The Prince And The Rose

06 - Swans And Pens

Steve hadn’t moved in almost fifteen minutes, mesmerized. He was supposed to be training, but he hadn’t even entered the gym yet. To be fair, he had a good reason.

Natasha was dancing.

In her black leggings and blue shirt, with the strains of a rippling symphony playing, she looked happy. Peaceful. Steve had almost never seen her so relaxed, or so beautiful, graceful and sleek and perfect. He knew he should probably stop watching, but he didn’t want to.

He stood in place for another five minutes before reprimanding himself severely and going back to his suite. She was going to be the death of him, almost certainly.

Still, there were worse ways to go.

He had an old-looking chest in his suite where he kept his art supplies (of which he had a staggering amount). Oil and chalk pastels, charcoal, pencils, pens, markers, colored pencils, clay, paintbrushes, paint, ink. He dug through them, retrieving his sketchbook from the bottom of the chest, and selecting a few pencils, a thin black pen, and his watercolors, then retreated into his room.

Natasha was always highly amused by the way he would sit on his bed, blankets, sheets and pillows piled around him like a small fortress, to read or sketch or watch movies. She told him it made him look like a little boy. It made him feel warm and comfortable, though, so he didn’t mind her laughing.

Laying out his supplies within reach (with his paint and water on the bedside table), he started sketching Natasha. He’d drawn her a few times before, usually asleep or fighting, but he wanted this to be different. Better.

The first few sketches he tried just weren’t right. Too stiff, too still. He stopped trying to draw accurately, letting his hand move almost on its own, remembering the smoothness of her movements. When he finished the line drawing, he opened his watercolors and started splashing color onto the paper, red for her hair, bleeding outside the lines, red for her lips, green for her eyes. Then bright blue and rich green for her clothes. They were supposed to be just pants and a shirt, but eventually he’d painted almost the whole page, leaving just her face without color. He added splotches of other colors, giving her a bit of a dress, blacks and purples and darker blues. He didn’t even notice Nat walking into his room.

He finally looked up, just as he was adding hints of yellow to painting-Natasha’s hair, when she sat down on his bed. They had keys to each other’s rooms, so Natasha had a tendency to walk in at any given hour to say hello.

“That’s pretty.”

Steve smiled sheepishly and tried to scoot the sketchbook out of sight, since he couldn’t close it. “Thanks.”

“You were watching me, then?” Nat slid over closer to him and stole his drawing, being careful not to smudge the paint.

Steve cleared his throat. “Well, yeah. I was going to exercise, and you were in there, so I didn’t go in…” He coughed, awkwardly, realizing how that probably came across. If he had just turned straight around and left, he wouldn’t be painting her.

Nat’s eyes glinted, and she moved even closer to him, getting in his personal space and smirking. “That’s real sweet of you, Rogers.”

Steve rolled his eyes, cleared his throat. Shrugged. “I know. When did you learn to dance?”

“It was part of my training,” she explained. “To make us strong, disciplined, graceful. The flexibility certainly didn’t hurt, either. I was one of the girls who actually loved it.” She closed her eyes. “I loved the dancing and the music and the stage… But then I grew up. And I didn’t dance again, except as a cover, for years.” She smiled a little, remembering. “The vision Wanda gave me brought all that back. And it wasn’t a good memory, but I guess I just wanted to have the dancing again. So I started practicing and reminding myself of all the steps. That’s what I was doing, just now. Trying to remember Swan Lake.”

Steve smiled and put away his art supplies, retrieving his sketchbook from her. “How did it go?”

“Well…” Natasha got up, stretching briefly. “How about I show you?”

Vaguely, Steve thought that he was most definitely not going to survive this. However, he didn’t say that. “Sounds good.”

At first, Steve felt uncomfortable, just sitting there on his bed while Natasha took out her StarkPhone and started up her music. But, inevitably, he got caught up watching her dance. The whole situation was a little strange, maybe, but it felt right. Nat seemed to have forgotten that he was there, her eyes closed as she moved. Steve was almost sure that she was making up the dance as she went along, because everything about what she was doing was so her.

He reached for his sketchbook and pen, tearing out the still-wet painting from earlier so he had a fresh page to work on. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to do, but he started drawing her, almost without looking down at the page, trying once again to capture her movements on paper.

She looked so happy. She was never this happy, not even with him. He swallowed back a lump in his throat. She was letting him see this, something important to her. On an impulse, he paused his drawing to climb out of the bed, going over to her. She stopped dancing for a moment, standing on relevẻ, meeting his eyes.

“Thank you,” he said, because that was all he could think to say. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for loving me.

She smiled and relaxed, coming back to the ground. “Dance with me?” she asked, and Steve pulled her close, his hands on her waist. They swayed back and forth to Natasha’s music, the floor creaking lightly under their bare feet.

Steve’s sketchbook stayed open, abandoned on the bed. A dozen drawings of Natasha twirled across the page, little pieces of her dance frozen in time. Steve’s black artist’s pen trembled on the edge of the book where he’d dropped it, threatening to fall.

But it never did.