Chapter Text
5:00 AM
Steven Grant Rogers wakes up to a stiff neck and the sensation of something heavy sprawled across his chest. A curtain of wild, curly red hair tickles his face and something wet - yeah, that’s drool - is soaking through his shirt. His cell phone, perched haphazardly on its charger near the edge of the bedside table, is blaring PinkFong’s Baby Shark.
Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo, baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo, baby-
Steve manages to silence it, but only just before it falls onto the floor. Great.
“Eve…” He groans.
His mouth tastes like something died in it and he’s reminded that he passed out without brushing his teeth. Steve tries his best to push Evangeline off, but four years worth of stubbornness just whines and snuggles closer to him.
Once he’s managed to extract himself after several minutes, Steve schlepps into the bathroom and makes certain to close the door behind him.
Ugh, he really needs a haircut.
He hasn’t managed to stop by Procuts for a few months, now, and long strands fall forward as he leans down to wash his face. It’s almost long enough to reach his shoulders, and when he looks in the mirror, his father’s face stares back at him; secretly delighted. He only ever knew the man from photos and to see their likeness even after all these years settles him in a way he never expected.
But for now, he rubs some moisturizer onto his face - it’s for protection, sweetheart, you don’t want to get age spots! His mother’s voice pipes up in his mind, besides, it will help you attract the girls! - and runs a hand through his hair to get it out of his eyes. It won’t stay that way, but it’s a short relief while he rifles through his closet.
Like most days during a Cape Cod winter, Steve winds up shrugging into a pair of jeans, plain t-shirt, and a thin, ‘professional’ sweater. It’s the same wardrobe he’s trusted for years, really, and no one at the office ever seems to notice it’s all the same pieces, varied by color. As he pulls his shoes on - modern, grey ‘office casual’ things, he thinks of the new girl at the office, Rachel - fresh out of college with a completely different outfit every day.
“I don’t like to wear two things that are similar in the same week,” she explained one day, “and I try not to repeat the same outfit more than once a month.”
She’s twenty-two, full of excitement and always shows up early. Steve has decided he likes her.
When he starts to look for his phone laying on the floor by the bed, he hears a tiny, rough voice.
“Daddy?”
A pair of wide green eyes framed by a mane of untamable curls are peering down at him when he looks up.
“Eve,” he greets his daughter. He’s still blindly groping around the floor as she blinks sleepily at him. “Good morning.”
But Evangeline offers nothing aside from a grunt, rolling back into bed and tugging the blankets around herself. When Steve feels the edge of the cell phone against his fingertips, hesnatches it up just as his snoozed alarm starts to blare the song again.
He rights himself and can’t help the small smile that makes its way onto his face as he looks at Evangeline in the dim morning light. She’s back to snuggling tight into the bed, hair spread out around her, little mouth parted in a faint snore.
To keep himself from sneaking back into bed with his daughter, Steve rakes a hand through his hair and pads down the hallway.
His mother’s bedroom is still dark, but she’ll get up and join him soon.
For now, he makes his way to the kitchen and gets to work on the coffee, scooping and filling and pressing buttons on the machine. It’s an old thing, but it somehow manages to make the hottest coffee Steve has ever come across. Anything less than scalding just won’t do the job for him.
When he moves to retrieve the newspaper from the front door, the crisp February air nearly steals his breath. He has to take a quick moment and double-check Evangeline’s supplies by the front door he’d laid out the night before: winter coat, sturdy boots, chunky mittens, and a hat shaped like a sea monster, check.
Earlier that year Steve’s mother had implored Evangeline to choose a hat for the winter, and with all of her hair, they’d opted for an adult-size. When she’d spotted the intricately knitted thing at a craft show before Christmas, Eve’d nearly burst into tears in delight and neither Sarah nor Steve had the heart to tell her she’d have to wait until Christmas, thus Evangeline had worn the hat around the rest of the fair that day.
Sarah had made her matching pair of mittens for Christmas that pulled back and fastened with a button to become fingerless gloves. She’d even gone the extra mile to line the mittens and the hat itself with a thick, comfortable fleece.
Steve sets the newspaper on the table for his mother when she rises, moving on to portioning butternut squash soup into Pyrex containers for everyone's lunches, placing two containers into his own lunch before slicing up the last of Sunday’s leftover focaccia bread.
For Evangeline, Steve pours the soup expertly into a unique bottle with a large straw. He makes sure to select only centerpieces from the bread - none of the crunchy, delicious crust; that he saves for himself and his mother.
Coconut milk yogurt finds itself alongside Evangeline’s drinkable soup and soft bread, as well as a nature valley granola bar: easily the messiest thing to send along with a preschooler. But, as one of the items on Evangeline’s “Okayed Texture” lists, the granola bars find themselves nestled alongside other limited foods she’ll eat more often than not.
Considering for a moment, as the coffee brews, his daughter’s texture aversions, Steve supposes he should count himself blessed.There are many other behaviors that could be far worse. Plus, she’s always favored the soft, mushy textures, or the most crunch - hence granola bars. Those textures have been easy enough for Steve to work with. At the start, his mother had been the one to do most of the cooking, but Steve slowly caught on and, thanks to google, had become a pro at doctoring up pureed soups while packing in as many vitamins and minerals as humanly possible.
As a result, Evangeline’s texture aversions, coupled with her allergy to dairy, had the little family eating the healthiest they’d ever been. After a hefty adjustment period, Steve now handles most of the cooking and he truly doesn’t mind. It feels good to provide for them.
Almost as an afterthought, Steve shoves some chopped carrots in Evangeline’s lunchbox. If she’s feeling adventurous she may want to dip the carrots - one of her ‘foods to work on’ - while waiting for her preschool teachers to heat up her soup.
It’s all a scientific process with her food requirements coupled along with therapy once a month. They visit Mrs. Katherine, a Speech-Language Pathologist specializing in feeding & swallowing disorders, armed with a detailed list of all the foods they’d conquered that month. There are checkmarks, stars, and little poop-face stickers. It’s the one Friday Steve takes as a half day in order to attend the sessions.
Secretly, he’d been picking Katherine’s brain for years about how exactly one winds up in such a profession, but everyday bills and security have him buying cheap, used Speech Pathology textbooks on Amazon, piled onto his bedside table in an effort to learn more about his daughter. But more often than not he’s fallen asleep out of exhaustion before he finishes a chapter.
Speaking of exhaustion…
Steve jumps when the coffee maker beeps at him, stirred from daydreaming as he finishes shoving fruit into his own packed lunch. He hears his mother shuffling down the hall to join him at the table as he finishes pouring out two cups of coffee.
“Morning,” he greets her with a steaming cup of coffee and a kiss on the cheek.
“Good morning, sweetheart.”
Always quiet and adept at caring, Sarah Rogers slides into her seat at the kitchen table and the scene stabs at Steve’s heart.
Thanks to his father’s posthumous military benefits and a career during the golden age of healthcare, Sarah is now retired, but she still keeps plenty active with Evangeline. However, Steve can still see the longing in her eyes as she casts her gaze out the bay window overlooking their sleepy little neighborhood.
He knows that caring for Evangeline has hindered her exploring the next steps and adventures of life; that she keeps her eyes trained curiously on each day’s ‘Want Ads’ while waiting for inspiration to strike.
“I’ve got to stay late tonight,” Steve’s words get stuck in his throat, so he stops to clear it and take a sip of coffee; gather up his lunch and put it in an insulated grocery bag he’s been using for years. “Shouldn’t be too long though, only ‘til 5.”
“I hope they’re paying you overtime for that extra hour,” Sarah clucks behind her coffee cup.
“They are, I promise.” Steve assures her with a kiss to her hair. “It’s just that Ana’s got the meeting for her mother’s nursing home. She’s tried to get it moved but couldn’t.”
“Well,” Sarah shakes her head. “You tell Ana that I’m thinking of her, and if she ever has any questions just to give me a call, alright? It’s never fun when someone decides to put their parents in a home, and today those corporations just want the money, they don’t give a rat’s a-”
“Okay, mom,” Steve cuts her off before she picks up too much speed. He jingles his keys and leans in to kiss her hair one more time. “I’ll let her know, promise. Love you.”
“I love you too, sweetheart.” There’s a bit of a laugh in Sara’s voice put she pats his cheek anyways.
When Steve pulls into the parking lot at work, most of the technicians are already there, arriving 6am daily- just like him. But Steve enters through the office doors rather than the warehouse, booting up his computer and settling in to sort through the overnight voicemails at his desk.
Steve doesn’t mind the hour alone at the front. Natasha, the small company’s HR specialist, usually comes in around the same time so they’re not really alone, but there are no phone calls coming through to distract him and that’s what really matters.
Today, though, Natasha’s cubicle is empty when Steve arrives.
Despite the fact that it’s February and it’s blistering cold outside, overnight calls are minimal and customers’ voicemails are polite, a truly rare occurrence. It allows Steve to get a head start matching packing slips and invoices so by the time the girls in dispatch come through the door Steve’s already organized their overnight calls into neat piles and downed the coffee he’d brought with him.
No matter, though - when Natasha comes strolling through the door just before 7 she sets a paper cup on Steve’s desk. The coffee is from his favorite shop just down the road; blistering hot and almost too sweet - just how he likes it. Steve removes one of the soup containers from his thermal bag and sets it beside the coffee: an even exchange.
Natasha shoots Steve a wink before she shashays to her desk and picks up her phone to stop the call forwarding service and settle in for the day.