soldier home from the freshly-ended war in Europe, Natasha putting her nose to the ground and finding a person who made fake papers within twelve hours of her arrival here. Now though, they had found a little bit of rhythm: Steve Johnson had earned a decent paycheck unloading boats at the docks, and Natalie Johnson had figured out how to buy food in a world where everything was ingredients and clerks expected you to give them a handwritten list.
Now, though, without the urgency of operations at hand, Natasha had finally found the voice to bring up the large, shiny star-spangled elephant in the corner.
“This is not so different from a prison for you,” she concluded.
Steve folded the newspaper and put it on the side table. “Or you. Dead or the 1940s wasn’t exactly a choice you thought you would have to make.”
She gestured to the little apartment around them with hardwood floors and cheery window drapes. “I’ve had a lot worse.”
“Me too.” Smiling, he stood up and clapped his hands together. “My turn to cook tonight, right?”
He made it a question as if either of them could forget the monstrosity she made last night: a three-course meal inspired by Gelatin Joys, found on the kitchen bookshelf. When he had hauled home from the docks, she had almost giddily put the Barbecue Cottage Cheese Salad out on the table. He had muttered a particularly ugly piece of profanity.
“Language,” she had teased, holding up the cookbook. “This recipe is a modern marvel for a busy housewife.”
The look on his face had been worth only managing a few bites of the meal and leaving the rest in the alley for the feral cats.
Tonight, Steve bore cheerful determination to do better. The vigor with which he dressed the small chicken in his hands would have made her chuckle if not for the concerns still churning in her head.
Natasha did not recollect dying. The moments before, hanging from Clint’s fingertips, knowing she must say goodbye forever, she had not been afraid. She had thought of her Avengers, one by one, each of them touching the soft web of her thoughts one final time. Perhaps Steve himself had been the last across her thoughts, for when she had looked up and seen him, standing in water across from her, she had not been surprised to see him there, not until she saw his leather jacket and checked shirt.
The only way he could look exactly the same as the day they met was if they were meeting again, for the first time, in another new life. Or so she had thought.
Being wrong had been better than being right.
But now, she wondered what she had created. Maybe Steve Rogers had believed he had a monopoly on self-sacrifice. Perhaps now he had given up himself -- his plans, hopes, and identity -- for her.
She washed while he cooked. With her back to him and her hands plunged in the scalding hot water, she revived the conversation.
“You can go look for them, you know. I can figure it out here. Natalie Johnson’s a solid cover.”
“I asked if you wanted to come with me. This was my idea.”
“Kind of.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You wanted to come back home. You just figured out this was a way to keep me alive at the same time.”
When Steve didn’t answer, she put the last dish in the drying rack and turned around. He had stopped chopping potatoes to stare at her too. He looked so at home like this -- cooking in trousers and a white undershirt, barefoot on his own floors -- that something low in the pit of her stomach ached. She resisted the urge to look down at herself, a stranger in the denim coveralls that seemed to be the only casual fashion of this era.
“I went to see Peggy before I came to get you,” he said.
She wiped her hands dry with the dish towel, held her surprise out of her voice. “How did that go?”
He nodded even though it was not a yes-or-no question. “We finally got that dance I’d promised.”
“It doesn’t have to be the only one.”
“Yeah. It does.” He held out a hand, and she passed him the towel. He wiped his off too. “Listen, I volunteered to take the stones back. It was a risk. I might have died, and I felt like it was my responsibility. Heck, Mjolnir had to get back to past Thor too. I went to Peggy first. I’ve always thought a promise meant something, and I owed her a dance. We talked, and I got to say goodbye to her, but I also got to tell her that she’s going to get married and have kids and have this big adventure. I know how much of a life she has coming her way. If I went to her right now, I’d be taking that from her. I didn’t even feel tempted.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Damn right it is.” His smile pinched at the corners. “But not as big of one as you think.”
“What about Bucky?”
“That was even easier. I got to ask him himself what he wanted me to do. If I went back and saved him now from everything he’s going through, Buck wouldn’t get to exist on the other side of it. He wants to see what’s coming his way.”
“Okay.”
“I talked to him about what I planned to do here. You know this is his apartment he never came back to, right? He wanted to see you live too.”
She nodded, shrugged one shoulder.
“If you’re not going to believe anything I say, why’d you bother to ask?” Steve hung the dishrag over the knob of one of the drawers.
“I like to know other people’s covers too.” She bit the left side of her lip where a smile threatened to wobble its way into existence.
“If I want to, I’ll leave.” He smiled now too as if he knew just what she was doing with that little nibble of her lip. “You’re fine without me. I’m not trapped. At least not after--”
They both looked the same direction, for she already knew the joke he was going to make.
“-- 35 minutes,” they read the oven timer simultaneously. She raised both eyebrows.
“Well, I am hungry,” he said.
Somehow that was just the thing to break the tension between them, and they went back to their tasks, chatting about the vagaries and quirks of their days. When they sat down to eat dinner, cross-legged on the couch with pillows on their laps because Bucky’s apartment had no dining table, they neither one commented on the chicken. It was bone dry and flavorless.
They’d figure out the cooking thing.
As if reading her mind, Steve pointed over to the pile of their dirty laundry beside the front door.
“Is it my turn to do that too?”
"And to sleep on the couch," she pointed out.
"Alright, now I'm feeling trapped," he teased, and she laughed aloud for the first time in a long time. They'd figure out a lot of things.
