
It was a rainy night out. The window was cracked open so he could hear things, and rain pattered on the sidewalk below. Steve and Natasha had been on the run for four months now. The accommodations weren’t the Ritz, the food wasn’t Michelin starred and the internet was always spotty. At least the company was good, he admitted. Natasha may have come down initially on Team Iron Man, but she showed her true colors and helped them in the end. It had put a mark on her record as well, but they were still out here, freeing others, fighting for what they believed in. They’d been on a three day task in the former Czechoslovakia, where Natasha’s still strong Eastern Block contacts had found a detention center. It was now in rubble and they’d managed to escape with little in the way of detection. Finding a seedy motel, they’d tossed another burner cell phone and checked in as Mr. and Mrs. Jones, for a change. He was keeping an eye on the road – he always kept an eye on the road – giving his partner a chance to shower and clean up. The Super Soldier would do the same afterwards.
Whenever these ops went down, Steve always had a surplus of energy afterwards. He needed to… work it off. Punch something. Hit something. Do something. And lately… though he knew it was dangerous to… his thoughts had drifted to Nat. Less about their partnership and more about the woman he was traveling with that had the body of a goddess and a spirit that matched his own. The knowledge that she was in there naked in the shower, and often slept beside him in a similar fashion, was slowly killing him. Hearing the door open, Steve looked back over his shoulder. “You manage to wash all that dust off you?” Involuntarily, his eyes traveled along her form and hoped his beard hid him biting his lower lip as other thoughts again crept into his mind.








