"Nat, are you making a snowflake or performing surgery?"

Natasha doesn't answer immediately. She's looking very intently at her folded-up piece of paper, her tongue sticking out of her mouth ever so slightly, exacto knife in her hand as she carefully cuts out small pieces of it at a time.

It's only when she finishes making her cut that she looks over at him, with the hint of a smirk on her lips. "You can't rush perfection, Cap."

"I wasn't aware that 'perfection' was the goal here." Their first few paper snowflakes sure as hell weren't perfect, but she's clearly upped the stakes since then.

"Oh, Steve." She reaches across the table to put a hand on his shoulder, playfully condescending with the movement, and says, "Perfection is always the goal."

Steve rolls his eyes lightheartedly and shrugs her hand off. "Yeah, yeah." She can have her perfect snowflakes if she wants. He's just trying to make some that don't completely suck. "What are you even trying to do?"

"You'll see," she says with a smirk. There's a pause, and then she adds, a little less smugly, "I hope."

Steve huffs a laugh. "I'm cautiously intrigued," he says.

"And I'm cautiously optimistic," she replies.

Steve shakes his head to himself. He tries to go back to his own snowflake, but he finds himself looking back at Natasha every few seconds. She's concentrating so hard on this. He can't imagine what it is that she's trying to do that takes this much effort. They're making paper snowflakes. Six-year-olds can do this. Why did she have to pull out an exacto knife for it?

Natasha's head snaps up, and Steve doesn't understand why until she starts staring at the TV. "I love this song!"

Steve has, in all honesty, not been paying any attention whatsoever to the TV, so he has no idea what's happening in the movie right now. There's some sort of Jack Frost-looking guy on the screen, singing some song about ice and snow and cold temperatures. It's not a bad song by any means, but, he'll be honest, it doesn't mean much to him without the context of the movie.

He looks over at Natasha, who's bouncing around in her chair to the beat with a childlike grin on her face. When she notices him looking, she punches him playfully on the shoulder and begins to sing along. "Friends call me Snow Miser. Whatever I touch..." She hits the table to the beat like she's playing the drums. "Turns to snow in my clutch!"

Steve can't help but laugh at the ridiculousness of this – both the song and her impromptu performance. It only gets better with Snow Miser's little baby Snow Miser guys dance out onto the screen with their own part of the song, and she sings along in a comical falsetto.

"This might be the best Christmas movie ever made," Natasha tells him, "for this reason alone."

"Because of the song?" Steve repeats in skeptical amusement.

"You mean the best Christmas song the world has ever known?" She nods. "Exactly."

Personally, Steve does not see the appeal of this song, at least to the point of dubbing it the best Christmas song the world has ever known. But he enjoyed it (and enjoyed watching her enjoy it) enough that he's not going to try to refute that.

"His brother sings a reprise of it later in the movie," Natasha says, "but it's not as good."

Steve huffs a laugh. "You mean the Snow Miser – his name is Snow Miser, right?" That wasn't just a joke for the song? His name is, in fact, Snow Miser?

"Steve, did you listen to the song at all?" she asks with joking exasperation.

"He called himself, like, seven different names!"

"Yeah, but he said his friends call him Snow Miser, and we are his friends!"

Steve throws his hands up playfully. "Okay, so you're saying that our 'friend' Snow Miser has a brother?" He snorts and jokes, "What's his name, Heat Miser?"

"That is exactly what his name is," Natasha says.

Steve stares at her.

She just smiles.

He stares at her some more.

Finally, he says, "I can't tell if you're joking or not."

"I am being dead serious," Natasha says. "It's Snow Miser and Heat Miser. They're step-brothers who kind of hate each other and they're always trying to piss each other off. It's great. It's my favorite part of the movie."

"Sounds like another pair of brothers that we know," Steve quips.

Natasha laughs at that (and he's thrilled, because he's kind of mocking Loki and she doesn't tend to find that funny). "I can see it," she says. "I can see the resemblance."

She props her head up on her hand to watch the rest of the Snow Miser scene, and while Steve doesn't really know anything that's happened in this movie beyond Santa Claus taking a year off because he's sick and doesn't think anyone will care anyway, he decides to sit back and watch it, too. If this is a sign that Natasha's moving on from making paper snowflakes, he's going to do the same.

But then the scene ends, and she's once again hard at work on her snowflake. He's glad, because while he doesn't know much about making paper snowflakes, he does know marginally more about it than he does about this movie.

"How much more do you think you have on that one?" Steve asks her. She's been working on it for quite a while.

"Almost done," Natasha says. "Almost..."

Steve is a bit skeptical, but he'll let time tell. He goes back to his own snowflake, and, after a few more cuts that he makes with zero precision and very little thought, he decides that he's finished it. He opens it up, which is always the scary part, and prays to whatever god may be in charge of paper snowflakes that this one turns out marginally better than his first few.

And it does! He's learned from his previous snowflakes, and he's begun cutting out more from the paper so it doesn't quite literally come away as a big square with slightly rounded corners and a few holes in the middle. This one actually kind of looks like a snowflake now!

"Damn, that's a good one," Natasha remarks.

Steve beams like a child whose teacher just said they were impressed. "I think I'm finally figuring it out," he boasts. "Put me in a room with a bunch of six-year-olds and I will not have the worst snowflake of the bunch."

"You might even be in the upper fifty percent," Natasha quips.

"I don't know if I'd go that far," Steve says.

Natasha chuckles. "Well, at least you're honest."

Steve holds his snowflake up in front of his face, content. "I think I'll just sit here and admire my snowflake until you finish yours and show me up."

"You're not going to get very long to admire it," Natasha warns him.

"Good," Steve says, "because the suspense is killing me."

So Natasha goes back to work, and though Steve had said that he was going to admire his own snowflake until she was done, he puts it down on the table with his other ones and watches her instead.

He really does enjoy it. It's more entertaining than making his own snowflakes. It's more entertaining than this movie they're playing. It's a sort of entertainment he couldn't get any other way. There's just something about her that fascinates him. It has nothing to do with the snowflake itself; it's her focus, her determination. It's the same sort of determination she has when she fights, or when she's playing board games. It's just so characteristically her.

Until finally, she puts her exacto knife down and looks up at him. "Are you ready?" she asks, kind of dramatically, like some TV narrator.

"Absolutely," Steve answers without hesitation.

"Are you sure?" Natasha asks. "It's going to put your snowflake to shame."

"That really doesn't take much, now, does it?" Steve quips.

Natasha cracks a smile. "No, not really," she agrees. "Okay, moment of truth. Did this work?" Quieter, almost under her breath, she adds, "I really hope it worked."

She picks her snowflake up and begins to unfold it. She's slow with it, careful not to rip any of the thin lines as she pulls the layers apart. Until finally, finally, it's open, and he gets his first true look at the piece of beauty that she's been working on.

In the middle of her folded up piece, in between the folded edges, she used her exacto knife to cut out her Black Widow logo, duplicated onto every facet of the snowflake. And then, across the folds, with much smaller, more fragile lines, she cut out a rendition of the Captain America shield. The star is cut out, and the circle around it remains. The next circle is gone, though two thin strips connect it to the next circle, and then another circle is cut out after that much the same way. No wonder it took her so damn long. This is ridiculously intricate.

Natasha looks at him expectantly. "So? What do we think?"

Steve scoffs and shakes his head in disbelief. "Nat, this is... How did you do that?"

"With a lot of swearing under my breath," she replies. "But I think it was worth it."

"I definitely think it was worth it," Steve says. "The suspense was worth it, I can tell you that."

Natasha grins. "Good, because this was not easy," she says. "But now we have a Captain Widow snowflake."

Steve huffs a laugh. "Captain Widow?"

"It's our team name," Natasha says. "Because what team is complete without a team name?"

"I think that's what 'the Avengers' is for, Nat," Steve reminds her.

"Okay, but what about our team?" she asks. "Are we going to pretend that you and me don't spend enough time together to call ourselves a team? Are you going to pretend that we don't deserve our own team name?" She folds her arms across her chest and cocks an eyebrow.

Steve tries to ignore the heat that sneaks up into his cheeks at that. He knows that she's just playing around. He knows that this is just a lighthearted joke. But the fact that she'd even think of it, that she sees that special bond they have just as much as he does, has him feeling embarrassingly giddy. This is his best friend, and together, they're a team. He couldn't be happier about that if he tried.

"Yeah," he says finally. "Yeah, we do deserve a team name."

"Good," Natasha says. "Then it's settled. We're Captain Widow."

Steve nods in agreement. "Captain Widow." That's them, and he couldn't be happier about it.