Archive of Our Own

 part one: stephanie grace rogers

Age 4.

When Steph looks back on it, her first memory- her first clear one, anyway, one that isn’t a hazy snapshot in her mind- is of clutching the table legs and huddling against the kitchen wall.

She flinches when the door slams, the slice of wind from it making her shiver, but her mother stands perfectly still, shoulders hunched, under the naked bulb hanging over her head.

Steph isn’t sure if it’s her or her mother who sobs- it’s violent; a tear-wracked gasp that rattles the walls, but either way, it makes her mother turn around. It doesn’t take long to identify the shuddering lump under the table as her daughter, and Sarah Rogers bends down, her smile weak but not wobbling in the slightest.

“Shhh,” she soothes, as her daughter makes half-formed cries into her collarbone. They’re warm and wet, making her shirt soggy. “It’s okay,” she tells her. “It’s fine, he’s gone,” she promises, and she rocks Steph back and forth, back and forth, until the shuddering stops.

She is careful to angle her face away from Steph’s back, so that the blood from her nose doesn’t drip onto it. Instead, it drips down her chin and onto the floor. With the hand not holding Steph, she takes an already-wet teatowel from the oven rack and swabs her face with it, pinching her nose for a few seconds before balling it back onto the oven counter. She’ll wash it later, but now she has a daughter to comfort; a daughter with big blue eyes and thick blonde hair, just like her.

“Mama,” Steph says into her t-shirt, and despite Sarah’s best efforts, when she draws back, Steph’s right cheek is smeared with Sarah’s blood. It sends a haze of guilt-anger-regret-sorrow-anger-anger-anger through Sarah, who wipes it off with the pad of her thumb, and says, Yes?

Steph blinks up at her, stubborn and young, and Sarah aches for her. Oh, Stephanie, she finds herself thinking. How the world will reveal itself in all its ugly glory to a girl like you. To girls like us.

Her daughter, beautiful and snivelling, sniffs loudly. She has another cold, the second one this winter, and it’s taking its toll. “Why didn’t you,” she says, and has to stop for a coughing fit. Sarah holds her as it shakes her tiny body, her chin resting on the top of her head.

“Why didn’t you stand down,” Steph croaks finally, and Sarah is stuck between bursting into either tears or laughter.

She does neither, and instead takes her daughter’s chin between both her hands, mostly blood-free, and tilts her small face back so their eyes meet. “Stephanie,” she says, and doesn’t let her voice shake. “I want you to listen to me.”

She nods. Of course she does. All four year olds nod at their mothers when there is blood on the floor.

“No matter who tries to step on us,” Sarah tells her, exactly how her big sister had told her after she had ran home crying with a ripped dress and sodden knees, “No matter who looks down on us or tries to tell us we’re not strong enough, we prove them wrong, and we stand our ground. We stand up.” There’s a lump in her throat. She speaks over it. “You hear me, Stephanie?”

Her daughter, her beautiful, sickly daughter who the doctors say won’t make it past her teens, looks up at her with liquid eyes and trusts her completely. Sarah is lost in this for a moment, hears herself say, “We always stand up,” feeling the stamp of it on her tongue, how it will fall like lead onto her daughter’s ears. “Okay?”

She listens to the quiet okay, and it’s not much, but Sarah Rogers takes it as a gleaming triumph in a sea of failures: her daughter will stand up. And god knows there will be something to stand up against.

“Good girl,” She tells her. Kisses the crown of her forehead. Strokes her long fingers through her hair. Says, “There’s my Stephanie. There’s my hero.”

Sarah Rogers doesn’t know that this speech will resonate somewhere deep inside her daughter, although she hopes. She hopes reverently, she hopes harder than she hopes for anything else, she hopes like goddamn hell that she understands how important this is, because Sarah knows what her daughter is going to grow up into, what every girl grows up into, and has to grow past.

So she doesn’t know, but she hopes, and years later, Stephanie can still remember it- the slow, steady stroke of her mother’s fingers against her scalp, her voice falling like balm: we always stand up. We always stand up.

Okay?

---

Age 7.

Her mother tells her that it’s fine, she can take the garbage out herself; she has a while before she has to get to the hospital for her shift, but Steph insists.

The night air pinches, making Steph shiver as she hauls the trash bag along behind her- she had tried to lift it over her shoulder, but the attempt had nearly bent her in half. So she lugs it down the steps in increments until she reaches the trash can, and she’s successfully dumped it in and is pushing the lid back on when she hears the shouting.

It’s muffled and not very far away, the next alley, maybe, and Steph’s fingers clench automatically. For a second her mind races towards muggers, thieves, but after a few seconds she can hear that whoever is yelling can’t be much older than she is.

She strains. There are more voices, now, some of them laughing, others jeering.

Steph should go inside, she knows. She should go inside and tell mama, or, failing that, call the cops on them. Not that that would help: they’ll dismiss it as boys being boys, some good ol’ rough and tumble, well-natured teasing that doesn’t amount to anything worth punishing.

The yelling increases, and again, there’s the fleeting thought of I should go back inside, before Steph is running straight towards where the noise is coming from.

It doesn’t take long, even if she has to pace herself due to her asthma threatening to act up, and soon enough she’s coming across a familiar sight: a group of boys surrounding another boy, sinking their boots repeatedly into his stomach.

Steph slows, coming to a stop a few meters away from the ring of boys. “Hey.” She clears her throat. Her most recent cold has made her voice half its usual volume. “HEY.”

They turn, and falter when they see who’s interrupting. One of the boys on the fringe of the group, who seems less than happy about how things are going, says, “Uh, what do you want?”

Steph braces her feet apart. “You wanna leave him alone? What’d he ever do to you?” She nods towards the boy on the ground, who is cupping both hands around a bleeding nose and staring up at her, though she can’t see his expression through his hands.

“Mouthed off at us, he did,” another boy says, frowning. “Didn’t he, Charlie?”

“That he did,” Charlie says, nodding, and Steph tries not to stare at the side of his face, which is marred by a dark scar. He looks about ten. “So shove off, girlie, this is none of your business.”

Steph locks her jaw. “No. Leave him alone.”

Charlie’s laugh is incredulous, and the look on his face is even more so. This gets echoed by everyone else in the group, though Charlie’s laughter is the loudest. “What’re you gonna do?”

“I’ll fight you.”

This time, the laughter is uncertain, almost feeble. Glances are traded; to and from Charlie and the others. For some reason, Steph feels a tiny thrill at that: she’s been discovering, however slowly, that for the right reason, she likes to make people nervous. Especially the kind of people who beat on other kids.

“You’ll fight us,” Charlie repeats. “Uh-huh. So it’s you against all six of us, is that it?”

Steph says, “Yeah,” and swallows the fear congealing in her throat. It’s still there, but smothering it is an overlayer of something she distantly recognizes, but can’t identify. Whatever it is, she likes it. She likes it enough that for a second, she’s not at all afraid of whatever is going to happen next.

But then that’s retreating, and the fear is back. Through it, her fists come up. “Who’s first,” she says, sounding bolder than she feels, keeping her voice stable by sheer power of will.

Again, laughter, but flimsier than ever. Steph watches the gazes dart from face to face, kind of helplessly, like, what the hell do we do now.

Finally, Charlie, whose smile is more genuine than the rest of his group but still ticking at the edges, sighs loudly. “Fine. She wants a fight?” He’s obviously at least half faking it, but still, he smiles like a shark, and it sends an involuntary shiver through Steph’s shoulders. “I’ll give her one.”

Steph’s toes curl into tiny little fists in her shoes. She imagines them biting through the material and scraping the concrete.

“I’d like to see you try.”

No-one laughs as Charlie sheds his jacket and Steph does the same, even though the first touch of cold air on Steph makes her worried about how long she’ll be stuck in bed after this, nevermind if she gets hurt or not. Charlie starts to circle, his thumb shoving to wipe his nose before coming back into a fist. Steph mimics him.

Seconds pass, and it becomes clear that Charlie isn’t going to go through with this even if his peers are watching, and Steph is going crazy with adrenaline as it floods through her, making her shake as she tries to hold fast.

Charlie is looking less certain by the second, his throat working. A minute of fruitless circling passes before he opens his mouth, presumably to call the whole thing off. He gets halfway through a nervous laugh and “She’s not worth it anyway,” before Steph lunges.

She’s never thrown a punch before. It impacts on Charlie’s jaw, hardly doing any damage except for making him stumble slightly, but he keeps walking back, hand covering where Steph had hit him, his eyes blown wide. Everyone is in mild states of frozen around him.

Steph’s breathing is erratic in her chest; her fist throbbing horribly, and it throbs hard enough so she nearly cries out when she punches him again, hard, on the cheek. She feels the hard steel of his cheekbone against her knuckles. It hurts, and Steph presses her lips together so she doesn’t make a noise, and this time, Charlie reels back to fall on his ass.

“I,” Charlie says. He chokes it. He shakes his head. He swallows again. Steph notes, with a burst of something like pride, that there’s a small speck of blood at the corner of his mouth.

A boy moves to help him up, and, sort of numbly, Charlie lets him. He’s blinking a lot. Laughs again, tries to sneer, fails. Tosses it over his shoulder at the boy who is now standing up: “Looks like your knight in shining armour came to rescue you after all, Barnes.”

Charlie leaves with his group in tow, and Steph expects the boy who is pinching his bleeding nose to start heading in the opposite direction, but instead he continues to stand there. Steph recognizes him from around the neighbourhood: all the adults like him, he has that air about him, the ability to win them over without trying. She remembers one time last year he had kicked a soccer ball through a window; remembers his apologies that seemed more sincere than anything Steph had heard before in her life.

What she can’t remember, however, is his name. ‘Barnes’ isn’t it; so Steph thinks it must be his surname.

“Thanks,” he says finally, his face muddy and bloody, his voice partly muffled by the blood blocking his nose. All in all, it sounds like he has a bad headcold. He grins, pure warmth in contrast to Charlie’s shark-smile. “I mean, gimmie another minute and I could’ve handled it, but thanks anyway.”

Steph opens her mouth before realizing he actually means it. It catches her off guard, so she stands there with her mouth open for a while. “You’re welcome,” she says faintly. She flexes her fingers, and feels a pang of guilt. They can’t afford the electricity bill; god forbid if she sprained anything.

“You’re that Rogers girl, right?”

“Yeah,” Steph says. “You’re… Barnes?”

“My friends call me Bucky,” he says, and extends a hand.

Steph takes it and then quickly regrets it, hissing and dropping it back down.

Bucky makes a noise in the back of his throat. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Steph says. Her left hand cradles her right, making sure not to squeeze. She attempts a smile. “I’m fine,” she repeats.

Bucky laughs. It holds none of the uncertainty of the other boys from before. Its steady, unwavering. He claps her on the back, which makes Steph flinch at first before she relaxes into it; there’s nothing in there that isn’t purely platonic.

It’s…

Steph doesn’t even know. She’s not good at boys. Until just now, they’ve been this mystical, out-of-reach things that pinch her back and tease her in the playground and will apparently become irresistible after she hits fourteen.

“Again, thanks for protecting my honour, or something,” Bucky says, still grinning that wonderful grin, “but I gotta say, that was pathetic.”

Not offensive, Steph reminds herself. He’s just being nice. “I’ve never punched anyone before,” she admits.

“Yeah, I guessed.” Bucky chuckles, a hand coming to sift through his clumped hair. He’s nearly as skinny as she is; thin limbs and brown, starving eyes. “Next time you punch someone, keep your thumb outside your fist. Like this.”

He shows her, and Steph copies it.

“Nice,” Bucky says. “We’ll make a regular fighter out of you yet.”

Steph shoves him, but lightly.

---

Age 22.

It’s been a long day, a long several days, a long week and a long year, all of which Steph feels she hasn’t slept a single second in. Her hands work automatically from hours and hours of previous work, of what must add up to weeks of scrubbing bedpans, of re-doing bandages, of offering comforting words that she’s come to understand less and less.

She’s at a man’s bedside, and he keeps trying to speak. She’s been telling him for a while now that he shouldn’t, that it’ll damage what’s rest of his vocal chords, and god, she’s so tired, she’s so dog tired she’s falling over where she stands.

The nurse outfit itches, pulls at her neck when she twists her head. The cap is too tight. Her hands stutter where they’re wrapping the bandage around the man’s shoulder.

Every time they bring another man into the infirmary, Steph checks their faces. It’s never Bucky.

Steph can’t decide whether that’s good or bad.

She continues the bandages on the man that isn’t Bucky, and when the commotion starts, she makes herself stay awake out of habit.

A flood of men, all moaning or screaming or eerily still and silent, and Steph watches each face and none of them are him, and she keeps working. She tugs at the bandages; asks if they’re too tight.

“No, no, they’re fine,” the man says. Slurs. His smile is lopsided due to the left side of his face being in skin grafts. “Thanks. Thank you.”

“No problem,” Steph says, and moves on.

She moves on, and continues moving, and then three breaks and two hours of sleep later, two men enter- one beefy with a big nose, the other older and in a white coat, both looking like they don’t want to be here. But then there’s a woman, and she’s in army uniform, her brown hair falling in lovely curls at either side of her face, her lipstick bright and branding.

She’s gorgeous. She’s shouting. Steph watches a coil of hair fall in front of her face. The woman pushes it out, her voice lowering.

The beefy man talks over her, says that yes, he agrees, but-

From her right, Steph hears a hissed, “Nurse Rogers,” said in the tone that means it’s not the first time she’s said it.

“What,” Steph says. Then, “Oh,” and she means to move for the next bed, bandages in hand, but she’s still turning to watch, to listen.

Her eyes are as bright as her lipstick. They flash like the imagined gunfire that Steph dreams about as she says, tone clipped, “Respectfully, Colonel, he’s a good soldier, but we don’t want some moron who’s going to jump the gun and get everyone in his platoon killed.”

In front of her, the bigger man’s jaw works. “Believe me, Carter, I get where you’re coming from-”

“Only half of the men we sent out have come back, and most of them are in pieces-”

“Okay, I’m with you on this, but we have to face facts-”

“We can’t have him leading our men, he completely dismissed them when they told him they should approach from the left side-”

Steph says, “No, he was right about going in from the other side, the escape was where he went wrong.”

Silence.

Steph finds herself suddenly under the hard gaze of the three of them, and at this point she’s so tired she can’t remember why this isn’t a good idea. The bandages in her hand are weighing her down, so she places them, almost as an afterthought, on the bed next to her. “I’ve talked to the men who were in that battle. To the man who lead them there. He did everything right up until they had to get an out.”

Three faces on her, all with different expressions, none of them good, but none of them strictly bad, either. After a few seconds, the man in the white coat opens his mouth.

Before he can say anything, though, the woman- Carter, apparently- says, “And where did he go wrong, Nurse…?”

“Rogers. Stephanie Rogers.” She clears her throat. “He followed the exact instructions he was given. He didn’t take the new circumstances to heart and went with the plan without any modifications. To my understanding, when you’re under that kind of pressure, you need to make the decisions that no other person is going to, and it’ll either blow up in your face or save everyone. He didn’t make either decision. He stuck with what you fellas told him, didn’t risk anything, and that’s what got him and his men caught in the crossfire.”

It crosses Steph’s mind that she probably ought to call someone ‘Sir’ right about now, but it seems too late for that. They’re still staring.

“Huh,” The Colonel says.

She might just be delirious, but Steph thinks it’s the good kind of ‘huh.’

Later, the man with the white coat- Eriskine, he introduces himself- tells her that they might have something for her, some way to help that doesn’t involve wrapping bandages. Steph agrees, and half an hour later, she’s staring at the stamp bleeding through the paper that states her acceptance to the army.

Eriskine asks her how it feels to be a soldier, and when Steph finds her tongue, she says she hopes she can help out as much as she possibly can.

When Peggy and Eriskine both start yelling for them to turn it off, Steph nearly agrees with them. Nearly screams, yes, god, turn it off, because it’s burning through her skin, through to her bones, boiling her blood. She thinks about doing it, about saying Yes, because it’d be easy, it’d be what everyone came here expecting.

Eriskine would be kind about it, she knows. Peggy most likely wouldn’t look down at her for it, would be there with something resembling a comforting hand, and no-one expected her to be able to do this anyway-

 “NO,” she hears someone yelling, and realizes it’s her as the sound ends. Her throat scrapes from it, but the pain is nothing compared to her bones shifting, solidifying; her skin folding over them. “LET ME DO THIS. I CAN DO THIS.”

For a moment, she expects the light to die anyway, for the machine to stop and for the air to swarm her overheated skin as she gasps it in. But it doesn’t, and the light continues, getting impossibly brighter, and it burns like nothing Steph’s ever imagined, and Steph bites through her own lip stopping herself from making more noise.

I can do this, she tells herself, and it’s muddled inside her head with her mother’s voice, whispering in her ear before pressing a kiss to it, a kiss that she can’t feel, because even her ears are burning from the inside-out:

There’s my Stephanie.

The light intensifies. It eats her whole. It floods her, beating at her insides.

There’s my hero.

And then, something that she thought was gone, just before at the moment the pain starts to fade all at once, just before and the light dims and the doors click open, just before the startled hands helping her out and the gunshots and Eriskine’s blood pressing against Steph’s suddenly oversized hand-

We always stand up. Okay?

Okay, Steph thinks, and her eyes slit open through the smoke, and the doors click to give way to the rest of the room.

She’s been used to it as long as she can remember: the looks with eyebrows raised. The scoffs. The whispers when they think she’s out of range. If anything, it’s only gotten worse since she got injected with the serum. Now, they just make sure she’s well and truly out of earshot, in fear of suffering the same fate as anyone who mouths off to Agent Carter.

They put on shows, and Steph fiddles with the miniskirt and tries not to feel like an absolute idiot as she punches the lights out of two hundred fake Hitlers in a row, one in every town they go through.

Miss America, they call her, and Steph doesn’t hate it, but it doesn’t sit right, either.

---

Age 23.

When she sees him, her heart starts beating a thick tattoo against her costume. Her hand tightens around her gun, almost wanting there to be someone there, anyone there, so she can reel around and fill them with bullets, because Bucky is sloughed with sweat, his hair slicked back with blood, his wrists a lazy red from where he’s been struggling against the cuffs.

But there’s no-one, and she continues to white-knuckle the gun before slinging the strap around so it’s against her back.

Bucky’s eyes are unfocused and glazing over, not zoning in on Steph even as she gets close enough to hear him mumbling. It’s mostly incoherent, but she thinks she catches her name in there a few times.

“Bucky,” she hisses. She shakes his shoulders. “Bucky!” She pats his cheek once, twice, and on the third it turns into a slap.

The mumbling bleeds into a groan. He blinks, and Steph watches in relief as, finally, he looks at her, instead of looking through her. Groggily, he blinks again. And again. His eyebrows crease. He wets his lips, and then freezes halfway. Steph almost barks out a laugh at the recognition sparking.

When Bucky speaks, it sounds like that one morning where they had both woken up severely hungover, wearing each other’s underwear. “Oh, god,” he rasps. “’M hallucinating. Please say this is a hallucination, because if it isn’t, then my pal Steph is huge moron, or has a twin sister, or, or-”

Steph eases him up out of the chair. The relief is threatening to swamp her, filtering through her body, but she forces it down: they’re not out of the woods yet. “Bucky, we have to get out of here. Can you walk?”

When she’s manoeuvring his arm around her shoulders, she feels his grin against her neck. It ticks. He wheezes a bit before he says, “Looks like my knight in shining armour came to rescue me after all.”

Steph doesn’t let her voice shake, and doesn’t let it shake, and props it up with whatever the hell she can, because goddamnit, God, Christ, Bucky. She busies herself with getting him on his feet, not looking at him because she thinks her voice will crack. “Move it, Barnes, this is a rescue mission, not a day spa.”

He chokes on a laugh, shudders with the force of it, but moves.

The scoffing mostly stops after she returns and insists on getting called Captain America instead of Miss, and she tells Howard that she’s had a few ideas about the costume, and this time she’s not going anywhere near a miniskirt.

---

Age 24.

Steph should close her eyes. She knows she should close her eyes, because the impact isn’t going to be something she wants to see.

The comm crackles. Turns to static. Then it clears, and a voice says, “Stephanie,” and Steph’s breath catches.

She swallows. “Peggy.”

“Steph-”

“It’s not going to be a safe landing,” she says, and it might be the first time she’s ever cut Peggy off. “But I can try to force it down.”

“I’ll- I’ll get Howard on the line.” Another breath. “He’ll know what to do.”

“There’s not enough time,” Steph says, and there isn’t, but also, she doesn’t want this to drag on any longer than it has to. Peggy deserves at least that. “This thing’s moving too fast and it’s headed for New York.”

New York, her hometown, and everyone with a radio knows that. What they don’t know is the bakery down the road that she could never afford but gave her their leftovers, because they said she needed some more meat on her bones. The hairdressers that went out of business up the street, since no-one could afford anything other than a cheap pair of scissors and the bathroom mirror. Their neighbours; an old couple in the apartment to their right and an art student, like Steph, on their left. He had gone off to war, but Steph never found out where he went.

He’s probably in pieces in the dirt right now.

Steph pushes the image far from her mind, and clenches her hands around the wheel. “I gotta put her in the water.”

She nearly dismisses the ragged inhale on the other end as more static. After a moment, Peggy says, “Please don’t do this. We have time. We can-”

“Right now I’m in the middle of nowhere. If I wait any longer, a lot of people are gonna die,” Steph says, cutting her off twice in one conversation, two more times than she’s ever dared. Then she says, “Peggy, this is my choice,” because she knows Peggy is going to try to protest, and at this point she knows just where to twist the knife. She feels awful for doing it, but at the same time, she knows Peggy will understand.

Steph has to do this.

And Peggy is silent, so Steph takes another breath and pushes the wheel downwards. The plane shifts, creaks, and starts to move downwards. She slices through the clouds.

“Peggy,” Steph croaks, because goddamn it. Goddamn it. She’s Captain America, she’s not fearless, and she’s not invincible, no matter what the serum did, and that will be proven in less than a few minutes.

Less than a few minutes, and then the plane will hit the ice. Less than a few minutes, and it’s all over. God. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Peggy’s response is immediate: “I’m here.”

“I’m going to need a raincheck on that dance,” Steph says. She doesn’t need to ask if Peggy remembers it, remembers offering to teach her how to dance; her hand soft and unyielding on Steph’s newly-broad shoulder, her perfume dizzying.

“All right,” Peggy says, and Steph recognizes it as the same voice she had used back in the theatre, when they had a few hours to kill and money to waste for once; the voice she had used after the dog had died in the movie that neither of them had heard of, because they hadn’t been out of the battlefield for the past month and a half. “A week next Saturday, at the Stork Club.”

Steph remembers. Not the best bar, but enough that they could afford it. She remembers the muzzy scent, the lingering eyes.

She’s never going to see it again. They both know this. She draws a breath. “You got it, Pegs.”

“Eight o’clock, on the dot. Don’t you dare be late, understood?”

“I still-” Steph had sworn that, after Bucky fell, she had honest to God worn out her tear ducts. She didn’t think there could possibly be anything left. But here she is, forcing them back. She doesn’t sniff them back, but doesn’t let them fall, either, because if this is how she’s going to be remembered, then god help her, she’s going to be remembered with her eyes clear and her voice holding firm. “I still don’t know how to dance,” she admits.

“I’ll show you how. Just be there.”

Steph almost promises before blinking again and thinking, this might be the last time I blink. This might be the last time I take a breath in. This might be the last time-

She doesn’t promise. Instead, she says, “We’ll have the band play something slow,” and her voice doesn’t crack. She thinks of Peggy’s heavy curls, the slash of her dark lipstick, how they felt for that one brief moment. Wonders if they left a red print on her lips.

The ice rushes up at her.

And this is- this is right. This is the right thing to do. But god help her if she isn’t terrified. She’s scared, so much so she’s being taken over by it, so instead of giving herself over to it, she tries to feel what she felt that first time in the alley, standing up for someone who would turn out to be her best friend for years to come.

She thinks about everyone she’s going to save.

Everyone who is going to live because she isn’t going to make it to the Stork Club at eight o’clock on the dot.

She says, “I’d hate to step on your-”

The world implodes in at her from all sides, and then there’s the water, cold enough to strangle, and then there’s nothing.

There’s nothing, and-

Nothing, and then there’s-

---

Her eyes open, and it takes her a while to figure out that there is something very wrong with that. The nurse is wavering, nervous, and wisely gets the hell out of the way when Steph cracks the wall in half and starts running.

She runs, keeps running until the nagging feeling that she knows this place starts to invade further, overlapping her brain and drowning everything else out until she stops, surrounded by sirens, casting her gaze around the city that she swears she recognizes.

By the time a man with an eyepatch with scars stretching out around it and with a severely not-joking expression walks up and tells her, Steph has already figured it out, though she’s trying to shove it back.

She’s right in the middle of the place she saved, and there are many more lights than she remembers.

“This is New York,” she hears herself say, numb.

“It is,” the man agrees.  Then he says, “You’ve been asleep, Cap,” not condescending or pitying at all, and Steph’s chest is heaving and her hands are shaking and she’s looking around at the city, at her city, oh god, oh good god.

Steph breathes, realizes distantly that she should be revelling in the fact that she can, in fact, breathe, and swallows. Swallows again. “How long was I asleep?”

“Nearly seventy years.”

It impacts like the ice; unforgiving and knocking the breath from her chest.

---

The first thing Steph does after she reads the files- not all of them, it’s going to take months to read all of them, because apparently a lot of things have happened in the seventy years she’s missed- is cut her hair.

It feels wrong, to feel it skimming her shoulderblades. It feels too heavy, like it’s dragging her down, and it’s a tactical disadvantage, anyway, or at least that’s what she tells herself when she picks up the scissors.

She hacks it off in slow, even lines, letting it drift down into the sink. Keeps eye contact with her reflection. Doesn’t back down from it. Tells herself over and over that it’s because it gets in the way, and not because she can feel Bucky’s fingers stroking soothing circles into her scalp when she couldn’t get to sleep in the trenches; her mother’s smaller, somehow stronger fingers tracing patterns into her hair; the Howling Commandos ruffling it when they got tipsy enough until Dum-Dum told them all to shove off; Peggy’s hand gripping it to pull her in to press their mouths together, just once before releasing her to let her take the flying leap onto Schmit’s ship.

The hair continues to fall into the sink, pale blonde and long, and the sight of it smothers her. When she looks up again, she remembers doing the exact same thing in the dull light of the tent, three years ago and also seventy, back when she was Miss America and had just gotten back from saving Bucky’s platoon.

Her eyes look overly large when her hair is shorn like this. They stare into her reflection until she’s blinking back liquid.

There’s my Stephanie. There’s my hero, her mother whispers, and the fingers scrape her scalp.

Steph wonders distantly if her mother’s grave will still be where it was when she last saw it, or if they turned it into a carpark, or a diner, or something.

She goes back to her room, sits in front of the table and stares at the papers splayed out in front of her.

There’s shaky footage or blurry photographs of it all: Concentration camps. Hiroshima. Wars being waged and won and lost. Coloured TV. Something called ‘DNA’ discovered. Princesses dying. Presidents being elected and re-elected and assassinated. Someone called Martin Luther King, someone called Rosa Parks.

Phones fit in pockets; computers in bags. There’s a pill that women can take so they don’t get pregnant. Christ, men have walked on the moon. There are honest to god footprints.

Even with the good nestled in the bad, this world isn’t the one she drove the ship down into the ice for. It’s different now; seventy years has taken its toll.

Finally, Steph’s eyes land on the one she’s been avoiding.

She doesn’t look at the photo, or even the name- just the stamped birthdate, for a good ten minutes before she leans forwards, bracing herself against the table top. Her fingers start to make grooves in the wood, and she decides that SHIELD has to have a gym somewhere around here, and she might as well use it.

According to the files, Howard had a kid.

A daughter.

part two: antonia ellen stark

Age 5.

It doesn’t take her long to realize that her father would have preferred a boy over what he got, which was her. When the thought comes, it hits softly, rather than hard and shattering, which is what she expects. Instead it’s quiet, calculated, and her hands slow, and then stop. The methodical clicking of the stripped-down gun that she’s slotting together quietens before guttering out entirely.

For once, Howard notices, which surprises her more than her sudden realization. He glances up, his gaze distant, otherwise completely immersed in the blueprints that are splayed out intricately in front of him. “What’s wrong,” he says, his voice low and distracted. The hand that isn’t around a pencil is clenching a glass of whiskey, which he’s been drinking from every couple of minutes.

Antonia pauses. Her mother told her yesterday that it’s good to stop and think before you speak; men will respect you better that way. “Nothing,” she tells him, and it’s not the first time she’s lied to him; and she knows, even when her chin can’t reach the tabletop her father is working on, that it won’t be the last.

Howard grunts. The scribbling hasn’t stopped, even while he was talking. His eyebrows furrow as he looks over the design that he won’t let Antonia see, and had snapped at her when she had asked. He had snapped at her again, less harsh, since he was too submerged in his project to pay full attention, when she had found the handgun in his drawers and started pulling it apart.

Don’t do that, he had said.

Antonia had been neck-deep by then, half lost in all the bits of the gun that come away and fit together just as perfectly. I can put it back together, she had insisted, and took his silence as approval.

Less than ten minutes later, she sits on the cold workshop floor, only just noticing that the buckles on her shoes are digging uncomfortably into her ankles. She picks up the gun, fumbles at it; uses both thumbs to push the safety on. “I did it,” she announces into the room, and when Howard doesn’t respond, she says it louder.

He doesn’t look at her. His hands smooth the paper down onto the table. “Did what?”

“I put it back together.”

Howard continues to scrawl his way further into whatever equation he’s working on. A few minutes pass, Antonia’s feet start to get sore again. It always happens when she gets new shoes; they blister occasionally and the maids have to rub ointment into her heels.

She looks up hopefully when Howard sighs. He still doesn’t look up, but srubs his hands through his hair, over his face, stopping there. “Just,” he says, and sighs again, heavier. “Get out from under my feet, Antonia. You’re distracting me; I’m trying to work.”

“I’ll be quiet,” she promises, but he turns, bites out, “Now,” and Antonia shrinks back, noticing how the glass of whiskey is empty now, and obeys. She slides the gun back into the shelf as she exits.

That night, the new butler, Jarvis, slides her dinner in front of her. Says, “Here you are, Miss Antonia,” in an accent that makes her think of a river running, china clinking into place.

She hesitates. It’s a big room, like nearly all the rooms in the house, so it takes a while for Jarvis to get to the door. It’s closing as she says, “Tony.”

Jarvis doesn’t startle. He never jumps, or stutters- instead, he turns back from where he had been heading out the door, smooth as anything. He folds his hands neatly in front of him. “Sorry?”

“Tony,” she repeats. “I’d like to be called Tony. Master Tony, not Miss.”

For a moment, she thinks he sees him smile, a small flicker of his lips. But then it’s gone, and he nods, a short duck of his chin. “Is there anything else you’d like, Master Tony?”

She shakes her head. “No, thank you.”

He nods again, and leaves.

---

Age 19.

It’ll make her cry later and laugh now, but the call comes at Christmas.

She’s having her nails done to suit the occasion. One fingernail red and the next one green and so on, even though her best Christmases have been the ones she can’t remember and she knows she’s going to be ignoring the holiday’s existence in every way possible except for the seasonal drinks at the bar.

When her phone rings, she ignores it. Her new assistant is a brunette, has a voice like a woodchipper and Tony’s probably going to end up sleeping with him before the month is up. It rings a second time less than thirty seconds later, and Tony heaves a sigh before flipping it open with the hand that has five drying nails.

“Yeah?”

“Ms. Stark?”

“Speaking,” Tony says. Then: “Ow, shit, Gladis, easy on the nail beds.”

Gladis says, “Sorry, miss,” even though with her accent it comes out with a few ‘e’ sounds. She shifts Tony’s hands further forwards to get a better angle for the brush.

“Ms. Stark,” the voice on the phone comes again, hesitantly. “I’m afraid something has happened.”

Tony tenses enough that Gladis looks up, because she knows it instantly, because there is only one thing it can possible be, because there is nothing else, no-one else it can be.

The sad thing is, she’s not sure which she’s more sad about: the fact of the car flipping, twisting, crunching metal on the pavement before careening down a hill, smashing ligaments and bones and battering them all around until both her parents necks broke, or that Jarvis was in the front seat. He died instantly on impact, the steering wheel crushing his chest.

She shows up for her parent’s funeral in a bright red dress. It draws everyone’s eye, just like she means it to, and her new- something, god, she doesn’t know what, friend or some shit- Rhodey, eyes her, half suspicious, half worried, before she leaves for the limo, but doesn’t say anything.

Antonia Stark sashays up the grass to the gravestones in a dress that just about glows in the mid-afternoon light.

People whisper. All the acquaintances of the Starks, the old-money, the high-society in cufflinks and earrings and a constant hand around a wine glass- they lean over and mutter in the ear of a spouse, a son, a business partner.

Tony says the necessary words, smiles enough but not too much, and then gets the fuck out of there for a week of well-deserved drinking. And if the week turns into something longer, then, well, whatever.

---

Age 21.

It happens on the tail-end of a pregnancy scare, it’s an early birthday present to herself, and Tony knows it’s the right thing to do.

She follows the signature on the bottom of the page with a shot of whiskey, and the next day she checks herself in and gets her tubes tied, finishing the Stark line once and for all.

She had been thinking about it since she was sixteen and was a week late- yes, she has the resources. Yes, she has the genes. What she doesn’t have are the qualities people look for in a mother, or even a parent in general. She can’t get her shit together enough to keep a friend, fuck if she can provide a child with any level of emotional stability, and fuck if Tony’s putting some poor kid through what she went through.

The scars are tiny, and for that Tony is grateful: one near her bellybutton, another hidden by her underwear. They heal, and when men ask about them, Tony grins and tells them to be careful if they ever go in a shark cage.

Three months after her 21^st birthday, she’s announced as Stark Industries’ new CEO. She steps out into the sea of camera flashes, makes herself smile, because she’s enjoying this, she has to be, and follows the light out into the person she never had a chance of not turning into.

---

Age 29.

She says, “JARVIS,” for the first time in nearly a decade, and for a moment, heart sticking to the roof of her mouth, hands clutching the motorboard, she thinks she fucked up again. That the code glitched, or she made a mistake with the wires, and is going over the schematics again in her head when the thing whirs to life, and a crisp British voice rolls across the ceiling:

“Can I be of any assistance, Sir?”

It makes her blink. She must have programmed this into him- obviously, since no-one else has come into contact with any of her designs, god, she doesn’t think she’s even seen another human for the past four days or so, not since she started working on this, at least.

She opens her mouth to correct him.

Then JARVIS prompts, “Sir?” and Tony snaps her mouth shut. She imagines that voice saying Miss and finds that for some reason, it sounds lacking, just like it did all those years ago.

“Uh, I think I need to check… my voicemail,” Tony says haltingly. She looks back up at the screen, which is scrolling numbers. Her workshop is nearly literally a bombsite; strewn with coffee cups and grease and random bits of metal. Jesus, she hasn’t been this bad since she had built Dummy. “Go do that.”

A pause, and then, “You have precisely eighty-four messages, over a half of them from a man by the name of Virgil Potts. They are of increasing urgency as they go on. Might I suggest you call him back?”

Tony winces. Crap. Pepper’s going to pull that glare where he makes Tony feel like she deserves all the skin stripped from her body and then boiled over a huge pit.

“Yeah, remind me later,” Tony says. She turns in her seat, rubbing the heel of one hand across her eyes. The walls are starting to do that thing where they don’t stay in the same place when Tony moves.

She pushes herself up from her chair and faces Dummy and Butterfingers, both who jerk up from their serving stations and start chirping. They’re like puppies sometimes, Tony figures- always wanting attention and being noisy and making messes everywhere.

“We have a new addition to the family,” Tony atones tiredly. Her hand sweeps towards the ceiling, which is stupid, because JARVIS isn’t there, but Tony has been awake for seventy-something hours and logic isn’t with her right now, goddamnit. “Dummy, Butterfingers, I’d like you to meet JARVIS.”

Both the bots careen their cameras at the ceiling, beeping in confusion. Tony could swear JARVIS hesitates before says, “Charmed, I’m sure,” in a way that has Tony suddenly spluttering laughter. She bends over the table, shaking with it.

JARVIS says, “Is something funny, Sir?”

“Nothing,” Tony gasps. Her sides ache. Everything aches, actually. Wow, sleep would probably be a really good thing right now. “You sounded so bitchy about it.”

“I am based off of your brainwaves.”

“Are you calling me a bitch?”

“I would never, Sir. I merely implied.”

“That I’m a bitch,” Tony accuses the ceiling.

JARVIS, if he had a face to smile with, would have been grinning as he says, “One might take it as a compliment.”

---

Age 32.

Before she even cracks open an eyelid, Tony is hit by the massive sledgehammer that she already knows is going to be the kind of hangover that makes her want to crawl back into bed and stay there until the sun goes back down again.

Her groan would only be considered a groan if you listened hard. “J’RVIS,” she says, and it’s muffled by the meat of her forearm and layers of dried spit on said forearm. “Lights.”

Said lights continue to drill painfully into her closed eyes, and she scrunches them tighter. “JARVIS,” she says, clearer this time. She twists in a tornado of bedsheets, arm waving at the ceiling. “Lights. Off. Bad.”

When he doesn’t answer, her frown creases the already-rumpled pillow, and she manages, in slow, agonizing inches, to raise her head and blink around at her surroundings.

“Huh,” she says aloud. She looks over, and- yep, there’s the guy to match the unfamiliar bedroom. She studies him groggily, remembering how his nose didn’t look so dumpy under all those pulsing lights last night, how his hair looked less greasy; his arms more muscular. All in all, everything looks more appealing when you’re drunk and its last call. But hey, whatever, from what she can remember he was a pretty decent lay; he stopped pulling her hair when she told him to and fucked her against the headboard until she came a few minutes before he did.

She winces at the sound of her phone ringing, casts a look over at- Mark? Marcus? Something starting with M- as she sticks her hand over the side of the bed and roots around for her phone. Her hand bumps into and then rears away from a used condom before skating over her phone, realizing what it is and then grabbing it, pushing it open against her ear. “Hello?”

“You were supposed to be here three hours ago,” the ever-trusty Virgil ‘Pepper’ Potts, says, and Tony has to take a second to rifle through the alcohol-addled depths of her memory. Oh.

Pepper is still talking. “I’ve been stalling them, thank god they’re used to your stupid antics, you haven’t showed up on time since the eighties-”

“Nineteen-seventy-nine, thank you very much,” Tony says, completely bullshitting it and knowing that Pepper knows it just as well as she does.

She balances the phone, pressing it in between her cheek and her shoulder as she pries the covers off. “I’ll be there ASAP, okay?”

It’s a sure tell of how harried Pepper is that he doesn’t sound dubious at that. “Fine,” he snaps. Tony can imagine the grooves he’s probably kneading into the bridge of his nose. “Do I send a driver to the mansion-”

“No,” Tony says. “I’ll get a taxi.”

There’s a brief beat of silence before Pepper says, “Fine,” again, less snippy and more tired, too tired for nine in the morning. “Get here soon, I don’t care if you have to pay the driver to run over a few pedestrians on the way.”

“Bye,” Tony says, flicking the phone shut and going to shove it in her pocket, before she realizes that she’s more or less naked and is therefore lacking in pockets. She looks down at herself, and it should most likely be a bad sign that she’s so used to this kind of thing that she doesn’t even raise her eyebrows.

She’s wearing some sort of bodice-bra monstrosity, along with a black, lacy garter belt and knee-highs with small ribbons pricking the sides that have been mostly pulled off. All of the items are silk, because Antonia fucking Stark doesn’t skimp on lingerie. There is also just under a thousand bucks in hundred dollar notes stuffed into her bra. Distantly, she hopes there isn’t already a video circulating about whatever she did to come into possession of them.

She picks at the silk, considering. She’s shown up in the office without a skirt that one time, but although those stuffy bastards would appreciate it, she doesn’t want the predictable media blowup if she turns up looking like this.

Looking for her clothes ends up to be disappointing, seeing as not even bleach could get the sickly-sweet stench of good vodka out of them, and she wrinkles her nose as she tosses her dress on her side of the bed, being careful not to hit and wake the man.

She looks down at herself again, seriously debates just saying fuck it and going like this, because moving her limbs is way too much trouble right now, before catching sight of the trenchcoat inside the mostly-closed closet on the other side of the room. Great, she slept with a flasher, since the only people who wear them nowadays seem to be the guys who leer creepily at girls on trains.

Standing in front of the mirror and working the trenchcoat off the hanger as she does, she glances over at the lump in the bed. If the guy is faking sleep, then he’s one of the best she’s seen. She tightens the strap around the waist so it accommodates to her curves, flashes her teeth to her reflection and turns to the left, then to the right, both only just slow enough to see what she looks like. She runs both her hands through her hair, decides that today she’s going to go with ‘just rolled out of bed’ and laugh at the irony later.

She peels off her knee-highs and balls them up into her pocket, and is about to leave when her reflection catches her again, magnifying what Tony denies to be worry lines creasing at the edges of her eyes. She pulls at them with her fingertips, erases the aching of her joints and the familiar whine of god, I’m getting too old for this, because she fucking isn’t. She’s Antonia fucking Stark and will be rocking it when she’s in a wheelchair.

She tidies up her mascara, pockets what is probably the guys’ girlfriends’ tube of lipstick after she smoothes it over her lips. After another once-over, she shrugs, turns to leave, and, on second thought, grabs a pair of sunglasses off the bedside table and slides them on. Her high heels are only marginally splashed with alcohol, so she slips her feet into them, pads out as quietly as any human can walk in high heels, and closes the door softly behind her.

Halfway to the office, her stomach starts growling loud enough that the cab driver gives her a look in the rear-view mirror. Tony shoves a hundred dollar bill into his hand so he waits thirty seconds as she walks up the line at the hot dog line, pushes three hundred dollars into the guy’s hands and tells him to make it quick. She swipes a couple of spare napkins and gets the hot dog and back into the cab in record time.

She’s still eating it by the time they pull up to the curb of Stark Industries, and is chewing the last bite when Pepper falls into fast pace beside her, clipboard in his hand. “I suppose that was fast in your mind, hmm?”

Tony says, “I stopped for a hotdog,” swallowing the last of it as she does, wiping her fingers on the napkin before balling it up, and waiting until they walk by a bin to throw it in. Then she does jazz hands with her now empty fingers, beaming at Pepper’s thunderous expression.

But because he’s Pepper and is a professional, for god knows whatever reason, he pinches his lips and looks straight ahead as they step in the elevator. He looks Tony up and down, and his eyes don’t linger, because they never do.

Tony bats her eyelashes. “See something you like?”

“Why are you wearing a trenchcoat inside,” Pepper asks, ignoring the previous statement like he ignores all of Tony’s witty one-liners.

Tony’s arms rustle as she rubs her hands up and down her arms. “I’m cold.”

“It’s the middle of July, Tony.” Pepper frowns down at Tony’s bare legs. Thank god she remembered to shave the night before last. “Are you- are you even wearing anything under that?”

Tony tilts her head at him. Her beam widens.

The elevator dings, and Tony gallantly bites down on a laugh when Pepper’s step stutters next to her as they walk out.

She draws the eyes of everyone she passes, flashing thigh and teeth, smirking if they stumble, remembering back to when she had her first few escapades like this, how people looked at her rumpled clothing knowingly, judgingly.

Remembers, teeth tight, the hot coil of embarrassment that she quickly swallowed down and replaced with a cocked eyebrow. How men and women alike had sneered at her bare feet or her alcohol-reeking clothes, and how Tony had continued to hold her head ever higher.

She watches as a man bends slightly to talk to his friend, eyes on her the whole time, in a way that is supposed to make Tony wilt, or put on a jacket, some shoes; smear concealer over the hickey branding the left side of her neck.

Instead, she makes direct eye contact as she passes him, and he doesn’t even try to hide his shock, faltering mid-sentence when she winks.

People stare, like they always do, and Tony lifts her chin.

Fuck ‘em.

If there is one thing she refuses to do, it’s shame.

---

Age 36.

Tony has a complicated relationship with her breasts.

Firstly, they’re too small. B-s on a good day, C-s if she wears a push-up bra. For a long time, that had been the only problem, and she had made do with wearing push-ups and flaunting her legs and pulling a middle finger to the haters.

Then Afghanistan happened, and then her boobs had been less small and more nonexistant, a marring of scar tissue with a slight bulge in both of them that could maybe be considered as boobage. And then there was the arc reactor nestled in between them, taking up a lot of her chest cavity, which wasn’t nice for anyone involved.

She had gotten home after the press conference, avoided the liquor cabinet, taken a shower- at first, she had tried not to look in the mirror, but then decided that she wasn’t going to pussy out on this, and had wiped the steam from the glass.

It wasn’t a pretty sight, to say the least. Tony had made a customized bra and started wearing graceful, high-necked shirts, and had taken to relying on her other assets.

She hadn’t designed boob plates in the suit. She had dismissed the thought the moment it entered her mind, and instead made it so the chest came smoothly out before evening out into her torso: sexy, yet sensible.

And now here she is, her eyes blown wide and blinking hard. Here she is, stiff as a fucking board as a hand roams down her body.

Here she is, lying paralysed on the couch as Obie, Obidiah Stane, the man who had been practically her uncle for the past two decades, trails a hand down her chest and squeezes briefly.

Tony, of course, is no stranger to unwanted attention of this nature. But right now, she would happily throw caution to the wind and just fucking bite his hand and hang in there until something comes unattached. Unfortunately, she can’t move: it hurts, it hurts so much she would scream if she could, it’s spreading throughout her entire body and it hurts, it blazes; it’s fire seething through her bloodstream, god, it hurts. She imagines sobbing. There is bile creeping up her throat. She imagines herself vomiting over her body without being able to do anything about it, without being able to even angle her head away from her body.

Obidiah’s voice is low and familiar and it makes her skin crawl. He tells her that over the years, he’s thought about doing this before, about taking advantage on one of the many nights she had been dangerously wasted in his presence. Tells her that he’s thought about it extensively; conjured up the dip of her hips, the sweet heat of her legs as he ruts between them.

Tony doesn’t doubt him. She’s stopped being surprised by this kind of thing by the time she hit fourteen. But she’s always shoved off anyone who she doesn’t express enthusiastic consent to, and she’d love to keep it that way, but she can’t move and Obie’s hand moves in slow, disgusting circles over what’s left of her right breast.

“Oh, I’ve thought about it,” he tells her. His voice has dropped a few octaves and Tony is disgusted with him, with herself, with her body and his body nearly equally. It’s a close call.

“How easy you’d be.”

Obie’s fingers clutch; release, graze her nipple. She imagines struggling. She would, but she can’t.

“How eagerly you’d give it up for me.”

Tony can’t do anything but glare. She wants to retch. She wants to sink her fucking teeth into Obie’s hand and spit the blood back out at him. Fuck you, she thinks at him. Fuck you, fuck you and everyone like you.

She wants to scream it. Wants to dig her nails into his fat fucking head and force the words down his throat.

Obie’s hands continue to move, stroking slow circles. One of them is over her breast. The other is over the arc reactor, half out of her chest and glowing like a star. He sighs. “But, sadly,” he says, and withdraws his hand after one last long squeeze, “Since your unfortunate accident, you’ve lost all appeal.” His gaze rakes down her body, lingering on her chest with what looks like regret.

Tony would spit into his face if she could.

“Pity,” Obie sighs. “Ah, well. Can’t dwell on these things, eh, Antonia? We have to move on.”

He smiles like a goddamn wolf. Thick and slimy and fully predator. “I, for one, have a very busy night ahead of me. People to kill. A world to revolutionize.”

His hand closes around the wires that connect the arc reactor into her chest.

He smiles like every guy she’s ever shoved off of her, and yanks.

Later, when Tony is washing the ash from her body and thinking over the repairs she’ll have to make for the suit, she ignores the hand-shaped bruises over the skin of her breasts.

After they fade, it’ll be the last thing left of Obie.

She turns her mind away from it, and thinks of schematics.

She stands in front of the cameras, lips the kind of red she’s come to associate with something other than blood. She looks out over the sea of reporters, and thinks, Fuck it.

“I am Iron Babe,” she says.

The cameras go off. The reporters clamour, yell over each other, jostle to get in front.

Just another Tuesday.

If Tony wasn’t Tony, then the name ‘Iron Babe’ would get laughed out of the headlines. But since Tony has always been the infamous Antonia Stark who re-touches her lipstick in front of a judge in court and wears heels that double as machetes and peed standing up at a party one time, she had managed to pull it off.

That, and it should be automatic. ‘Iron Woman’ is a mouthful, she tells the press, and besides, come on, she’s a total babe.

Fits like a glove.

---

Age 37.

Like she has for the past decade- nearing one, at least- Tony re-evaluates her feelings about her incredible, capable assistant-turned-CEO-turned-assistant-turned-god-knows-what.

Pepper is her constant, always there with a droll, fond look and a reminder that she’s late to yet another meeting; exasperated, freshly-shaven, well-combed and forever immaculate.

Tony figures that ten years is enough waiting, since she’s fell into bed with people she’s known for less than ten minutes, so Tony kisses Pepper one day while he’s in the middle of a rant about why Tony should care more about the sculpture she had been trying to discreetly throw out.

It lasts for a good two seconds before she’s being gently but firmly pushed back by her shoulders.

“Tony,” he says, and that’s all he needs to say, really.

She rubs at her forehead. “Right. Sorry. I really am, promise I won’t try that again, I’ll give you a raise if you want, I’ll just, uh, you mentioned I had a meeting-”

“Praise the Lord,” Pepper deadpans, and Tony shoots him a look.

“How dare you, I go to meetings-”

“Once a century.”

“Lies. Cruel, vile lies.”

Pepper looks down at his clipboard. “Go to your meeting. You have another one at three.”

“Oh, that one I won’t be able to make.”

Pepper raises an eyebrow.

“I have things to do,” Tony tries.

“I organize your entire life,” Pepper says. “I would know if you had things. What you do have is a meeting now, and another at three.”

Tony nods. For once, she thinks she might let this slide, due to the whole awkward-kissing thing that makes Tony want to high-tail it as fast as humanly possible. “Yep. Sure. I’ll be there. Probably,” she adds. Just to be safe.

“You better, you’ve missed the last four,” Pepper tells her. He glances up from her clipboard, and Tony is more relieved than she should be to see the soft smile, the unspoken We’ll be fine, you numbskull.

Pepper re-adjusts his tie. “Will that be all, Ms. Stark?”

“That will be all, Mr. Potts.”

Tony saves the day.

She saves it repeatedly, on what seems like every day of the week; she goes to meetings, she bitches at Pepper; she builds and re-builds the suit. She spends a lot of time in the workshop, stripping the suit down before building it up again, repeating the process until her sight blurs and she starts stumbling everywhere. She ignores everyone who informs her that since she’s on the bad end of thirty, that she should be at least considering Botox.

She finds out she has six months to live, copes with that knowledge for three months, and makes several awful decisions that lead to Rhodey taking off with one of her suits.

The day after that, she finds a cure to not dying, takes down Ivan Vanko and makes up with Rhodey, all while nursing the hangover from hell.

She meets Phillipa Coulson, a deadpan woman in a suit and lethal with a bag of flour. For some reason, Pepper takes a strange affinity to her; Tony catches them gossiping in the elevators and watches them roll their eyes one too many times.

Along with Coulson, Tony also meets Nate Rushman, who is revealed to be Nate Romanoff, who is revealed to be Nate Romanov. Nate Romanoff/ov is a terrifying undercover Russian spy-turned-SHIELD-agent who stabs her in the neck with a syringe and turns in a report on her a week later: Iron Babe, yes. Antonia Stark, no.

She doesn’t pretend not to be put out by that.

Rhodey is occupied, as always, but they make sure to hang out once every few weeks. She takes him for flying lessons, and they whoop their way through the sky, no matter how many times Rhodey insists it’s strictly professional.

“Don’t tell me you don’t love this,” she crows.

His laugh is warm in her ear. Or, well, her helmet.

She makes a left turn that sends her careening back towards Malibu.

She gets a call as she’s brushing her hair, and forfeits the comb for the phone. It’s Coulson, and she has news.

Tony has to get her to repeat it three times.

They’ve found her, Coulson tells her. They’ve found Captain America.

part three: collision

Age 37 & Age 24.

It doesn’t take long for Steph to admit to herself that Antonia Stark is a huge disappointment, in contrast to what she was expecting.

There’s the base elements there, yes: the intellect, humour, the smirk, the swagger that Antonia- Tony- walks with; like she’s got all the time in the world, like everyone else are just backup to her centre stage. But she lacks the- the casual that Howard had. Howard had always brushed everything off like it didn’t matter, and Tony tries to put that on, Steph notices, and god knows she makes a good show out of it, but it’s a thin film to whatever the heck is underneath. Whatever that is.

And then there’s a static fuzz in the corner of her vision that she keeps brushing off, one that tinges blue, and her teeth are grinding and she marches right up to Stark- or, well, Stark’s kid- and tells her right to her face, and Tony sets her expression and retaliates.

Big woman in a suit of armour, Steph says, and doesn’t regret it until much later. Take that off and what are you?

Genius, billionaire, playbunny philanthropist, Tony tells her, not smiling anymore, and Steph’s laugh punches its way out of her throat.

Right. Sure.

Steph tells her how she’s known people who are worth ten of Stark (Tony), and it bites at her; the naked loss, the gaping hole where her platoon should be, but are instead lost to the ice or car crashes or Alzheimer’s or just goddamn old age, their hearts giving out from the sheer effort of it all. They’re gone, or close to it, and this woman, the late-forties child of her dead friend, is standing right in front of her.

Everything special about you came out of a bottle, Tony tells her, her tone steel-tight.

For one fleeting moment, Steph has a funny feeling that they’ve done this before. It transcends deja-vu, crosses over into memory and then something deeper, something more ferocious and warm, the kind of warm that burrows before getting hotter and hotter.

But then it’s gone, and Steph smirks in a way that Bucky always used to pull her away from, because it meant she was close to offering up her fists.

Put on the suit, Steph says. Lets go a few rounds.

Stark- Tony, Antonia, who cares- opens her mouth, but her voice is abruptly cut short by the explosion that rocks the ship; tears open the ground underneath them, knocks them both backwards.

Steph doesn’t black out, but she does see spots for a second. She blinks them back, taking stock of her surroundings- her leg’s been sliced open, she’ll deal with it later- notices the woman clutching the doorframe. Steph locks eyes with her and says, Put on the suit.

Yeah, Tony rasps, her voice only barley shaking, rough from something other than the smoke that is starting to rise.

Her shoulder gives under Steph’s grip when Steph takes it, and she has to grab again with both hands for Tony to stop her from wrenching out of her grasp for a second time.

Later- four hours and somehow a lifetime- they’re in the streets that are twisted in Steph’s memory, and the asphalt is cracking under the alien heat, and Steph’s shield boomerangs back to slide into place on her arm.

Out of the corner of her vision, she sees Iron Babe soars downwards, her hand coming up, and so does Steph’s. In a move so fluid it could have been practiced for years, she reflects the repulsor beam off of her shield, directing it straight into the path of the Chituri.

They go down instantly. Steph and Tony don’t thank each other, don’t even acknowledge it, hardly even think about it, and then Tony is flying upwards.

You know that’s a one-way trip, Steph tells her, after a hesitation she never thought she’d make.

Tony doesn’t answer. Instead, she turns off the comm, and Steph watches her ascent: up, up, up, towards the mouth of the wormhole, burning blue.

Steph’s breath comes in tight bursts, and beside her, Thor’s weapon stills in her hand. The battle rages on, but they can spare these few seconds; they can at least afford that.

From this far away the suit looks normal, a streak of gold and red, but Steph knows that if she were to get close enough, there would be grooves where the knives had dug in. Burns from where she didn’t get out of the way in time. Scrapes where the metal impacted with the concrete before forcing the aching machine up again.

Antonia leaves a trail of black in her wake; smoke from where she didn’t dodge fast enough from the blasts. Still, Steph can’t help but see it as a blurred gold and red.

She remembers a hand stretching out towards a train. Countless other hands, reaching out, in her dreams or otherwise. Dirty hands, bloody hands, hands with missing fingers or shrapnel-ripped palms. Hands searching or pleading or shaking around a gun.

Tony’s hands and arms are metal-locked around a nuclear missile, and distantly, Steph remembers the notes she had read about Hiroshima.

Tony vanishes, swallowed by the portal.

Steph closes her eyes.

Tony hangs, suspended, in alien space, eyes sweeping shut against the sight of a bomb detonating and spreading outwards to consume everything in a violent, fiery red.

Her eyes falling shut for the last time have been long time coming. She thinks that this might be a good way to go out; one hell of a last thing to see, and she nearly laughs, but can’t seem to get enough breath to do it.

She starts to fall, still in that slow, easy blink.

Harsh, blinding light starting in front of her, and soft, blinding light at her back. Finally, she feels her eyes close, and the darkness takes her as she passes out.

At the same time, the light behind her swallows her whole and she’s falling.

Tony falls.

The Chituri collapse like puppets with their strings cut.

New York City has turned their heads skywards ever since the portal opened; a great, otherworldly gape in the sky that will forever only be pale blue in comparison. They watch. They point. Some of them are crying; either silent tears or loud, gulping sobs that ring in the sudden silence.

Somewhere underneath a dusty restaurant table, a young girl quietly clutches a homemade Iron Babe doll. Her eyes are clear and fixed out the demolished window on the red-and-gold downward streak, nearly identical to the one in her hand that she had spent hours with a clumsy paintbrush trying to mimic.

Her shaking mother pulls at her hand, the one that isn’t squeezing the doll fit to burst.

The girl tugs stubbornly back, eyes desperate and hoping hard as she says, just wait, wait just one second, just one, please, c’mon, she can do it, I know she can-

Tony falls.

In a plane, a hundred miles away, Pepper Potts’ breath freezes in his throat as he watches the TV screen.

To his right, his phone continues to flash, unnoticed.

Tony falls.

“Son of a gun,” Steph says. And, then-

“She’s not slowing down,” Thor says urgently, and Mjolnir starts gaining momentum in her hand, and Steph watches, breathless, because it’s all she can do, before there’s a roar and a blur of green and the Hulk smashes into a building, a limp Tony clasped in her meaty hand. Another leap, a crunch of concrete, and Iron Babe sprawls on the cracked sidewalk.

Steph thinks she laughs, the images blurring- one sweaty hand extending towards a train; two metal hands around a million deaths.

And then, the fall.

This time- half limping as she sprints towards the crouching Hulk and the unmoving figure of Iron Babe- Steph definitely laughs, a short bark of it that quickly dies in flare of pain from the wound in her side that burns as she runs.

At least someone managed to catch one of them.

They get shwarma afterwards, since Tony suggests it and they’re all too tired to do anything but agree.

At any other time it’d be uncomfortable, but they’re all sagging into the table and the food chases away what’s left over of the grit and blood in their mouths. None of them speak, chewing tiredly until their hands reach and there’s nothing else to chew.

And then they leave, and Steph leaves; the wind in her hair and the future at her fingertips and all that crap. She adapts; she Googles what she doesn’t ask about and shows up for fights and beats at the punching bags down at the gum until her knuckles either numb or bleed, or the punching bags split down the middle.

She keeps an eye out for the Avengers, scrolling through newsfeeds and tracking their tags and only phoning them when there’s no other option, or when there are too many yellowing photographs and enough empty bottles that she’s starting to feel a bit of a buzz.

They’re not a team, not really, at the very least not yet, and they all know this. They all have their shit to deal with, all with their own demons and nightmares and thick folders detailing their individual PTSDs, apart from Tony, who hacks into SHIELD and erases whatever she can get her hands on.

Thor switches between Asgard and John Foster’s flat, posting confused pictures of the both of them on Instagram once every few weeks. Tony continues to slowly cut back on the amount of galas she goes to, but pretends to stay in the public eye as much as she always has.

There’s a weight to her gaze, Steph thinks. Something that wasn’t there before, or something Steph didn’t notice, something she saw too many times in her fellow soldier’s eyes.

After Briony leaves Tony’s mansion two weeks after walking into it, she keeps under the radar as per usual, and the last Steph heard, she was in Brazil hiding with some woman called Betty. Nate and Claire are ‘otherwise indisposed,’ Coulson tells Steph after it’s revealed how Not Dead she turned out to be, which Steph takes to mean as ‘cut off in a foreign country doing something semi-illegal for our more-than-semi-illegal organization.’

And Steph- well, Steph copes, like she’s always done. She catches up on seventy years of history, when she isn’t pissed off at the world and throwing books/TVs/her bunched fists at walls. She wakes up screaming or sweating or both four out of six nights when she isn’t avoiding sleep entirely.

She puts it off until she can’t anymore, and then she visits graves and old folks’ homes and white-knuckles her ways through every one of them.

She copes. They all do.

Over half a year passes like this.

The Avengers spread out, most of them not even trading cellphone numbers. They yell at other people and themselves and very rarely each other, on the occasions that they ‘drop in.’

They all go their separate ways, until they don’t.

One day, Steph wakes up in the dark to a knock on the door. Automatically, her hand goes to wrap around the leather strap of her shield, her mind still stuck in the dark that fills the room, thinking of men with red skin, women in uniforms, soldiers dying and climbing and falling.

“Hello,” she croaks. She clears her throat, and goes to say it again.

It’s not the Red Skull. It’s not any of her dead friends. It’s not Peggy. Instead, it’s Coulson, unflappable as always and not raising an eyebrow to how Steph’s fingers aren’t exactly steady around the doorknob.

She tells Steph they have an offer for her, but Steph doesn’t fully wake up until she hears the word Avengers.

---

Age 38 & Age 25.

A few weeks after Tony everyone moves into the Tower, she designs a reinforced, super-strength elastic sports bra for the Hulk. She-Hulk, whatever, Tony doesn’t screw around with things like that- come on, people called her ‘Iron Woman’ before Tony corrected them.

She bites back a sigh as she thumbs through the schematics one more time after a battle where the Hulk had nearly ‘popped out,’ as the articles say. ‘Hulk nip-slips,’ says another, with a blurry, mostly green picture that Tony sabotages when she finds out about it.

She still cringes when she thinks about how it must have been for Briony before they met- giant green boobs flapping everywhere, yeesh. She really doesn’t pity the military guys who tried to gun the Hulk down before all this; one of them is still in the hospital from getting hit full-force with a rogue nipple.

Tony snorts. ‘Rogue nipple.’ That makes it sound like there were more than two and that said nipples were all lethal and flying around at random, knocking people out when they had their heads turned. And possibly include built-in heat-seeking missiles. And lasers.

From behind her, there’s a rustle of paper and Tony looks back over her shoulder where Steph has folded over a page of her sketchbook- she meets Tony’s eyes with a vague smile that means she’s mostly in drawing-mode. “What’re you thinking about?”

“Rogue, lethal Hulk nipples,” Tony answers automatically, and thinks about adding, with lasers, before she realizes what she’s saying and how she doesn’t even consider any of this strange anymore.

Steph looks like she’s having the same realization, frowns, and clears her throat. “Still working on the bra? I mean, I hope that’s the reason you’re thinking about the Hulk’s…uh.” She looks like she’s struggling to make her mouth form it. “Nipples.”

In the heat of a fight, Steph can bark out just about anything. Tony’s heard her drop the f-bomb on multiple occasions when one of them does something stupid and typical, like jump off a building or go after the bad guy without backup, both of which happen regularly and make Steph pissed off enough to glare at the person in question for the entire Helicarrier ride every time without fail. Which, about forty percent of the time, happens to be Tony.

When the adrenaline’s faded, though, she doesn’t even say ‘bitch.’ Not that she would anyway, because according to her it’s derogatory to both women and female dogs. That, and she’s spent years in the army before this, which means she can think up swear words that don’t suck and are a billion times more degrading.

Anyway, the point is that when she’s bleeding out from a gut wound and yelling at Tony to get out of the blast zone, Steph can say the dirtiest filth Tony’s ever heard.

Put her in an everyday situation, though, and she fights against saying the word ‘nipples.’

Tony smirks on default, because winding Steph up turns out to be something biologically wired into her that happens before she can stop it, and she tucks her head downwards, looking up at Steph from under her eyelashes. When she speaks, it’s half-teasing and half the flirty, low, syrupy voice she uses when she’s on someone’s arm. “What, suddenly I’m allowed to think about nipples in any other scenario?”

Steph’s uncomfortable flush makes Tony want to lick everywhere it spreads to, which is stupid, because since when the hell is blushing sexy? In movies, sure, and probably in ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ which Tony scowls at whenever she sees it in the bestsellers aisle, but in real life it’s just people’s faces heating up and it’s supposed to be unattractive and dumb and not making Tony want to lick Steph all over, which she’s most definitely wanting to.

Then again, Tony’s found out that Steph can make a lot of supposedly unappealing things sexy. Like eating a burrito, or what she looks like when her breasts are strapped down in the Captain America suit (she didn’t do that back when it was called ‘Miss America,’ when she was preforming in every state and punching out a makeshift Hitler. And the name ‘Miss America’ got shot down and made over when she started to kick the asses of actual real life Nazis). And that one really throws Tony through a loop, because strapping down someone’s breasts, again, is not supposed to be sexy, but there’s something about Steph running around in what’s basically the American flag with her breasts strapped in that makes Tony thankful, for once, that she doesn’t have a penis, because it’d be painful having an erection in the Iron Babe suit.

And Tony still wants to lick Steph all over. Fuck.

With a face that she’s seen Steph use in press conferences and a voice to match, Steph deadpans, “You’re allowed to think about nipples in whatever scenario you want, Tony, just leave me out of it.”

Tony nearly laughs at the wording of that, but manages to stop herself just in time because she’s a sensible individual with no desire to get the Glare of Doom from a Steph Rogers that hasn’t had her evening coffee yet.

So she says, “Will do, Cap,” and winks. And then graciously and elegantly resists the urge to go over and tongue her way up Steph’s swanlike goddamn neck and broad jawline that could cut steak, because the bastard is still blushing.

Steph will get used to it in no time, Tony guesses. The overdone, incessant flirting, she means. Rhodey used to get weirded out by it- hell, even Pepper used to startle to it a bit, but now he just says, “Will that be all, Miss Stark,” and swaggers off in a way that makes Tony imagine him in sprained-ankle-inducing pumps.

She’ll get used to it; Tony even thinks she’s starting to get used to it now, because she had said something about Steph being sweaty under the suit and Steph had just bantered back, simple as anything. But until they get to the stage where they do that every time Tony makes a pass, Tony is going to stand here in her workshop with exactly three hours of sleep under her belt and marvel at Steph’s lickable everything.

God, Tony isn’t even that into licking. Or biting, but then again, she could definitely think up some creative ideas for the things she could do to Steph’s collarbones. Maybe suck a bruise or two just above where her jawline ends-

So incredibly thankful for the lack of boners, Tony reminds herself, snapping herself out of it and turning back to the schematics to make sure that next time, the Hulk doesn’t flash everyone and cause that one guy to start screaming and brain himself on a pole.

It’s a quiet week. No doomsday devices get set off, no-one nearly dies, there are only two villains trying to get revenge on their team, and generally the Avengers all spend it around the lounge, eating nachos and complaining about being bored.

Claire tries to teach Steph how to shoot a bow before grabbing her quiver from her after only half an hour, grumbling about how Steph ‘didn’t treat them right.’

Nate watches Thor demolish eight banana splits in one sitting and then watches as she tweets about it, remarking that ‘the tweeting is enjoyable, verily! And there are barely any birds!’

Tony hides around a doorframe for ten minutes at three in the morning until Briony comes out of the bathroom. When she does, Tony says, “SHELDON UNHAPPY WITH CASTING CHOICE.”

Briony hulks out. Tony pays for the damages and laughs about it the entire way through giving Pepper the paperwork.

It’s the fourth month they’ve spent together as a team, and it’s- it’s nice, to say the least.

And if Tony has gone through three separate vibrators in those four months because of a certain Captain, well. That’s nobody’s business but hers and the site she buys them from.

After the first few months of living at the Tower, late-night channel surfing has become something of a habit for the team. After all, they didn’t get to become superheroes by leading a stable life and living through events that made them emotionally stable. Instead, they got a myriad of questionable to abysmal parenting, a lack of friends and several traumatic experiences all around. They each have their ghosts, they sometimes shudder for no reason; they have been known to be set off more dangerously than any fuse. They have their unique and extensive issues, and most of the time, none of them are stupid enough to push too far.

To cope with their accusing reflections, their lack of sleep, or even worse, the jolted, thin veil of sleep in between nightmares, the Avengers wander in the lounge at ass-o-clock in the morning for something to take their mind off the fact that their hands are shaking, or they keep seeing their long-dead foxhole buddies out of the corner of their eyes. More than often, there will be the soft, flickering light of the TV, with one, two or more of the team on the couch, running from whatever they have on their heels.

For Steph, it’s Bucky again. If she closes her eyes for more than four seconds, his hand closes on empty air. So she’s focusing on blinking while wearily following the plot of a bad soap opera that Claire had recommended to all of them. Briony is sitting next to her, holding the remote in a way that means it’s the main object that attaches her to reality. It’s not a particularly bad night, but it’s not a good one, either- they’re both clutching the couch cushions; both jumping at every noise, both looking at each other like they’re daring them to mention it.

Steph forces her eyes open; one of the main characters has started on a new love interest and for the life of her, Steph can’t remember his name. In her head, she calls him mole-boy, due to the various moles she can spot on his face.

Beside her, Briony grips the arm of the couch. Her eyes are glassy, but she looks like she has things under control, at least for now. Steph keeps an eye out for each of them: Briony is never to be with anything locked around her wrists, or watch anything involve cages. Claire should never be held down in sparring, or god forbid tied down. Nate isn’t to watch anything involving Stockholm Syndrome, or brainwashing, and they skirt around anything involving screamed Russian. Tony isn’t to watch anything where anyone drowns, or are buried alive, and she’s iffy about caves. Steph doesn’t see anything yet for Thor, but she’s keeping a careful watch on her.

“I thought Kate was with Aaron,” Briony says suddenly.

Steph nods. Nods again. Nods for a third time, mostly because it’s keeping her awake. “She was. They broke up when he cheated on her with mole-boy.”

Briony is silent for a second. “You mean Jake,” she says finally.

Jake, Steph berates herself. “Right,” she says. “Jake. He was the one who got Serena pregnant, right?”

“No, that was Leon.”

“Then who got Serena pregnant?”

“Geordi. After the fire at the hospital.”

“Oh,” Steph says. “Right.” Slowly, she realizes she’s still nodding.

Briony nods along with her, eyes half-lidded and never wavering from the screen.

Steph likes Briony. She’s kind, unassuming and understanding even when Steph is being needlessly irrational. Also, she’s the kind of chubby that Steph is jealous of, the kind that she never achieved as a kid, the kind that would have classified as curvy in the time that she grew up and would be admired by everyone who has the privilege to pass her. Here, though, anything above size 6 is considered a failure, which Steph will never understand no matter how hard she tries.

After too many minutes of tearful yelling from the characters and Steph’s looping, mostly-coherent thought of god, this is boring, her fingers flex and she remembers that she’s holding the remote. She looks over at Briony. “Are you okay with me changing the channel?”

She gets a grunt in response, but it sounds like a positive grunt as opposed to a negative grunt, so Steph starts flicking down the channels. There’s a movie with talking dogs on the next, and then a reality TV show where two pregnant women are in mid-slap, and then a talk show with two blonde women gushing at each other.

Another grunt from Briony, sounding mildly interested, and Steph’s finger pauses over the buttons to watch.

The show looks familiar, which is entirely possible, due to Steph watching all kinds of shows at this time in the morning and remembering only half of them. She could have watched this every night for the past three weeks and been too tired to remember it.

On screen, there’s a woman- probably the host, from what it looks like- with a smart tie and her hair cropped short, beaming at a woman with a look that Steph recognizes, but can’t quite place. The voices fuzz in her ears until the two women stand up, and the host addresses the audience, who laughs enough for Steph to nearly fall asleep right there. Just as Bucky’s fingers start to materialize, though, the host’s voice snaps her back awake.

They’re comparing heights, Steph realizes. She watches as the host hands the woman back her shoe and they both sit back in their seats, giggling like schoolchildren, and the applause dies down after the host tries and fails to get a word in.

‘-mainly why I had you on the show, to settle that,’ Steph listens to the host say. Then, in brighter tones: ‘Hey, Portia.’

The guest- Portia, who is beautiful with striking features and dark eyebrows- grins back. ‘Hey, Ellen.’

‘So, uh, we’ve been married- this is our seven month anniversary, today,’ says the short-haired woman, apparently Ellen, and the audience starts clapping again.

Steph wonders if she heard that right. Or if they’re both women- she checks their throats, both with no adam’s apple in sight.

Huh. That’s- huh.

Both of the women wait for the applause to stop, and when it does, Ellen shrugs. ‘So, I’m going to try to treat you like any other guest who just got married, I’d say how’s, how’s married life for you?’

More laughter from the audience. Steph wonders if ‘married’ is slang for something nowadays. God knows everything else is.

‘I think it’s, uh.’ Portia smiles. ‘Goin’ pretty good.’

‘Are you enjoying being married to me?’

Portia laughs, pushes her long hair behind one ear. ‘Yes, yes I am.’

All thoughts about ‘marriage’ being a slang word for something different vanish from Steph’s mind as photographs begin to appear on the screen: the two women in their wedding dresses, holding hands and looking radiant, and distantly, Steph hears the long-haired woman- Portia- tell Ellen that it was the happiest day of her life.

‘Me, too,’ Ellen says, and the crowd bursts out clapping for a third time, whooping and cheering, all the while Ellen and Portia look at each other like the other hung the moon.

Steph reels. She knew that being homosexual- ‘gay’- is legal now, but is, is marriage-?

She watches as on the screen, Portia sighs and gestures at Ellen. ‘You know, people always ask me if there’s anything that she does that’s annoying, like around the house. Like if she leaves wet towels on the floor, if she’s messy- and I gotta tell you, she is considerate, and kind-‘

The breath is punched out of Steph when the shot changes, switching around to Ellen, who isn’t grinning anymore, but is instead wearing an expression that Steph occasionally sees out on the street when she’s people-watching for things to draw. She’s tried to sketch that expression a thousand times over, and has never got it just right, and now here it is, being directed at a woman, from a woman, and Steph is- god, Steph is loving the 21st century right now.

‘And, and wonderful and- neat,’ Portia finishes, nodding.

‘Oh, thanks-‘

‘All of those things. Really, the most amazing. So what would you say about me? No pressure.’

‘I would say the same thing.’

‘Really?’

‘Not the neat part. I don’t think you’re- neat. But you’re kind and considerate and all those things.’

‘I’m not as neat.’

‘No, you’re not as neat, it’s not just as important to you.’

It takes Steph a second to recognize the feeling in her chest as wistfulness- she’s never received that look from another man, let alone another woman, whom she wanted it from. Now, watching these two women look at each other like they are, like they’re the only two people in the world despite the studio audience, Steph finds herself almost aching for it, in a way that she hasn’t until now.

 She only realizes she’s leaning forward towards the screen when Briony’s toes nudge her feet, and when Steph looks over, Briony meets her gaze steadily, though through layers of exhaustion. Her blinking is bleary, getting heavier with each one.

“Did you know it was legal?”

For a second Steph considers playing dumb, before thinking that no, Briony knows her better than that, and Steph respects her too much for that. So instead of playing it off and saying, did I know that what’s legal, she just says, “No,” and tightens her grip on the remote.

Briony nods. Her cheek sags into where it’s resting on her fist. “Okay.”

“I’m fine with it,” Steph hurries to say, but Briony just trains her with a look, like, I know, dumbass.

Steph nods. Briony nods back.

They turn back to the TV, and Steph listens as Portia continues on to describe an encounter with fans in Rome, something about a camera and a tourist.

The couch dips beside her, and Steph is half-berating herself for not hearing the footsteps and half wondering how the hell Tony got this close with all that lack of noise, and Tony says, “What’re we watching?”

“The Ellen Show,” Briony says.

Tony hums. “Overrated.”

Steph says, “I like it,” quieter than she means to, and there’s something in Tony’s gaze that makes Steph keep her eyes open.

“It’s an okay show,” Tony says eventually, “but I prefer crappy sitcoms at 3 in the morning.”

“Two,” Briony says.

“Mm?”

“It’s two in the morning,” Briony says into her hand.

Tony shrugs. “Same diff. Both my optimum working times. Did either of you have the common decency or sense to bring popcorn?”

“You want popcorn, you get it yourself.”

Tony nudges Briony with her foot. “You’re cruel.”

Briony grunts.

The remote is curled in Steph’s hand. “We were watching sitcoms. I can switch back.”

“No, this is fine.” Tony’s feet slip onto the coffee table, her heels bare against the wood. Steph thinks she should complain about that at some point, if she can manage to keep her eyes open.

“Steph?”

Steph blinks, hard, forcing her gaze back up at Tony, who is facing the screen. “Yes?”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Steph says. “Tired.”

Tony nods. None of them ask why she’s up; they don’t ask anyone anymore, the conversation always goes down a path they regret later. They listen if it’s needed, but they don’t probe. Tonight, apparently, isn’t a night for talking. Instead, they have the dull light of the TV and murmured comments and bare feet on the coffee table.

“Good episode,” Tony says towards the screen.

Steph blinks. Blinks again. “Yeah. They’re,” she says, and can’t find a word that conveys it enough. “I didn’t know it was allowed,” she says finally.

Beside her, she feels Tony’s shoulder lift, and then drop. “It’s not fully socially accepted in a lot of circles, especially in some states, but yeah, it’s legal.” A pause. “God knows girls are better fucks nine times out of ten, since they focus on something other than thrusting in and out.”

Steph laughs, a surprised, choked thing, which startles a laugh out of Tony. Briony looks like she’s dozing, or close to it. Her eyes are closed; her breathing slow and even.

“Good to know,” Steph tells Tony, too tired to be embarrassed by it, and she thinks she hears another huff of laughter.

On the screen, the audience is clapping again. Steph catches the split-second glance between the two women that is impossible to fake, and Tony is undeniably warm against her, her limbs carefully arranged next to her body.

Steph’s breathing cinches.

Oh.

Later, everyone but Claire agrees that it’s almost entirely Claire’s fault, mostly due to her being the one to suggest the game of truth or dare and her also being the one to beg relentlessly at everyone until they finally played.

And that’s how they end up sitting around the lounge, not watching the TV that’s on and trying to top everyone else’s truth, because they agreed that if anyone picked ‘dare’ that it’d probably end up in a Hulking out and none of them could be bothered with the cleanup today.

When Tony calmly picks up her coffee and exits onto the patio, no-one really thinks anything of it.

However, Tony's scream of, "VIRGINITY IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HOT," causes everyone to jump.

"GOD DAMN IT," Tony continues, oblivious, and at this point everyone's turned around in their seats and are staring through the screen doors where Tony is shouting at the sky, fists clenched.

"HOW THE HELL," she screams, "CAN ANYONE, ANYWHERE, POSSIBLY MAKE VIRGINITY HOT? IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE AWKWARD AND EMBARRASSING AND I AM SO PISSED OFF RIGHT NOW I AM SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING THROWING MY COFFEE USELESSLY AND UNAFFECTEDLY INTO THE SKY. THAT'S HOW FUCKING PISSED AT YOU I AM, NONEXISTANT GOD THAT I AM USING JUST THIS ONCE BECAUSE I HONESTLY HAVE NO OTHER WAY OF EXPLAINING WHY I AM CURRENTLY YELLING AT THE SKY. FUCK MY LIFE."

"She said the screen doors were soundproof," Briony says over her, her eyebrows raised as she watches Tony shake her fist. "I guess they, uh, aren't."

"-FUCK CLAIRE FOR BRINGING THIS UP, I HATE HER AND HOPE SHE DIES IN THE NEXT DOOMBOT INVASION-"

"I resent that," Claire says mildly, and she's grinning from her sprawl on the couch, bringing her knees up to curl a hand around them as she watches.

"-OT FAIR AND WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU MAKE ME SO UNBELIEVABLY ATTRACTED TO THE ONE FUCKING PERSON WHO WOULDN'T HAVE ME UNLESS WE WERE BOTH DOSED BY FUCK-OR-DIE POLLEN, AND I'VE BEEN SO SEXUALLY FRUSTRATED IN THESE PAST FEW MONTHS THAT I'VE ACTUALLY BEEN THINKING OF MAKING ONE JUST SO I CAN ACCIDENTALLY SPILL IT ON HER AND NOT GET BITCHED AT BY FURY FOR TAKING CAPTAIN AMERICA'S INNOCENCE-"

Thor is full-out laughing now, covering it with both hands as she chokes quietly on it.

Tony comes up for breath, sucking in air like she’s been drowning for the past thirty seconds.

Steph says, "I'm not that innocent," staring, and it comes out strangled, but then Tony’s yelling again.

“-ANT TO WEAR HER FUCKING FACE AS A HAT AND THE LAST TIME WE CAME BACK FROM A MISSION SHE WAS REALLY FLUSHED AND I HAD TO PHYSICALLY STOP MYSELF FROM LAUNCHING OVER THE TABLE AND SUCKING ON HER CUT LIP AND OH MY GOD THOSE THIGHS SHE COULD RIDE ME FOR HOURS-"

Claire says, "Whoa now," and Thor has fallen off the couch, tucking into a roll as she does so she doesn't land with a thump, shaking and trying not to cry from laughter.

"-I AM SEXY, I AM GODDAMN SEXY AS FUCK, I CAN HAVE ANYONE I WANT AND I WANT HER AND IT SUCKS AND FUCK YOU SO MUCH-"

"You know," Nate says, "for all the reasons for Tony Stark to scream at God, this isn't one of the ones that I pictured."

Claire says, "Hear, hear."

"-EVEN HOW SHE COUGHS IS SEXY AND IT CAN'T JUST BE ME THAT'S LIKE THIS ABOUT HER AND YESTERDAY I WALKED INTO A DOOR BECAUSE SHE WAS REACHING UP TO GRAB THE SALT AND HER BREASTS HAVE BEEN CARVED BY MICHELANGELO'S ANGELS I SWEAR TO GOD. MOTHER. FUCKING. CHRIST. HOW."

There's a collective silence and they all watch as Tony stands there, panting, before patting her hair back into place, taking a mouthful of coffee and turning around.

Everyone quickly bolts back to what they were doing as Tony walks in, Briony grabbing for the remote which is laying from Thor falling off the couch.

Tony sits down next to where Steph is determinedly avoiding her gaze and Briony says loudly, “So, sports.”

At the same time, Claire says, “Basketball, yeah, love it, all those- orange- balls, they have orange balls, right, with the black stripes” and Nate says, “The football isn’t looking good for us this year,” and Thor just booms, “TENNIS,” loud enough to almost drown everyone else out.

Tony looks around suspiciously, and Claire says quickly, “Hey, have you finished my boomerang arrows yet,” which makes Tony drop the suspicious look and replace it with an exasperated one.

“No,” Tony says, “I have not, in fact, finished your boomerang arrows, because I haven’t started them, nor will I ever start them as long as I’m still capable of telling someone to go fuck themselves on a particularly lengthy cactus.”

Claire whines, long and dramatic, letting her head flop back. “Why noooot?”

“Because your reason for arrows is bigger bullshit than Coulson’s anti-gravity defying boobs, Claire, that’s why.”

“I have a totally legitimate-”

“’Because, boomerangs,’ isn’t a legitimate reason, Claire,” Tony says, shifting so her feet are pressing into the arm of the couch before looking over at Briony. “Anything good on?”

“…sports,” Briony says, sounding kind of lost, pointing to the TV where some players are doing something with a ball that they drop in a hoop or whatever and it gets them some kind of points for some reason.

Tony makes a face. “Ew. Why?”

“…because Thor wanted to watch sports.”

Thor glances up from where she’s plaiting her own hair. “I did nothing of the-”

She tenses. Beside her, Nate, munches innocently away on a re-heated plate of nachos and continues to keep one arm hidden somewhere behind Thor’s back.

Thor says, high pitched, “I wish to learn the Migardian rituals of putting the ball through hoops,” and turns to stare at the TV, where someone just did something to make the crowd boo at him because they all suck and the team sucks and Tony doesn’t actually have any idea what game this is.

Tony hums through her nose. “Well, I’m bored. This is boring. You guys are boring. I want to do something else.”

Claire makes a coughing sound that sounds oddly like, ‘someone else,’ and then there’s a muffled like Nate has dug an elbow, none too gently, into the back of her spine.

Tony watches the arm in question slip back and then as Nate takes another bite of nachos, chewing wetly, never taking his eyes off the TV.

“Uh,” Tony says. “Are you guys okay?”

Even more high-pitched than Thor, Claire says, “Yes, we’re fine, why wouldn’t we be fine, everything’s fine, shut up.”

Tony stares.

“I can see that,” she says slowly, and Nate rolls his eyes.

“It’s just Claire being a featherbrain, Tony, ignore her.”

Claire laughs blandly. “More bird jokes, they never get old, you’re so funny, Nate,” she says, and then folds her arms firmly across her chest and stares at the TV.

Tony looks over at Briony, who shrugs, eyes glued to the screen.

Half an hour passes in terse, confusing silence until Claire breathes out loudly, says, “Hey, you know what, I’m going to go outside for a bit, don’t mind me,” and starts towards the patio fast enough that Nate can’t grab her.

Claire closes the screen doors behind her, and Tony is looking back at the TV when Claire starts yelling.

“I LOVE THIS PATIO,” Claire yells, and Tony stiffens.

“I LOVE THIS PATIO SO MUCH I THINK I’M GOING TO MARRY IT. THIS PATIO IS MY SOULMATE. YOU ALWAYS GET A TAN OUT ON THIS PATIO, IT’S SUCH A GREAT-”

Tony hates her life. Tony has always thought the people saying that they wished for a hole to open up underneath them so they vanished forever were grossly exaggerating. Tony has a sudden urge to run from the room. Or, failing that, out onto the patio to push Claire off it and fifty floors down onto the unforgiving New York concrete.

Everyone is suddenly looking determinedly at their feet, and Briony looks like she’s biting her lip to keep herself from bursting out laughing.

“THIS PATIO,” Claire announces, “WILL MAKE A FINE HUSBAND FOR ME. YES, I HAVE DECIDED. THIS PATIO WILL BE THE FATHER OF MY YET TO BE CONCIEVED CHILDREN. I’M JUST MAKING SHIT UP AS I GO AND I REALLY DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING RIGHT NOW, I’M JUST SHOUTING WHATEVER COMES TO MIND. BANANA. LEMONS. TESTICLES. TONY IS AN IDIOT AND CLAIRE IS AWESOME. SO ARE BOOBS.”

“I thought it was soundproof,” Tony tries, sounding like she’s been eating sand for a week straight, and beside her, Steph is incredibly still.

Tony doesn’t look at her; instead she stares, deer-in-the-headlights style, at the TV, where people are doing stupid things because they’re stupid and what the fuck even is this game, it looks awful.

She wets her lips. “Uh,” she says. “I’m sorry you had to hear that. What I said, I mean. Or yelled. What I yelled very, very loudly and- passionately. Out over the entirety of Manhattan, which I hope very much wasn’t close enough to hear it.”

Steph says, “It’s fine,” sounding equally strained, looking at the TV like it holds the secrets to the world.

“It is?”

“Yes, it’s-” Steph clears her throat, and Tony knows that if she looks over she’ll be blushing so badly that Tony will have to adjust her legs.

“It’s- fine,” Steph says again, less like she’s been gargling barbed wire. “Working in close quarters, tension, and all of- that. Stuff. It’s bound to happen to some of us. It’s fine.”

After a few seconds, Tony says, “Uh, okay,” and Steph says, “Okay,” and Claire yells, “HAVE FUN WITH THE SEXUAL FRUSTRATION.”

Tony turns around. “FUCK YOU, CLAIRE, YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE AND NOT EVEN THE PATIO IS GOING TO BE THERE TO LOVE YOU.”

“YOU WOUND ME,” Claire yells through the glass.

Tony thinks he sees Briony stifling laughter behind her hand, but she’s too distracted to do anything about it.

“Okay,” she says again, and to her side, she sees Steph nod, eyes still fixed on the screen.

Well, Tony thinks. I guess that’s settled, then.

If Steph is being honest, there are times when she resents the super soldier serum. Like when she was stumbling all over the place for the first couple of weeks due to her unexpected new size. Along with the fact that it was why she managed to live during her seventy-year ice nap. Sometimes she accidentally crushes plates when she’s doing the dishes. Also, the cramps.

Cramps, as in period cramps. Cramps, as in the serum modified her body so she never gets her period for more than 12 hours, but for every one of those 12 hours, she’s in so much pain she can barely make it to the sink for a glass of water. Cramps, as in there isn’t much blood, but the first time she got them she had legitimately thought someone had slipped a flesh-eating poison into her drink so her insides would slowly dissolve.

Ironically, thanks to the serum, painkillers are useless on her, so she usually spends 12 hours a month trying to find a comfortable position to lie in, ignoring phone calls and pretending she doesn’t exist.

 As she's slowly making her way to the bathroom sink, every step jarring her stomach in the kind of agony that rivals several stomach wounds she's received, she's all but convinced that the cramps are the worst thing by far.

She has to stop in front of the bathroom to lean on the door frame. Breathes in slowly, carefully. Breathes out just as carefully. Grips the door frame hard enough to hear the wood splinter under her fingers. “One day,” she grits. “One. Day. It is just one. Day. Half a day, even. Just half a day. You punched Hitler, you can survive half a day.” It’s become her mantra, over the years. At this point, she’s screamed it at the ceiling multiple times.

She can’t concentrate enough to enjoy a book, a movie, or even an audiobook, and she can’t draw because even that amount of movement is painful, so there’s nothing to do except lie on the bed with her entire body lit up in pain, and maybe wish for death.

A few hours later, when she has drained another two glasses of water and is gunning for a third, there’s a knock on her door. “What,” she yells.

“It’s me,” Tony says, and Steph- god, Steph can’t handle this right now. Or any type of human interaction. Anything that isn’t still, silent contemplation of how much she hates her uterus.

“I’m busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Go away.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“I’m bored.”

“God help us.”

“Ha, ha.” More knocking, like Tony is leaning against the wall and isn’t planning to leave anytime soon. Fuck. “Come ooooon.”

Steph bites back a moan. “What do you want?”

“I’m BORED.”

“Go bother Briony.”

“She’s out with Betty.”

“Go bother anyone.”

“I felt like milkshakes, and you’re the only one who appreciates them properly.”

It’s true, and Tony always drags Steph along whenever she gets a craving for the milkshake shop down the road, but right now Steph would rather pitch herself off the top of the Tower if it meant she would have to move less. “I can’t.”

Tony groans, long and loud and annoying. “Why not?”

“I’m, uh.” How the hell do people say it nowadays? “I have my period.”

There isn’t even a pause from the other side of the door. “No shit, we’ve all been synched for months. Guess that means I’ll get mine in the next day or two. JARVIS, weren’t you supposed to keep me updated?”

“I informed you of your upcoming period several hours ago, Sir,” JARVIS says. “You told me to, and I quote, ‘go suck a fuck and die,’ and then asked if we had any adimantium left.”

“That does sound like me.”

Steph laughs quietly and then regrets it, hissing air through her teeth when pain flares more prominently than before.

“Steph?” The knocking’s stopped, but her voice has gotten closer. “Is it bad?”

“Yeah,” Steph manages. “It’s- they told me it’d be intense. I sorta can’t move.”

“Shit. And you can’t use ibuprofen or anything?”

“Wish I could. I seriously considered morphine a couple of hours ago.”

“Do you have a heating pad? Ice cream?”

“Wouldn’t help.”

“Scientifically, no, not for you,” Tony agrees. “But they’re awesome placebos, and it’s practically tradition, anyway. Didn’t you use to curl up on the couch with your favourite pillow and your Cookies ‘N Cream and eat until the pain got a little less like a gnome was trying to carve his way out of your stomach with a rusty spoon?”

Again, Steph laughs, which isn’t worth it. “Couldn’t afford ice cream back then.”

“Well, you ride with me now. And I say there’s going to be so much ice cream the pain will be doubled by stomach aches.”

“That’s sort of the opposite of what I want.”

“Fine, then. Just enough to ease the pain.”

“That sounds… good.”

A second passes, and Steph images Tony’s knuckles wavering over the wood of the door, not knocking. “Want company,” Tony asks finally, and Steph opens her mouth with no idea what to say.

“Depends who it is,” she says eventually.

“So Briony’s out, but I’m free, obviously. And I’m pretty sure Thor is in her room, getting her hair plaited by John, like she usually does this time of month. Nate is sparring with Claire, who is a bitch who doesn’t get cramps, just gets freakishly hormonal and wants to fight or fuck all the time. Probably both.”

“If she can tamp down on both of those, then I’d be fine having her here.”

“Awesome. Avengers Assemble?”

“Avengers Assemble,” Steph agrees. “But really, really quietly, please.”

Forty minutes later, she’s easing a spoon stacked with Chubby Hubby into her mouth. Her eyes are closed, she’s leaning against Tony’s shoulder and Nate is giving her a back massage which for some reason is making her stomach hurt slightly less. She wonders distantly if it’s some assassin technique used to dull the nerves of their victims before they kill them, before deciding she really doesn’t care as long as it helps with her cramps.

Everyone has their shoes off, since most of them are on her bed- it’s a huge bed, more than enough for Steph- and they’re lounging around in socked feet or bare feet. Claire has her headphones in at the top of the bed, a pillow wedged behind her back, and Thor has her head lying in her lap as Claire plaits her hair into even more intricate designs than John had.

Steph cracks one eye open as she listens to Claire hum quietly. “Could you do me next?”

Claire pauses in her plaiting to take a headphone out. “You want your hair plaited, Cap? Seriously?”

She shrugs. “I thought it might be nice. Someone touching my hair always helped me though when I was sick.”

“I’ll do you next,” Claire promises.

Below her, Thor’s face sets in a frown. “I don’t plan on letting you stop for another hour at least,” she rumbles.

Claire looks at Steph apologetically, and Steph nods. Goddesses on their period, she has learned, are a force never to be reckoned with.

“I can’t plait,” Nate says from behind her. “Sorry. I can- play with your hair, if you want.”

“No, this is fine.” Steph leans her head back again. “Thanks anyway.”

Later, when Nate has left for bed and Thor is more or less napping on Claire’s lap, who is trying to read a book by propping it on Thor’s forehead, Steph’s head is drooping sideways.

“Sorry,” she grunts when her head lands close to Tony’s knee. “Tired. Only got a few hours two nights ago, and then the cramps started last night.”

Tony adjusts her legs so Steph can rest her head comfortably on her thigh. “They’re gone now?”

“Mmm.”

“That’s good.”

“Mmm.”

“Don’t fall asleep on my knee, Cap, I’m not as nice as Claire, I will shove you off.”

“Sorry,” Steph mumbles, and moves her head so she’s lying on the duvet. She primps it up a bit into a makeshift pillow, pushing it into place, and places her head back on it.

At the first touch of fingers at the crown of her head, she startles drowsily. She looks up into Tony’s face, silhouetted by the lights streaming down from her ceiling.

Tony’s expression betrays her. “Sorry, you said-”

“’S okay. ‘S good. Keep going.”

The fingers in her hair start up again, in slow, even strokes. Tony’s sure fingers, her deft hands that Steph has seen, so precise, so careful, mixed up in wires and metal, making shapes out of nothing, play with the ends of her hair, twisting it around softly before letting go. Her nails scratch gently against Steph’s scalp, dragging along until they get to the base of her neck, where tiny wisps of blonde hair are. There, Tony’s fingers pause, running tiny, short sideways strokes before returning into her hair again. This repeats until Steph is dozing blissfully in and out.

She falls asleep to the low sound of Tony humming AC-DC, and finds that she doesn’t hate it as much as she did when she first heard it.

Christmas approaches faster than anyone expects it to, and a week before it hits, Steph finds herself agreeing to go to the Christmas morning sermon with Thor’s boyfriend and his best friend.

John Foster’s best friend since diapers, Darcy Lewis, is a dark-haired guy about Steph’s age, who has a seemingly backwards name, wears a lot of plaid, owns an extensive music collection and is friendly with just about everybody, except to the select people he hates passionately with the loathing of a thousand suns. Strangely, Loki isn’t on that list, but Fury is.

When he had first asked if Steph wanted to get a coffee during their first week of meeting each other, Steph had thought he was asking her out on a date. She had been in the middle of explaining thank you, but no thank you, you’re a perfectly nice fella, but-

Darcy had laughed. Not a mean laugh, just a laugh, bright and bubbly and maybe a little tired, if the bags under his eyes were anything to go by. He had said that he wasn’t ‘into her like that,’ and that he was ‘totes cool with being friends, that was what he was gunning for in the first place,’ and that Steph seemed like an awesome potential bro.

Then he had clapped her on the back, and Steph’s throat had constricted painfully for a second; painfully reminded of Bucky.

And so the weekly coffee Not-Dates had begun around October, during which Steph finds out that although Darcy is Jewish, he had attended church with John and his family on Christmas for most of their teenage years. Darcy tells Steph that they might as well drag her along, and Steph is all too happy to agree.

On Christmas Eve, Steph invites the Avengers, after debating it for a few days. She’s fully prepared for getting five polite or even not-so-polite declines, and gears herself up for exactly this. So she’s more than a little surprised when they all show up at breakfast, pulling on jackets and shucking on hats and gloves. None of them look particularly enthused about it, and Steph assures them that really, it’s fine, she was just going to go with Darcy anyway so she isn’t going to be alone, but her team quickly shut her down.

“I’ve never been,” Claire tells her. “It’ll be a learning experience. Or something. Some dude with a staff lecturing me about the meaning of Christmas, I can’t wait.”

Steph says, near laughter, “There’s no staff,” and Claire shrugs and says it’s close enough.

Nate hasn’t gone, either, and Thor hasn’t, for obvious reasons. Briony and Tony both used to, apparently; Briony stopping around age ten when her mom died and Tony only having a few fuzzy memories from when she had been small enough that Maria picked her up so she could see the pastor.

It’s snowing, and since they’re so covered in layer upon layer of winter clothing, none of them get noticed. Instead they get second glances and I’m-sure-I-know-you-from-somewhere frowns, but people mostly stay out of their way. The sermon isn’t like Steph remembers it, but she supposes that the decades have changed church like they’ve changed everything else.

She tries not to feel bitter about it, and mostly succeeds.

They return back to the Tower around ten, minus John and Darcy, and while everyone else shakes the ice off their boots and coats, Claire all but trips over her own feet running to the tree, which is glowing. Steph thinks it has something to do with how JARVIS likes the lights; he’s kept the room just dark enough for the lights to show ever since the tree got put up two weeks ago.

Of course, that might just be on request of someone in the Tower, but Steph likes to think JARVIS has his own secrets. After all, Dummy sometimes seems more human than his creator does, and god knows she wouldn’t put it past Antonia to make an AI who develops feelings about things like Christmas lights.

Claire drops to her knees and then rolls back on her ass in front of the pile of presents that is bigger than any pile of presents that Steph has ever seen, cackling like a little kid. “Mine first, mine first,” she calls, grabbing the first one she sees and turning it over. Her nose scrunches. “Or not; it’s from Steph to Nate.”

She makes a move to throw it back into the pile before Nate is there, plucking it out of her hands and dropping into a graceful sitting position beside her. “You could have just given it to me,” he says, and runs a thumb under the wrapping paper, pulling the tape away with minimal tearing.

Claire grabs at another one, turns it over. “From Steph, to Briony,” she reads aloud, tossing it to Briony, who catches it, but only just. Claire makes a face as she picks up another one. “From Steph, to Tony- Steph, if you got a present for everyone but me, I’ll bitch about you to everyone at SHIELD, and they’ll spike your coffee with salt forever.”

Nate says, “No, they wouldn’t, they like her better,” and Steph sighs. Everything tastes different since she woke up, including coffee. She’d probably think that the salt was some stupid new flavour they invented to keep the brand going.

Claire’s face lights up as she finally turns a present over to see her name on the label. “Okay, team, let’s see what Captain America got us.”

She tosses Thor her present one-handed, and now everyone is opening the presents from Steph first. Right. Okay.

There’s the ripping of wrapping paper, and then five people are holding up their knitted sweaters, and Steph can’t stop clicking her jaw for some reason. Her thumbs flick against her palms. She feels blood flushing up under her neck. She wills it down.

Thor is beaming. Her laugh is bright, much like her sweater, which is gold and striped. “Many thanks, Stephanie,” she says, and tugs the sweater over her head, shaking her hair over it when it comes to nestle at her neck. Her arms wrestle in it for a second before slipping out the sleeves.

The others echo it, most of them with something like- well, not confusion, but close to it- angling their sweaters up, some of them holding it out to examine them.

“Wow,” Briony says, almost soft. Her fingers squeeze the wool. “Did you knit these?”

“Yeah,” Steph says, suddenly at a loss. She tries for a smile, but it comes out flimsy, wondering why this seemed like a good idea. “I, uh. I just, in the war there was a lot of waiting around, and we all needed to stay warm. Sorry, I couldn’t do anything fancy with them.”

“They’re great,” Briony assures her, and she folds her yellow sweater in careful movements. “Thank you,” she says again.

“No problem,” Steph says, and pretends she’s not watching everyone else’s reaction- Nate’s one is burgundy, and resting softly against his knees, and his expression is one that so far Steph’s only seen directed at Claire.

Claire had looked surprised when she had opened her present (a dull purple with tiny beads around the neck) but now she’s just smiling, tucking it under her chin and pushing the material down the inside her collar to get a feel for it.

Tony, like Thor, pulls hers on, and it’s met with a laugh from everyone around the room, which Steph can’t help but echo. She can’t do anything fancy, that’s true, but what she can do it Google ways to knit a pale blue circle in the middle of the chest of the sweater.

“Huh,” Tony says. Her lips twitch as she continues to look down at the blue circle, which is stretched slightly across her breasts in a way that Steph tries not to notice.

Tony says, “Not bad, Cap,” and her tone is nonchalant, but her face says otherwise.

When Steph had first given Bucky a sweater- a birthday present instead of Christmas- he had reacted about the same. Asked if she knitted it, his fingers moving over the material with the same half-reverent words, the same quietly pleased smile.

Through the sweater, Steph can see the muted glow of the arc reactor, blue through blue, and is thankful that she went to six different stores to get the right colour of wool.

She coughs, low in her throat, and looks over her team. “Hey, why don’t we see what Hawkeye got us?”

“Rocks,” Claire says flatly. “I got you all rocks. I hope you like ‘em.”

More huffed laughter, and Steph remembers those Christmases with her first family- cold apartments, her mother, and then later, Bucky and his grandparents. Then her first team, her Howling Commandos, still cold, probably red-nosed and shivering and ankle-deep in the snowy trenches, or huddled around a fire indoors, all laughing and shoving.

Now, there’s this- her second team, Steph’s Avengers, splayed over the lounge and perfectly warm.

And she’s lost a lot of people along the way, and most if not all of the presents she had gotten over the years, but now, there’s this: Claire dangles her head back to tell JARVIS to crack down the heating a few degrees. There’s this: Briony hands Steph something that might be a book. There’s this: Steph smiles, thanks her, and keeps smiling.

---

Age 39 & 26.

When Claire sprains her left arm in combat and bitches the whole way through Medical, there is a sudden increase in movie nights- it’s only a minor sprain, but it’s enough to get Claire out of the field for the next several weeks, which is apparently enough for Claire to sulk around the Tower and moan until everyone relocates to the lounge and slots in a DVD.

That night- or, well, evening- Thor digs her way into the back of the collection, and emerges with a bulky one in hand. Before she can even say anything, though, Nate says, “No,” and picks it smoothly out of her hand, placing it aside.

Thor frowns, opening her mouth again, but, as soon as Tony angles her head enough to catch a glimpse of the title, she quickly says, “Nope.” She pats Thor on the shoulder as she passes. “Sorry, buddy. Pick another one.”

Steph bends to where Nate is cross-legged on the carpet, keeping her voice low. “What is it?”

“It’s about the Holocaust,” Nate says after a pause. “That’s why it was in the Red Flag section.”

“We have that section?”

“Yes. We can watch them, but only when the person or people it’s flagged for aren’t around. Tony started it last year.”

Steph hums in acknowledgement. Last year, when they had just been getting comfortable with each other, Tony, Nate, Steph and Thor had been watching an episode of NCIS, and Tony had gone catatonic for a good three minutes and had come out of it with something that they’ll never tell her was a sob. She hadn’t come out of the workshop for a few days after that, and when she did she was stumbling.

It hadn’t been the first thing like that to happen in the Tower, and Steph knows that with this bunch of people, it sure as hell won’t be the last.

She asks Nate if it’s particularly graphic, and Nate tells her yes. She asks if there are any battles, and he says no.

“What’s graphic about it?”

Nate keeps her eyes on the blank screen of the TV. “A lot of people being shot in the head. Some abuse scenes. Mass body burnings. Kids getting killed. A woman gets raped at some point. I’m probably forgetting a lot; I haven’t watched it in a long time.”

“What’s it called?”

“Schindler’s List.”

“I’ve heard good things.”

Nate laughs quietly. “Yeah, you would’ve. It’s a classic.”

“I think I’d be fine,” Steph says honestly.

Nate hums.

They end up watching ‘WALL-E,’ and it’s nice, even when they all end up getting slightly too emotionally involved. When WALL-E’s foot slips and he’s half-crushed, none of them bother trying to hide their stricken gasps.

A few months later Steph is back in front of the DVD player at six in the morning, with Briony sleeping on a couch a few feet away. Steph ventures into the Red Flag section and finds a movie that seems decent- she’s heard about it online, and it’s a Tom Hanks film, who she remembers from watching The Green Mile a couple of movie nights ago.

She starts reading the back of Forrest Gump, and opens her mouth just as JARVIS answers the question she was going to ask.

“It has a graphic depiction of the war, Captain. I suggest you find another movie. Or, if you’d like, I could fast-forward the parts-”

“I’ll be fine,” she assures him. “Play it the whole way through.”

A pause. “Certainly, Captain.”

And Steph is fine. Or, well, she is up until Bubba dies bloody in Forrest’s arms telling him he wants to go home, and Steph has to stand up. She calmly exits the room, which deteriorates into a slow run down the hall, and spends the next half an hour puking violently into the toilet bowl. At some point she runs out of food to vomit and ends up dry-gagging, her stomach clenching around nothing.

There’s a knock on the bathroom door, and she hears Briony ask if she’s okay.

“I’m fine,” Steph croaks, determinedly not thinking about the kid- and he had been a kid, he had lied and said he was eighteen- back in the war, breathing funny after his neck got a thin pipe shoved through it. He had been able to speak for a few minutes until the blood got into his lungs, and then after that he had only been able to choke wordlessly.

The blood had gotten all over Steph’s legs, since she had hoisted his head into her lap. She had lied, telling him it’d be okay, that it wasn’t even that bad, that the medic would get here in time, and the kid had looked up at her, all bloody and sobbing and terrified and young, and asked if he could go home now.

She remembers thinking, you should be home, you stupid moron, god, you should be HOME, you aren’t even shaving yet. Not much long after that, the choking sounds stopped entirely.

Steph rests her head on the toilet bowl. It’s cold against her overheated skin.

The next morning, Tony comes and sits at the breakfast table with her, coffee in hand. Her hair is matted on one side, like she had fallen asleep at the workshop bench again.

Steph can’t help but stare, though she does it out of the corner of her eye as she eats her toast.

“Red Flag movies are in the Red Flag section for a reason,” Tony says, eyes on the designs in front of her. Her fingers move effortlessly over the sleek screen of her tablet.

“I thought I could handle it.”

Tony makes a noise like a grunt. “Next time, at least get JARVIS to skip the icky parts.”

“I will,” Steph says. “Thank you.”

She thinks Tony glances at her, but she could just be imagining things.

---

Age 40 & 27.

When the hurricane warning is announced, Nate and Claire make the smart choice and get the hell out of dodge, accepting the request to go on a mission to Bangladesh. Briony tells everyone that it’d probably be a bad idea if she stayed, so she goes to stay with Betty until it blows over. At this point, Thor has been in Asgard for nearly a week, which Tony catches Fury bitching about in the elevator.

“Couldn’t wait a week,” Fury mutters. “No, our moon is right, Nick. The ceremony has to be now, Nick. Motherfucking Norse gods.”

“Amen to that, Sir,” Tony says.

He flips her off. She grins.

Tony, wisely, is headed to her cabin in Aspen with Pepper. Purely in a platonic sense, she insists. She’s going to ski and hit on pretty boys (not including Pepper) and sip margaritas in the snow and pretend she isn’t forty, and she’s going to enjoy it, damn it.

She gets Pepper to book a flight, packs her stuff, and is looking out the window when Steph walks in.

Tony motions towards the sky. “You’re really going to stay here while all hell breaks loose? You could come, you know. I’ve only offered a zillion times.”

And Steph- Steph just looks at her. With that fucking look. That fucking look that Tony’s seen countless times on countless missions, the look that means they’re all coming home bruised and battered and complaining bitterly about it. The stupid, stubborn look that is half Cap but somehow manages to also be one hundred and ten percent Stephanie fucking Rogers, the girl from Brooklyn who was too stupid to stand down from a fight.

“No,” Tony says. Her bag hits the floor. “No, no, no. No.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“No,” Tony repeats, louder. Like maybe if she screams it, it’ll finally drill into Steph’s thick head. “Fucking NO, Cap, no way.”

“Would you quit yelling at me,” Steph says, annoyed, like the bastard has no idea what Tony’s talking about.

“It’s a HURRICANE,” Tony snarls. “It’s literally a FORCE OF NATURE. A FORCE. OF. NATURE. You can’t go outside and stand on the roof and yell patriotic shit at it, it won’t stop destroying the city, because it is a HURRICANE. This is not our job, we don’t stop this kind of thing.”

When Steph’s jaw locks, Tony realizes that this is a losing battle. This, of course, just makes her yell louder. Which turns into Steph yelling back. Which turns into both of them in a sudden screaming match, complete with them getting up into each other’s face and god, they haven’t done this in, like, at least a few months. Four, at least.

At one point, Steph snaps some barb about why Tony won’t help, Tony yells something that sounds an awful lot like, “Well, weren’t you the one who said I wasn’t anything without the suit? I’m a squishy, useless human being sans armour, Cap, a hurricane would beat the crap out of me.”

Steph’s face flickers at that, but she continues to look straight into her face, unflinching. “You’re really going to leave when there’s something you could do to help?”

“There isn’t anything I can do to help! Humans aren’t supposed to go out and help in hurricanes, they’re supposed to get the fuck indoors and stay there until it dies down. And in case you’re asking, which I know you’re not, but yes, ‘human’ includes you.”

“There are going to be people who don’t get inside in time-”

“It isn’t going to make a difference if you run around in a spandex suit-”

“There are going to be people who are trapped-”

“So we’ll suit up and get them out after the hurricane stops, for fuck’s sake, Cap, don’t be an idiot, you can’t beat this-”

“Tony, we have to do something-”

“We WILL,” Tony bites. “When it’s OVER. Steph, you can’t beat this. You can’t.”

Steph stares at her, all steely determination and a stiff jaw, and a good couple of seconds pass before Steph says, “I thought you were better than this,” and Tony has to push back a full-body flinch, because wow, ten minutes ago they were joking about the weatherman and now they’re swinging words like punches. Tony has really forgotten how much this shit hurts; how it hurts worse than the Helicarrier by a thousandfold, because now they have three-years-plus of knowing each other behind the scenes.

Also, there’s the whole Loving Steph Thing, but Tony isn’t touching that anytime soon. Or ever.

And because Tony’s a grade-A asshole, she rearranges her face so it’s all faux-calm. “And I thought you understood by now that you’re more or less garters, Cap. Pretty to look at and relatively functional, but kind of useless anyway since it’s the 21^st century and tights can stay in place on their own.”

Again, Steph’s face flickers, but this time it’s hurt that flashes through, raw and open before clamping down again and making Tony want to apologize on the spot. Steph opens her mouth, but stops. Tony does the same. They stand like that, caught, pissed, with wind starting to howl at the windows, when Tony’s phone rings.

“What,” Tony snaps into it after a few-second fumble in her pocket.

It’s Pepper. He tells Tony she better be pulling up right now, or the flight has to either leave without her or be cancelled entirely due to the weather getting steadily worse.

It’s kind of sad, how Tony only hesitates for a second before telling Pep that there’s been a change of plans. It’s worth it, though, because she watches Steph’s face change again as she says, “Leave without me, and I’ll see you in a day or two. It looks like I’m sticking around.”

Pepper sighs. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Tony laughs loudly into the phone.

They spend three hours ducking pinwheeling objects, battling the wind and getting people the fuck out of the way. Tony swears loudly into the storm, screams curse words that get lost in the roar of it, and puts one fucking foot in front of the other.

They’re both in civilian clothes, Steph with her shield, Tony with a single gauntlet in case she needs to blow anything up, since going out with the suit would just weigh her down.

Their hair is plastered to their face from the rain when it isn’t being ferociously blown back by the wind. They stumble, they slip, they duck. They are forced backwards. They help each other forwards.

Finally, long after they are soaked to the skin, Tony motions to Steph. “TOO STRONG,” she yells ineffectively. “WE NEED TO GET INDOORS.”

Bless your super-soldier-serum enhanced hearing, Tony thinks when Steph nods.

They can’t make it across town to the Tower, like they anticipated, so they have to duck into a hotel, instead, which is full of people in the same situation. When the manager explains to them that they don’t have enough beds, Tony nearly laughs.

Steph asks what that means for them, and the manager sighs. Scrapes a hand through his hair like he’s tempted to pull it out; Tony figures he’s been answering these same questions over and over ever since the hurricane started. “I’m really very sorry, ladies. We are genuinely out of beds, unless you want to share one.”

Tony’s too tired to be anything but irritated. “If the room has a shower, I’m all for it. Steph?”

“Seconded.” Steph looks like blinking is a gargantuan effort. Tony hopes her eyelids hurt. “Sorry, but where would we get food around here?”

“There’s a buffet downstairs. Free of charge for Avengers, of course.”

Tony takes the room key, leaves Steph to wander off in search of the buffet, and goes to shower. Washes her hair with the tiny shampoo bottles before running conditioner briefly through it. Towels herself blissfully dry after hours of dripping, and by the time she steps out with a towel tucked into place above her chest, Steph is arriving back.

With something like satisfaction, Tony watches her falter; her eyes flicker down before returning to her face. “I,” Steph says. She blinks rapidly, and holds up two bags: a see-through plastic bag, and a brown paper one. “I brought some food back for you. And I asked the Lost And Found if they had anything to spare, since our clothes are, um. Ruined.”

“How incredibly kind of you.” Tony sits on the bed and holds out her hand, and Steph hands her the brown bag before taking a shirt and some pants out of the plastic bag and giving Tony the rest.

“I’ll just,” Steph says, clothing clutched in her hand, and nods towards the shower.

“You just,” Tony nods back, and doesn’t bother watching Steph retreat. Instead, she starts rummaging in the bag- of course, there’s the obligatory ‘I <3 NY’ shirt in every hotel Lost And Found box, along with a pair of sweatpants that are probably going to fit Tony if she holds her breath. She shucks them on, and then opens the other bag.

Mashed potatoes in a container, a plastic fork, and what looks like stew. Right now, it might as well be heaven.

As she gets dressed, her mind is a loop of I would have been on my way to Aspen and instead I’m in a hotel dressed like a confused tourist and am about to get into bed with Captain America.

When Steph emerges, Tony snorts. Loudly. Steph is wearing mustard-yellow shorts along with a baggy cardigan and apparently nothing else.

“Shut up,” Steph says, half-smiling, and for a second, it’s like the screaming a few hours before never happened. “Now go sit on the sink.”

Tony blinks. Now her eyelids hurt. “Go what on the what?”

“Sit,” Steph repeats. “On the sink. So I can swab the cut your cheek.”

No matter how much Tony argues that she just wants to go to sleep, Steph stands her ground. Of course. Because running out into a hurricane isn’t enough stubbornness for one day.

“I’m fine,” Tony says. Again.

Steph says, “Sure you are,” as she crouches down to her eye level. Tony very pointedly doesn’t wince at the first sharp sting of antiseptic against her cheek.

From here, Tony can see Steph’s individual eyelashes- pale and blonde and nearly nonexistant. Can feel her soft, wet breath. Her gentle fingers, dabbing tiny lines down Tony’s cheek to get rid of the blood tracks. Soldier’s fingers, artist’s fingers; they’ve strangled men to death and brushed charcoal into the shape of a face.

The fingers continue, dabbing, staining red. Tony wonders if Steph’s mother ever applied her mascara like this, telling her to look up at the ceiling; if she tickled Steph’s nose with a makeup brush afterwards so her newly-done eyes creased.

And Tony- god, it’s no secret that Tony isn’t used to this kind of proximity. Intimacy. Whatever. She’s fucked people, sure, she’s fucked so many people she legitimately can’t remember most of them, but anything verging on intimacy had been actively avoided, sneaking out of bed and down to the workshop as soon as they’ve fallen asleep. But Tony has been doing this whole self-improvement shtick for a good five-ish years now, she’s stopped the excessive drinking and partying and sleeping with people she doesn’t care about, she’s actually attended several of her therapist appointments, so she’s at the stage where she can freely admit that okay, yes, she has some issues. Intimacy issues being a biggie. Emotional issues being another, and also another entirely different subject that she isn’t going into. Along with Daddy Issues. Ha. Ha, ha.

So: intimacy. Something Tony’s never really had huge amounts of with anyone, except for occasionally the ever-increasing moments in a battle or after a battle or sometimes the days following a battle, where they drag each other out of the way or lean on each other’s shoulders or sling their legs on each other’s knees in front of the TV, or even just- gravitating into one another without even noticing, with their legs brushing or their shoulders pressing. It’s been good. It’s been a pretty decent last couple of years, if Tony’s honest. If she’s been honest, it’s been the best years of her life, not noticing how her leg is slung over someone else’s because it’s such a familiar thing to do.

There’s even a familiarity to how Steph cleans Tony up; wiping the blood away. Briefly, Steph’s hand hesitates at the edge of Tony’s face, near her hair, where there’s a trace of blood matted in it. She moves like she’s going to stroke through it, but then falters, stops, and then goes back to cleaning Tony’s cheek.

Tony trains her eyes on the wall behind Steph’s head, breathes in through her teeth and focuses on the burn of the antiseptic.

Around midnight, when Steph’s fake-sleep-breathing is close to falling away to real-sleep-breathing, Tony says, fast, “You aren’t garters,” because she’d rather look like an idiot than go back to how they’ve been so many times, tiptoeing around things they shouted in the heat of the moment or things they should’ve said but didn’t due to their stupid fucking pride.

A pause, and for a moment Tony thinks that Steph might have actually fallen asleep, before-

“I do think you’re better than that.” There’s a rustle, like Steph’s hands are moving. “I mean, I never- I would never- I didn’t think you were less than what you are.”

“…Thanks?”

“It’s a compliment.”

“So was mine. About the garters. Which you aren’t.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem. Hey, by the way, did we, uh. Did I ever apologize about the time we first met? In the Helicarrier?”

“I. Don’t think so?”

“Oh. Sorry, then.”

“Me, too. It was- rude. And, and circumstantial.”

Tony shrugs against the mattress. “We were magicked by Loki’s staff, I think we can pretty much put a blanket apology on anything we said back there. It was years ago, anyway.”

“I’m still sorry. I didn’t- I didn’t know- I would have apologized sooner if-”

“It’s fine.” Tony swallows into the sudden silence. This is good. Communication. Is good. According to the emotionally healthy people she’s talked to, and also her therapist. “My back’s cold,” she says, and then winces to herself.

“What?”

“My back,” Tony says, internally screaming, stupid, stupid, you’re an idiot, what the fuck. “It’s cold.”

Tony thinks she’s going to have to draw an elaborate map to explain it, but thankfully, Steph gets it on the second try and there’s a further rustling as she shuffles closer. Tony shuffles with her, and then their backs are pressing together through an ‘I <3 NY’ shirt and a mustard-yellow cardigan.

The word intimacy flashes through Tony’s head again, surprisingly comforting. Warm. Like a familiar back pushed up into yours, solid and staying.

For a moment, she thinks of Zeno’s paradox- two objects, cascading, always getting closer but never touching; and thinks about Steph’s back warm against hers. Then she shoves it out of her mind, because she can’t afford to make the connection between the two.

“Better?”

“Yeah. Yes. Thanks.”

“Night,” Steph says for the second time in an hour.

“Night,” Tony replies.

She doesn’t get to sleep until well after three in the morning, both lulled and fucking terrified by how Steph doesn’t seem to be sleeping, either.

Waking up happens slowly. First Tony becomes aware of the fact that yes, it was a dream, and that she isn’t currently running from a skyscraper-tall marshmellow beast while armed only with mugs of hot chocolate, and that instead she’s spooning Steph. Which, sadly, is only a little less ridiculous, given the life they lead.

For a while, she just lies there, half-awake, her nose pressed into the top of Steph’s hair, before she realizes how inappropriate this will look to Steph when she wakes up, and prying one arm out from underneath her. Unfortunately, she does it a little fast, and Steph startles. Tony watches, holding back a grimace as Steph’s eyes blink open.

“Hullo,” Steph says muzzily. One hand comes up to scrub at her eyes. “Time ‘izzit?”

“Uh,” Tony says. “Haven’t checked yet. The hurricane’s stopped,” she says, only noticing as she says it, looking towards the window.

Steph follows her gaze. “Mph. Good.”

“Yeah,” Tony agrees stupidly. Graduated MIT at fifteen, ladies and gentlemen, but can’t come up with anything relatively close to intelligent around this woman. “We should have breakfast.”

Steph squints at her. “’Kay.”

“I’ll boil the jug.”

“Coffee isn’t breakfast,” Steph says blearily, cracking a smile, sounding more awake this time.

Tony sits back on her heels. “That’s just because you never drink enough of it.”

“Whatever you say, Tony,” Steph says, and whatever she was going to say after that is swallowed by a yawn. She presses her hand over her mouth, waits for it to end before saying, “Good sleep?”

Tony grunts something that she hopes isn’t interpreted as, your physical closeness distracted me to the point where I physically could not sleep. “You?”

“It would’ve been good, if someone stopped hogging all the blankets.”

Tony looks down. There does seem to be a surplus of blankets on her side. Huh. “Yeah, well, I actually needed them,” she says, and pokes Steph in the shoulder. “You’re a human furnace, Rogers.”

Steph snorts. “Doesn’t mean I don’t get cold. I was freezing.”

“Aw, poor Cap.”

“Blanket stealer.”

“Whiner.”

“Jerk,” Steph laughs, and makes a swipe for the blankets that Tony now has clutched in both hands, but Tony pulls them back just in time for Steph’s hands to close on open air. Neither of them are really trying- if they were, lamps would be broken and the walls would be dented and the blanket would be torn and possibly Steph and Tony would be in pieces, but instead it’s playful, light, as Tony dodges Steph again.

They’re laughing, grabbing and reaching and leaning away, and this is normal, right, they spar all the time, they have half-hearted wrestling matches over the remote every week or so, this is just them returning to normal as Tony holds the blanket far behind her, out of Steph’s reach.

Steph lunges, grinning, and they struggle, limbs twisting. Tony manages to catch her hand and manoeuvre the both of them back into the bed, blanket bunched somewhere near Tony’s right fist, which is holding Steph’s down, along with her left hand holding Steph’s right.

She’s still laughing, even though she knows that Steph could overpower her without trying, and starts to crow something like, victory, before her eyes focus and she sees Steph’s face has changed and the words shrivel in her throat, wedging her breath to a stop.

The fact strikes her, again, that Steph could have stopped her anytime and taken the blankets with barely a twist of her wrists, and Tony is holding her down on the bed by her hands, inches from her face.

Her face, Steph’s face, which looks completely stripped bare, her eyes staring into Tony’s, naked and cloudy something Tony has seen too many times even though the haze of booze. It’s want, but more than that it’s confusion, but more than that it’s nervousness, it’s a dozen different emotions laid open and unfolding below Tony on the bed.

Tony breathes out, and feels Steph’s breath on her cheek in return. She is suddenly hyper-aware of Steph’s breasts pushing into hers; their shirts have both rode up during wrestling, leaving an inch or so of naked stomach to press against each other.

Tony breathes. Steph follows suit. Their breasts press firmly as their chests rise and fall, and Tony focuses on keeping her breathing steady.

When Steph parts her lips, Tony nearly goes into cardiac arrest right then and there, but then Steph is saying, haltingly, “Thank you for staying with me. I’m- I’m glad you didn’t leave. Thank you for helping me.”

Tony wants to joke, I couldn’t let you go off and do all that crazy shit on your own, could I?

Wants to tell her, I’d follow you to the end of the universe and back, you wouldn’t even have to ask me, I’d just go. Every time.

Wants to say what she never had the guts to say to anyone except mockingly, and Steph is underneath Tony and her bedhair is laughably bad, drying into place as she slept, and her clothes are awful and Tony would go willingly to her death a thousand times if there was a chance Steph would be safe because of it.

“Yeah,” Tony says instead. “Anytime, Cap, I-” and then she stops, and it’s stuck in her throat, looking down at this wonderful woman whose hair is frizzing over her forehead and is so beautiful it physically aches.

I’d never leave you unless you asked me to, she doesn’t say, and it shoves, and shoves, and shoves.

“Anytime,” she repeats, making sure her voice doesn’t stumble.

She gets stuck on how Steph’s eyelashes skim her cheeks as she blinks, and they’re still so close together, feeling their breath on each other’s faces, their words landing on their skin.

Neither of them are laughing now.

And Steph- god, fuck, oh, Steph tilts her face upwards, and they’re so close it doesn’t even put her neck at an awkward angle.

Tony stays still, and Steph pauses, close enough that Tony can feel the warmth of her mouth.

Tony stays still, and Steph kisses her on the lips- soft, questioning, barely contacting. When Tony’s brain finally comes online a few moments later, she turns it into a proper kiss where both parties are moving their mouths, and then, all too soon, Steph is leaning back into the pillows, the contact broken.

Tony follows, like she always does, like she always would- but only slightly, only moving in increments, half because of the fear and half because they’re too close anyway. She meets Steph’s eyes again, and Steph cants her face upwards and Tony moves downwards and then they’re kissing again, and Tony’s fingers tighten where they’re linked in Steph’s. Stay there, she wants to say. Let me keep you here, like this. Please.

She doesn’t say it, of course, but Steph stays anyway.

They might kiss for a few minutes. Tony isn’t sure. She’s lost in it, in the feel of it, in the sheer loveliness of Steph, all hesitant and unsure and solid and giving under Tony’s mouth and lips and tongue.

Steph takes Tony’s bottom lip between her teeth and bites, and it’s hardly even a bite, just a squeeze of her teeth, and it’s tender and slow and then she’s smoothing her lips over it, kiss-kiss-kiss. Slowly, deliberately, she presses a kiss into Tony’s chin, into her jawline, and then shifts her head sideways and places an open-mouthed kiss on Tony’s neck.

I, Tony wants to say, and doesn’t even know how she’d finish it. Then Steph is kissing her way back up the other side Tony’s neck, sucking lightly at her collarbone before bringing her face up. She sighs, almost silent, a quiet exhale into Tony’s mouth when Tony squeezes her hand.

The phone rings, after a minute or maybe two or possibly half an hour of soft kissing, Tony is honestly not sure, but just like that the spell is broken. They jerk back and then freeze, and Tony watches the gears change in Steph’s face: what am I doing, what am I DOING-

The phone continues to ring, and both at once, they burst into motion. Tony rolls off of Steph and both of them go for their phones, fumbling with them until they realize that Steph’s phone is the one ringing.

“Hello,” Steph says into it. Her voice is trembling a bit, but in a good way. Tony doesn’t know how she feels about it.

It’s Fury. He’s pissed. He’s yelling about how they could be so stupid, battling a hurricane, and Steph takes it and nods and says Yes, Sir, and doesn’t look at Tony at any point during the call.

They don’t talk about it. They’re friends- of course they’re friends, they’re best friends- but they don’t talk about it.

So instead of talking, they watch movies. They spar, they go out for street food, they fight monsters and save the city and occasionally the world, and they both start noticing the glances more often than usual. The touches. The accidental or not-so-accidental brushes as they pass.

Their gazes connect over a team dinner. Over a sea of heads at a gala. Through a gap at a routine meeting. Stolen moments, silent communications that make their breath catch.

And even though they don’t fully know why, something in them is saying the exact same thing: not yet. We’re not ready yet.

---

Age 41 & 28.

There is a Youtube video that Tony takes down as soon as she hears about it, and spends the rest of the day adamantly avoiding phone calls. Unfortunately, in the hour it had been online, three million people including most of the Avengers, Darcy, Fury and Pepper had been linked to it.

Darcy keeps grinning knowingly at Tony whenever she walks into the room, and Tony is getting tired of pretending not to notice.

The video is cellphone footage that some guy in a cafe took, and it’s steady enough that Tony can’t dismiss the people as anyone other than her and Steph, and Tony is desperately taking the video down again and again after it keeps coming up. And it keeps. Coming. Up. Fucking. Christ.

 The video is the bane of Tony’s week, and it’s is called ‘tony stark stares weirdly at cap for TWO WHOLE MINUTES OMG???? WUT.’

The content, sadly, is what the title suggests. It starts off with a guy with wide eyes and a potato nose hissing into the phone, “Dudes dudes dudes this has been going on for like thirty seconds and Cap isn’t noticing what the fuuuuck,” before twisting around to see Tony and Steph sitting at a table.

Thankfully, Steph is drawing for the entirety of the video, utterly absorbed and totally out of it, chalk smearing down her wrists, her hands blurring across her notepad. Not at one point does she look up and notice Tony and her stupid dopey smile from across the table.

In Tony’s defence, she had just spent the last 62 hours awake and Steph's hair had been doing the thing where it was perfect. Also, the sun had been doing the thing to Steph’s face where it fell in all the good places, except Tony had been at that point of sleep deprived and therefore honest where everything about Steph was a good place. She had been just ONE BIG GOOD PLACE DAMNIT and there was SUN and Tony just got DISTRACTED and there was STEPH and Tony was TIRED AS FUCK AND MAYBE SORT OF HALLUCINATING A LITTLE.

Somehow Tony had been exhausted enough that she didn’t realize the possible consequences of staring with her chin in her hands at Steph for two full fucking minutes as her coffee was being made, and some fucker had gotten the whole thing on tape.

In the video, this goes on for a while, and finally the waitress comes up behind Tony at around the one-minute-forty-seconds mark. She stands, wavering, and they’re at the one-minute-fifty before she coughs, lightly, into her fist. “Um,” she says. “Um. Miss Stark?”

“Mm,” Video-Tony grunts, the spell broken. She blinks, and looks up blearily.

The waitress hands her the coffee, and Tony grunts a thank-you, and the waitress is blatantly smirking as she walks off.

Quietly, the guy taking the footage says, “The fuuuuuuck,” again, before the video ends.

Bane of Tony’s existence. Bane. She’s prided herself on masking everything, on primping and pressing her emotions into a neat line and covering them up with a lipsticked grin, and then there they are, all laid out bare in a shitty café in Brooklyn.

At this rate, Steph is going to undo her completely.

Back when everyone had first moved into the Tower, Tony had just started therapy after narrowly avoiding a panic attack in the suit and consequently nearly ramming into a building. She had wobbled, come out of it, assured everyone that she was fine and then stumbled into a bathroom to dissolve into loud, gulping, embarrassing hysterics for forty seconds.

And the therapy had helped a lot. It turned out when Tony actually co-operated and didn’t spend all her time shutting the dude down and making cutting remarks, it had been easier to make actual progress.

The nightmares had been dwindling, nearly stopping completely, and then Tony had had a bad day which turned into a bad night which somehow turned into Steph stopping an empty Iron Babe suit from throwing her across the room.

Steph had been half-asleep on the couch, when apparently the Iron Babe suit had woken her up by mounting the stairs to Tony’s room. She had frowned, called, Tony, and when Tony hadn’t answered, she had asked JARVIS what Tony was doing.

When the curt reply came that Tony was currently sleeping, Steph had bolted up the stairs, into Tony’s room and had arrived just in time to duck a blow from Iron Babe’s fist.

Tony had woken up, cutting off her whimper, quickly realized what was going on and launched her foot into the suit’s chest, scattering it into pieces. She had started babbling breathlessly about schematics, and Steph had said, Tony, and Tony had continued, still shaking, and Steph repeated her name, louder.

An hour later they had been both sitting on the floor against the base of the bed, occasionally looking at each other but mostly at the floor or their feet, trading horror stories and nightmares. Steph had told her about seeing Bucky reaching for her every time she closed her eyes; seeing him scrabbling for help under the ice, and she never saves him. In turn, Tony had told her about how she had been tortured for three months and had bit off a guy’s dick and they had left her alone after that, and for some reason she hadn’t started getting any panic attacks until the wormhole.

Go figure, she had said, laughing humorously, and Steph hadn’t laughed, but she didn’t say anything, either.

It had been a turning point for them, switching them from people who tolerate each other during drills to semi-friends, and then later, genuine friends. And it continued to deepen to dry-mouthed glances, to painful gut-twinges, and kept getting deeper until one day, years later, they looked up, squinting, and found that they couldn’t see a way out, and that most of the time they didn’t want to find one.

And although it sometimes ached more than they could stand, they were perfectly content to sit in the dark past the point of no return, as long as they got to sit beside each other.

Still half-awake, Tony mutters a thank you to Steph when she is handed her coffee. She sips at it, lets the taste fill her mouth before swallowing.

Steph steps around her and Tony moves where she’s meant to, sitting down at the kitchen table at the same time Steph does, twin mugs in their hands.

“Meeting today,” Tony says after she starts on her second cup, wondering distantly if she can get away with sneaking a third after Steph leaves.

Steph hums. Takes a sip of coffee. “Jameson or Currie?”

“Jameson.”

“Mm.” Steph passes her the sugar when Tony makes a face like she needs it, and Tony nods at her in thanks. “Fun.”

“Not even a little,” Tony says, though Steph already knows, because Tony’s already told Steph about it weeks ago.

They sit there for a while in a comfortable silence, not needing conversation to fill the gaps as they take mouthfuls of coffee until their mugs are empty.

Once, back in the war, there had been a skirmish in amongst many skirmishes. Steph doesn’t remember what day or even what month it had been, but she remembers the exhausted pull of her joints, the methodical stutter of the machine gun in her hand, a man’s nose shattering when she had thrust her shield at him.

Bucky had been off to the side, re-loading his gun, and Steph had been shouting orders. The words had stumbled over each other, but she managed to pry them apart and shout them into the void at her troop.

Minutes had passed, and Steph lined up her shield and lofted it in an arc towards the last remaining enemy soldier, who went down and stayed there. His neck had been broken, and Steph had spared him a glance as she had slid her shield back into place on her arm.

Bucky had said something, god knows what, and Steph had replied in kind. At this point, she had been so tired she was nearly staggering. She had blinked, blinked again, hard enough that spots started to burst in front of her eyes, and when she opened them, she turned her head towards the horizon.

And this is what she still remembers, four years and also seven decades later.

They had been on the rooftop of a crumbling house, the city mostly evacuated, bodies hunched in the street, dead or close to it. Smoke had been rising from the craters that used to be houses, or carparks, or diners.

Steph had blinked again, softer this time, her lashes brushing. Ash had grazed her cheek, her lip; her bloodied knuckles around the strap of her shield.

And she remembers it like it had been an eternity instead of a fraction of a second, remembers standing there with her shoulders back and her stance swaying, hands loosening, chest slowing. Remembers looking out over the ruined city, places people used to live that were now falling apart. The flames dying quietly, the people even moreso. The ash, filtering down like snow that made them hiss when it connected with their skin, but from heat instead of ice.

The landscape had been completely and utterly destroyed, splashed with red from either blood or bombs, with the rising sun making light spill, bleeding outwards. It was enough to make every single one of the Howling Commandos stop and stare, all of them weary enough to fall over on the spot, all starving and stumbling and injured, but this gave them pause.

Steph is reminded of this when they’re in the immediate aftermath of a battle that is bigger than usual, and the Avengers are checking each other over, and they’ve stopped shrugging each other off about two years ago. Tony is talking to Nate, not making eye contact as Nate angles her arm to get a better look at the gash running along her elbow. Her hair is ridden with dust from where they had dug her out of a fallen building.

Everyone knows Steph is going to yell at her later for making the risky dive in the first place, but for now they’re taking stock of each other, and Steph looks over Tony’s head, out over New York, and remembers the unnamed city, alive with explosions.

It was destroyed in the worst way possible, and it was stripped down raw in its destruction, and it was so beautiful that Steph itched for an easel, or a sketching pad, even though she knew that she’d never get the colours right.

For Steph, loving Antonia is like that. For the most part, anyway.

She turns her tired gaze to where her team are in various states of beat-up, and thinks that the medics have been getting later and later through the years. There’s a chunk burned out of Briony’s hair; Thor’s plaits are singed, and there’s a slice in Claire’s forehead that’s going to need stitches even though she’ll deny it until they’re close to sedating her.

A quiet laugh catches Steph off guard, and it shouldn’t have, because they’re all talking in the soft tones of post-fight and a huffed laugh isn’t anything out of the ordinary, but Steph looks towards the laugh, towards Tony, who is examining the burned-out boots of her suit as Nate jokes dryly, one eyebrow arched.

Tony’s smiling mouth is bitten bloody.

Steph thinks of long-forgotten bombs and a sunrise.

end.