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Sharon is aware of Steve, of course. It’s hard not to be aware of Steve Rogers. He’s one of the smallest kids in school. He’s pale and has no meat on his bones. Sure, a lot of people are gangly. They’re high school freshmen. They’re almost all gangly and awkward. But Steve is different. He’s not big enough to be considered gangly, and he seems to take his size as a personal affront. He does things just because people say he can’t. They say he can’t play a sport, so he tries out for the football team, the lacrosse team, the basketball team. Every team. It becomes a joke. He tries out for everything. He finally finds a place in the student paper and uses his name recognition to run for student council president. Not that he wins, but he tries.
Sharon has him in some of her classes. She runs for class secretary, knowing it’s a necessary but not glorious job. No one runs against her, and she ends up doing the treasurer’s job, too, after Loki finds out he doesn’t get to use the money himself and loses interest.
Sophomore year is much the same. Steve tries out for everything, tries to join every club. The two of them find themselves on the student paper together.
“You could run for treasurer,” Sharon tells him when he expresses interest in running for president again. “Loki won’t do it. He’ll probably run for president to try to beat Thor.”
“That’s how I’m going to win,” Steve says, his voice firm. “By taking advantage of the split vote.”
He’s seventy pounds sopping wet, but he’s got spirit.
He’s also got health problems that keep him out of school. He loses the election, but she ends up taking notes for him, typing them up each day and sending them to him in emails, with pictures or video attachments of different lectures. She even sends him a condolence note when she hears that his mom died.
The class is required to attend the funeral as a show of solidarity. Sharon thinks it’s a cruel thing to do. Steve isn’t popular. He’s small and argumentative and sick all the time. He doesn’t deserve the hell he gets when he’s at the top of his game. And this, this sallow-faced version of him that stares at the casket with haunted eyes, is not him at the top of his game. She manages to give him a brief hug before the students are ordered back to the bus.
After that, he moves in with Bucky Barnes. After a couple weeks, he comes to school more regularly, and she just types up notes for the classes he misses when he has to go to doctors’ appointments. Now that he’s on Bucky’s parents’ health insurance, he apparently has better doctors. It’s good, she thinks, because she won’t admit it to him, but she worries about him sometimes.
Only the seniors get a prom at their school. The other three grades get a consolation dance. It’s called the spring fling, and it happens the week before prom so the seniors can still attend, but everyone knows it’s a consolation dance. Something to keep them from talking about discrimination or something.
Brock asks Sharon to go, and she’s tempted. She really, really is. Brock’s an ass, sure, but Sharon is one of those quiet, studious people, the reliable kind that doesn’t tend to attract notice unless someone wants something. It’s not like anyone else is going to ask her to go. But he’s still an ass.
But he’s such an ass that she can’t bring herself to say yes, so she says no.
A couple weeks later, Steve approaches her in the hall. In his hand is a folded piece of notebook paper. “Hey,” he says, and she wonders when he shot up like a weed. He hadn’t been this tall even at the beginning of the year.
She grins at him. “Hey. I don’t have those notes ready yet. I was thinking. Do you want to do a study night?”
He frowns distractedly. “Did you write this?” He holds up the paper.
Before she can even ask what he’s talking about, she’s grabbed from the side and pulled into a hug as Brock laughs loudly. She hears the laughter and jeers of his friends on the football team, too, talking about what a moron Steve is, and before she can understand what’s happening, Rumlow’s pulled her into a kiss.
By the time she’s convinced him to let her go by kneeing him between the legs and elbowing him in the nose as she’d been taught in her self-defense classes, Steve is gone.
She storms off, humiliated. She gets why Brock would try to punish her for saying no to him – he’s the sort. And honestly, she suspects he’d only asked her out as a prank in the first place, but her rejection was still a rejection. He’s not going to forget.
She waits for Steve in Coulson’s classroom where they’re all supposed to turn in articles and photographs for the paper. He has to show up sometime, and she’s right. He comes in, looks at her, and quickly looks away. “Brock asked me to the dance and I said no. I’m sorry. He shouldn’t have involved you in his revenge plan.”
Steve glances at her. “Don’t worry about it,” he says after a silence that seems too long. She tells herself it’s just in her head.
They’re ostensibly normal enough after that. She still takes notes, only more often he’s there to add his own. They study together, and though Sharon has always been amongst the top-ranked in the class, she finds herself and Steve trading off the top spot.
But something is also different. She doesn’t know what. It isn’t that he seems healthier or more outgoing and energetic, even though he is. But he’s still different.
No one asks her to the dance. She opts not to go anyway.
When they come back for their junior year, Steve is definitely different. He’s tall, for one thing. Undeniably tall. And he has muscles. A lot of muscles.
He’s attractive, too. People who try to deny it are told they’re crazy, flat out. Steve becomes more popular. Smart and hot? What else would he become? And his lack of popularity has made him sensitive.
Sharon wants to roll her eyes. More than that, she wants to know what’s going to happen next. She doesn’t have many friends in school, especially after she’d pissed off Brock and the whole football team, which meant pissing off the cheerleaders and other athletic groups. Well. Except for the mathletes. But for obvious reasons, Sharon doesn’t think they count.
But Steve is a friend. Someone she studies with. Someone she enjoys studying with. Someone she enjoys competing with. What will happen to her if he becomes popular?
Oh, God. She’ll have to make her own friends. High school sucks.
It sucks even worse when Brock runs against her for secretary and she loses her position. And gets even worse when the teachers ask her to train him and the new treasurer, Rollins. She refuses, explains why, and is told that all they did was a prank.
She smiles at Pierce. “Consider this a prank, too. I won’t do it. Good luck.”
“You can’t do that,” he tells her, striving to sound patient.
“It’s just a prank, Mr. Pierce. No big deal, right? I’m sure you can figure it out.”
In the hall, she watches Steve try to politely detach himself from Lorraine, one of his most ardent admirers, and sighs. She needs to find more friends. Even if Steve doesn’t abandon her for others, which is a given at this point, it isn’t healthy for her to put her need for friends solely on him. Even he has friends who aren’t her.
She moves to his side and grins at Lorraine. “Sorry. We’re late for the paper.” She ignores Steve’s look of gratitude as she tugs him away. “Sorry you lost,” she says quietly when no one else can hear.
“I’m sorry you did,” he tells her. “I didn’t expect to win. Not really. But I thought surely you’d get the incumbency vote.”
She shrugs. “Incumbents can’t hold a candle to celebrities.” She shoves open the door. “So what news stories are we going to break today?”
“Whatever corruption floats your boat to uncover, Ms. Lane.”
She glances at him in surprise. “Did you just refer to me as Lois Lane?”
He waves a hand to the room. “Why not?”
“Because it’s only a high school paper.”
“I don’t think that would matter if breaking a story mattered to you,” he says, and something about how earnest he sounds when he says it makes her look at him, really look at him, and she doesn’t know what’s changed, but she knows it has. The air feels like all the atoms in the universe have shifted into a new way of being. The atoms composed the same objects before, but now, the atoms have moved, and everything is the same but different. He shrugs. “Right?”
“Right,” she says, sounding stupid to her own ear. She blinks, rouses herself. “Whatever, Smallville.”
His grin widens.
The next day, she gathers her wits and sets aside her books for her lunch break, approaching Natasha and Bobbi’s group. They seem nice enough to her when she’s partnered with them in labs and class projects, and she’s practicing not sounding pitiful when she asks to sit with them when Natasha sees her stop in front of them and claps her hands. “I voted for you,” Natasha exclaims, and then gives all the other kids in other groups a death glare. “You should have won. Have a seat!”
And just like that, she finds a group. She’s invited to impromptu hangouts and to the movies on weekends, to a sleepover at Daisy’s place. She invites them to a sleepover at her place, which, given that her house has a pool and a poolhouse with an entertainment center inside, becomes their usual hangout. Sharon doesn’t mind at all. She finds she likes having a social life, and it helps that they’re all determined to be successful, too. She doesn’t give up her study sessions with Steve, but he has other friends. And now she does, too.
She thinks, briefly, that he might ask her to homecoming. He seems like he might, she thinks. Natasha and Bobbi think so, too. But other than looking at her a lot and not saying anything, he doesn’t do anything, and she’s so sure that she must be assuming too much that she doesn’t say anything, either. After all, he could date anyone in school at this point, football team or no. Why would he ask her out?
She goes to homecoming anyway with Natasha and Bobbi and the others. He’s there with Bucky and Sam. They look at each other across the gym, but she only dances with her friends, and from what she can see, he doesn’t dance with anyone. At the end of the night, she tells herself that she had fun, she just wishes he’d had as much fun as she’d had.
A week after, and there’s a note in her locker. It’s unsigned, but it’s written in careful, neat handwriting. Thank you for being you. She frowns at it, trying to figure out what that means, and ends up showing it to everybody at lunch. “Is one of the clubs doing one of those morale boost things again? I hate when they do that. I don’t want to be loved by a post-it note.”
They pass the note around, reading it and passing it on as they shake their heads. As far as they can tell, no one else has gotten a note.
The next week there’s another. You deserve the best. A week after that, More people should see how kind you are.
“You have an admirer,” Natasha says.
Sharon grumbles. “An anonymous one is kind of creepy, isn’t it?”
“Everything’s kind of creepy these days,” Natasha argues. “We have to repeat the Pledge of Allegiance every morning to brainwash us into submission.” She pauses. “You should do a story on that for the paper.”
“You should freelance it. I’m working on something else.”
The student council meetings are supposed to be closed to the public. But Sharon had been curious how Brock and his buddies on the student council were doing, and it was easy enough to hide an audio recorder in a fake plant. Was it weird? Yes. Was it verging on paranoia? Yes. Was it mostly to see if she could get away with it? Also yes.
It’s also how she figures out that they’re bringing in more money than they’re using, and they’re lying about it.
She approaches Coulson after school one day and asks to talk in private, explaining about the recorder. He tsks, reminds her that what she did isn’t strictly legal, and then, once she tells him what she’s figured out as a result, says that as a minor she likely won’t be punished. She gets the green light to write the story.
It comes out right after Thanksgiving break, and part of her is delighted when Brock is called out of their chemistry class.
There’s an emergency campaign. She’d found evidence that all of the class’s representatives and some from other classes knew about the embezzlement. The students are suspended, and their positions are open. She isn’t surprised to find Steve in the principal’s office that day, nor to see his name under the list for president. She smiles at him and takes out her pen to sign the secretary sheet.
“You should run for vice president,” he tells her.
She looks at him as if he’s lost his mind.
“You should at least try,” he insists. “It’ll look good on college applications.”
Vice president seems like a lot, and she doesn’t have his confidence she’ll succeed, but he was right about her and corruption, and… well. Maybe those encouraging notes she’s been getting are working. Maybe it’s because he’s confident she’ll succeed.
She signs up to run for vice president.
She has competition, of course, but she also has Natasha and Bobbi and people from the paper. The student paper won’t endorse anyone, but they definitely work on her behalf.
Steve wins president for the first time. She wins vice president. He seeks her out after, and she stops herself from hugging him as she congratulates him.
“I guess we’ll be seeing more of each other now,” he says with a grin.
She rolls her eyes with a smile. “Because school and the newspaper aren’t enough?”
He runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah,” he says, not quite in agreement.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
And then they have to go back to work. Which is fine. She likes work. And she likes how it can distract her from being hyper-aware of the atoms in the universe when he’s around.
The spring fling is much like homecoming. She buys a dress and goes with her friends. He goes with his.
This time, though, he asks her to dance. His palms are damp with sweat; she shivers with nerves. His face is red nearly the entire time. They don’t talk much during the dance. Her brain has ground to a halt and her mouth can’t formulate words. They look at each other, always seeming as if they’re on the verge of something else, and then they look anywhere but at each other.
She doesn’t understand it. She thinks she might like him. Like, like like him. Which is stupid. Because they’re friends. And there’s no way he likes her back. It almost makes her cry in frustration and confusion, which is even more stupid.
The week before summer break, there’s a full-fledged letter in her locker. She stares at it as she reads it, walking into Steve and dazedly greeting him before almost walking into a wall.
The letter is most definitely a love letter. Maybe all of the notes have been love notes?
Someone loves her. Or at least, they seem to think they do.
“Yeah,” Natasha says at a sleepover. “If only there were someone, somewhere, who likes you.”
Sharon frowns at her. “You don’t have to be mean about it.”
Natasha gets on her knees, shuffles over to Sharon, and smacks her lightly on the head. “It’s Steve, you idiot. Steve likes you.”
There’s a thrill of irrational hope as Sharon bats Natasha’s hands away. “No way.” She looks at the letter and the notes. She’s kept them all. She hopes no one thinks that’s weird, because she’s not ready to throw them out.
She looks at the letter. “Brock gave Steve a letter like this and made it seem like it was a love letter,” she says thoughtfully.
“You still got a note even when they were suspended,” Daisy points out.
“They have friends.” Sharon looks at the letter again, her heart breaking as she realizes the truth. “Steve might- might like me. But he wouldn’t send me notes. We see each other all the time.”
The others look at each other, but they don’t seem convinced.
“You’ll just have to investigate, won’t you.” Natasha pats Sharon’s head.
Sharon’s eyes narrow. “I guess so.”
“Oh, crap,” Bobbi mutters. “Stop it, Natasha. You’re making her scary.”
“I like when she’s scary.”
Senior year is a different game entirely. Sharon hits the ground running. So does Steve. They get together the first week of their return; they both want to run for student council again, and they agree to work together on a platform.
Sharon also has several ideas for news stories. She does a humanitarian piece on the cafeteria workers, custodial staff, and a piece on the school’s fundraising practices. She also focuses on the sports teams. She knows it could cost her the student council election to look like a stick in the mud, but all it takes is another recording in the boys’ locker room for a couple days (Coulson sighs this time and reminds her she won’t be a minor for much longer) and she gets evidence they’re planning to spike some drinks at a party that weekend so they, in their words, “don’t have to work so hard to get laid.” There’s a raid on the football players’ lockers, and their bags are searched. Date rape drugs are found. Suspensions and expulsions follow, and there are openings on the football team.
“Think I should do it?” Steve asks her when they’re going over that part of her story.
“Not really,” she admits. “The head trauma alone is enough to not want someone to do that. You could do another sport that wouldn’t risk so much injury.”
“Rugby,” he teases.
“Base jumping,” she says, matching him.
He ends up joining the lacrosse team and makes team captain. But she spots him on the sidelines at football games and finds out he’s asked to be the student strategist, a position he’s created for himself. He doesn’t play, but he goes over the plays and suggests improvements and comes up with entirely new plays. Coach Fury doesn’t know whether to hug him for helping or hit him for being stubborn and annoying.
She writes another piece, this time about Steve and how he utilizes the often unnoticed skills of several of the players to lead the team to a few wins – far fewer than they would have had if Sharon had kept her mouth shut about the date rape, but more than they would have had without Steve.
No one asks her to homecoming, and she tags along with Natasha and Bucky, Bobbi and Clint, and the rest of their dateless friends. Steve is there, too, often running sweaty hands along his trousers, and the two of them mostly sit together and talk. It’s nice, talking to him, but Sharon is a little discouraged that no one asks her to dance. She tells herself that her feet would have been too sore anyway, but she can’t help but be disappointed. It hurts to see everyone else dance and not even be asked herself.
The letter from her admirer is longer the next week, and she’s still frowning at it when Steve finds her.
“What is it?” He looks at the letter, then at her face. “Love letter?”
She wonders which of Brock’s cronies delivered it. She wonders why they’re still doing it. Brock is suspended – there hadn’t been enough evidence to expel him. Maybe they were still trying to curry favor with him? She knows Brock will never forgive her. She shoves it in her bag. “It’s so dumb.”
“Dumb?” he echoes. He looks taken aback.
“Brock.” She rolls her eyes. “Remember how he wanted you to think I’d sent you some sort of letter? I think he’s doing it to me, too. Using his friends to deliver them.”
Steve blinks at her, his expression inscrutable. “You think he’s sending you love letters?”
She shrugs. “I think it’s to mess with me. It’s not like anyone’s asked me to a dance. The letters… the letters are nice. Like, they say nice things. But no one’s asked me to a dance. No one’s asked me out. You asked me to dance once, but that’s it. If someone meant these letters, they’d actually act on it, right?”
“You think no one would send you love letters because no one’s asked you out,” he says, as if still trying to understand.
“I know, right?” she says, agreeing with his confusion about the situation. “Why act like they like me but then never act on it?” She shakes her head. “Like I said. They’re just trying to mess with me. I’m kind of curious what their endgame is. Probably try to Carrie me at prom.” She grins at him, striving to show a bravado she doesn’t feel. It’s not fun, admitting to someone she likes – er, respects – that no one seems to like her. “What a story, right?”
“Right,” he says, still sounding distracted. “So… how long has he been sending you love letters?”
“About a year. I think he has someone else drop them off when he’s suspended.”
“Huh,” he says, still sounding as if he doesn’t know what’s going on.
She shakes her head. “Sorry. Enough about me. What’s the game plan, Cap?”
He grimaces. “Not you, too.”
“Hey. You make lacrosse captain and football captain when you don’t even play football, you get called Cap.”
He looks at her, and she feels the atoms shift again. Only this time, they move in a way they aren’t supposed to. They move like an earthquake on a subatomic scale, and when they settle, things aren’t the same, and they’re wrong, as if something in the universe is misaligned.
He treats her differently after that. He still talks to her, of course. They still study together, still work together on student council and the paper. But something’s different. He doesn’t look at her as much.
Before Christmas break, there’s another letter. It tells her to meet on the football field at four. She arrives and finds Steve, bruised and bloodied, and spots some of Brock’s friends running out of sight. She helps him to the nurse’s office, calls Bucky and his parents, and then stays to talk with the school administration and later the police about the assault. Security tapes are pulled, and Brock and his friends are suspended. If she didn’t realize how much money Brock’s family give to the school, she’d be confused as to why they aren’t expelled. As it is, she’s still angry at the injustice of it all.
When she comes back after Christmas break, there are no more letters.
She starts getting a little nervous when she comes back in January. Not about the letters. She doesn’t mind not getting any of those. It’s Steve. He won’t even look at her, which hurts. But neither does any other guy at school, which isn’t as hurtful (should it be?) but is definitely worrisome. Some people already have dates for prom. Spring break comes and goes, and people start pairing up in earnest. And Sharon doesn’t have a date. She doesn’t have much hope for one, either.
“Does it even matter?” Steve asks, sounding somewhat impatient. Now that Natasha and Bucky are dating, he spends more time hanging out with their group at lunch.
“Yes,” Sharon says stiffly. “It’s my last school dance. I’d like someone to ask me. I’d like to dance.” She’d like to feel like someone wants her there because there’s something special about her, not because she’s part of a group. It’s selfish, but true. She sighs and pulls out her phone. “Does Tinder let high schoolers sign up?”
Bucky plucks her phone out of her hands and hands it to Natasha. “No,” he says firmly. “No, it most certainly doesn’t.”
“Plenty of fish might,” Daisy suggests.
“No,” Natasha says coldly, shooting Daisy a warning look. “Steve is taking Sharon.”
Both Steve and Sharon look at her, then at each other, then quickly look away.
“It’s decided, then,” Natasha says. “Good.”
“You don’t have to,” Sharon tells him later, not looking at him.
“It’s fine,” he says, not looking at her, and her heart sinks. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her friend. She would give up having someone take her to prom if it meant having him back.
Most of what they do is at Natasha’s direction. She knows more about school dances. That might be why. She knows that Steve is supposed to buy a corsage that matches the color of Sharon’s dress. She knows how to take care of the restaurant and the limo.
Sharon and Steve go along with it, but a week before prom, Sharon can’t take it anymore. She calls Bucky’s house and asks to talk to him and lies on her bed as she tells him that he really doesn’t have to. She’s thinking about not going, actually.
“I thought you wanted to go. It’s your last dance and all that.”
“I don’t want to go with someone who doesn’t want to go.” She stares at her ceiling. “I wouldn’t be happy knowing your not happy.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Too long. “Give me a minute.” And then he hangs up.
She listens to the dial tone and wonders what the hell her life has become. She’d been so good at avoiding high school drama. Even after getting people suspended and expelled, she’d avoided drama like this.
About half an hour later, her doorbell rings, and her father calls for her. She goes down, confident that her eyes aren’t red enough for anyone to notice, and stops short when she sees Steve. Her father disappears, leaving Steve doubled-over on the stoop.
“Are you okay?” she asks, inching forward.
“Didn’t know you lived in a gated community.” He straightens, a hand pressed to his side. “Guard. I think- Might get a trespassing charge- never mind.” He looks at the door frame. “No one knows how kind you are. No one sees how smart and brave and clever you are. No one sees how special you are.”
She stares at him. He sounds like the notes she keeps upstairs in a box under her bed. “What?”
“If I’d known you thought Brock was sending them- for God’s sake, I never thought you’d think-” He shakes his head and doubles over, trying to catch his breath.
She spots the guard up the street and quickly pulls Steve inside, closing and locking the door. “You can’t like me!”
“I can,” he says mulishly. He pauses to look around the foyer. “I only sent the letters because I didn’t think you saw me that way. The way I wanted you to see me.”
She doesn’t move from the door. “How did you want me to see you?”
He turns his eyes to her face. “Not how Brock left me after he beat the crap out of me. I was going to come clean then. Didn’t want you to see me that weak again.” He looks away. “I hated that you saw that.”
“I didn’t.” She swallows. “I know you’re not weak, Steve. A coward, maybe.”
He looks at her in surprise.
“You should have told me!” She looks away. “I might have liked you for a while. I didn’t- I didn’t think you liked me.”
“I do,” he says, and there’s that earnestness again, that sincerity that makes her heart flutter.
Her hand inches toward his, then stops. “Do you? Because you haven’t acted like it.”
He hesitates, then brushes some of her hair out of her face. “I do. I might be an idiot, I definitely should have signed the letters and notes, but you were always the only one I had a crush on. The only one who treated me the same way before and after. The only one who was nice to me all along. The-” He shakes his head. “I’ve had a crush on you since freshman year. I just- I wanted you to like me for me and not out of pity.”
She stares at him, then presses her face against the door and laughs. “I did, you moron.” She purses her lips. “Sorry. You’re not- you were a moron, though.”
“I was.” His fingers drift closer to hers. “Are you- Do you think you might- I mean.” He takes a breath. There’s a faint gulping sound. “Can I try to make it up to you?”
She turns her head, her temple against the door, and watches him. “Sign your letters from now on?”
He manages a weak grin. “At the very least.” His fingers make their way to hers, and the universe reverberates. When the atoms settle, she can sense that they’re closer to how they’re supposed to be.
Suddenly, they’re inseparable at school. She doesn’t mind. She’s missed having him with her. They hold hands far too often for anyone to miss that they are now, officially, a couple, and they spend some time awkwardly kissing one another before getting the hang of it. Neither of them mind the practice.
She makes valedictorian. He makes salutatorian.
He asks her to dance for every dance at prom. Her feet hurt so much she has to take off her shoes. She spends some of the faster dances just swaying with him, her cheek on his shoulder.
They win the prom king and queen and look at each other.
“Carrie moment,” Sharon whispers.
“You’d look great in red,” he whispers back.
No blood or guts fall on them, and the next day, it feels like a dream. But it’s real. He’s real. And if ever she has doubt, she can close her eyes and feel how all the atoms in the universe are perfectly aligned.
Years later, when they’re married and have children to chase after, he leaves a letter for her on the kitchen counter at least once a week. And yes, he signs his name.