Logs:Operation: T.I.M.E.L.E.S.S.

Operation: T.I.M.E.L.E.S.S.
Troublesome Issues: Must Elongated Lifespan Engender Stressful Solitude?
Dramatis Personae Natasha, Steve
In Absentia Clint, Fury	2024-08-21 "I can do this all day."
Location <NYC> S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ - Fitness Center - Times Square
The fitness center is an extensive complex adjoining medical, and all agents -- not just just those in Operations -- are encouraged to make use of it. There's an honestly over-stocked weight room, an entire room full of aerobic workout machines, not one but two pools -- one for exercise and the other for aquatherapy -- a few indoor ball courts, and several open studios for various kinds of martial arts. There's a pair of fairly new-minted agents just leaving this room, looking very sweaty and a little poleaxed -- from the looks of them, large and beefy, they're probably field agents. It's left Natasha alone in here, in the ring in the center of this boxing gym. She's in black sneakers, black bike shorts to just above her knees, and a red racerback sports bra, her hair tied back in a loose braid. Maybe she's just here to start her workout, because she looks neither sweaty nor winded, but at the moment she is just leaning up against the ropes and taking a long swig of water. Steve has just left the weight room in a skin-tight blue tank top, black shorts, and gray sneakers, with a red Montreal Canadiens cooling towel draped around his neck and a matching water bottle in hand. He's not sweaty, though he does have a bit of a glow, and he passes the two greenhorns in the hall with a casual friendly "hey" that earns slightly out-of-sync replies followed by almost simultaneous double-takes. He looks into the room they just vacated and gives a soft "ah" of understanding before slipping in himself. "Hey." It's a different "hey", in some subtle way that isn't easy to tease out. He ambles up to the edge of the deck and looks up at his sometimes-teammate. "How are you holding up?" Natasha glances over toward the door as Steve enters, her brows hiking. She takes another long gulp and lowers the water, elbow hooked over the top rope. "Better than the greenies, I think." She rests her hand and the water bottle against her midsection, glancing from Steve to the punching bags. "Were you here to --" Her head jerks towards the bags. Steve chuckles, shakes his head quick and tight. "Best they learn early, muscles aren't enough to win a fight. Though," he admits, "they sure do help." He looks over at the punching bags -- the row of reinforced ones have seen heavier use recently and several have been replaced. "Not usually if there's anyone else in here. It gets a little intense." He blushes and lowers his eyes. "Gosh, that sounds puffed-up. I just mean -- I can do that another time. Actually been meaning to pin you down for some training. For the Avengers, I mean." "I've been around a minute," Natasha replies lightly, "I can handle a little intense." Her mouth pulls up at one side, one finger tapping lightly against the side of her water bottle. "I do think you guys could do with some training." Steve smiles bright. "Exactly!" Taps his water bottle on the canvas lightly as if by way of emphasis. "You and Agent Barton train a lot. Together and separately, and I think we all need to do that. Not just to improve our own skills..." He gestures loosely at himself, though it seems more matter-of-fact than modest, and then tips his hand up at Natasha. "...but also to learn each other's strengths and weaknesses." "Oh, we drew up detailed profiles of your strengths and weaknesses before the team was assembled," Natasha reassures Steve. "If you ask nicely, Fury might even let you read them." Steve pinches the bridge of his nose, although the ironic quirk of his lips isn't completely unamused. "Knowing a thing doesn't mean you know what to do with it," he points out. "And even if you do, you'll only get so far if your teammates -- you know what." He steps up onto the platform, leaves his towel and water at the side, and ducks into the ring with Natasha. "I'm not great at explaining, and I've always learned best by doing, so..." He loosens his shoulders and lowers his weight and beckons playfully. "C'mon. Ladies first." The words have hardly left Steve's mouth when Natasha is pushing off of the ropes, one hand coming up to intercept his beckoning hand at the wrist. Her hand circles around to catch his in one smooth movement, jerking forward with a strength that is improbable at her considerably smaller size. She's pulling off of his bulk like it's leverage, vaulting herself up into the air to hook her legs around his neck and twisting down with his considerable momentum to bear him to the mat with a WHUMPH. Her water bottle is landing at the side of the ring where she'd let it fall, a moment later. She's rolling a shoulder as she gets back up, plucks her water back up. "I'm decent at improvising." Steve rolls away from Natasha and comes up in a crouch, none the worse for the takedown and possibly too startled for embarrassment. Studies her closer as he rises. Opens his mouth. Closes his mouth. "You're a --" He frowns, suddenly uncertain, looking down at his wrist as if he could estimate the force of her attack by examining where she grabbed him first. His voice drops low. "Are you a mutant?" Natasha crosses an arm over her chest and leans back against the ropes again, this time with a quiet snort. "You've met Fury, right?" Steve's mouth pulls to one side. "Yeah, but he doesn't have a monopoly on secrets. To his chagrin, probably." He shakes a finger sort of loosely in her direction. "You're a spy, too. But the kinds of fights we'll take on as the Avengers aren't the same kinds you do as an agent of SHIELD." He straightens up fully now and joins her at the ropes. "Even if you know everything about how I fight -- and I'd bet dollars to donuts you don't, whatever your profiles say -- I know hardly anything about yours. Now I can take your strength into account in a fight. And you can take that into account, too" "I'm no more a mutant than you are. Fury knows that." Natasha rolls her head over to the side to look at Steve when he joins her. "We have absolutely no idea what kind of fights we'll be talking on. We'd never have practiced for giant space bugs teaming up with a Norse god and we won't have training for what comes next, either. Just have to stay good enough at what we do do that it doesn't matter if we're blindsided." Steve's brows lift slightly. "I think that makes flexibility all the more important. The rest of us may not be superspies, but we'd still improvise better knowing what we have to work with." He tips his head back for a moment, as though seeking help from above. "Or at least avoid blindsiding each other like we did aboard Skithbal...Skithibl..." He sighs. "That bigass Alchemax ship." Then his expression softens. "Like you just did me. Sorry, I'll leave off. Won't go over your head, either." He plucks his own water bottle back up from where the force of his blindsiding tipped it over. Doesn't drink from it. Just looks down at it, tracing his fingertips over the raised NHL logo. "You any more human than I am?" "Who knows. Are mutants more or less human than Thor. Are we more or less human than them." Natasha is shrugging, kind of blase at this question. "For now, this country says we're human enough if our strength came from a test tube but not if it came from our parents. In twenty years maybe they'll decide the exact opposite way. Doesn't feel like there's a lot of point in philosophizing about it." "Can't deny I've done some navel-gazing about that," Steve admits, ruffling a hand through already tousled hair, "but I wasn't asking philosophically. For all I know you're an alien, or from another dimension, or a regular human who's just that strong, no X-gene, no...test tube." He's not studying her this time, just staring, but probably not the way men usually stare at her, with a kind of dawning recognition teetering on the edge of dread. "I didn't think they were ever able to replicate the process, and you're not military, at least not --" It's only a brief hesitation before he ventures. "Did you volunteer?" Volunteer actually prompts a low bark of laughter from Natasha, before, perhaps, she catches on that this is a serious question. She doesn't answer it, though, just echoing, "Replicate," small and amused. Though her accent sounds perfectly General American there's a clear if mild scoff in her, "-- Americans really love thinking you're exceptional somehow." She shakes her head, and sucks down another mouthful of water. "I don't know if your scientists ever did. I was like this loooong before you got all -- vite'd up." "I wasn't just talking about SSR." Steve's exasperation doesn't fully dislodge the uneasiness riding on that hanging question. "Dr. Erskine was German, and so was his first subject. We found HYDRA labs --" There's a small hitch in his voice that he pushes right past. "-- trying to reproduce it, too, and I'm sure the Soviets also got..." He's staring again. "You mean before SHIELD revived me? I didn't think any 'vita-rays' were involved -- you know that was just Howard Stark trying to patent some band of high-energy radiation, right? In 1942." He pales a little. "Oh no. You mean...before 1942." "Well before. I was going on my first missions while you were hawking communist papers in Red Hook." Natasha doesn't sound like she's bragging, just very matter-of-fact about this. "I did meet you, once, though. Way back then. War days. You boys were so helpful even when I got you all off course." She shakes her hair out of its braid, pulls it into two pigtails, and her stance is abruptly less confident, a little more shivery, a little wider-eyed; when she speaks again its in quiet but flawless rustic French. "{I just need to get back to my sister, please, help.}" "Missions?" Steve echoes. "What do you mean..." He trails off and watches uncomprehendingly as Natasha changes her hairdo. His eyes grow wider, but some of the bewilderment has gone. Or, been replaced with a different bewilderment. "{Colette? You've got to be shitting me.}" He isn't speaking the same bastardized French he learned from the Resistance; he's speaking a different bastardized French, half-way to Québécois and peppered with sacres very few people have heard him drop. "{What the fuck is going on? Did you get frozen in the goshdarned motherfucking arctic, too? Who the hell was sending you on missions and why did you --}" He shifts back a step and drops back into English, the sudden calm in his voice far more ominous than the flabbergasted profanity that preceded it. "-- get us off course?" Natasha shakes her hair back out, running her fingers through it so it's falling in a kind of sweaty mess of waves. "That munitions depot wasn't going to blow itself up. You guys had a rep." Steve relaxes again, almost instantly. "Oh...that was -- you knew it was there?" He's swinging back to exasperation again. "Why didn't you just tell us? We got all kinds of intel from refugees. And, God help us, we'd met our fair share of kids with the Resistance and the partisans, though..." He's clearly doing some math in his head. "...not that young. But -- you don't look more than a few years older than you did in '43. I wasn't really serious about the 'frozen in the arctic' thing, but did you go through some other sort of...suspended...animation?" This time, when Nat looks at Steve there's something almost like pity in her eyes. Almost, and it's gone again a moment later. "I heal fast." She's pushing away from the ropes again, and lightly bapping Steve on one large bicep before she pulls her hair up again into a quick ponytail. "C'mon. I got a few. We can go a round." The dread that's been dogging Steve's questions finally catches up fully, and his perplexity lapses into shock. Then back into perplexity again before he gets hold of himself. Takes a deep breath. Takes a long swig of water. Looks Natasha over again and follows her out into the center of the ring. "A round?" His smile doesn't look entirely forced. "I can do this all day."