She can count the times she's been under his shield, recount them with precise detail, replay them at will like a digital rendering and not mere memories. She remembers it that clearly because she's grateful for that shield and the man who held it over her head, and she knows that she owes him beyond what she thinks she's capable of repaying.

In New York, all of her colleagues directly or indirectly saved her life at some point. Stark zapped a Chitauri soldier before he could open fire at the back of her head, Clint's arrows might have been slightly more fond of protecting her than anyone else, and Thor's hammer had deflected a car flying through the air directly towards her. That was what teammates did, look out for each other. That was all Rogers did when he protected her, or let her jump off of his shield to take a dangerous ride on an alien aircraft. That was all he did when he kept saving her life, kept trusting her, and kept defying her expectations two years later during the hell of the HYDRA nightmare in D.C..

And yet, despite the fact that she was the best liar that she knew and could deceive the best of them, she has never been particularly great at lying to herself, and this time, she doesn't want to.

The room is warm and growing warmer with each new ray of light that comes flooding through the windows, and she can't get the small grin off of her face. The bed is rather large, and it's too warm for sheets. She lays on her stomach, arms under the pillow beneath her head, and she can't quite look away from the man next to her. A part of her can't believe that she's here. Another part wonders what took so long.

The shield that she remembers so fondly is on the floor, propped up against the bedframe near their feet. Her knife is in her boot, which is somewhere in the hallway - she thinks - and her guns are stashed on top of his dresser. He disarmed her of those himself, and he is now one of maybe three people in the world whose arm she would not break for touching her weapons.

She hasn't felt this relaxed since a time that is such distant past that she's not sure it ever existed. But that is a minor detail dwarfed by the sheer, pure safety that she feels here, and that is a gift more precious than any. She would know.

She feels his fingers in her hair, hair that she's sick of and wants to cut off to her shorter length from two years ago, but she has a feeling someone would now object to such an idea. Or maybe he wouldn't. No, he would tell her to do what she wanted, do what made her happy and comfortable. He was sweet and pure like that. A product of a time she had only read about in books and understood on a theoretical level.

He doesn't crush or crumple her hair, like some lovers in the past. He doesn't yank or pull or direct her movements with it. Instead, he takes the strands in his fingers, twists them, twirls them, tangles them, and then undoes the knots with his fingertips, combing through with a touch more gentle than... anything.

And as he does this, he alternates between watching his hand at work, and glancing up at her eyes and letting her still-present grin bring out a small one of his own. She's seen him blush more times than she can count today, and it's barely dawn. But they haven't slept, so she counts it as part of yesterday.

She wants to make a joke. The situation is practically begging for one, and the potential angles are endless. She could ask him if it was all he'd built it up to be in his head for the last ninety five years. She could make an observation about super-soldier stamina and see if she could make him blush again. She could point out that of all the parts of her that are not hidden from his view at the current moment, he is staring at her hair, and what's up with that?

But something keeps her silent. She doesn't want to speak and end the spell that she's sure they're under. As soon as one of them speaks, then reality will emerge from the shadows and claim them both. And she isn't ready for that yet.

Lies are familiar, they're what she knows and what she's comfortable with. This moment is a lie, she knows, but it's one of the nicer ones she's had the pleasure of witnessing.

A lock of her fiery hair falls into her eyes from his touches, and he is quick to move it behind her ear, grazing her cheek with his fingertip as it goes. His gaze meets hers again, and this time he gives her a look. She interprets it as wordlessly conveying the question of hey, what's so funny? She tries to force the grin off of her face. The last thing she wants him to think is that she's about to start laughing at him. She isn't. She's just... amused. And other things.

It sounds like the title of a sweeping romance novel that would eventually be adapted into a sappy movie that would leave moviegoers in tears. The soldier and the spy. The very words implied impending tragedy. When did something like this ever result in anything not disastrous? The answer was easy - when it was confined to a bed. Of course, even then, disaster was still a possibility. Disaster was always on their heels regardless of what they were to each other. It was the nature of being who they were.

He was a national treasure, trusted implicitly by the citizens of his entire country, viewed as a symbol of everything that was right and good about America. She was a shadowy import from the bowels of a foreign enemy, no longer hidden by covers or falsified backgrounds thanks to her own actions and seen now for what she was: a symbol of everything that was wrong and dangerous about the world.

At least, that's what she's pretty sure most people think. It's easy not to care what anybody thinks of you when nobody actually knows you and what you've done aside from one or two colleagues. It's not so easy when your face is plastered on magazines and websites by people debating whether to judge you by the horrific crimes of your past or by the heroic actions of your present.

But that's what makes her current position so fascinating. The man lying next to her, America's pride and glory, knows everything now. He knows about the crimes that had once been thrown in her face by a man - alien, Asgardian, whatever - in a glass cage, who used those deeds to try to terrify and manipulate her. He knows, and yet he does not think that she's a monster. He doesn't look at her with disgust. He doesn't even ask her how she can live with herself in the wake of all that she's done.

She understands now how he was able to drop his shield and refuse to fight his lost, compromised best friend, when anyone else would have thought the man a lost cause and tried to save their own skin.

He's just not like the rest. He's better. And she knows she shouldn't be here, because she'll drag him down long before he ever lifts her up.

His fingers are still playing with her hair as she closes her eyes. She thinks back to all the dates she told him to go on, the names of girls that she knew were harmless to him, girls that she thought might be good and grounding for him. She thought that he deserved happiness, deserved some companionship, preferably with someone who knew enough of their world to understand it but not far enough into it to taint him or have to keep secrets from him. At the very least, she just wanted him to live outside of the stars and stripes every so often and just have fun.

But, he never did call any of her suggestions, and he never tried to call Sharon after he left D.C.. He lost himself in the search for his friend, and she unexpectedly ended up at his new apartment in New York. Her arrival surprised them both equally.

Figuring out a new cover ended up not really being what she wanted. Maybe she'd try out being herself, for once, whatever that meant.

She wasn't sure what had led her to his door, but she had deduced by now that it was most likely trust, rarer than anything in her world. What led her to his bed was more obvious and yet not at the same time.

Her eyes open when she hears him speak. His voice is low, a little tired, but there's something satisfying in its timbre that she's never heard before. Probably because she's never been any man's first until today. As far as she knows.

"I'm sure you've read my file before," he says, still playing with her hair, his fingers sometimes grazing her back and her shoulder in the process.

"Once or twice," she replies, her own voice competing with his for which expresses the most satisfaction. She's always been told that her voice is an asset, but she's not trying to use it as one right now. She doesn't need to.

"Then you know that before this," he says, gaze fixed on her hair as he again combs out the knots he's created, "before the serum, I was colorblind."

She pauses. She doesn't remember reading that. His eyes meet hers, and now she has an idea of why he hasn't stopped touching her hair since she first kissed him the night before.

"So," she says, "I assume you a certain... particular appreciation for the color red, then."

"You can tell?"

She smiles at his lazy grin. She knows she needs to be careful, start treading this situation more cautiously, for her own sake, but the lull and comfort of feeling safe is making such a thing seem too cumbersome of a task to deal with at the moment.

"It's real, right?" he asks.

She nods. "Not many believe me, but yes, it doesn't come from a bottle. Unlike some things."

He takes the jab with as much good nature as she expected, exhaling and pretending to be wounded for a moment before the grin returns. "Hilarious." Then he pauses and adds, "It was the first thing I noticed when I met you."

It's things like this that make her falter and forget what she was about to say. It's his sincerity and the way he fully believes in every word that comes out of his mouth. It's the opposite of what she knows, and that's what makes it so uniquely frightening and alluring.

"Well, that's a first," she eventually manages. He gives her a small smile, and a look like he knows that she's not entirely sure how to react to some of the things he says. She's had some practice with men actually being nice to her and treating her with genuine warmth and care through Clint, but Clint is not Steve Rogers. He's as closed off and cautious and haunted as she is. Steve is anything but. Haunted perhaps, yes, but he has a handle on it all, as far as she can tell.

He lets his hand fall from her hair, drawing in a breath as he looks around the bed for a moment and then pulls at his sheets. He drapes it over her, and she supposes he's trying to allow her a sense of modesty, though he knows full well she has no use of such a thing. Still, it's cute.

Then he settles in closer to her, and as he lays his head on his pillow, he asks, "If I fall asleep, will you be gone before I wake up?"

She smiles. "Maybe."

"And if I ask you to stay?"

"It might only convince me to leave sooner," she admits, though she's still faintly smiling.

"You don't have to do this," he says, looking at her seriously.

"Did you expect something different?" she asks softly. "Maybe dinner and a movie later, followed by snuggling on your couch before another sleepless night?"

He raises his eyebrows and gives a slight shrug. "I've heard worse ideas."

Her faint smile returns. "Come on, Steve." Reality has successfully crept in from the shadows, and it's as cold as it's ever been.

"No," he shakes his head in mild frustration. "No, this is... you can't expect me to believe that you came all this way to... to..."

"Make a man out of you and then leave?" she suggested.

He glares at her a little bit and shakes his head again. "If you want to go - if that's what you really want to do - then fine, I won't try to stop you. I just don't think you really want to."

"Not all of us can live by what we want, Rogers," she shrugs.

"Rogers," he repeats softly, shaking his head again.

She sighs, shifting from her comfortable position to her back. This is when the disappointment in herself comes flooding in. This was why she had tried to set him up with less lethal women before, and why she knew to keep her distance even when she didn't particularly want to. He was too good for her, in the purest sense of the word. Too pure, too intact, too... Steve.

"You've already got one ex-Russian assassin to take care of, Steve," she says, resignation in her tone. "You don't need a second one pretending to have some real place in your life."

"I'd like the chance to decide that for myself," he replies. "And I think you would, too."

She knows that Steve is uniquely stubborn and quite determined when he sets his mind to something, so arguing is futile. She decides to save him the trouble and leave before he can have the chance to wear her down.

She sits up and draws her legs over the edge of the bed, letting out a sigh and pulling away the sheet he'd covered her with. Her toes are centimeters from reaching the floor when an arm around her middle suddenly appears and stops her from getting up. He pulls her against him, against the warmth and the firmness of his chest, and his other hand brushes her hair to one shoulder as his lips graze her ear.

"Come on, Natasha," he murmurs against her skin, the vibrations traveling down her spine as she closes her eyes. He starts kissing down her neck, and her hand is over the one holding her waist, waiting to either throw him off or pull him closer. "Stay."

She opens her mouth to tell him no, but his free hand gently takes her chin and turns her head to the side just before he kisses her with a quiet fury. It takes her by surprise, and her hand flies up to his hair before she can stop herself.

She can feel a higher confidence in his touch, his kiss, even his posture as compared to last night. Still, she knows what he's going to do before he does it, and for whatever reasons that she doesn't want to consider, she lets him. She lets him turn her around, hold her against him as his lips move with hers, and then lay her down beneath him as he finally breaks away for a breath.

"Steve," she half-heartedly protests before he stops her with a fast kiss.

Then he draws away and gently holds her face in his hands, and his blue eyes lock with her green ones as he half-whispers, "Stay."

There's something too potent in the moment, something that feels too good about how much he desires her continued presence, and for one brief moment, it doesn't matter that she doesn't deserve it. It doesn't matter that she should go. It doesn't matter that the soldier and the spy don't get a happy ending, not even in the books she's read. It doesn't matter, because what she sees in his eyes matters more.

She sighs as one of her hands reaches for the back of his head, pulling him closer as she pushes off the bed with the other. "You know," she says as she makes him sit, then climbs on his lap, "it's hard to keep my train of thought when you do things like that."

He grins, taking a handful of her hair in one hand as the other pulls her closer. "I can do this all day."

She smirks. "So can I."

Then their lips meet in a kiss as fiery as the hair on her head that he's grown so fond of, and she decides that surely, of all the things she's done in her life, the good and the bad and the even worse, this can't be among the latter two.

But, then again, she's been wrong before. For now, she'll enjoy the heat and the pleasure that comes from being in the safety of his arms, knowing that it's only a matter of time before life throws them under his shield again. Someday, maybe she'll tell him how irrationally safe he makes an extremely rational woman feel.

Until then, his shield stays propped up against the foot of the bed, on the floor, and the world lays forgotten outside for once as the soldier and the spy leave sleep for another day.

A/N: This happened because midnightwings96 sent me a Tumblr post about Steve's pre-serum color blindness that hit me with a tidal wave of feels, and then I had to write this so I could get it out of my head and, you know, function like a normal human being again. Seems to be a recurring theme lately. I can't help it. To anyone reading this and cursing me because I've written something else that is not an update for Ruin, let me reiterate that midnightwings96 is working on the next update (and I am also co-writing a portion of it with her, though she is still the official (awesome and amazing) new owner of the story), so that will come in time, and we are greatly appreciative and thankful for the readers' patience. This oneshot and Breath of Life are random bursts of feels that I couldn't contain and had to write before I exploded. :) Oh, and to any Loki enthusiasts reading this, I am also working on a follow up to my oneshot Never Enough, which I think is almost a year old by now, but I got a request for a second part and then had an idea, so look out for that in the next few weeks. :)

Thank you for reading! :D