Chapter Text
Freshly showered and changed, Steve stands in the entry to the main room, watching Nat struggle over her knitting for a moment before turning away from the living area and toward the kitchen to get a snack.
“Your tension’s too tight,” Steve calls over to Nat as he opens the fridge. Nat doesn’t respond. “Nat?” Steve asks, crunching into his apple as he takes the few short steps to the couch. Her hair is falling forward in a sleek red curtain, obscuring most of her face from this angle. “Hey,” he says, squeezing her big toe.
“YAWP!” Nat screeches a garbled noise of surprise, throwing everything in her lap at least two feet in the air. Her phone vanishes under the armchair like a startled dog, earbuds trailing behind. “Ow,” Nat glares a reprimand at Steve, putting her hands to her ears gingerly.
Steve grimaces sheepishly. “Sorry.” He points at the knitting, now a tangled mess on the floor, the yarn ball rolled into a far corner of the room. “Your tension is wrong. Beginners always pull too tight.” Natasha doesn’t say anything, just continues to glare at Steve. “Want some help?” he asks, taking a second bite of his apple, right into the core. Nat teases him for eating the pips, but he can’t eat them the way she does, nibbling little bites as she turns it round and round, like the world’s saddest rotisserie. Steve and his ma had wasted not, but they’d sure as hell still wanted, and food hadn’t exactly been abundant out on the front, either. Some of those old habits just never knock loose.
Steve retrieves Nat’s ball of yarn while she crouches down to fish out her phone from under the armchair. Steve mimes a magnanimous gesture as he hands the yarn over, a peace offering. Nat snatches it with a huff and settles herself back into the couch, scrolling through YouTube and muttering to herself in Russian as she tries to find the video she’d been watching – she'd hit the screen when she tossed the phone accidentally, and had navigated lord-knows-where.
“Why don’t you just forget the knitting, Nat?” Steve suggests to her. She doesn’t look up at him, but grunts in acknowledgment that he spoke, at least. “The whole point of it is that it’s supposed to be fun, and relaxing. You don’t appear to be having fun. Or relaxing.”
Nat sighs heavily and rolls her head from side to side, stretching out her neck. “Nothing’s fun or relaxing till you’ve figured out what you’re doing. I’ll get the hang of it.”
Steve has to admit, that’s...a pretty well-adjusted sentiment. “Fair enough. Why knitting, though? You never did say. You intending to humiliate me with constant gifts of Captain America-themed winterwear?” Steve’s voice is fond in its teasing.
“I think it’s weirdly funny. Like, knitting is this old lady hobby, right? But you do it with these,” Nat holds up two extra-long H-gauge aluminum knitting needles. “Deadly-ass fuckin’ weapons, man. In untrained hands. But people are just like, oh, that’s knitting, that’s a boring, dumb hobby for wimps, or whatever.” Nat shrugs as she straightens out her stitches. “I like the juxtaposition of creating something soft, something to care for and comfort someone you love with what amounts to murder sticks.” Steve tosses the last chunk of apple in his mouth and runs his hands over the thighs of his jeans to wipe away the little bit of juice on his fingers, considering Nat’s reasoning.
“I’ve decided not to be offended by the ‘old lady hobby’ comments,” Steve declares, hoisting himself out of the chair now that he’s finished his snack. “ You’re welcome for helping you pick out supplies and showing you how to cast on, by the way. Want me to tell you the rhyme Mrs. Barnes used to teach me again?” It was an idiotic little stanza that didn’t actually rhyme and had confused Nat more than it’d helped – hence the YouTube tutorials.
“Fuck off, Rogers,” Nat responds flatly, affection twitching up the corners of her lips.
Steve crosses the room to the shelf where he keeps the little cache of art supplies he’s accumulated since his birthday. Pulling down his pencil tins and the little box of paints, Steve weighs them in each hand, feeling like he’s in the mood to create but not having any specific direction or inspiration at the moment. “Medium?” he asks Nat over the quiet.
“Hmm?” Nat looks up from her work, confused.
Steve waves his art supplies at her in turn. “Pencils or paints?” Steve offers her the choice.
“Oh!” Nat’s face clears in understanding. “Hm. Pencils, I think. Just the charcoals, though.” Steve nods and turns, putting away the paints, pulling down the sketchbook she’d given him, the embryo of an idea slowly taking shape in his mind as he gets himself situated to sketch Nat’s portrait.
Nat looks up again a few moments later to see Steve sitting in a kitchen chair in the corner of the room, ankle crossed over knee with his sketchpad balanced on his raised leg, a look of intense concentration on his face as his eyes shift back and forth between Nat and the page.
“You drawing me like one of your French girls, Rogers?” Nat teases. They’d watched Titanic a couple nights ago, and it had been one of their most fun movie nights thus far. Steve had been enthralled at first, utterly swept away by the detailed sets, the elaborate costumes, but mostly by Rose and Jack’s love story. The spell broke abruptly, however, about two-thirds of the way through when Rose’s asshole of a fiancé lost what was left of his narrow, bigoted mind and started a goddamn gun chase on a literal sinking ship. Steve had barked an incredulous laugh at the absurdity of it and then spent the remainder of the movie ruthlessly making fun of all the dialogue and plot points that had suddenly become obviously and painfully ridiculous. Nat had gotten into it, teasing Steve in turn about the things he got worked up about. He had no opinion on the perennial question of whether or not Jack could have fit on the door along with Rose, for example, but she was deeply amused by his level of irritation with the fact that they didn’t show the wet metal whistle freezing to Rose’s lips, which it absolutely would have done, Nat .
Steve laughs a little, feeling silly in a warmly pleasant way. “Gonna have to get a little more naked for that, m’dear,” Steve says with a smile, continuing to scritch away at his drawing. He watches as the needle in Nat’s right hand levers up and down a few times in her attempt to capture the too-tight loop on the other needle. Steve's hand stills over the paper, a sense memory stealing into him at the sight: the gentle brush of Mrs. Barnes’ hands against his, the scratchy pull of the wool through his fingers as she takes the needles and pulls out a row of stitches, the quiet patience in her voice as she explains how to keep the tension balanced while she reworks the row, the faintly floral scent of her soap and powder where Steve’s small body is tucked against her side, the cashmere softness of her worn cotton housedress, faded from too many washings and slightly tickling Steve’s cheek where the inside seam of the sleeve is fraying, sounds of Ma in the small kitchen behind them fixing lunch and giggling at Bucky who delights in making funny faces to amuse grownups, the warmth of safety and love and happiness glowing sweetly in his belly. Home .
Steve loses time, drawing until the changing light brings him back to the present. Holding the sketchbook at arms’ length, he looks with a critical eye. A few minor adjustments, and he signs and dates the bottom right corner of the paper. He’s always over-critical of his own work, but he’s pleased with this portrait. Not so much for how it looks, but for how he feels when he looks at it. It grounds him, simultaneously, in these two separate worlds. One long past, lost first in the way all adulthood supplants the fragile innocence of childhood, and then lost again in the bitter annulment of his chosen sacrifice; the other new and confusing, frightening and loud and mean and yet somehow still full of extraordinary beauty. Both of them are filled with loss and hardship but what he feels first is the abundance of love.
Yawning, Nat dumps her knitting in the basket and toes it under the side table, pressing her fingertips into the tight muscles at the top of her shoulders and running up into her neck. “Sitting too long like that,” she mumbles a complaint to neither of them in particular. Steve closes his sketchbook carefully, silently cleaning up as Nat stretches.
She never asks to see his art, a manifestation of her instinct for privacy, he supposes. It's always been a relief before, but today it makes him a little sad for reasons he can’t quite explain. His drawing of Nat feels important, pivotal even, the way she’d connected him to an uncomplicatedly good moment from before, how it had made the sweet times in his two lives intertwine and strengthen one another. He wants to share that feeling with her, but doesn’t quite understand it, doesn’t know how to speak it. So he does what he usually does when words fail him; he takes Nat in his arms and holds her close to his heart, letting the sweet scent of her hair and the soft warmth of her skin anchor him to himself in time and space, breathing into the comfort of her presence here.
Nat embraces the embrace until Steve begins to shift. She then pulls back a little to look him in the face, gauging his level of distress. It isn’t distress, though, that has him clinging to Nat, not exactly. Mostly he feels overfull, like a suitcase packed beyond capacity with every kind of emotion, snapped closed but threatening to bust the latch at any moment. Just – what is it the kids say these days? Feeling his feels. Nat’s eyes are shining and kind as she looks at him, the tender bedroom smile that undoes him every time sending a wave of affection through Steve so suddenly and powerfully he could weep. Pressing a trembling kiss to her lips, Steve smiles back at Nat as he straightens, his heart squeezing almost painfully with happy gratitude. “I’m king of the world!” he shouts gleefully, head thrown back.
Nat erupts in delighted laughter, smacking him solidly in the bicep. “You’re such a fucking dork.”