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Rhodes is the one who finds her dirty, sun-burnt, and disheveled, wandering the dessert 4.37 miles away from the large explosion that took out her captors. Per the reports from the chopper crew, Tasha had fallen to her knees in the sand and clung to her best friend, almost like she couldn’t believe he wasn’t a mirage manufactured from her fevered mind, as if she had expected him to slip from her fingers the moment she touched him. When he proved to be solid, she had laughed then, the sound maniacal and almost on the verge of tears, as Rhodes bundled her up and helped her limp to safety.
Steve wishes he could have been the one to find her.
He wishes he could have saved her and brutally dispatched the men who dared take her from him.
Hell, he wishes it had never happened at all.
He’ll never forgive himself. He should have insisted on accompanying Tasha to the missile demo, but she had waved him off, telling him she had an armed escort and Rhodes at her side. He shouldn’t have let it go. If only he had been there, then maybe he could have…
He could have–
The what-ifs are enough to drive a man to drink, not that it would have affected him or helped the situation at hand.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
After all, he is the soldier, a black ops field agent who put his life on the line and wondered if he would ever see the love of his life again every time he left for a mission, and his wife is the civilian, a brilliant businesswoman. In his darkest nightmares, it was always Tasha receiving the news that Steve had disappeared in a war-torn country. He would be tortured while she scoured the earth trying to find him using all SI’s vast resources and connections to track him down. And, if the worst came to pass, it would be her wearing the veil, her mascara running but Tasha still beautiful and whole, and him in a box.
It was never supposed to be her.
Okay, Talk to me. What are you thinking, Steve? Rhodes had asked him that day, while both stood in front of the map defining the search grid outside the now-destroyed encampment. The mountains made the northern section impenetrable by foot, and Steve thought it unlikely that Tasha would have gone in that direction anyway, not without air support.
Steve?
My team will take this area, Steve had replied, circling the southern access point.
He had canvassed his chosen region thoroughly, fruitlessly, his superior eyesight scouring the sand dunes, searching for the smallest trace of his wife, but it had been Rhodes who ultimately found her in a spot that should have been impossible to reach from her original position. But then again, that had always been his Tasha, flouting conventional wisdom to be in the one place no reasonable strategist would expect.
At least she is alive. Steve doesn’t know what he would have done if she–
But she’s alive, and that’s what matters. Everything else is secondary to that one shining truth.
What are you thinking, Steve?
Steve is thinking about how different Tasha has been since she returned state-side. She had spent two weeks in medical and had refused all visitors – even Steve – during her stay. And when she finally came home, she withdrew completely, both physically and emotionally. She now dons the baggiest clothing at all times and locks herself in her lab for hours at a time, sometimes overnight. She barely sleeps, barely speaks to Steve as well as shies away from any displays of affection, even so much as a touch or a simple embrace.
Steve doesn’t like to think about why that would be.
So instead, he works through his frustrations in the gym, one reinforced sandbag at a time. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he’s out of punching bags, but he knows what he’s not going to do. He isn’t running, because he already failed her once, and he’d promised himself he’ll be there when she needs him.
If she needs him.
Last night Tasha had tossed and turned, grumbled and cried in her sleep, rousing with a scream. Steve had tried to hold her, to comfort her, lightly shushing her and whispering, Everything’s okay. You’re going to be okay. You’re home; I’m here, and everything’s okay. You’re safe.
But she had pushed him off frantically, skittering to the far side of the bed. Her eyes had been wild and a touch glassy as she held her hands up in front of her chest.
Don’t touch me!
The punching bag goes flying and bursts open against the opposite wall, spilling sand everywhere. Steve stares at the split leather, then hefts the next one up onto the hook.
He couldn’t protect her, and now she can’t even look at him, but that’s okay; Steve has trouble looking at himself these days, too.
“Captain Rogers,” J.A.R.V.I.S. interrupts from above. “Madam is inquiring after dinner. She asks whether you would like Mastro’s Steakhouse or Emmy Burgers.”
He unwraps his fists. “Will Tasha be joining me this evening?”
“There is a 64.9% probability of that occurrence.”
Steve will take it. “Emmy Burgers with the curly fries. She likes those.”
“Very well, sir.”
Steve is sitting at the dinner table while their meal grows cold.
“Is she still in the lab?” he inquires, glancing over at the elevator foyer.
“Madame has said to go on without her. She will be up late and can reheat dinner herself,” J.A.R.V.I.S. informs him for the third time in thirty minutes.
Steve rubs his face, his hands traveling up and over his hair as he breathes out. Tasha hasn’t been eating, or at least not at reasonable times or on any semblance of a schedule. Steve had taken note of the contents of their fridge and pantry, and as far as he could tell, she had been subsisting solely on coffee and green smoothies for weeks now.
That ends today.
Steve grabs a tray from an old silver tea service, places both meals on it, and heads down the elevator. He will have dinner with his wife, even if he has to wait for hours in the hallway outside her lab.
Luckily, the door is unlocked. Steve looks up at the camera, but he doesn’t question J.A.R.V.I.S.’s motivations. Perhaps the old A.I. is just as worried as he is over his wife’s reclusive behavior. The door slides open, assaulting Steve’s ears with the wretched tones of AC/DC. But then he sees Tasha, elbow-deep in a mechanical chassis, her back turned away from him and still sporting an old oversized MIT sweatshirt from the 80s that she likely hasn’t washed in at least a week based on the grease stains all over the bunched up sleeves. Her hair is greasy and uncombed, secured in a (not-very-artfully) messy bun on top of her head. Steve can just barely make out light pink scarring on the side of her neck, leading towards the front and disappearing under the worn burgundy cotton.
She’s so beautiful; it still makes Steve’s breath catch even after all this time.
J.A.R.V.I.S. cuts the noise.
“What the hell, J?” Tasha complains, looking up from her work and sliding up safety goggles up her forehead. “It was just getting to the good part.”
Steve clears his throat, startling Tasha, who rounds on him, her eyes wide and muscles taut, brandishing a wrench in front of her like a weapon. When she clocks the identity of the intruder, she relaxes, but only fractionally.
“Don’t sneak up on me like that!” She admonishes him before looking up at one of her cameras. “And you. A little warning next time?”
“My apologies, Madam,” but the A.I. doesn’t sound particularly sincere.
Tasha puts down the wrench on the workbench behind her before addressing her husband once again. “What are you doing here anyway? Didn’t J. feed you yet?” She looks down on at the tray in his hands. “You can eat mine if you’re starving. I don’t mind.”
Steve takes one look at her pallid skin, the dark circles under her eyes and deep frown etching lines at the corner of her mouth and along her brow.
“I was thinking we could eat dinner together,” he says, a touch sheepish. He’s bothering her – he knows it – but it’s been weeks. “You know, for old time’s sake.”
She looks at the burgers, her expression still squirrely and perhaps even a bit guilty.
“…Okay.”
Tasha heats up the burgers by placing them on a piece of metal and taking a blowtorch to the bottom, but the result edible, if a little unevenly scorched. Steve stands to eat at the workbench while Tasha sits upon her spinning chair. Dinner is a quiet affair until Steve asks her what she’s working on.
“Would you believe… defensive body armor?”
“Not when you say it like that,” he replies.
Tasha picks at her fries. “It’s not ready yet, but I think it has the potential to revolutionize the industry.”
“I thought SI was getting out of weapons manufacturing.” Steve knows Tasha had already canceled her defense projects and closed the weapons arm of R&D, tanking SI’s stock value. Pepper had told her the Board is already clamoring for her removal, looking to replace her with a more conventional CEO, one who hadn't soured on the whole ‘Merchant of Death’ experience having witnessed it firsthand. Of course, as majority stockholder, Tasha had managed to fend them off.
For now.
His wife wouldn’t appreciate his personal intervention into her business affairs, but sometimes, Steve wishes he could beat talk some sense into the others. Man to man, like the good old days.
“Body armor isn’t a weapon.”
“Uh huh.” Steve stares at what looks to be a rocket launcher strung from a gurney. “That’s a lot of firepower for defensive body armor.”
Tasha puts down her half-eaten burger. “You got something you want to say?”
“It’s just I know things have been… hard for you since you came home,” Steve closes a hand over hers, and to Tasha’s credit, she barely flinches, but he withdraws just the same. “And I wanted to know if there is anything I could do to make things easier for you.”
“You’re already doing everything you can,” Tasha says, staring down at her hands where her fingers are beating a rhythm against her thigh. “I don’t need you to do anything else.”
But Steve insists, “Please, I just want to help.”
“You can’t,” Tasha tells him, suddenly seething, her fingers tightening into balled fists. “You can’t do anything. You can’t fix me like you do your motorcycle, so stop trying to make everything better, because it’s not going to work.”
“Just tell me–”
“I can’t even fix me. So just stop, okay? Just stop! Things aren’t going to magically get better just because you want them to, and every time you try, it just makes me feel like a failure for not being able to give you what you want.”
“I’m not asking you to get better right away. You went through something very traumatic, and it’s going to take a long time to work through it. I just want us to be a team again,” Steve counters, his tone teetering on desperate. “You and me, we can get through anything as long as we're together.”
Please Tasha; please don’t shut me out.
He continues, “I just want to know what’s going on in that head of yours.”
“You really want to know?” Tasha asks. She scoots back, making the chair screech across the concrete.
Before Steve can respond, she’s grasping at the hem of her sweatshirt, pulling it up and over, making the short hairs of her head stand in haphazard directions as she plops it down on the floor. Her eyes narrow, almost accusingly. “How are you going to fix this, Steve? How does this factor into those grand plans of yours?!”
Steve can only stare at the soft blue circle of light shining through her black tank top, but the new hardware isn’t even the most surprising part. Her chest, which has always nicely filled out her various tailored suits and black-tie dresses, is completely flat, the hint of pink surgical scars emanating outward from the edge of her tank top to rest in spiderwebbed cuts and criss-crossing sutures over her mangled décolletage.
“Do you see it now?” Tasha shouts through angry tears. “You can’t fucking understand because you’re perfect. You’ll always be perfect! No matter what happens, what injuries you sustain, you’ll always heal, but I can’t! It’s not pretty, but this is reality.”
Steve sidesteps the workbench, coming around to gather her in his arms. She struggles, trying to push him away, but he holds fast, shushing her softly. “It’s alright, Tasha.”
She stops then asking brokenly, “How can you say that? You haven’t even seen the worst of it. It’s… it’s ugly. There’s just so much damage, and I don’t know if…” she can’t even finish, but Steve doesn’t need her to.
“I’ve never cared about any of that,” he murmurs into her hair. “You’re perfect as you are, and I will never stop loving you. I’m sorry for pushing you; I was just so scared that I was losing you, that I had already lost you.” He holds her closer, trying to keep her together, remembering the moment he first heard she had been found alive. “Thank you for sharing that with me.”
Tasha clings to him, buries her face in his shirt, and cries.
It’s a long road out of Afghanistan. Steve may have been absent at the beginning, but he promises he will be there for Tasha every step of the way as they stumble together out of the dark cavern of memory.