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There are four exits, not counting the drop-off points the supply trucks use in the back. There is an elderly woman in the aisle whom Steve will have to make sure to draw fire away from, if things escalate. There is a camera in the upper right hand corner that he resists looking at, choosing instead to reach stiffly for a bunch of cilantro.
Captain America, cool under fire, except for when the misty spray of the produce section is bombarding him and the whole "hiding in plain sight" thing still makes him want to crawl out of his skin.
"Everybody needs groceries, Steve," murmurs Natasha out of the corner of her mouth, taking note of his discomfort without looking. She turns over a head of lettuce. "Now relax and get me a plastic bag for this, will you?"
Return to normalcy is what they called it, after the First World War, Steve remembers. This, perhaps, is theirs. Governments play the long game; they still have their many tendrils, eyes peering down the rifle scope, finger on the trigger. But everyday people—after months, a year—have other, more pressing concerns. College tuitions, taxes. Which team's going to win the Finals. The presidential election. Groceries, and how to open these damned plastic bags.
"Need some help?" Natasha is grinning at him, heartless, as she takes the bag from his fumbling fingers. Darting her tongue out quickly to wet her pointer and thumb, she pinches the thin film and rubs. The slippery plastic sticks, shifts; Natasha seizes the lip, pries it apart, shakes out the bag with a flourish, translucent in the supermarket's yellow light. There's something...tender, about the motion, and Steve thinks of newspapers in Brooklyn, pale fingers at the top corner of the page, his mother smiling at him over the day's black headline.
"Just because Scott had a craving for nectarines," he jokes, holding the bag open for her as she drops in the lettuce, the leaves wet with cold, glistening droplets.
He isn't trying to complain, really. Scott's gone out; so has Sam, Wanda. They'd all have gone a little stir-crazy if they hadn't. Hell, Steve runs in the park at least twice a week. But in places like this, where the minute the automatic doors slide open, there's a TV documenting his entry, no matter the disguise—where the cameras are obvious, abundant—memories of Hydra's algorithm come rushing back. He has dreams, besides the usual ones of Bucky flailing, falling, waking up, now in Wakanda, with eyes still unfocused, filled with someone else's precision and metal machinations. In his other dreams, there are invisible, unreachable guns trained on Sam, Sharon, Wanda, Tony, a million faceless others. There are cold calculations, futures bartered, lives struck through with the sweep of a hand.
"Think of it as an exercise," Natasha instructs, breaking through his thoughts.
"An exercise in what?"
"In normalcy," she says, eyes meeting his as she begins pushing the shopping cart.
He jerks a little, at that. It's not unwelcome, the way Natasha wriggles her way into his head sometimes; nor is it even a surprise. But there's guilt, on his part, about the asymmetry of the whole thing. In battle, he can look at her and know: arm around the waist, head down, feet here, tuck and roll. But when they're buying shampoo and Natasha gets a whiff of coconut—when she pauses with the bottle in her hand, deliberating, then puts it back on the shelf—Steve is left wondering.
He's still learning.
He counts that as one of his blessings: that learning Natasha, little by little, is something he has been given time to do.
"Oh, look, honey!" Natasha calls from farther ahead, the brightness in her voice only half manufactured. "We can even bring home some apple pie for the kids." She holds it out toward him, the shrink wrap catching the glare of the fluorescent lighting. The spark in her eyes reads: Wanda's going to love this.
Steve comes up behind her. "Sure thing...sweetie," he tries, the word awkward and unwieldy.
From across the table, a frazzled mother looks up, gives the pair of them an appreciative once-over before her toddler grabs her arm.
When she's gone, carting her child off to the cereal section, Steve stifles the urge to look around, trusting Nat to have assessed their surroundings already.
Instead, he hooks an arm around her waist, ducks his head toward her neck as pretense to mutter, "Are we being watched?"
"Only by every jealous housewife in the vicinity," Natasha smirks.
"Nat."
"Your whole 'sweetie' thing was a little lackluster, I'm going to need you to work on that."
"Let's just go and get that triple chocolate ice cream you were eyeing earlier," sighs Steve, not missing the way Natasha's eyes flick toward him, pleased, a fond smile curling at the corner of her mouth.
*.*.*.*
"We need a mascot," Scott declares over dinner one day.
Clint sets his fork down. "Yes, because I was just thinking to myself: what animal says 'wanted in 117 countries'?"
Across the table, Natasha raises an eyebrow, catches Steve's eye. Steve wishes for the pre-serum days, when it was easier to make himself appear smaller.
"No, Nat," he groans.
"Sounds like a shopping trip," she decides.
*.*.*.*
"The thing is," Natasha says, seriously, "you underestimate how much people want something to rally around."
"I know, Nat," he points out. "I signed up to be a symbol."
"This is different," Nat explains. "It's not about standing for something, as much. It's more like, when the world takes so much away from you, you want a place to measure yourself from." She shoots him a sideways look. "You have your World War Two books. I have my hair."
"A history textbook," Steve eventually manages, staring at the lifeless plastic eyes of the plush baby seal in front of him, "is very different from a stuffed animal."
But Natasha is already reaching for it, saying, "It'll be like the team pet, except softer and less annoying than Redwing," and Steve gets it, in a weird way, how it helps to have that one familiar thing when you're on the run; something to orbit around, to snatch up and save when so much else slips through your hands.
*.*.*.*
It's ridiculous. They're adults. But then Steve remembers how Sam was when he first got Redwing, and he bites his tongue.
They name the seal Hopper. He—or she, depending on who's holding it—quickly becomes enmeshed in their daily lives. Scott uses Hopper as an extra vote whenever they have a tie, and Wanda delights in sending the plushie zipping around the room, red tendrils trailing in its wake as Sam lazily races Redwing after it. Clint keeps it on his knee when he reads, a habit borne from balancing various other stuffed animals on his legs when reading aloud to his children, and Steve is reminded once more of the family the archer left behind.
And Natasha?
Natasha throws Hopper at him and tells him to lighten up and he tosses it right back. Natasha hands him jars she's too lazy to open and watches him twist off the lids. Natasha unceremoniously swings her feet into his lap without asking, eats peaches straight from the can despite Sam's complaints, watches Scott and Clint bicker over what makes the best getaway car and turns to Steve and mouths, something to rally around, and Steve drinks in her smile and thinks: yes, I know.