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It shouldn’t surprise him, not when he just survived Christmas and the marathon that involved (he’s fought in a war and he’s fought aliens, but neither of those has anything on the lines at Macy’s between the beginning of November and the end of December), but somehow it does: Steve Rogers just does not understand what happened to Valentine’s Day.
“Capitalism,” is Tony’s explanation when Steve brings it up at lunch. Tony has them all over at Stark Tower every once in a while. Steve figures the billionaire sees it as his way of being a team player. “It’s capitalism. Best way we can thumb our nose at the dirty commies, right, Romanoff?”
Natasha ignores him. Steve figures she mostly comes for the food, which has a thing or forty on the gruel they serve on the Helicarrier.
“What are you talking about?” Steve asks.
“Oh, right, that was after you fell asleep,” Tony says. “Well, in the 1950s, they introduced a little something called communism—”
“You’re rewriting history again,” Bruce says.
“History is written by the victors and given that I hand-delivered a flaming bag of nuclear dog poop onto the front porch of a certain Chitauri attack-force…” Tony waves his fork, making broad, meaningless gestures as he chews on a bit of risotto. At first, Steve thought “broad” and “meaningless” might have perfectly summed up Tony Stark, but in the months where the Avengers have worked together and fought (each other) together, he’s learned something he never should have forgotten from the war: people can surprise you.
Of course, sometimes everything boils down to, “Oh, that was after you fell asleep,” and people don’t surprise you at all.
“You celebrated Valentine’s Day back in the war, Cap?” Clint asks. “I thought that was always a Hallmark Holiday.”
“A what?”
Clint and Natasha glance at each other and have one of those silent conversations Steve both respects and fears. In the end, Clint shovels more risotto in—he can eat as much as Thor or Steve, if he wants to—and Natasha clears her throat. “The card company,” she says.
“Yeah, some of the boys, they got cards from their sweethearts for Valentine’s Day.” They’d been several weeks late, usually, Steve remembers. He’d never received one, but several of his men had. “Guess Hallmark’s still around.”
“And making beaucoup bucks,” Tony says, and Steve can practically see a light bulb flickering over his teammate’s head. “Hey, JARVIS, remind me: did we get in on that with the merchandising?”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Beckman left a box in the other room with hopes that you would review the material.”
“Ooh.” Eyes bright, Tony hurries out.
Steve turns back to his plate. As ever, it’s full of delicious things he never would have imagined getting to eat during his days in the trenches, but he can’t seem to work up much of an appetite. He knows kids used to paint his shield design on trash can lids back in the forties, but now there are tiny dolls that look like him, and his face on T-shirts. Just like there are cellophane-wrapped boxes of chocolate on the end of every aisle at the grocery store, and red and pink M&Ms, and stuffed dogs, panda bears, monkeys, and all manner of creatures from the animal kingdom that Steve doesn’t really associate with love.
Peggy would probably find them hilarious in that buttoned-up way she has. Or had.
“It all seems so commercial,” he says, and he knows he’s being, as Tony thoughtlessly put it once, “that depressing old guy,” but he can’t help it. “Like it doesn’t mean anything.”
Clint shrugs. “Probably never did.”
“You’re such a romantic,” Natasha tells him, and he waggles his eyebrows at her.
“It still means something to some people, Steve,” Bruce says.
“Like what?”
“Cheap candy in March?” Clint asks, and this time, Natasha actually kicks him. “Ow!”
“A lot of the holiday is commercial, but I don’t know, some people like it.” Bruce gets up to fetch another cup of tea from the counter. Steve knows Tony must have staff, as the man can’t cook worth beans, but whenever the Avengers are over, there’s never anybody around to witness the lunch. It just shows up mysteriously in the dining room every time, always piping hot and expertly prepared. Maybe the chef hides under the floor. And Tony obviously pays attention to what they like because Clint’s food never has mushrooms, and Bruce has a preferred type of tea that’s always available on the side-counter during these lunches. Bruce pours a cup of that now. “It’s kind of nice that there’s a holiday that just celebrates love for or a connection to another human, even if it is a Hallmark Holiday. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“So do any of you celebrate it, then?” Steve asks.
Bruce gives him a smile that only has a little sadness at the edges. “No.”
“I give Fury’s office manager roses,” Clint says. The others look at him in surprise. “What? She orders the coffee. And office managers run the world. Everybody knows this.”
“You have a point,” Natasha says. “Women in Russia expect gifts on Valentine’s Day from their husbands.”
“And do you?”
Natasha takes a sip of her tea. “I have no husband.”
“Ah,” Steve says, and Tony barrels back in, several flat, brightly-colored boxes tucked under one arm.
“Found them!” Iron Man says brightly, holding them aloft. He drops the entire stack, which doesn’t weigh much, on the table. “Look at this. There’s a box of each of us, even Thor. I don’t know what they’re doing with his profits while he’s on Asgard, but isn’t this great?”
Warily, Steve reaches over the basket of rolls and plucks up one of the boxes. Several sheets of cardstock-like paper flutter out. Each has four little cards on it, perforated so they punch out. There’s a cartoon of the Hulk on each one, either growling or mid-roar against a purple and pink backdrop.
There are captions behind the Hulk: “I think you’re SMASHING!” or “Will you be my INCREDIBLE VALENTINE?” in cartoon type. One half of the card has a stylized box with lines that say “TO:” and “FROM:” on them.
“What?” is all he can say.
“‘I’d like to take a BITE out of you?’” Natasha asks, her voice disbelieving. She’s holding a similar box, but hers has a cartoon of herself on it. “‘You’ve caught me in your WEB?’”
“I think it’s clever,” Tony says. “Because the black widow is a type of spider, see—”
Clint, on the other hand, shakes his head. “Why am I dressed like Cupid? Also, ‘You hit the BULLS-EYE, Valentine?’”
“Wait, do all of us have these?” Steve asks, and Bruce hands him a box with his own face on it. He blinks at the caption. “‘You’re sure SWELL, Valentine?’”
“Oh, somebody in merchandising deserves a raise,” Tony says. “That is so dead-on, it’s almost spooky.”
“What are these?” Steve asks.
“Kids give them to their classmates. A lot of them have candy attached, but apparently Stark Industries are a bunch of cheapskates,” Clint says, and Tony frowns. “Also, there’s clearly a case of sucking up to the boss going on. Thor gets ‘Wouldst THOU be my Valentine?’ but Stark’s is ‘You make my HEART glow,’ which is actually clever.”
“They’re all cheesy,” Bruce, always one for equanimity, points out.
“And kind of dirty, if you read ’em right,” Clint says.
“With you,” Natasha says, “anything is dirty if you read it right.”
“Well, yeah,” Clint says as though he doesn’t understand why there would be any other way of living.
Steve pushes the pile of Hulk and Captain America valentines away from him. “Is there anything not mass-produced these days?” he asks. He means to sound exasperated, he really does, but the sentence comes out surprisingly glum.
“I think that’s what Etsy’s for,” Tony says. It doesn’t help. Steve has no idea what an etsy is.
Natasha pushes away from the table. “These are disgusting,” she tells Tony, and she doesn’t give him the box of Black Widow valentines back. “If you gentlemen will excuse me, there’s something I need to see to.” She nods at them as she leaves.
Reluctantly, Clint shovels in another spoonful of risotto before he climbs to his feet and snatches a couple of rolls, tucking them into his pockets. “I’d better go save some unpaid ad-writer intern from death by thigh-squeeze, I guess,” he says, and saunters out with a wave, leaving Steve with Bruce and Tony, who do their best in their own ways to try and kick the melancholy mood out of him. They’re mostly successful (Tony’s not-even-close impression of Nick Fury dealing with valentine cards is funny, if possibly sexist and untrue), but there’s part of a deep sadness and confusion that Steve can’t seem to shake these days.
He wonders at it as the Quinjet lands on the deck at Stark Tower. Usually he rides to the Helicarrier with Clint and Natasha, but they’re off to Mongolia in the morning, so Steve’s stuck catching a ride with whoever’s heading back to the ship. There’s no way Fury’s going to trust him with one of the multimillion dollar jets after that thing in Kuala Lumpur a couple of months back. He raises an eyebrow when he sees Maria Hill in the cockpit. “Mind company?”
“Strap in,” she says, so Steve stows his duffel and climbs into the copilot’s seat. “Good lunch?”
“It was. No alien invasion in the middle of it,” Steve says, forcing a smile like that hasn’t happened twice.
Maria gives him an absent nod in reply. For a woman that obviously doesn’t like the idea of the Avengers, she treats them all professionally, and Steve can respect that. Tony’s not her biggest fan, Steve knows, which is fine because Maria isn’t his biggest fan, either. “Did Stark behave himself?”
“For the most part. Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day?”
“Why?” Maria gives him a suspicious look. “Are you asking me to go steady?”
Steve chokes on nothing. “Uh, ah—”
A rare smile flickers across Maria’s face. “I’m messing with you. Though if you’re looking for a valentine, I’m sure you could find pretty much any woman in SHIELD that would love to fill that position.”
“Really?” Steve is so flabbergasted that he stares at her for so long that it’s likely rude. “That many?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“But I’m so bad at talking to dames!”
“Tip,” Maria says. “You’ll probably be better at it if you called them ‘women.’”
“Sorry.” Steve flushes. “I don’t mean anything by it.”
“Just helping you get used to the new century.” Maria checks off a series of switches, her voice completely easy. It’s a little amazing how competent she is, sometimes. Peggy, Steve thinks, is—was the same way. It makes him remember the first time he’d laid eyes on Agent Carter, how she’d decked a guy with a firm right cross and how competent doesn’t always mean nice. “Why do you ask about Valentine’s Day?”
“Oh, it came up at lunch,” Steve says, omitting the fact that he’d brought it up. “Tony had these little…Well, here.” He digs in his pocket until he finds the one little Valentine’s Day card he liked, which has the entire team on it (though Clint and Natasha are tiny and shoved into the background in a way that offends his artist’s eye for perspective). It has a caption across it that said, “VALENTINES, ASSEMBLE!”
Maria takes it from him and shakes her head, though she’s got a tiny bit of a smile curving up one side of her lips. “Cute,” is all she says.
“Is it? It feels so…cheap.”
“It’s a commercial world, we just live in it.”
“What?” Steve asks.
“Never mind.” Maria hands him the card back. “It’s just something kids give each other, and kids love the Avengers.”
She doesn’t sound entirely thrilled at that prospect, but Steve doesn’t feel like arguing. “Yeah.”
“What were you expecting?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Valentines that mean something, I guess, but I suspect it’s probably old-fashioned—Dr. Banner called it cheesy—to want something hand-made or thoughtful.”
“You want hand-made valentines?”
“I’m talking more about ones that mean something.” And somebody, he realizes, to be behind that meaning. He never gave Peggy a Valentine’s Day card.
Maria makes a noise in the back of her throat and checks the altimeter. “Better not let all the single ladies—and some of the men, I don’t judge—hear you say you want handmade valentines,” she says. “You’ll discover quite a few closet crafters in SHIELD, and sometimes it’s better not knowing.”
Steve knows, in her own way, she’s trying to cheer him up, but the smile he musters is mostly sarcastic. “Thanks,” he says.
“You’re welcome.”
For a while, they fly in silence. The Helicarrier is circling India this week due to a potential hotspot happening in the New Delhi region, so it’s a longer flight than usual. Steve doesn’t mind. He’s spent a lot of the time on the backs of trucks, surrounded by other soldiers, as they moved from one HYDRA base to another. He knows how to turn his brain off, rest and relax to the next mission, and it’s nice that Maria Hill is a fellow soldier, who understands that quiet between. If she wants to talk, she’ll talk, but he figures it’ll probably be him that brings up the next subject, as Maria can make Natasha look like a chatterbox if she wants to.
But it’s her that breaks the silence, surprising him. “You know, mass-produced doesn’t always mean cheap and thoughtless,” she says. “Just for the record.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Sorry. You should just ignore my bad mood. I’m having one of my ‘old man fits,’ like Tony calls them. Of course, he usually adds, ‘You kids get off my lawn,’ which I don’t get, but that’s okay.” Steve gives her a real smile this time, and she shrugs back at him as if to say Tony’s humor is a mystery to them all, and this time, the silence is a lot easier.
Somehow, it gets out that Steve Rogers likes his cards homemade and meaningful because his locker on the Helicarrier is stuffed to the gills with lace, frills, and poetry when Valentine’s Day rolls around. Cards gush out in a waterfall when he opens his locker. Steve, fresh from a training session with some of the senior agents, looks at Maria in surprise.
“Wasn’t me,” she says.
“Oh, I didn’t think—”
Maria pats him on the shoulder as she walks by, and the brief contact is enough to make Steve want to shuffle his feet. He notices that Sitwell and Cho suddenly find any place in the locker room to look that isn’t either Steve or Maria.
Cho covers a laugh with a cough. “Wow, Rogers, who’s the lucky valentine? Or the…eighty lucky valentines?”
“Looks like most of the engineering crew,” Sitwell says.
Steve has to admit that some of the cards are incredibly well-constructed.
“No, this smells like Romanoff,” Cho says. “For all we know, she’s a secret ninja with a cricut cutter.”
“A what?” Sitwell asks.
Steve tunes them out as he flips through the cards, most of which are heart- or angel-shaped. There are some very disturbing drawings of a chubby toddler with a bow and arrow on quite a few of them that would make some of the Renaissance artists cry themselves to sleep at night. They’re all signed with names like Stacey and Tracey and Trish, and he has no idea who any of these people are, but apparently they’ve written him poetry and baked him cookies, if the little tins in his locker are anything to go by.
“Are you sure? I think this is a word you’re making up,” Sitwell is saying when Steve rises and begins stuffing the cards in his bag. It’s a little mind-boggling that so many people have made him cards and things when they don’t even know him. And a little disappointing, too, but he doesn’t want to look too deeply into it. “Cricut doesn’t even sound like a real word.”
“It totally is, my wife has a cutter mat for it and everything—”
Steve’s cell phone rings. When Tony gave him the phone, he’d explained that the ringtone was some band called Black Sabbath, which seems like a strange band name to Steve. But then again, they’re all strange band names. He answers it and a holo of Tony appears over the phone. Which is pretty neat, in his opinion.
“Hey, Captain Chocolates and Roses,” Tony says. “Did you—are you in a locker room?”
Steve’s fully clothed, so he shrugs. “Nothing in here that God didn’t give us, Tony.”
“Well, cool, that’ll fly, I guess. I’m just calling because I wanted to know if you got my present.” The tiny holo figure of Tony makes a point of looking down at Steve’s duffel bag. When he looks up, his grin is rakish. “Guess you did.”
“I shoulda figured,” Steve says.
“All I did was mention to the very friendly Wanda from Accounting—lovely woman, you should look her up, she’s got a goldfish named Pete—that maybe the great Captain Rogers might be lonely this Valentine’s Day.” Tony’s shrug is pure impudence. “What she did with it from there, I can’t begin to say, but it seems to have worked.”
Maria, who’s been fussing in her locker, steps closer. “Why were you talking to Accounting?”
“Oh, Agent Hill! Lovely to see you. I don’t think Pepper will hit me if I wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day. You really are my favorite Agent Hill at SHIELD.”
“I’m flattered. There are three Agents Hill currently employed by SHIELD,” Maria says.
“See? It even means something now!” Tony looks pleased, but Steve figures the good mood is because his latest plan has worked out better than even than he suspected it might. “Steve, my good man, if this doesn’t help you get a date, I am declaring you hopeless. After all, remember, when Captain America throws his mighty shield…”
“I’m hanging up now,” Steve says, and Tony gives him one final smirk before the call disconnects.
“I notice he never answered me about Accounting,” Maria says, but she returns to her locker and grabs a water bottle out of it. Steve makes sure not to watch the column of her neck—it’s a very long neck—as she takes a drink.
“Hey, Hill,” Sitwell says. “Answer something for us—”
“Yes, cricut is a real word,” Maria says and, grabbing her bag, heads for the door. Halfway there, though, she stops and swivels on her heel. She rummages around in the side of her bag. “Wait, I forgot something. Rogers, here.”
She holds out a small red envelope. Warily, Steve takes it.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says.
“Does this make me your valentine?” Steve asks. The envelope looks absurdly tiny in his hands.
Maria gives the stack of cards bulging out of Steve’s bag a dry look. On the other side of the locker room, Sitwell and Cho have gone suspiciously quiet. “Rogers, if getting a card from somebody makes you their valentine, you’re going to have a lot of explaining to do to a whole bunch of women, don’t you think?”
It’s all Steve can do not to flush as red as his shield. “Yes, ma’—I mean, uh, yes. Thank you for the card. I didn’t get you one or anything—”
“No big deal.” Maria gives him the same coolly professional smile she’s always given him before she takes off, gym bag bumping against her hip.
“Well, that was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen at SHIELD,” Sitwell tells Steve cheerfully as he and Cho leave. Their argument about cricuts drifts down the hall after them.
Steve sits down on the locker room bench and pries open the envelope. For a moment, he stares before laughter overtakes him. It’s one of the Hulk cards, but not one Steve has seen before. This one is a Hulk hugging a giant teddy bear. It says, “BE MY FRIEND” and the look on the Hulk’s face is so unlike any expression Steve has ever seen the Hulk wear when banging cable cars into the Golden Gate Bridge isn’t involved that Steve can’t do anything but laugh until tears stream down his face and his sides ache. Eventually, his laughter dies to chuckles. He wipes his face with his towel and turns the card over, marveling at the fact that Maria has written, “Happy Valentine’s Day” on the back. She hasn’t signed the card.
His gaze drifts from the cheap, factory-manufactured card in his hand to the stack of homemade ones falling out of his bag. For a moment, he thinks about them, about how many people have taken the time to make them for him, somebody that person barely knows. And he thinks of Tony, who set all of this in motion. Part of it is that he no doubt gets a kick out of seeing Steve squirm in the spotlight, but there’s also a part of Tony Stark that recognizes loneliness and does what he can to fix it. It keeps him human, something that’s hard to understand unless you’ve been frozen in the ice for decades or your heart glows in the dark.
But, Steve thinks, looking back at the Hulk’s cartoon face, maybe Tony’s not the only one that understands the detachment he feels. The card’s not a tether to the new world he’s found himself in, not by long shot, but it’s a small piece of the world that he can enjoy despite itself. He leaves a drawing of Nick Fury wearing a heart as an eye-patch in Maria’s locker as a thank-you because her card may be cheap and mass-produced, but it’s a connection to another human being, as Bruce put it. And with that little gesture, Steve Rogers finally understands Valentine’s Day.