Salty Sea Air
By: InitialA
Disclaimer: I don't own anything under any copyrights in this story. (there are probably a lot, so yay blanket statements)
Author's Note: This is a sequel to "Sleepless". And as a personal disclaimer, I have never been to Coney Island. Internet research can only go so far, so please suspend your disbelief and imagine that in the Marvel universe the atmosphere is less monolithic-corporate than our universe. Enjoy.
Steve braced himself as Natasha swung her leg around his torso. He grappled with her, trying to keep her from closing his airway, until she slammed a fist into his calf and he fell. She rolled off, giving him a cheeky smirk as he got back to his feet. "That's what, two for me?"
"Cripes, Tasha, you're a spider monkey," he replied, feeling his leg; it would probably bruise, but not horribly.
She laughed, tossing him his water bottle. "You want another round?"
He took a long drink before answering. "Nah, I think I'm okay for now. Thanks."
It had been a few weeks since the first, unofficial meeting of the Midnight PTSD Society. The next morning, Steve had asked Natasha what she thought would work the best to help him get through the night without the dreams haunting him; after sizing him up, she said he'd probably be able to keep up with her in wrestling. Steve had laughed, thinking she was being funny, but the way she quirked her eyebrow at him made him fall silent. Since then, they'd grappled at least three times a week. It worked in several ways: the fact that she was able to take him down more often than he her kept his mind busy working out a strategy to beat her, and she was almost tireless, leaving him with fatigue that led to dreamless sleeps.
She stretched, and he tried to hide the fact that he appreciated the way her clothes hugged her form. "It's uncanny," he said suddenly. "I can't figure you out, and you seem to know every way around what the serum did to me."
Natasha gave him a dangerous smile. "When They took me… They weren't sure if the Americans would ever find you. And if they did, They wanted me to be ready. There was… another, someone else who a similar formula worked on. I trained against him until the day I was able to kill him."
Steve hurriedly took another swig from his water bottle. Her smile lost the dangerous edge. "Don't worry; it was a long time ago. If there's anyone around here I'm going to kill, Stark tops that list."
That brought a chuckle out of him. Their eyes met for a moment, and Steve grabbed on to the swell of courage that rose in his chest. "D-Do you uh… D'you want to go somewhere… sometime? Like ah… An activity?"
Her eyebrows shot up, and he swore she stifled a giggle—the Black Widow, giggling. "An activity?"
The familiar anxiety sparked to life, and he felt hot. "Well er… I mean… we could go… on a walk? Downtown? No, too many people… In the park! Or the beach? Wait, that's presuming a lot isn't it… A ball game? Oh, you probably don't… don't like baseball… I mean, well, you could like baseball, I don't know. What I mean is we could do anything. Go anywhere, I mean, we can't do anything—well, we can do some things, what I mean is we aren't capable of doing everything, there's a lot of things we can't do, I mean there's a lot we can but some things we shouldn't do, oh God no I mean we can do but we don't have to… I should stop talking now, shouldn't I?"
Natasha was actually covering her laughter with her hand. He knew his face was probably turning purple from embarrassment, and her laughing at him wasn't helping. "Rogers, I'm not laughing at you. You're really not good at this, are you?"
"No, ma'am."
"A walk would be nice," she said, giving him a look he couldn't entirely decipher.
"O-okay… Saturday? Afternoon? We could uh… grab lunch or something."
The corners of her lips twitched again. "Lunch, or something, sounds good too."
"Okay. Good. Great. This is good."
She patted his shoulder, only a little condescendingly and said teasingly, "Yes, that was good. We'll work on it for next time."
Next time? Steve wondered as she left to shower. He was just hoping he could get her to stick around with him through Saturday.
On Saturday, he kept his nerves down by telling himself it was just Natasha and they'd been able to talk and joke plenty of times before. Just because she wasn't trying to kick his ass today didn't mean he had to treat her differently. Much differently, anyway. His mother had raised him right, after all. He went down to her floor and knocked on the door to her rooms. After a moment, she opened it, and treated him to a rare, full-toothed smile. "Hi."
He was glad she wasn't wearing anything nicer than usual; he wasn't sure he could handle what he'd seen of her "Natalie Rushman" persona and the smile. "Hi. Oh, I keep forgetting…" He handed her the knife she'd threatened Tony with weeks ago.
She flicked her eyes up at him in a way that made his heart skip a beat. "You know, some guys still go for flowers on the first date. It says something when a man really speaks to my heart and gives me a knife." She slipped it into her boot.
"Just in case?" He asked, gesturing.
"Well, I've got seven others. Eight's a symmetrical number."
Steve raised one eyebrow slightly, and then looked her over again, carefully. "Eight knives… and your bracelets, the necklace, your earrings, and your boots have reinforced steel toes. You can walk in those?"
The elevator dinged, and they got in. "I'll be fine. You missed the miniature pistol, but I'm wearing flared jeans so I'll let that slide," Natasha said.
"All that, when you could kill me with your bare hands."
"But look how nicely manicured my nails are," she said, her voice changing to that of a woman whose life was nothing more than superficial pleasures and the country club. She even held out her hands. Steve, who knew nothing about female beauty practices, pursed his lips and shook his head. "They've got varnish?" She smirked.
The elevator dinged again, and they exited the building. Natasha took a slight lead. "I don't know if you had anything in mind, I have a fallback plan just in case."
"We can do that. I honestly wasn't even expecting to get out of the building," Steve said, hardly lengthening his stride to keep up.
She looked up at him with an expression that would have made Tony proud. "Oh really?"
He belatedly realized the implications of what he'd said and spent the rest of the walk to the subway trying to both apologize and correct himself at the same time and failing spectacularly. Natasha, to her credit, didn't laugh at him as much as he'd expected her to. He followed her lead when they got into the station. They took the 6 to Lafayette, and from there took the F out to Brooklyn. He wondered if she was trying to take him to his old neighborhood, but they rushed past the station where he would have probably gotten off at. They rode it to the end of the line, and a small part of him was giddy with boyish glee at the recognition of Coney Island. "Seriously?" He asked, unable to conceal his grin.
Instead of replying, she took his hand. They left the station and walked out into the bright, spring sunshine. Steve was instantly taken back to his childhood: the sweet, salty tang of the ocean mixed with the smell of hot dogs and confectionaries. The lack of screams from amusement park rides was noticeable, and he said so, but Natasha explained that parts of the old park were still around. A few rides were further down the boardwalk. "They try to keep things similar, for nostalgia's sake, but corporate America marches on…"
It was different, and Steve felt a pang of sadness that he would never again see the park he and Bucky would cut class to wander. But some things remained. They strolled the boardwalk, hand in hand, and Steve paid for two Coney dogs—Natasha had never had one before and eyed it suspiciously, and Steve took great pride in the way her face changed when she took a bite. She said something in Russian, her tone sounding prayerful. He laughed, and finished his own dog. They split a soda.
They found a line of midway games. Natasha was adept at the ring toss, and Steve knocked out all of the milk bottle pyramids with little difficulty—something he never could have done eighty years ago. They both gave their prizes to a couple of children who had recognized them. The little girl who received Steve's teddy bear smiled shyly before running back to her parents. Natasha threaded her arm through his. "I think I've got some competition."
They decided to avoid the rides; Steve wasn't entirely sure he could fit into the small seats by himself anymore, let alone with Natasha. Instead, they doubled back and he paid their way into the aquarium. They spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the exhibits and habitats at their leisure. Natasha gently ran her fingers down the glass outside of a jellyfish habitat. "I love the aquarium," she confided quietly. "It's very soothing. The fish are graceful."
They walked past a crowd of children by the clownfish area, all of them shrieking, "Nemo, Nemo! I found Nemo!" Steve looked at Natasha expectantly, and she shook her head, amused. "It's a children's movie."
They went to the stingray tank. Steve was hesitant to touch one. "You're asking me to trust a creature that could kill me in seconds."
Natasha forced his hand into the water and he started at how smooth the creature gliding under his fingers felt. "You trust me," she said simply, and then gestured to the sign that explained the stingray's poisonous stingers had been removed.
They tried out the tidal wave experience. Steve was delighted at all of the water crashing overhead, and missed Natasha watching him curiously. The children screaming and laughing around them found it extra exciting that Captain America was just as amazed at the exhibit as they were, and badgered him with questions until their apologetic parents whisked them away to learn about the barnacles and periwinkles from the patient volunteer.
Their last stop was the otter habitat. It was feeding time, which apparently doubled as playing time, as the keepers tossed balls for the otters to gleefully race after and fetch back in exchange for dinner. Steve watched Natasha out of the corner of his eye, noting that she couldn't quite hide her grin at the sight of the otters zipping through the water without care. He put his arm around her when the feeding show was over. "You want to take the hint from them and find out own food?" He asked.
"As long as you don't make me chase any balls beforehand," she said. They looked at each other wryly, both catching the innuendo.
They settled for enormous slices of pizza, and sat on a bench along the beach to eat them. The sun was going down, casting an orange light over the ocean. "This was nice today," Natasha said.
"Yeah. Yeah, it was," he agreed.
"And you hardly tripped over your words," she teased.
He smiled at his pizza. "The hard part was getting you out here to begin with."
"Have you always had trouble talking to women?"
"Pretty ones, yeah."
He should have patted himself on the back for the very faint blushed that stained her cheeks, but he didn't see it. "You seem fine when we're in the gym."
"Well, there… You're a soldier in there. I'd never win against you if I thought of you as a dame."
"You hardly win against me as it is," she pointed out.
"True, but it's not because I'm worrying about hurting you or anything. You beat that out of me the first day."
"I try," Natasha said, biting off some of the crust.
He tried to think of how to explain it. "I just… I see you differently, because that's how you want me to see you. Right now, you're a swell gal I've had the pleasure of taking around the town. In the gym and on the battlefield, you're my comrade."
"Point of interest, don't call me comrade."
Belatedly, he remembered the change in meaning of that word. "Sorry. You're my… fellow warrior. We look out for each other in the field, we keep each other in check in the gym. And then there's your disguises. Natalie, when you're working for Stark, for instance. You aren't just one person, in my mind."
She didn't respond for a while, finishing her slice and throwing away the wax paper. The sky was turning purple when she finally said, "The problem with disguise is, you're always you underneath. So when you put on a different person, you can only change so much about yourself. Bits still come through. When I flirted with Stark, before he became a consultant, part of me meant it. He was attractive, for all he was reckless and dying from the palladium. Loki did get to me, a little. Bruce losing control scared me. You can only put so many layers over yourself before the weight of it cracks.
"So, even though you see me as a different person, I'm still me under all of that."
"And who are you, normally?" Steve asked.
"I don't know." They stared at the ocean. "I'd like to be the 'swell gal' you took around town today. I can't promise I'll always be that person, but it was nice… It was nice getting to know her, and you."
Steve took her hand. "I did wonder, once or twice, if you were acting to make me feel better. If you weren't enjoying yourself."
Natalie squeezed his hand. "I can promise you that I wasn't acting. This was… fun."
She said it as if it was a foreign concept to her, and he thought it might be. The genuine sense of carefree fun, not just hitching a ride on an alien's back in the middle of battle.
When the sun finally set, they took the train back to Midtown. It was crowded, and Natasha tucked herself against Steve the whole trip back. He wasn't sure if it was to make more room for everyone around them, or because she was tired from their day, but he liked the sensation anyway and kept one arm around her as the other held the rail above them. She stayed under his arm as they walked back to the tower and up the elevator to her floor.
At the door to her suite, she looked up at him, half expectant. He smiled, and met her halfway. The kiss was soft and sweet, and neither forced the issue. Steve had no reason to expect anything further, and while he suspected Natasha would have had no qualms about it, she wouldn't force him to do anything he wasn't comfortable with—except touching poisonous sea creatures. "Good-night," he said when they parted.
"Night. We'll do this again sometime?"
"It would be my pleasure."
She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. "Don't think that just because we're doing this, I won't take it easy on you on Monday," she told him, opening her door.
"I wouldn't dream of it."
Natasha smiled at him one last time before closing the door. Steve tucked his hands in his pockets, and went to the elevator, fighting the urge to whistle. He went to the communal kitchen, where Tony and Clint were arguing about the modifications Tony wanted to try on Clint's bows. Steve peeled himself an orange, listening with amusement as both men swore more than they argued about the matter at hand. Finally, Tony cut Clint off by changing the subject abruptly. "What's got you so sunny, Spangles? Memorial Day sale?"
Steve said nothing. Tony studied him for a moment. Clint got to it first, "You and Nat, huh? I thought I saw you leaving earlier."
Steve grinned, popping an orange slice into his mouth. Tony whistled appreciatively. "You got some balls, Cap."
"I'd warn you to be good to her, but a) I'd be stupid to think you'd do anything that dumb, because b) she'll make you regret it twelve ways from Sunday," Clint added.
Remembering the number of weapons she'd carried all day, Steve shook his head. "Truthfully, I'm probably the one you need to worry about."
"She wouldn't have it any other way," Clint replied, grinning.
((Fin. I'll be writing more about these two, don't you worry. We'll work up to it!))