Nat was many things, but patient was not at the top of her list. That’s a lie. The list of things she was was horizontal, so actually everything was at the top of her list.
But the point is. The point is she’d been waiting in that bar for 45 minutes and still no sign of Sam. Which was uncharacteristic, uncalled for, unexpected, but most importantly, unfortunate. She ordered another whiskey and decided to allow herself 30 seconds of moping (as opposed to brooding, which she’d been doing thus far) before abandoning the bar for her couch and bad movies.
She’d found a cat. A beautiful, hateful creature with long cream fur and chocolaty socks, which treated her with the same lack of interest she treated the world, and she was pretty sure they were soulmates. But before she made the call she needed to tell someone (Sam) that she despised the miserable beast and wanted her out of her apartment.
The ball would then be in the cat’s court.
But, alas. No Sam. She knocked back half the whiskey and her phone vibrated on the bar next to her.
“Rly srry; running late. JBB and SGR too quieet. Chcked for bugs.All hardware in place still. No cables anywhere. Fake sleeping atm. 90% sure.”
She mulled this over. She wondered what turn their lives had taken where twin concussions could be construed as a sign of a potential plot to hide the router (a cry for attention) again. Their supersoldier set’s sense of humor was bizarrely innocuous, but highly effective in annoying the ever-loving shit out of Sam, whose keys went missing about twice a fortnight.
“It’s alright,” she texted back. “How do you know they’re fake sleeping?”
She got no response for another 5 minutes.
“They’re doing the weirdly intimate cuddling thing,” Sam’s voice sounded from her shoulder. She smiled at him as he dropped onto the stool next to her and ordered a beer.
“All cuddling is intimate,” she offered.
“Maybe, but I don’t trust them. They’re trying too hard. They’re probably ordering a gas stove as we speak since Stark said not to two weeks back. Anyways, JB says you made a friend,” he countered.
That bastard. He must have bugged her running shoes again. She’d bug one of his arm plates in revenge next time she saw him.
“A building fell on them; I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt. But anyways, I hate her and she would eat my corpse if I died,” Nat offered, already digging up images of her beastly child on her phone. Sam made the appropriate cooing noises and offered to babysit. He looked at all 16 pictures without complaint. She was keeping him.
She dragged him home and they both mused on how disgusting the creature was as she (Miho) wove figure-eights around Sam’s calves. She leapt up onto the back of the couch and looked at Natasha from half-lidded eyes, effectively conveying how boring and petty she found her existence. Then she settled down on top of her little chocolate paws with her little cocoa beans and purred.