Heat Wave ➣Romanogers

Seventeen

Something happened during the night.  At least, it seemed like that, because when Natasha awoke and they headed off together the next morning, Steve immediately noticed she seemed…different.  It was extremely subtle, and maybe he didn’t know her well enough to actually put any stock in what he saw, but she wasn’t as stiff around him.  Not as guarded.  Not as cold.  It was hardly anything, but the way she looked at him was less like a glare and more open.  Her words weren’t as clipped or condescending.  Her posture wasn’t as rigid and defensive.  Despite the fact that their situation was only marginally better than it had been the day before, she was more optimistic.  Calmer and more accepting.  It was as if she’d gone to sleep as the icy, unconquerable, immovable Black Widow and woken up as something not quite so forbidding.

Steve didn’t know what had affected the change, but he was incredibly glad for it.  Dealing with her when she’d been so prickly and difficult had been unpleasant enough, their current situation notwithstanding.  He could understand her reluctance to trust him.  He knew that bonds forged between teammates and partners could be deep, powerful, and difficult to break and cast aside.  If anyone had asked him to switch units or bust up the Commandos during the war, he would have been just as resistant as Natasha was.  And if someone had suggested Bucky and he be separated…  He couldn’t imagine how that would have gone, being torn from his best friend, his brother, when they’d needed each other the most.  He couldn’t picture what he would have said or done.  He liked to think he would’ve taken it in stride, given his new circumstances a chance, but he couldn’t be sure.  The shock of losing Bucky when he had had been devastating enough.

And he didn’t like to judge.  Natasha was right; he didn’t know her, didn’t know the extent of the relationship she had with Barton.  It wasn’t his place to assume or guess.  It definitely wasn’t his place to ask.  But if she felt something for Barton, anything at all, that certainly complicated the prospect of being assigned a new partner.  Regardless, she was more comfortable with this, with him.  And any inclination he’d had to be angry with her for the way she’d treated him was fading rapidly in the light of this new day and her new attitude.

They headed off to make another attempt at breaching the interior of the rainforest in better spirits, quiet but not tense.  Steve led the way, carrying their bag full of pilfered supplies.  They’d walked quite a few miles south along the beach yesterday evening before finding that yacht, and here the jungle wasn’t quite as thick.  That was just as well, because even though these clothes were infinitely cooler than his uniform, his shins and calves were rapidly getting torn from pushing through the brush.  That was annoying but tolerable.  And the heat was rapidly climbing and climbing anew, a damp, stifling misery the intensity of which he’d never really experienced before.  It didn’t take long for the cotton of the godawful ugly shirt he was wearing to become plastered to his skin with sweat.  Again, it was uncomfortable, but he could deal with that, too.

His biggest concern was the simple fact they still had no food, and he was getting pretty hungry.  Really hungry.  It wasn’t so bad at the moment that it was a serious issue, but he knew from experience it would very rapidly become one.  The super soldier serum had increased his metabolism four fold, and that meant he needed to eat far more than an average man.  A ridiculous amount more than an average man, in fact.  The army had been rather efficient at feeding him a lot and feeding him often, but there’d been a few times when he’d been too far from base or too involved in a mission to eat regularly.  He and the Commandos once had found out the hard way what happened when Captain America ran out of reserves, to put it mildly.  He’d almost died to make that little discovery, one autumn night not long after he’d rescued the 107th in Italy.  Their mission had taken them far into the mountains and valleys of northern Italy, and an air raid had pinned them in a gorge.  They’d run through their supplies in short order, having not anticipated this unfortunate turn of events.  He’d gone about three days without eating before succumbing to starvation.  The hunger had started out easy to ignore, not much of an impediment.  Around the end of the second day, though, it had very quickly gone from a low-level, background bother to a full-blown, crippling impediment.  He didn’t remember the end of the mission very well.  He’d been too weak to stay conscious, delirious and literally wasting away as his body turned to metabolizing his muscle mass to keep him alive.  He had vague recollections of passing out in Bucky’s arms, Bucky teary-eyed and desperately begging him to hang out, and then waking up at SSR’s base in London hooked to an IV of nutrients and a feeding tube with Bucky still right there, just as teary-eyed and angrily telling him he was a goddamned idiot for letting the army inject him with a serum that killed him if he didn’t eat like a horse.