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Steve likes baseball. He prefers to see a game sitting in the actual stadium, but he's learned to settle for televised games. Unfortunately, he's busy most weekdays. He works out, does paperwork, wrangles Tony out of his lab and into various Avenger's meetings, and fights bad guys. It's a little monotonous and a lot dangerous - just the way he likes it.
He spends Saturdays sleeping and filling up on calories, so the only day left for something like a good baseball game is Sunday. Sometimes he catches a live game, but most of the time he spends catching up on baseball games that happened while he was in the ice. Jarvis is kind enough to filter through thousands of recorded games and play them on the flat screen in his sitting room. Despite the fact that the fates of these games have already been decided, Steve finds himself cheering and yelling at television as if it will make a lick of difference.
So. That's what Steve is doing one Sunday when Agent Coulson appears out of thin air with an armful of paperwork, Steve's freshly laundered uniform, and a rather dry remark of "Clint and Bucky are spending rather a lot of time together".
Steve blinks at him in surprise, halfway out of his seat with his mouth hanging open in preparation to shout at one of the refs on the screen.
"Ah," Coulson says pleasantly, "Oakland A's and Royals in Kansas City, 1990." He drops the paperwork on Steve's coffee table, shucks off his suit jacket, and damn near flops onto Steve's couch. Steve thinks his eyes are quite possibly going to pop out of his skull and realizes rather belatedly that he should probably sit down and shut his mouth sometime soon.
~~~
It becomes a regular thing.
Coulson is a busy man, but he manages to show up - unannounced and uninvited, though not unwelcome - nearly every Sunday for a game. He brings a stack of paperwork that sits, unattended, on the coffee table until the game is over. Around the fourth or fifth game, he starts bringing a six-pack of Steve's favorite beer, too.
Steve's never known Coulson to be a man of many words; his briefings are informative but succinct, and he's never been particularly talkative outside of work, either. That changes around the fifth inning of their second game. Coulson is on the edge of his seat, nearly vibrating from tension, and more words than Steve's ever heard the man say ever are falling rapidly and with no small amount of exasperation.
"C'mon, Hardaway, are you serious," Coulson snarls at one point. The player scuffs the toe of his shoe against the ground and pays no attention to the Agent's heated mutterings. Steve watches warily out of the corner of his eye, but Coulson doesn't descend into the inexplicable rage that some people do when things don't go their way, just scoffs in disgust and tells Steve about a much more satisfying game that he got to see in person back in '02.
Steve relaxes around Coulson after a few Sundays and joins in with choice words of his own. Even disdain from the two of them combined - disdain which, separately, could break any Junior Agent into a shivering mess - does nothing to change the already set-in-stone outcome of the games they watch.
~~~
"So, you and Bucky?" Coulson asks one night through a mouthful of lo mein. His sleeves are cuffed to his elbows, and he's wearing thick, black glasses. Steve very (very) quietly thinks that he's beautiful and hopes that Clint appreciates him the way he deserves. If Steve ever catches even a rumor that he doesn't, he'll be the first to whisk Coulson away - Bucky's never minded sharing, after all, and Steve knows first hand just how deep Bucky's competence kink runs.
Steve swallows a piece of the orange chicken he favors. "Me and Bucky," he agrees. Coulson graces him with a withering half-glare and waves at him to elaborate.
"Tell me about him," Coulson insists.
Steve does.
They don't catch much of the game that night, but, by the end of the night, Coulson knows that Bucky still has nightmares, loves oranges more than anything in the world, and can't cook to save his life. (He also knows, without a doubt, that Steve is head-over-heels. He knows this because Steve waxed poetic about Bucky's love for oranges for over forty minutes.)
~~~
Around the same time that Coulson stops bringing a stack of paperwork as an excuse to catch a game with him, he also tells Steve to call him Phil.
~~~
Steve almost dies on a Sunday. They should have been comfortably ensconced in Steve's sitting room, yelling at a baseball game from the past and drinking beer that's a little too sour for Phil's tastes. Instead, Phil is sitting in a waiting room with blood from his fingers to his forearms. He rubs a red thumb against his wedding ring in morbid curiosity, trying to reconcile the Steve he knows from Sundays past with the Steve whose intestines he had held together just minutes ago. Clint pulls him up to their floor, strips him out of his suit, and helps him scrub Steve's blood out from under his fingernails. He leaves Phil with a cold glass of water and a kiss to the forehead and traipses down to the laundry room to save Steve's Winter Soldier from self-destructing.
Phil personally thinks he does a pretty good job of it.
~~~
"Bucky bought me a ring."
There isn't a game on, Steve's hair is sticking straight up, and he's managed to greet Phil at the door before Phil can pull one of his "secret agent moves", as Clint says, and sneak into the apartment.
Phil smiles at him warmly, pats him on the back in congratulations, and rather adeptly talks Steve out of a panic attack.
Steve swears he'll make Phil his best man if Bucky ever gets around to putting that ring to good use.
~~~
It takes another four months.
Sixteen baseball games come and go in that time and Phil finally gets the story of how exactly Steve found out about the ring.
As it turns out, there is very little that Steve Rogers doesn't know.
(Phil changes the bio-metric locks on all of his doors as soon as he gets back to his and Clint's floor. The supersoldier downstairs is a little too smart and a lot too curious for Phil's peace of mind.)
~~~
Phil arrives at Steve's door with a six-pack of beer and several cartons of Chinese food. He takes one look at the soldiers entwined on the couch, blushes from ears to toes, and swears to bring disinfectant spray next Sunday.
~~~
Steve doesn't forgive Phil for ruining his favorite couch with nearly three cans of disinfectant spray.
Then Phil saves him from swooning like an idiot at the altar with a steadying hand on his shoulder, and Steve maybe forgives him a little bit.