AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've mostly used the names of actual people in this story, but there were a few spots I felt uncomfortable doing so. I didn't want to put any real person in a villain role, and I didn't want to use the names of anybody's real-life children, since I felt that would be kind of creepy.
Steve had been to Malibu once or twice, to visit Stark at home there, but Stark's house was way out on the point and it hadn't been necessary to pass through the city on the way. Now, on their way to Scarlett Johansson's house, they went straight through the middle of it, and the houses were positively ridiculous. Every architectural style Steve knew of was represented, sometimes in the same building, and all on an absurdly grand scale. There was nothing remotely like it in New York City, where living space was at a premium. Malibu, with its huge lawns and backyard pools, was sprawl for the sake of sprawl, and it felt almost like an insult to somebody raised in the tight quarters of Brooklyn.
The soft voice of the GPS gave them directions, and Natasha followed them right up a long, curving driveway to a two-storey mansion. The house was all fake stonework and huge windows, with palm trees inside and out. It looked horrifyingly expensive and utterly tasteless – just right for some prima donna actress.
Dodger was the first out of the car, and ran to start checking out the trees and pick the ones he wanted to keep. Steve was second, followed by Nat, once she found her keys. There were quite a few of them on a keychain with a giant pink pom-pom, and she was about to start trying them in the front door when there was a click, and it opened from the inside.
The face that peered out belonged to a thin teenage girl with long, straight black hair. She was wearing short denim overalls over a Guess t-shirt, and her expression was wary. A moment later, however, she realized who had knocked, and her eyes went wide with delight.
"Ms. Johansson!" she said. "Hi! It's so cool to finally meet you! Is everything okay? Your husband said you weren't going to be back until late."
Natasha smiled back. "You must be Danielle," she said. "Your mother has nothing but good things to say about you. Ridley gave us the evening off, so you don't have to stay if you don't want to. Where's Mari?"
"She's napping upstairs," Danielle replied, then looked up at Steve with some evident concern. "Oh. Hello."
Steve noted that Chris Evans evidently wasn't as cool as Scarlett Johansson. "Hi, Danielle."
"Hello, Mr. Evans," said Danielle uneasily. "Uh… Mom told me you weren't gonna be allowed here anymore."
"It's my house," said Nat firmly. "I can have what company I like. You can go, Danielle." She reached into her purse and handed the babysitter an impressive-looking wad of cash without even really looking at it. "And Chris," she added, flashing Steve a smile as she headed inside, "Make yourself at home. Grab a snack, fire up Netflix or something. I'll be back as soon as I've changed." She passed Danielle, and vanished up the stairs.
Steve waited by the door while Danielle grabbed her stuff to leave. She kept giving him sideways looks, obviously quite unnerved by his presence, and Steve felt more and more skeptical about the wisdom of this whole plan.
"Who told your Mom I wasn't allowed?" he asked, though he suspected he knew the answer.
"Mr. Darville," Danielle replied. "I won't tell him," she added quickly.
"Thanks," Steve replied. He assumed Darville must be Johansson's husband, and wondered whether the man didn't have some other way to find out who'd been there. He and Nat had to get back to their own universe, but ruining somebody's marriage needn't be a part of the process.
After shutting the door behind Danielle and turning the lock, Steve looked around the house, hoping to find a computer. The interior was open-concept, with hardwood floors and areas delineated by furniture rather than rooms divided by walls. There were multiple televisions, one of which took up nearly a whole wall. Modern art hung here and there between the windows, and there were potted trees everywhere and a cage with a big, colourful parrot sleeping in it. The powder room was the size of Steve's trailer at the film lot. It wasn't quite extravagant enough to look like somewhere Tony Stark would live, but it was close.
The kitchen was decorated in white wood and glass cupboards, with green granite countertops and a big set of patio doors. Steve found a laptop on the counter and turned it on, and while it booted up he took a look at some of the pictures – because like her co-star, Scarlett Johansson had photographs of her family and friends in her kitchen. There was one of he actress and her husband on their wedding day – Natasha getting married, now there was something Steve never thought he'd see. Other pictures showed her with strangers, though there was one with a man who looked like Stark's security chief.
Pride of place, however, went to the pictures of a smiling blonde girl, ranging from pictures of her as a small baby to a child of two or three. That must be Mari. There were probably more like this upstairs, Steve thought… what did Nat think of them? Steve knew she loved children. Was this a life she wished she could have had?
Come to think of it, Nat was taking an awfully long time upstairs. Steve had seen Natasha make herself unrecognizable in under three minutes. She couldn't need twenty to change her clothes.
Steve headed cautiously upstairs to see. After looking at the pictures, he was half-afraid he'd find Nat weeping over a photo album – but he hoped he didn't, because he'd never seen her actually cry and wouldn't have known what to do about it. As he climbed the steps, however, he heard not sobs, but giggles.
Halfway down the hall was a bedroom done up fit for a princess, with polka-dot walls and an alcove bed with a ruffled canopy. Natasha was sitting on the bed, still wearing the distressed jeans and sea-green t-shirt she'd come home in. The little blonde girl from the photos was sitting next to her, listening to Nat read aloud from Dr. Seuss.
"Ready?" asked Nat.
"Yeah!" said the girl.
Nat took a deep breath. "When the beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles, and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles… they call this a muddle-puddle-tweetle-poodle-beetle-noodle-bottle-paddle-battle!"
The child squealed in delight and clapped her hands, then looked up and saw Steve peeking through the door. "Uncle Chris!" she exclaimed, and bounced up from the bed to run and greet her.
Steve knew exactly what to do there. He bent down to hug the girl, and ruffled her hair. "How are you doing, Mari?" he asked.
"Good!" Mari giggled. "You smell like makeup!"
"We've been filming all day," Nat told her. "That's why."
Mari ran back to the bed to grab the book, then returned to Steve with it. "Now you have to read it," she informed him, thrusting it in his direction.
"Oh, I don't know." Steve held up his hands. "I don't think I could say that whole noodle-poodle-beetle thing."
"Sure you can!" Mari insisted.
"Give it a try," said Nat. "The worst that can happen is you'll fail horribly and get laughed at by a three-year-old."
Mari smiled impishly.
"Actually," Steve said, "I need to have a word with your Mom for a moment, if that's okay."
Okay," Mari decided, "but you have to read the story after."
"Got it," said Steve.
"Promise!" Mari ordered.
"Promise. Cross my heart," said Steve. He drew an 'x' on the left side of his chest with one finger.
"We'll be right back, sweetheart," Nat promised.
She followed Steve out into the hallway and shut the door of Mari's room, then leaned against it with a sigh. "I know what you're going to say," she said. "She was already awake when I came upstairs, and she heard me. I wasn't about to tell her that I'm not her mother, and she wanted me to read her a story."
That sounded reasonable enough, and yet Steve was unable to help a horrible suspicion. "You said we were coming here because there'd be more privacy," he reminded her.
"Don't get paranoid on me, Rogers." Nat held up a finger. "All I did was look into the room. I told you, she was already awake."
Steve folded his arms across his chest.
Nat sighed. "I just wanted to see her," she said, and her voice was unexpectedly pleading. "Just a look, okay?"
"This was a terrible idea," said Steve.
"Hey!" Nat protested. "Don't you start! After all the time you've spend brooding and angsting over the life opportunities you missed, you're not allowed to say a thing! What's gonna happen if you meet Barnes here? Are you just not going to want to talk to him?"
Steve's jaw tightened, and he had to take a deep breath and let it out again before he was able to reply. When he looked Natasha in the eye, she didn't even seem sorry. Of course she wasn't. She was very well aware of the cruel blow she'd just landed, and it had been entirely intentional.
"That is different," he said.
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is!" Steve insisted. "Because if that happened I would know it's not actually Bucky, it's just some actor who plays him. Him and this Evans guy probably aren't even friends!" That was something that hadn't really sunk in until that moment, even after Steve had seen the face on the poster – somewhere in this universe would be the actor who'd played Bucky, somebody who looked exactly like Steve's old friend but might have a totally different personality. Would he want to talk to such a man? Part of Steve was eager to do so, but it was already at war with the part that was horrified by the entire idea. "Anyway, that girl is not your daughter, and it's not fair to her to pretend."
"So what am I supposed to do, just tell her that?" asked Nat. "She'd never trust a grownup again, let alone her mother. All I did was read her a story when she asked me to. I couldn't just push her away."
The worst part was, she was right. Now that they were here and Mari had seen them, they had no choice but to keep up the pretense. "We need to get home," Steve said.
"I know."
"We're not going to stay the night here," he said firmly. "We need to get in touch with Thor and Loki, call the babysitter back, and go."
"I know!" Nat repeated. "Did you find a computer?"
"In the kitchen," Steve said.
"Then I'll go do that," Nat told him, "and you can read Mari the book." Her lips curved into a mischievous smile again. "You did cross your heart, remember?"
"Yes, I did," sighed Steve. "Okay."
Natasha went downstairs to look for Thor and Loki's contact information, while Steve went back into Mari's room and sat down in the pink papasan chair to read the book of tongue-twisters to her. Mari herself said cross-legged at his feet, gazing up at him adoringly, but Steve was having trouble with it. His mouth was as clumsy as his fingers, and he kept stumbling over the words.
"Uncle Chris?" Mari reached up to tug on his hand.
"Huh?" Steve blinked, and realized he'd stopped reading. "Sorry. I was thinking about something."
"What were you thinking about?" Mari asked. "Was it Captain America stuff?"
"Yeah, Captain America stuff," said Steve. He looked at the page. "Where were we? Okay. Here's a new trick, Mr. Knox: socks on chicks and fix on… sorry, and chicks on fox."
He'd been thinking about Natasha, and had realized with a chill that this universe would suit her nicely. She was an excellent actress – at times she could fool even her own close friends, as when she'd convinced Steve she was grieving for Fury's death while she'd known he was very much alive. She could win Oscars if she wanted. She loved children, too. Clint's kids adored her, and Mari had clearly enjoyed her company. The opportunity to be a mother was perhaps the thing she most resented the Red Room taking from her. Was it just possible she would want to…
No, Steve told himself, she would not. Nat wasn't always a paragon of virtue by any measure, but she wouldn't steal somebody else's life and leave this poor actress stranded in their dangerous world. Besides, Nat and Steve shared a sense of responsibility for that world. She cared too much about the red in her ledger to run off and live out a fantasy.
"Fox in socks, our game is done, Sir," he read. "I hope you had a lot of fun, Sir." Steve closed the book and looked at Mari. "How'd I do?"
She cocked her head to one side, thinking – a posture so typical of Natasha that it almost made Steve jump. "Could use some work," she decided.
"I figured." Steve gave the book back to her. "Do you think you can play quietly up here for a while? Your Mom and I have more stuff to do."
Mari was agreeable to that, so Steve left her playing with some plastic ponies and returned to the kitchen. There he found Nat, sitting on a bar stool with the laptop on the counter in front of her. She was feeding cold cuts to Dodger with one hand, while typing with the other.
She noticed Steve as soon as he appeared in the doorway, and turned to look at him. "Is she okay?"
Was she worried Steve might have told Mari the truth? "She's fine," he said. "Did you find them?"
"I found her Skype contacts," Nat replied, and pointed at the screen. "Loki doesn't answer, of course, but I've got Thor!"
Steve hurried to look over her shoulder, stopping on the way to grab one of the cold cuts and stuff it in his mouth. There on the screen was the man from the earlier photograph, though with his hair cut even shorter and without the beard. He was lying back in a reclining shirt, evidently with a computer in his lap. His shirt was off, and there were painful-looking red welts, like a mass of pink spaghetti, all across his shoulders and neck. One went all the way up to his cheek. Steve had never seen anything like it.
"What happened?" Steve asked.
"This?" The man on the screen glanced down at his strange injury. "I arrived in this body as its owner was 'catching some early morning waves', and was unprepared to keep my balance on the board. I fell into the water, and there did battle with a Midgardian monster called a jelly-fish. Though it was but little, it was fierce, and Elsa Hemsworth insisted I be taken to the hospital." The face might look strange, but the voice and diction were definitely Thor's.
"He was discharged after a couple of hours," Nat said. "No mere fish of jelly can contend with the son of Odin."
"I will come at once if you can tell me where to meet you," Thor said. "The Hemsworth family has been most welcoming, and I have promised to return their loved one's body without further harm."
"Do you have any idea where we can find Loki?" Steve asked.
Thor, however, was distracted, as a voice off-camera asked, "can I say hi?"
"Of course you may, Miss Alaska," said Thor.
A girl of five or six, with sandy blonde hair in a ponytail, climbed up on top of Thor to wave at the camera. "Hi, Captain America!" she said. "Hi, Black Widow!"
"Hi, Alaska." Steve waved. Natasha did likewise.
"Can I come with you to find Loki?" Alaska asked Thor eagerly.
"It is brave of you to offer, but no," Thor replied. "When you are grown, I'm sure you will be a mighty warrior, as is your father."
Steve was about to ask what Thor had told the Hemsworth clan and what they'd said about it, but just then, Dodger suddenly sat up and barked. Steve looked down and shushed the dog, but a moment later he heard the front door open and shut.
"Danielle?" The voice was Johansson's husband. "Did I leave my blue folio in the kitchen?"
Steve and Natasha traded a glance, then both looked around the room. At the end of the counter was a blue leather document folio, with post-it notes sticking out of it.
"We gotta go, Thor," said Nat. "I'll call you again later." She closed the laptop and slipped down from the stool. "I'll handle this," she promised Steve, and scooped up the folio. "Hang on to your dog."
She hurried off to the front door, and Steve grabbed Dodger. Where could he hide? Most of the cabinets had glass doors… except for the tall one down the end, furthest from the patio doors. Steve opened it, and found brooms and a vacuum cleaner. That would do. He squeezed inside and held on to Dodger tightly, hoping the dog wouldn't bark again.
"Sssssh, buddy," said Steve, as Dodger whined and wiggled in his arms. "Just be quiet for a minute."
There were voices. Steve strained to hear them, but couldn't make out the words. Natasha greeted the man warmly and she must have given him the folio, but the reply was an annoyed question – it might have included the word barking. An argument began.
"Daddy!" Mari called, and Steve heard her arrhythmic footsteps as she descended the stairs one at a time. "Did you miss your plane again?"
"Hi, sweetie," Johansson's husband replied. "I'm trying not to – but does Mommy have a friend over?"
Steve couldn't hear Mari's reply over his own pounding heart ,but he knew she wasn't old enough to understand the need to lie, even if he and Nat had told her to. Moments later, doors began banging, as Johansson's husband searched the house. Steve tried to stand perfectly still, holding his breath until his head began to spin.
"I told you never to bring him back here!" the husband shouted.
"For Christ's sake, Richard, he's a co-worker!" Nat said. "We were just going over the script!"
"What part? The love scenes?" he snarled.
"Why don't you trust me?" she demanded.
"Because you keep giving me reasons not to!"
Darville's furious footsteps entered the kitchen, and the broom cupboard was the only place in there where a grown man could hide. Sure enough, the door was flung open. Dodger wiggled out of Steve's arms and ran.
"There you are!" Darville grabbed Steve's shirt and dragged him out. "I told you never to come back to my house again!"
"Stop this right now!" Natasha ordered. "You're scaring Mari!"
Richard Darville was not interested in anything she had to say. He wound up to punch Steve, and both Steve and Nat reacted on instinct. She grabbed his arm and twisted it back so that the punch would miss – Steve shoved the man back with a kick to the gut, and because he still felt weak and slow, he did so as hard as he could. The result was that Darville was thrown against the patio door. The glass shattered in a small explosion of tiny cubes, and an alarm blared. Dodger, upset by the noise, started barking frantically.
Darville picked himself up, slowly. Ashamed of what he'd just done, Steve went to help him, but that only frightened the man – he crawled a few steps away before managing to get to his feet, and then when he did, he ran.
"Help! Help!" the man shouted, heading around the house back to the street. "I've just been attacked in my own home!"
Dodger continued barking. Steve knelt down and started trying to quiet the dog, who thought this was a game and bounced up to lick Steve's face. Natasha found the alarm panel and tore it out of the wall, then yanked out some of the wires to shut it down.
"Mommy?" asked Mari. She was standing in the kitchen doorway with big, frightened eyes, clutching a plush Dumbo toy in both hands.
Natasha didn't answer immediately, but for perhaps the first time Steve could remember, the expression on her face spoke exactly what she was thinking – and she was horrified. She had made a terrible mistake coming here, and it was only now that she was starting to understand what the consequences would be for Mari and her mother.
"Yes, Mari?" she asked finally.
Instead of asking a question, Mari toddled up with her arms held out. Nat dropped to her knees and gave the child a hug, partly just because Mari needed one, but probably also so that this little girl wouldn't see the tears in Natasha's eyes.
"I'm very proud of you, Mari," said Nat, forcing her voice to stay level even as her eyes overflowed. "You did a very good thing. You told Daddy the truth. Promise me you'll always tell the truth, even if it upsets people, okay?"
Mari just squeezed her.
"Promise me," Nat repeated.
"I promise," said Mari. "Cross my heart."
There were sirens outside. Somebody – maybe Darville, maybe one of the neighbours – had called the cops. Steve glanced over his shoulder at the broken window, and then back at Natasha. "Romanov, we gotta go," he said.
"We can't leave Mari alone!" she protested.
"We…" Steve began, and then realized he had nothing to follow it with. She was right. Mari was only three years old – leaving her in this house alone would be a crime in itself, not to mention the mental anguish it would cause her to be abandoned by both parents just before the police barged in. They couldn't take her with them, either. Neither knew what they'd have to do in order to find Loki and drag him home to their own universe, but both were sure that was no job for a small child.
"So what do we do?" he asked.
When the police entered the kitchen a few minutes later, they found Steve and Natasha waiting there with their hands up.
"My daughter is in the rec room," said Nat, as both were placed in handcuffs. "She'll need somebody to watch her."
"Her father is waiting outside, Ma'am," a policewoman said.
They were escorted into a waiting car, and left alone there for a few minutes while the police photographed the kitchen and took a statement from Johansson's enraged husband. Steve expected Nat to get them out of the handcuffs, but she didn't – she just stared silently out the window, lost in thought. Outside, the sun was going down.
"We should have just done the research in my trailer," said Steve.
"Too much chance of being interrupted," Nat replied miserably. She was trying to convince herself, not him.
Steve said nothing more, as he realized he was being mean. She knew she'd made a mistake, and she didn't need it rubbed in her face right now.
"I wouldn't have come here unless it seemed like the best option at the time," Nat added. "I did want to see her daughter. I wanted to know what kind of parent I would have been. Now I know." She swallowed hard. "It really did seem like a good idea at the time. Nobody around, someplace to sleep if we had to spend the night…"
She had to stop then, as the driver got back in the car. The policewoman locked the door and called in to the station, then looked over her shoulder at her two suspects.
"Hello, Superheroes," she said.
"Officer," Steve replied, with a slight nod.
The cop started the car. "Welcome to the real world," she told them sardonically. "Where throwing people you don't like out windows has consequences."
"Imagine that," said Nat.
At the police station they had their photographs and fingerprints taken, and were asked dozens of questions while frowning officers wrote things down. Steve denied that Evans and Johansson were having an affair even as he actually had no idea, and wondered what this actor was going to think when he came back to find himself with a criminal record. At least it would be pretty minor compared to the one he must be dealing with right now, in Steve's world.
With that done, Steve and Nat were escorted to separate holding cells and left there to stew. Steve waited until nobody was looking, then grabbed the bars in both hands and tried to bend them.
Back home he would have been able to do it – Stark had once cajoled him into trying, after seeing the feat depicted in an old Hercules movie, and had been delighted by the result. This time, of course, the bars did not budge. Steve strained until his shoulders stung, but then had to give up and sit down on the uncomfortable cot. He would have to wait for Natasha to get them out. It probably wouldn't take long, once she stopped moping long enough to do it.
So, he thought – this was what it was like to be normal.
It wasn't something Steve had ever thought about before, but now that he did – he'd never been normal, had he? Steve Rogers had been a skinny, sickly little kid, always unwell and in constant pain, and then the serum had transformed him into a superhero. Normal lay somewhere between, in a place he'd never been before. It felt dull and weak and clumsy, but then, he was coming down to it from peak physical condition. What would it have been like if he'd come up to it from his previous state? Everything was relative, after all.
Eventually Steve nodded off, only to wake again with a start. Somebody was rattling the door of his cell. Had Nat come to break him out? It appeared not – the person standing outside was another police officer, a middle-aged Latino man with a thin mustache. Steve's watch said it was 12:02 AM.
"Wake up, Sleeping beauty," said the cop. "You've got a visitor."
"I do?" Steve sat up. "Who is it?" What if it were some member of Evans' family, here to ask what was wrong with him?
"It's a surprise," said the cop. "Come and see."
For a moment, a flame of hope flared up behind Steve's breastbone – maybe it was Thor! Maybe Thor had arrived and they were going to find Loki and get out of here! But Thor was half a planet away, and unless he'd either recovered his powers there was no way he could have gotten here yet. The warm flicker was replaced by a cold dread, because if it wasn't Thor, it could only be somebody who would lead them to another disaster.
Maybe it was Loki. It did occur to Steve that if Loki, too, were occupying the body of a human actor, then Steve would probably be able to take him – but hot on the heels of that thought, he remembered that he was already in a police station under arrest. Beating Loki up here would be their worst idea yet.
As it turned out, the visitor was neither Thor, nor Loki, nor a stranger. The policeman escorted Steve out to the station's front foyer, where a man was waiting by the front desk. He was smaller than either Loki or Thor, and middle-aged, with gray in his short dark hair. It had been a couple of days since he'd shaved, and he was wearing plastic-rimmed glasses and a gray peaked cap. He was looking at his phone, idly fiddling with some app, until he looked up and saw Steve.
"Hey, Dorito," he said.