DISCLAIMER: I OWN NOTHING
Steve has a feeling about these people. He's only just met them, sure, but there's something about the fact that the six of them just fought off an alien invasion that gives him a sense of closeness that he hasn't felt since before the ice. And yeah, it's only been a month, but a month is a long time when all your friends are dead. Anyway, he has a feeling in his gut about this team, and Bucky always said Steve was about the only person who had any business at all trusting his gut.
"Tell ya what, Stevie," he'd said once, an arm slung around Steve's shoulders, "you were right about that pig Joey Newsome."
"What'd he do?"
"Beat up on Ella's little sister. And you called it, didn't ya? Said, 'I don't know about Ella's new guy friend. Got a bad feeling about him.' I'll say this, pal, your gut's usually right, you oughta trust it more 'n most people."
"Yeah, yeah," Steve had laughed. "Now maybe we should go teach old Joey a lesson."
He blinks, wrenching himself back to the present. Don't be an old man, he scolds himself. Even as he thinks the words, he wonders how he can be something he's not, because he's not old, not really. He's twenty-five in his mind and ninety-something to everyone else.
Steve rubs a hand over his face and looks back down at his sketchbook. He's done little character studies of the team - the Avengers (he's supposed to call them that now). None of the drawings are too detailed, just impressions, really, things he'd first noticed about them.
He's never been good at drawing people, so these suit him best, these little pieces. The nervous curl of Banner's hands; the wicked glint in Stark's eye; Romanoff's hair that he tried to make red without using any colors. They look somehow more alive to Steve than the other drawings he's done since the ice. All those are of Bucky and Peggy and the Commandos, their faces perfectly rendered—his eiditic memory saw to that—and so dead they might as well have been buried with their subjects.
Steve stares down at Barton's flippant smirk. Yeah, he has a feeling about these people.
I don't post for months, and then I write this. I'm sorry.