December 14, 2014
She wakes up on Sunday to a hush in the air and knows. She lets her eyes flutter closed, lets herself luxuriate for five more minutes before she actually pries her eyes open. She avoids the windows as she pushes out of bed, as she heads for the coffee maker and slips in and out of the bathroom. It's only when she has that first mug cupped between her palms that she allows herself to finally look.
New York is covered in a thick, white blanket of snow.
She's caught up immediately, watching thick fat flakes float down from the sky, settle on the piles they've already formed. She can't even hate the slush coating the streets below. Everything is so quietly beautiful, so much so that she barely hears her phone ring. She ignores it, doesn't want to step away from this moment. These simple moments of beauty remind her it even exists. She knows she has a habit of forgetting.
And isn't that part of what Steve's doing? Helping her see that Christmas is a thing that everyone has, that this year she won't be working – Stark has been adamant about SI shutting down over the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth – and getting a tree at her request so they can celebrate together? She has someone to celebrate Christmas with.
Her phone rings again and she glares at it for a moment before giving in. It's Steve's face there and her smile is growing before she slides her thumb across the screen to connect the call.
"Did you see it?"
He's breathless but sad. She takes another sip of coffee. "I'm watching it now."
Steve blows out a heavy breath. "I want it to be beautiful."
That startles her a little. If anyone could find the beauty in the slushy sidewalks this will create it's Steve. "It's not?"
"Bucky died in the snow. Or, well."
Her heart skips. It's not that she's forgotten Barnes by any extent of the imagination – she's got her best woman on it, doesn't she, and they'd just talked about it yesterday – but the heavy sadness that hangs there forces her to remember that Barnes isn't just an asset. He isn't just the Winter Solider and this isn't just a mission to rescue a man from the same life Natasha once had. It is, even in a twisted way, for Steve. For what he wants, what he yearns for, that connection and part of his life that she knows he misses.
It's a stark reminder that Barnes isn't far from Steve's mind.
She sips at her coffee, watching the snow, trying to figure out what she can do here. Just a couple of days ago he'd given her tree hunting, just yesterday the magic of a Christmas tree she'd never had. She wants to give something back to him, almost desperately. She's just not sure how.
"I couldn't stand the cold as a kid. It sunk into my bones. I didn't have any body fat and even layer after layer of wool couldn't seem to keep it out."
She hums, enthralled. He does this to her, maybe longer than she'd thought, but the minute the words had come out of her mouth a couple of nights ago – "Talk to me" while she's shaking and shivering, blood painted across the back of her eyelids – it had kind of crystalized. She thinks it's his tone, his voice, the soothing cadence.
"Let me guess," she says quietly. "Bucky loved it."
Steve grunts, amused and pained in equal measure. It draws a quiet chuckle from her too.
"Dragged me out into the first snow. Every year like clockwork."
It's adorable and she thinks maybe she can picture it. Well, as close as she can get considering she finds it very difficult to hold onto the pictures she's seen of the sickly kid in comparison to the man she knows.
"What about you?"
She hums, distracted. "Gave my dad a new excuse to use in the hospitals. 'She fell on the ice and broke her arm'."
His gasp brings her back, clues her in. The breath whooshes out of her lungs hard and fast.
"Shit. Steve-"
And yet, it had been an easy admission, hadn't it? One that slipped out because she'd been distracted by snow and the man on the phone. Unthinking in a way Maria normally is not. Trusting.
"How can you like it then?"
She blinks as she thinks. He's asked her a question within a question. How can she still look at snow, at the danger it provides, the cover up it was, and not hate it? How did she move forward?
She closes her eyes, floats back. It's a good memory, this one, and she doesn't have much trouble pulling it up. "My first year at West Point, during the first snow, I went out. I went for a walk. I slipped on ice and probably bruised the hell out of my tailbone, but didn't break a bone. Didn't get hurt. I was pretty defiant then, done with authority and being under my dad's thumb and I was not going to let him ruin it for me. Not when I was going to have to live in it every day."
She chuckles a little, watches a cab push slowly through the drifts on the road. "Right when I thought my fingers were going to fall off, I made myself stop and build a snowman."
"A snowman?"
"Rocks for eyes, and a nose. Stick arms. Even gave him three little buttons."
She can laugh now, but Maria knows then it had been something different. Totally and completely different. It was about proving to herself that her father couldn't control her, that he couldn't make her feel small or worthless.
"He was mine."
And there it is, isn't it? Exactly what she should do, what she can do for him. The perfect line pops into her head – Thor pleading with them all because he does not understand the obsession with this Elsa when he sees her kind of magic every day – and the smile blossoms over her face.
"Hey Steve."
"Hm?"
She almost laughs before she gets the words out, can barely catch her breath in amusement and excitement. "Do you want to build a snowman?"
. . . . .
He is absolutely frozen. His hands hurt from the cold, from the way the snow soaked into his gloves, but he knows from the warm glow in his heart that Maria had achieved her goal. Well, and she'd given him something too. She'd given him back the beauty of snow.
And maybe frostbite.
"Don't be a baby," she says on an amused huff, nudging into his back to keep him moving. He shivers as she pushes his soaked shirt into his back – he's starting to think she could take Natasha with those ninja skills she's hiding. Or that he forgets about. Whatever – and stumbles forward, unwinding his scarf. She's right behind him, so close that he can feel her full-body shiver. He turns, finds her cheeks so red, her eyes a little glazed.
"You're freezing."
This time her laugh is real. "I am."
She says it with such relish that he's a little scared for a minute. But then she's leaning in, taking his mouth, and the heat of that zings through him so fast he almost stumbles. Instead, he catches her up against him, gives as good as he gets.
"Not so bad now."
This woman. Who the hell is this woman? Where is her spine of steel, her careful adherence to rules and strict discipline? None of that was with them in Central Park as they piled snow on top of snow, hunted down rocks, even made snow angels. And, of course, the requisite snowball fight where he'd only managed to win by pinning her and using his weight. Otherwise he thinks he'd be the only one soaked to the skin.
"Shower," he says, even as he tugs her in. It's a move he immediately reverses when she lets out a vaguely pained sound, but one look at her eyes tells him there was nothing painful about the move. He laughs a little, has to take her mouth again because this woman.
Maria.
"Not an invitation."
It hadn't been. He hadn't meant it that way. Eventually, sure, but he's only willing to push her so far, is only willing to instigate so much.
"I know," she replies. "But. You know."
Oh. Oh he does. Because he would, he could. He knows he could have her, knows that he does. Knows that the hard exterior is what she shows everyone else because she's damn soft beneath. Vulnerable and easily hurt but hiding beneath steel and determination and a drive to be whoever she wants to be and not what others expect her to be.
He huffs, strips her coat off her shoulders and leaves it in a heap on the floor. He'll pick it up in a minute, when he feels more like she's not going to freeze to death. "Another time."
And she needs to stop looking at him like that, eyes so blue and so hot because he is not a saint and he damn well wants her. He growls, leans in to nip at her jaw, her ear. It gets a laugh out of her, low and dark and he wants to hear that when she's pressed beneath him, warm and responsive and-
"Okay, okay. Steve, you can't-"
"You first," he interrupts, shoves her towards his bedroom and the en suite beyond. "I'll put coffee on."
And find her clothes. Baggy clothes where he can't see her curves like he can with the way her sweater is plastered to her skin. Oh, he got her good.
"Maria," he calls, because he can't help himself. He needs her face again, her eyes that aren't brittle. He smiles, valiantly resists the urge to go after her. "Thanks."
She smiles right back, not an ounce of heat from before in the look, but stunning in it's own right. "Always."
Soooooo. Laaaate.