Natasha comes to Steve because she's seen him, siting crosslegged in little patches of sunwarm floor in the long grey hours of the morning, his fingertips smudged with graphite and little stubs of pencils dwarfed in his palms. More importantly, she's seen his sketches, long lean lines of clean charcoal and ink, smudged artfully and blown clean of eraser shavings. She likes them because they remind her of something she can't quite name, abstract enough to be nonsensical and planned enough to be beautiful.
"Yeah," Clint says when she tells him, "okay. Use protection." Natasha punches him in the rotator cuff hard enough he almost doesn't hit the bullseye on his next practice shot.
Steve frowns, and makes noises like he's not sure, but Natasha knows he won't turn down a request for a favour from a teammate. He agrees to do it in the privacy of her apartment, assures her he'll get the necessary supplies from SHIELD.
Natasha stretches out for him in a thin bra and panties, and Steve skims the tips of his fingers across the shallow curves of her hips, the dip of her belly, the flat stretch between the juts of her hipbones and then up to her collarbones, the swell of her breasts.
"Beautiful," he tells her, and traces her scars with his nails.
"Bullet graze in Minsk," she says when he finds the raised line up her ribs. "Knife fight in Vienna," she says for the puckered crescent to the left of her belly-button. "House fire in Jersey," for the twist of scar tissue on the inside of her bicep. Steve takes a long black stick of ink and smiles.
He gives her German Expressionism in black and white, long spindly fingers with jagged nails and narrowed eyes with manic pupils. He gifts her colour across her scars, bright oranges and red like flames that map her skin. On her spine he draws a web made of cryllic poetry, copies carefully from a book Natasha keeps at the bottom of her bedside table drawer. He finds lines that describe her, describes the sharp shine edges of swords under bloody skies and coiled steel springs in the hearts of guardian angels.
Natasha looks at herself in the mirror when he's done and smiles. She kisses him, very softly, with her mouth closed, and settles a thin cotton button blouse on her shoulders. She takes him to a deli and lets him buy her a bowl of Hungarian stew.