sarah grant 🇺🇸 [steve rogers] (charcoal) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2018-11-13 23:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | !narrative, r * laura, r: sarah grant |
WHO: Sarah Grant
WHEN: this evening
WHERE: Margaret's couch
SUMMARY: Sarah takes a nap and dreams about running from SHIELD with a friend.
She tells herself she only intends to rest her eyes for ten minutes. That’s it. There isn’t much left at her house now, but between packing up her life, moving it to Margaret’s house (theirs, now, she reminded herself), and then trying to fit all of her life in with Margaret’s, she’s tired. Toss the job on top of all of that, and Sarah’s sure she could sleep for hours. It leaves little time for her own art, but that’s fine. She’ll be settled in at Margaret’s soon, and then she’ll get focused again. In the meantime, she drapes herself over the couch cushions and closes her eyes. Clad in a hoodie, he walks down the hallway with enough confidence to seem like he’s meant to be there, but not so much that he stands out. He isn’t great at this yet -- that’s Natasha’s field of expertise -- but it’s surprising how much people don’t pay attention to when their minds are on something else. He slips by unnoticed by nearly everyone, even though he’d been in that same hallway not long before. Even though his face is plastered on every television, all over the internet. He had really wandered into a mine field this time, and Steve has no idea which way is out. The space where he’d put the flash drive is empty. Someone had taken it, someone -- he sees Natasha’s face reflected in the glass of the vending machine. Chewing gum. Without a second thought, full of anger and grief, he shoves her into a room on the other side of the hallway. She looks surprised at his aggression, but she could have resisted harder if she’d felt she needed to. They argue -- him demanding answers and her not giving in, her making similar demands of him but he doesn’t have any answers to give. It isn’t until she says she knows who killed Fury did Steve’s grip on her arms relax, just slightly. That’s one thing he doesn’t know, one thing that’s been eating away at him. He knows how it happened, he knows that the sniper is as fast as he is, maybe even faster. He knows the killer has reflexes like his own, and is able to disappear into a city like a shadow. Natasha calls him the Winter Soldier and tells him the assassin’s story, tells him her story. She shows him her scar, and Steve’s blood cools from a rolling boil to a simmer, like a ghost has just passed between them. “Let’s find out what the ghost wants.” The mall’s a safe bet. Hiding in plain sight. Or so she says. Steve doesn’t believe her, but there they are. There’s an Apple Store where they can plug in the flash drive and access what’s inside, but they’ll have a limited amount of time before SHIELD finds them, so they work fast. She pretends to be his girlfriend, his fiancée, and he struggles to catch up. They tell an employee they’re researching honeymoon spots -- New Jersey, of all places -- and he buys it. Steve’s astounded, but he buys it. (There’s a split second where Steve thinks the employee is going to recognize him, but instead, he just says he has the same glasses. Steve’s relief is almost palpable.) They have to hurry out of the mall because SHIELD (HYDRA? Steve can’t tell anymore) is there. Natasha tells him to kiss her because displays of affection make people uncomfortable, and that isn’t the word he would have chosen (although it is that, too, it is uncomfortable). But her trick works, and they escape. He hotwires a car and he can’t believe they’ve gotten away. It’s enough to make him relax as they drive to Camp Lehigh. “What do you want me to be?” she asks him. “How about a friend?” When Sarah wakes, for the first time in a while, she wants to go back to sleep to see more. No - she knows where she could see more. Knowing isn’t the same thing as feeling. She wants to feel more, she wants to feel the budding friendship between these two people who’d worked alongside each other but never really trusted each other, not fully. She wants to feel his loneliness and his anguish and know it’s all worth something in the end, because he never really was alone, even when he thought he was. She groans and rubs at her eyes. Maybe she’ll get lucky, she thinks as she swings her legs over the edge of the couch, because when Steve looks at Natasha, he sees a camaraderie he thought he’d lost forever, and that’s something worth holding onto. |