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Fury calls the weekly movie nights "team building", Bruce calls it "cultural immersion", and Tony runs with it and goes with "Intro to 20th Century Cinema"--which is inaccurate. An introduction would require watching the essential films of each decade and really, the movies they're all picking to watch with Steve vary from classic (Pepper suggests North By Northwest) to questionable (Clint goes with, of all things, Dodgeball).
Natasha goes down the neo-noir path, and picks Out of Sight .
Steve is the perfect person to watch movies with. He doesn't hog the popcorn, doesn't find it necessary to comment on every minute detail. No, he's content to sit and enjoy--which makes figuring out if he's actually into the movie at all a little bit tricky. Every few minutes Natasha steals a sideways glance at him, sitting straight in his chair (such good posture) with a half-smile on his face, and she feels like a kid on a first date (well, what she imagines a kid on a first date would feel like), hoping that he enjoys it.
And then Karen enters the steam-filled bathroom while Jack Foley languidly lounges in the tub, and Natasha turns in just enough time to see Steve's eyes flicker downward and his ears going red. It's oddly endearing to her, knowing that his cinematic knowledge is of fades-to-black after a kiss or trains going through tunnels (wait, that's 50s Hitchcock, right?), and nothing so blatant as this.
"That's really uncomfortable," she says casually. She keeps looking at the screen (Karen's long since awakened from the dream that she was having), and she doesn't even have to turn to know that he's looking at her. "In theory, it's intriguing. In practice, it's... messy."
"Oh," he says before cramming a fistful of popcorn into his mouth.
At that moment, she decides that the next movie she's showing him will be The Graduate.
