Steve and Natasha, forced to share a bed
Rooms in Paris come even smaller than they do in New York.
This wasn't actually the place he'd paid for tonight, but running into Natasha can change your plans like that. In the morning, he'd left a modest but clean B&B with hopes of tracking down a certain expert neurologist; now, after a long chase and several gunfights through an outer banlieu, he and Natasha are holed up, quite literally, in the last run-down garret in Montmartre.
He's surprised, the way it gives him pangs. Clint got him into these comic books once, where toward the end of the run, a character who'd been alive since the Middle Ages could only feel at home in a condemned building. Steve's not always sure people understand what wealth and modernity really mean, that the way the world had gotten richer usually had to do with what no one notices anymore.
Natasha, whom he's seen in couture and trenches alike, has taken up a spot on the narrow twin bed, her spine against the scrubby wall. "Steve," she says, and it's in her face, the order (or the strong suggestion) that they both need to rest, even them. There's no room on the floor, and he's slept head-to-toe with worse.
When he stretches out, Natasha curls around him, her left arm looped under his. He almost protests, but there's no advance in this, just the heat and mass of her body close to his. He stares at the door, brows knitted. They'd interrupted something today. Bucky was on the same path they were, and they'd missed him, probably not by much, thanks to that firefight with who knows who. Nat had seen it too, the smashed library, the obscenely broken neck. It was the most tangible trail they'd had yet, and it flooded him. It comes out now, a stuttering sigh.
"I'd have done the same, if I'd been loose instead of with SHIELD," Natasha says.
"Would you have come in?"
"I did," she murmurs. "The right person asked me."
Steve pulls in on himself, as much as he can, as if he didn't take up most of this bed. He feels her fingers run up through the short hairs at the back of his neck. Natasha breathes quietly, evenly. Steve tries to relax; he's still surprised by how much tension releases in his face, that it just moves deeper inside himself, down into his belly. He tries to match her breathing, the press of her ribs against his. She doesn't say a thing, just keeps on stroking his hair.
He bows his head, and closes his eyes against her fingertips on his bare neck. The small hand pressed to his chest, he reaches for it.