redintheledger | Central Park, Steve Rogers

Central Park, Steve Rogers

The glorious thing about New York is that if people recognize you, you are probably just another person they recognize and they pay you little heed.

Also, the footage from the battle had no close-ups and was blurry, so all the public know of Black Widow is a redhaired woman in a black catsuit. Natasha can live with that.

She can also live with the New York branch of SHIELD being annoyed at her for skipping out and taking a long lunch. It's not as if she's out of the country (this time), and she'll come back. Eventually.

For now, Natasha is sitting on a bench in Central Park sipping coffee, looking like any other office-worker out on her lunch break; dressy slacks with matching jacket, a stylish blouse, smart heels with a thick heel and a thick strap, a gun in a holster underneath her jacket-

Okay, maybe normal officer workers don't have guns.

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No guns on Steve. Just a plain undershirt, button-up plaid, and good old American blue jeans. Plus the brown leather jacket that makes him feel a little less like a fuddy-duddy; like maybe he could fit in, if nobody looked too close.

They keep a sharp eye on him -- S.H.I.E.L.D., the government, bureaucrats in monkey suits, whomever -- but Steve still has a slight advantage. He's Captain America, American hero, star-spangled relic who everybody thinks just fell out of the apple tree in the quaint midwest. They're not expecting to be outsmarted, or tricked, which is why he has successfully escaped three times without any chaperones or shadows. Sometimes, a guy just wants a hotdog, maybe a ballgame, and to take a walk.

Of course, a guy used to get a hot dog for ten cents, and a coffee for five, so today he's not eating. He has a couple crisp twenty dollar bills in his pocket, but it's the principle of the thing.

He meanders his way through Central Park, alternately amazed by how much it's changed and how much it's stayed exactly the same. He was hoping it would feel comforting, being someplace he knows. Someplace familiar. But it's just different enough to feel alien, and that puts him slightly on edge. It doesn't get any better when he spies Natasha on a park bench, and figures they've caught up with him sooner rather than later.

"Can't a guy get a breather?"

She glances up, like she wasn't expected him.

Which, to be fair, she hadn't been, even if she was aware of him in her general vicinity long before he speaks.

"What makes you think I'm on babysitting duty?" she asks, finally, allowing herself to frown at him. Unsaid, I have more important things to do.

Some of that annoyance melts into bashful second-guessing. He doesn't stutter, but his body movement gives that illusion.

"Aren't you?"

"...No. I am taking a long lunch-break. I don't do babysitting."

Pause.

"Unless you are my neighbour, but she knows how to bribe me."

"Oh." He winces, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'm sorry, I just assumed ... "

Gesturing blithely, he realizes he doesn't know how to tell Natasha that he assumed she didn't have anything better to do than haul him back to seclusion, or S.H.I.E.L.D., or wherever else they might decide he's needed. So, he doesn't. He isn't a knucklehead.

"So you ... watch your neighbor's kids?"

"Occasionally, but I'm not telling you my price." She tilts her head, just a little.

"You gonna sit, Cap? Or...stand there like a school-boy caught out?"

He stares for just one second, and then cracks a grin. Chortling, he glances at his feet (like he's making sure they still work), and sits down beside her. He leaves an appropriate distance between them, just on this side of being stiff, like this isn't something he does often.

"I thought I'd get a hot dog." He shrugs, hands in his pockets. "It's been a while, but it's still my hometown. I don't see why the detail is necessary."

Amused, "You're the new celebrity. SHIELD can be a little...possessive. I had a watchers on me for about a year after I joined."

Then her smile widens, just a little.

"And it's good practice for the rookies."

He arches his eyebrows, smiling crookedly.

"Don't you mean I'm the new old celebrity?"

He's used to being watched, followed, asked for favors, and stopped for autographs. He isn't so used to being cooped up. The senator spared him from that the first time around.

"When you say 'rookies', why do I get the feeling you're not just talking about the agents?"

"Could just be that underneath all of that grown-up choir boy niceness you have a cynical, suspicious mind," she says serenely, taking a sip of her coffee.

"Choir boy?" he repeats, eyebrows ticking higher. Really? "I'm just getting used to 'Gramps'."

He's lying. He'll never get used to Gramps, god damn Stark. But that one he gets, in a weird way. What he doesn't understand is why people are always commenting on how nice he is, like that's what makes him some kind of creep. And maybe it's a little conceited, but the last thing you want a dame to call you is a grown-up choir boy.

He clears his throat. "Maybe I'm not who everyone thinks I am."

"You are a decent young man, who believes in people and his country. You went off to war, and disobeyed the rules to save your best friend. You've lost people. You sacrificed yourself. And you woke up decades later, and worked out that you can never go home again.

People always forget that you have a temper. They treat you like you're old because they don't know how to treat you like your age. They think you're stupid because you come from a different time, but you're not, and this annoys you. So you go you wandering off looking for hot-dogs, and you don't really care about the paperwork this causes because no one makes you do any.

How am I doing?"

Steve is a product of his time. They're not real big on psychoanalyzation in the forties; getting poked and prodded is something he had to get used to in order to be heard. It doesn't mean it's something he likes.

"You read all that in my file?" he asks, deadpan. She's right for the most part. He did do all of that. He does believe in sacrificing himself for his country, in holding on to the American dream; he believes people treat him like an outsider because he is one, and he wishes they'd just call him Steve. He broke the rules to save Bucky. A lot of good that did him.

He lowers his eyes.

"I ... didn't think about the paperwork. It didn't seem important enough."

"It shouldn't be," Natasha agrees. "Although you should do your own paperwork. Everyone does. Unless you can trade someone else to. That's Barton's trick."

Then she..not smiles, but her mouths curves slightly.

"Yes, I've read your file. But you've read the highlights of mine, so you know that my main occupation is spy. We tend to be good at reading people."

"Right."

Paperwork. Sounds easy enough. Unless they're worried he'll stab himself with the pencil.

(That only leads to thoughts of being sat down at a school desk with a blunted pencil and a safety-sharpener, conforming to a chair much too small for his build. Fury's at the head of the class, holding a ruler.

Steve would rather not ever have to think about that again.)

"I like to think I'm good at reading people. I spent a lot of time being invisible before all this. I guess it made me a good listener, anyway."

"It's a good start."

She takes another sip of her coffee.

"What do you want to do, Rogers? When you're not saving the world, I mean."

He glances at her.

"You know, I hadn't really thought about it.

"We were at war for years, and before that ... Well, I was fresh out of school. There wasn't anything I wanted to do more than join the army. After I met Dr. Erskine, nobody asked what I wanted to do besides save the world. It's the only thing I'm good at."

He looks embarrassed briefly, but shrugs it off with a nervous smile. "I guess I draw pretty well. The movie business wasn't too awful. I'm kind of hopeless at dancing, though."

It's the only thing I'm good at, he says, and she grimaces ever so slightly.

So slight, someone might miss it.

"There's art school, you know. If you wanted to study, and...have a life again."

That echoes in his brain for another second after she says it. He frowns, the creases in his brow deep.

The smirk that follows is light and lopsided, and doesn't seem to fit at all. "Is there life after what we've done?"

The look she shoots him is almost irritated.

'Almost', in a woman as controlled as Natasha Romanoff, says a lot.

"Yes," she says. "Of course there is. We're alive until we die, Steve. We might as well make the most of it. You pay your debts as best you can, and you make damn sure you remember how to laugh.

Unless," and her tone is light as a razor-blade, "you like behaving like you're the only one who can't go home again."

That razor blade catches him in the throat.

"No, no, that -- that isn't what I meant!" he says, lifting his hands just as much for defense as to reassure her.

He sighs, dragging a hand through his hair, and tries again. His voice is slightly tense, a combination of nerves and frustration. "I mean, yes. There's no going back home for me, or you by the sounds of it. I just meant S.H.I.E.L.D., the Avengers, Fury, whatever -- they're going to let me go to art school?"

It's more than that. Does he even want to go to art school? Now? Ever?

"Natasha -- Ms. Romanoff -- Natasha. I just saw giant alien centipedes spill from a hole in the sky, OK? I saw half this city reduced to rubble because of one crazy ... alien, who, while green, was not as little and friendly as they would have had us believe. The world needs us, don't you think?"

"What's the point of saving the world if you're not part of it, Steve?"

He thinks before answering, even if he doesn't feel like he needs to. "I already feel like I am. Maybe not the most important part of it, but a part."

At least this is something he knows how to do. Someone he knows how to be. He's already had to start over once this month.

"Good. That's...good.

But the world doesn't need saving every day. Everyone...needs something else. Not just people, but something so you can go and relax and have a bit of normality in their lives. It's grounding. You need grounding in this kind of job.

Do school part-time. Leaves time for training, and saving the world. And if you get into trouble with the paperwork, I can help you."

Normality.

Yeah. Steve could use a little more normality. He's resigned himself to "getting used to things" because, as far as he can see, nothing is going to be normal again. Not in the ways he's used to.

"Right."

He rests his elbows on his knees, keeping his head turned so he can see the agent. He chortles when she offers to help with his paperwork.

"You're from Russia, right?"

She quirks a brow, but nods. "I left when I was twenty-one."

He nods.

(He knows better than to ask her why.)

"So what did you do?" He glances at the park, making a small gesture. "New country, new customs. Strange people. How did you rejoin the world?"

Natasha regards him for a long moment, and then looks away.

"I've had training in blending in," she says at last. "Lots of training at being American, at being French, at being Hungarian. That isn't just language skills, but it's slang and know how things worked. So, for a while I didn't really 'rejoin' anything, I just drifted and blended in and then took off again."

Mercenary, assassin-and-spy-for-hire, on the run from the Red Room and various agencies.

Until Agent Barton made a different call.

"Once I got to the US thanks to SHIELD, it...I had an agency again. I had a team to work with. I had Clint, who insisted on making me watch crappy action movies. Which is fine," she adds with a fond smile. "I like crappy action movies.

But there's no trick to it. You just have to talk to people and belong to something. Make friends. It took me several years to make myself a home. But, you're not as paranoid as I am."

He's attentive to her. It's the forties in him oozing out again: the respect for a woman his mother instilled in him; the way Being a Man means being polite, minding your manners, and taking care of someone, like his father used to say. He seems interested in what Natasha has to say because he is interested, and not just for his own benefit.

He clasps his hands, one foot bouncing almost imperceptibly under the weight of his torso (like he's sitting on the sidelines waiting to be called into the game, needing to keep his muscles active, ready to spring). He smiles when she finishes, moving around the etch-a-sketch of his forehead to show bemusement instead of consternation.

"Can you imagine me sitting down with Stark for a flick? Or Banner?" he mutters lightly. It's the kind of lightly that says it could happen, maybe, someday that isn't right now. He wonders if making friends is what he's done with the Avengers. He'd trust them, her, with the city, the country, his life; but is this right now them being friends, or just a couple of teammates shooting the breeze?

It isn't a date. He feels the need to point that out to his subconscious.

Very much not a date - he's a kid, all early twenties and shiny with ideals.

Besides, she's married.

"Funnily enough, Stark and Banner aren't the only people in the world," she observes, slightly amused and slightly blank.

"You don't...spar with anyone from SHIELD? Never suggest going out for a few beers? Join a movie club? They are around."

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Central Park, Steve Rogers

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