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America Chavez had one rule when it came to romance.
Never fall in love with straight girls.
It was a simple one.
Probably the only rule that she had ever heard that she didn’t end up breaking twenty seconds later.
She kept it blunt, asking before she even took a second glance at a girl, if they’d even be interested in that sort of thing.
Rules like that were important. They kept in her in the clear, kept her heart intact, through the various ups and downs of her love life, as well as a few evil alien invasions and supervillain heists.
Then there was Kate Bishop. Who, of course, ruined everything.
“I’ve seen the way you look at me, Princess. You’re not that straight,” she had said, once upon a time, just to get a reaction out of her. It hadn’t meant anything, really just a joke, just a way to ruffle the features of their archer.
And so what if the next time she was hopping through the multi-verse and she ran into another woman, with dark hair and familiar eyes, dressed in a pristine purple dress, she paused mid-step unable to breathe until the woman grinned at her in a way that was so different from the Kate that she knew, that America was finally able to remember how her lungs worked.
It didn’t mean she was in love with her or anything, certainly not.
***
This whole thing would be a lot easier if she could stop seeing Kate everywhere.
Of course, that’s not the way the multi-verse works.
Instead it works like this.
There are people like her, singularities who only exist once in all the dimensions, and then there are other people. People who can live a completely different life, in a different universe, but still at their core, be the same person she’s always known.
There’s a multitude of them. Girls who calls themselves Katherine Bishop. Sometimes she’s as rich and princess-y as America always called her. Sometimes she’s a full-fledged Avenger already older in a way America could never have imagined her. Sometimes they’re not playing on the same side, and the face she hopes to see smile, turns to her with a lip curled up in disgust saying ‘Hail Hydra’ in a voice that might have once been familiar.
It’s complicated.
And part of the reason America can never stay in one universe for long.
Because no matter how hard she tries, Kate always manages to appear, orbiting in her circle, and into her life, as though she’s always belonged there.
Perhaps she always has.
***
One time she kisses one of those Kate’s.
This version goes by Katie and prefers twin pistols. She’s wearing a purple ribbon in her hair and she kisses America like her life depends on it. But her lips taste like cheap whiskey, she insists that she hates coffee, and by the end of the night America’s already on her way to another universe, trying to finger out what the unsatisfied feeling in her chest is supposed to mean.
It doesn’t mean she’s in love, it can’t, surely.
Still the memory of that kiss lingers on her lips, in the back of her mind, far longer than America would like to admit.
It takes three different versions of reality in which she completely ignores their version of the young archer, for America to finally feel level headed again.
Though she feels worse remembering how she’d snapped at one of them to leave her alone, because it had been easier than reaching across the space and kissing her, knowing full well that that Kate would never be her Kate.
***
Then comes the change.
The anomaly.
She falls asleep in a world with a purple sky and awakes in one where everyone knows her name, and acts as though this is where they all belong.
Nobody remembers what they used to be, what they could have been in another life.
Nobody, but her.
It would be a lie to say that once she realized leaving this universe for another was impossible, America didn’t set out among the group of them, searching the mass of familiar faces for one that had followed her through all of the universes. Yet, her search had proved fruitless, and eventually she sees the worried looks on the faces of the women who treat her like sister, and had thus had decided to give up her search.
Perhaps this is better.
After all, hadn’t that been what she wanted? To find a universe where her Kate Bishop dilemma no longer proved to be a problem, and here she finally seems to have found that.
Why then did she feel emptiness inside her, one so great that she woke some nights with a ghost of a kiss on her lips, a familiar smile hidden in the memories behind her eyelids, and a hurt inside her heart?
“You look like a woman in love,” this universe’s version of Loki had told her one morning.
She’d never known Loki to be the perspective type.
She doesn’t answer the question.
***
“I’m Lady Katherine of Bishop.”
She’s a princess this time, or near enough to it, a real life princess, fancy gowns and everything. She talks different, and dresses different, but there’s that damned bow slung over her shoulder and a purple gown covering her familiar form.
Seeing her again, feels a bit like coming home. The emptiness that America had been feeling inside herself since the world went strange, seems to fade away as soft fingers slip into hers for a friendly handshake, like this was the first time they’ve met.
For Katherine is certainly is, but for America, well she’s done all this before.
A million universes, a million realities different from hers and she’s never managed to not fall for that woman.
And she thinks that perhaps those rules she made for herself what seems like an eternity ago, were meant to be broken, for when Katherine smiles ever so slightly at her and says “oh cross starred-lover” her heart starts to beat just a little bit faster.