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Steve found the first stick figure drawing hidden in his copy of the SHIELD Field Manual. The lines are precise, and the circle perfect, and it had a shock of blond hair, a smile that took up most of its face and was carrying a blue and red shield. ‘Hi, I’m Captain America,’ it said in the speech bubble at the top. Beside it was a black spider with a red hourglass on its back. ‘Let’s be friends,’ the spider was saying.
The second stick figure drawing was on a diner napkin pinned to his suit. His new and shiny suit that Stark had presented after the Chitauri Invasion. This time, Captain Stick—it was what Steve has taken to calling it in his head—was sporting a large lump on his head and frowning. The spider was right there beside him, and the speech bubble read, ‘thanks for the lift ;)’
The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth drawings had Captain Stick and the spider eating together. Each drawing had a different woman’s photo over the spider’s face and they were having a different meal each time. The spider’s speech bubble held details on where Captain Stick could find these women. Steve never followed through on the suggestions, but he did keep the drawings sans photos. He pressed them flat in between the pages of his notebooks, and looked at them when he was alone and the apartment was too quiet.
Over time, the drawings went back to being whimsical and odd and heartfelt. Steve didn’t bother to hold back a sigh of relief.
One time, Steve took a Jericho round right in the shield and was thrown back three hundred meters. Not even the serum could handle that much concussive force and he spent the next forty-eight hours in a coma. When he came to, he found a drawing pinned to the ceiling right above him. It was Captain Stick lying on the ground with x’s for eyes, and the spider said, ‘next time, dodge.’
For a few months after that there were no pictures and Steve wondered if he did something to upset her. He tried not to examine the strange ache in his chest at the thought. Then one morning, he returned from his jog to find a picture pinned to his door with a knife. It was the spider on its own this time, wearing an ushanka and standing in front of a highly-stylised Kremlin. ‘чертовски холодно’ the spider said.
Then the Lemurian Star happened and there was no time for cute stick figures and its equally cute spider companion. Instead, there was Sam and his steadfast loyalty. There was Bucky and a sliver of Steve’s past right there for the taking. There was Fury and Pierce and their lies. There was Natasha and her refusal to be anything Steve wants and her ability to be everything he needs.
The drawings made a return when Sam and Steve were chasing after Bucky. Steve had no idea how she tracked them but two days after arriving in a city, without fail there was a drawing in the mail. The message they carried were more along the lines of news from the homestead, but occasionally there would be one that said something like, ‘come back before I murder the idiots’ and Steve couldn’t stop his emerging grin if he tried. Sam saw one of them by accident and whatever he was about to say died when Steve stared him down. Eventually, Sam shook his head and said, “I don’t wanna know man. You Avengers and your weird flirting.”
There were nights when the drawings—still pressed between the pages of his notebook, to the point of near bursting the spine—and Sam’s eternal optimistic realism were the only things that kept him going.
After it was all over and Bucky was sleeping in one of Stark’s private labs, monitored and chained, Steve returned to his new room in the Tower to find a drawing tucked under his pillow. It had Captain Sticks holding the hand of a masked stick figure with long brown hair. The spider was on the Captain’s other side, and it said, ‘welcome back.’
Steve stared at it for a moment before digging out his artbook and setting pencil to paper for the first time in a year. He drew Peggy and Bucky first; not as the soldiers he knew but as they were now because they didn’t deserve to be his ghosts. He drew Sam, with and without his Falcon exo-wings, and drew the Avengers in and out of their costumes. He drew Natasha last and by the time he finished it was five in the morning and he felt like he could finally stop. Stop being sad, stop being scared, stop living in the past.
He ripped out the page with Natasha’s face on it—in three-quarter profile and smiling—and scribbled a little Captain America at the bottom. He wrote, ‘the truth is a matter of circumstances,’ in the speech bubble because he remembered the look in her eyes as she said it, and slid the drawing under her bedroom door.
Hours later, Steve looked up from trying his best to prove Stark’s claim of ‘strongest punching bag in the goddamn world’ wrong, and saw Natasha sitting off to the side, flicking through his notebook. She was in a t-shirt and a pair of shorts, slouching against the wall with her legs stretched out and ankles crossed. Steve went to sit down next to her as he unwrapped his hands. She never looked up.
"I’m much better at drawing schematics and security layouts," she said after a while.
"I dunno, I think you got your point across," Steve said.
Natasha closed the notebook and turned, just enough to look at him out of the corner of her eyes. “And what point would that be?”
Steve laid down his hand, palms up on the bench between them. In response to her little smirk, he gave her a challenging look. When she finally put her hand in his, the left because she needed her right to draw the gun strapped to her stomach, he grinned.
"Wanna be my best guy, Steven Grant Rogers?" she asked, her smirk transforming and growing into something more genuine.
Steve brought their interlaced hands up to hover between them. He leaned in to place a brief kiss, more of a brush of his lips, to her knuckles.