Archive of Our Own

Steve started walking through New York because sitting still made the city feel stranger.

There were pieces of it he recognized if he looked hard enough: a street that still cut the same way between buildings, a church that had survived everything the decades had thrown at it, the occasional brownstone that reminded him of a block he’d known before anyone living there now had been born. Most of the city existed beyond anything he remembered, though, and he found himself with more unclaimed hours than he knew what to do with. Walking gave those hours somewhere to go.

He crossed neighborhoods without much of a plan, stopping whenever something interested him and gradually learning which streets became impossible around lunchtime and which parks stayed quiet after dark. He found a movie theater that showed films he remembered seeing the first time around and a bookstore whose owner pretended not to recognize him until Steve had been there often enough that pretending became unnecessary.

The café came a few weeks later. It occupied the ground floor of an old brick building on a side street that people seemed to use mostly as a shortcut between busier avenues, with six tables inside, four more on the sidewalk when the weather cooperated, and a handwritten menu above the counter that changed often enough that Steve stopped trying to memorize it. The first time he went in, three people stared. The second time, only one did. By his fourth visit, the woman behind the counter greeted him like any other regular and left him to choose his own table.

You had apparently beaten him to it.

He noticed you because you were almost always there before him, usually occupying the same table beneath the window with enough paper spread across it to suggest you’d established residency. Books appeared in uneven stacks around your laptop, their spines filled with words like mobilization, public opinion, wartime media, and national identity. Photocopied documents disappeared beneath notebooks, while sticky notes accumulated on whatever surface remained.

Steve never tried to read over your shoulder, but he’d spent enough of his life around maps and briefing files to absorb information without meaning to. You were working on something about the war.

More specifically, you were working on something about him.

That realization nearly made him choose another café. Instead, the next time he came in, you glanced up as he passed your table, gave him a brief smile, and went right back to whatever article you were annotating. You didn’t ask for a photograph, lower your voice to whisper to someone on the phone, or watch him when you thought he wasn’t looking.

Steve sat down at the table nearby.

After that, the arrangement continued without discussion. You worked by the window while Steve took one of the smaller tables close enough that he occasionally caught whatever you were muttering under your breath. Sometimes one of you arrived first, and sometimes hours passed without either of you acknowledging the other beyond a nod. He liked that nobody expected anything from him there, and he gradually realized your presence had become part of what made the place comfortable.

Then, one rainy Tuesday afternoon, Steve caught enough of what you were muttering to yourself to finally speak to you.

“This still doesn’t prove anything,” you muttered, tapping the end of your pen against a photocopied page. “Bond sales increased everywhere. You can’t isolate the effect of one campaign from the entire national apparatus.”

Steve lowered his book slightly.

You scribbled something out. “Correlation isn’t causation just because someone put Captain America’s face on a poster, and half these sources are measuring recognition instead of persuasion. Of course people recognized him. He was everywhere.”

“They did like the show.”

Your pen stopped.

Steve immediately wondered whether he should’ve kept his mouth shut.

Very slowly, you turned toward him, then looked down at the papers surrounding your laptop as if reconsidering every decision that had brought you into the café that afternoon.

“I’m sorry. Was I talking that loudly?”

“Not that loudly.”

Your expression suggested this wasn’t reassuring.

Steve closed his book around one finger to hold his place. “But they did like the show.”

“The USO show?”

“Most places.”

You stared at him for another second before your academic instincts apparently defeated your embarrassment. “What do you mean, most places?”

Steve glanced at the papers scattered across your table. “People bought bonds at the shows, sure, but that wasn’t always because the performance convinced them to. Some came because they wanted to see the girls. Some came because there wasn’t much else happening nearby. Some already planned to buy bonds before they got there. It wasn’t the same everywhere.”

You reached slowly for your notebook, hesitating just long enough for him to notice. “Do you mind if I take notes?”

Steve considered the question, then glanced at the title written across the top of the nearest page.

Audience Reception and the American Hero: Measuring the Efficacy of Personified Wartime Propaganda, 1943–1945.

“Is this your research?”

“My dissertation.”

“History?”

You nodded. “Twentieth-century American history. Mostly political culture and media.”

One of the books nearest Steve had his shield on the cover. He looked from it to you and couldn’t quite suppress a smile. “You picked a hell of a case study.”

A laugh escaped you before you could stop it, easing the last of the tension between you. You angled your notebook toward yourself again. “So when you say people liked the show, are you talking about civilian audiences?”

“Mostly.”

“What about the soldiers?”

Steve hesitated.

The question brought memories he hadn’t expected to encounter between the hiss of the espresso machine and the rain against the windows. Mud. Canvas tents. Men who hadn’t slept enough in weeks. The first time he’d walked onto a stage in front of soldiers and discovered exactly how little patience they had for a performance that had played beautifully back home.

“That was different.”

You must’ve seen something in his expression because your pen lowered before it ever touched the paper.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

Steve looked at you. You had spent countless hours studying Captain America and had somehow found yourself sitting a few feet away from the man at the center of your case study, yet your first instinct was to give him a way out rather than press for an answer.

He liked that about you.

“I don’t mind,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

Only then did your pen return to the page.

Steve shifted his chair slightly closer to your table. “I can tell you what I remember about the crowds.”

That should’ve been the extent of it.

Instead, Steve ruined one of your footnotes three days later.

You were reading through a chapter draft while he ate lunch nearby when he leaned over far enough to tap the photocopy beside your elbow. “That guy was lying.”

You looked up sharply.

“He wasn’t even in France when he said this happened.”

Your eyes moved from Steve to the author’s name and back again. “You’re kidding.”

Steve took another bite of his sandwich. “No.”

“I cited him eight times.”

“Sorry.”

The apology might’ve worked better if he hadn’t looked faintly amused.

By the following week, you had given him a copy of the chapter with a pencil and strict instructions to mark anything historically questionable. He returned it covered in notes, some useful and others irritating enough that you briefly considered rescinding his privileges.

Never heard anyone call it that.

This happened later.

Bucky would’ve hated this description.

One particularly expensive academic biography came back with a sticky note attached to a paragraph describing Steve as maintaining a rigidly formal relationship with the Howling Commandos.

Absolutely not.

You laughed loudly enough that several people looked over from their tables, while Steve sat across from you with his coffee and the unmistakable satisfaction of a man who had accomplished exactly what he’d intended.

After that, the friendship developed in increments too small for either of you to identify when the arrangement changed. Steve started asking how the dissertation was going before he even sat down, and you began texting him whenever you encountered a source that made an especially ridiculous claim. He answered with corrections at alarming speed, occasionally sending enough context that a simple complaint turned into another paragraph of notes.

When your advisor returned a chapter with enough comments to make you consider abandoning academia for a career involving significantly fewer footnotes, Steve arrived at the café carrying dinner from the place down the street.

You looked from him to the paper bag. “I didn’t ask you to bring me food.”

“You said you forgot lunch and planned to stay here until they closed.”

“That wasn’t an invitation.”

“It sounded enough like one.”

You narrowed your eyes at him, but Steve was already unpacking the food onto the corner of the table you had left uncovered. He sat across from you afterward, reading while you worked, and stayed until you finally closed the laptop for the night.

At some point, his table stopped being his table altogether. If you were already there when Steve arrived, he simply joined you, moving whatever books or papers you indicated before settling into the space across from you. Neither of you commented on the change.

The dissertation remained the excuse for the first few months. Steve helped when he could, particularly when your sources flattened people he had known into patriotic archetypes or transformed chaotic events into neat historical narratives. You helped him in different ways, usually without appearing to realize it.

You knew which museums had updated their wartime exhibits and which ones still relied on information written decades earlier. When Steve admitted he’d never actually gone inside the main branch of the New York Public Library despite walking past it plenty of times before the war, you looked so genuinely offended on behalf of the building that he agreed to go with you the following Saturday.

There was an exhibition running when you went, which Steve would later maintain was the reason the visit took so long. You blamed his lack of patience. He blamed your determination to read every word printed on every placard before moving to the next room.

Afterward, you bought sandwiches and wandered through the neighborhood until the afternoon had slipped away from both of you. Steve pointed out where a movie theater had once stood, now replaced by a luxury apartment building, and told you about going there when tickets cost less than whatever you’d just paid for lunch.

“That keeps happening,” he said as you continued down the block.

“It has been seventy years.”

“I’m aware.”

The way he looked at the next glass-fronted building made you smile. Your shoulder bumped his as you walked, and Steve found himself smiling too.

By autumn, Natasha knew about you.

It happened because she called Steve while he was sitting beside you in your university’s library. He stepped into the hallway to answer, leaving the study-room door cracked behind him, and had barely finished greeting her when Natasha noticed the echo.

“You’re in a library.”

“Yeah.”

“Voluntarily?”

Before Steve could answer, your voice carried through the doorway. “Steve, was Philadelphia before or after the Cleveland stop?”

He glanced back toward the room. “After.”

There was a brief silence on the phone.

“Who was that?”

“A friend. I’m helping with her dissertation.”

Natasha’s interest became obvious enough that Steve immediately regretted giving her that much. He admitted the dissertation concerned wartime propaganda and, after a little more pressure, that his own bond tour featured prominently in it.

“Interesting,” she said.

Steve recognized the tone. “Don’t.”

He ended the call before she could insist she hadn’t said anything.

Two days later, Natasha found him at the Tower and asked how his historian was doing.

“She’s not my historian.”

“Your friend, then.”

“That’s what I told you.”

Natasha studied him for a moment, apparently finding something interesting in his insistence on the distinction. Steve went back to his book before she could share whatever conclusion she had reached.

He should’ve known that would only be the beginning.

Tony was worse.

The first time you came to the Tower, it was because Steve had mentioned several boxes of wartime material that had been relocated during renovations and might contain records useful to your research. You spent twenty minutes insisting that you couldn’t simply access private archival material because you happened to know him, until Steve finally explained that the files technically belonged to him and he was the one giving you permission.

You still looked faintly uneasy when he brought you upstairs.

Tony wandered into the room halfway through your second box, took in the carefully arranged folders covering the table, then looked between you and Steve with immediate interest.

“You brought a girl home to look at seventy-year-old paperwork.”

“She’s working,” Steve said.

Tony’s expression suggested that wasn’t the part he found noteworthy, but he left without pursuing it.

You waited until the door had closed behind him before looking at Steve. “Does he think we’re dating?”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

“Tony likes making up his mind about things before anyone explains them.”

Your gaze drifted toward the door. “And he made up his mind about us?”

“Looks like it.”

“We’re friends.”

“Right.”

You said it easily.

Steve did too.

At the time, it was true.

Natasha met you properly not long afterward, when she stopped by the Tower while you and Steve were working through another box of records. The two of you got along easily enough that, by the time the Chicago conference came around, you’d started making plans without Steve involved.

Steve realized something had changed when you went to Chicago for three days.

There was a conference. Steve knew this because he’d heard about it for months, including the original proposal, the acceptance, the panic about presenting an argument from a chapter you no longer liked, and the exact sequence of events that had nearly caused you to miss the registration deadline.

He knew your presentation was Friday afternoon and your flight home was Sunday evening, which made it particularly stupid that he walked into the café on Saturday morning and automatically looked toward your table.

It was empty.

Steve stopped for half a second before remembering exactly why. He ordered his coffee and sat down, telling himself that nothing about the morning was unusual.

The café was exactly the same without you. The same music drifted from the speakers, the same smell of bread warming behind the counter filled the room, and familiar faces occupied several tables, people Steve had seen often enough over the past few months to recognize without ever learning their names.

It felt wrong anyway.

He read half a page of his book before checking his phone.

There was a message from you.

Someone just presented an entire paper arguing that patriotic superheroes functioned primarily as aspirational masculinity and somehow failed to mention enlistment advertising once.

Steve smiled before he could stop himself.

Maybe he ran out of time.

The typing indicator appeared almost immediately.

steven

He laughed quietly, earning a glance from the counter that he ignored. Your next message included a photograph of an aggressively beige conference room with this is what academic suffering looks like as the caption.

He saved the picture.

Then Steve sat there with his phone in his hand and finally admitted something he had apparently been avoiding for weeks.

The café wasn’t his favorite place anymore.

You were.

He had known attraction before, and he remembered Peggy with enough clarity that there were still memories he approached carefully. This wasn’t some mystery he lacked the experience to identify. He knew exactly what was happening, which unfortunately meant he also knew how much he stood to lose if he handled it badly.

You had become one of the few constants in his life that made New York feel less unfamiliar. You knew who he was without making everything about what he represented. You could spend three hours asking about wartime morale and then complain because he’d eaten the pastry you were saving. You invited him into ordinary places and expected nothing extraordinary in return.

Steve had spent enough of his life losing people. He wasn’t going to risk losing you because he wanted the friendship to become something more.

When you returned from Chicago and dropped into the chair across from him with a tired smile, he asked about the conference and listened while you described every paper worth remembering.

He didn’t tell you he’d missed you.

Your own realization came a few weeks later.

You had talked to Steve about your research plenty of times before, although most of those conversations had begun without warning and ended with you scrambling to write down something important he’d mentioned while discussing something else. They were invaluable to your work, but they weren’t material you could formally cite as an interview unless you documented them properly.

Your advisor eventually pointed this out, which was how Steve ended up sitting across from you in a private study room with a recorder on the table between you.

The difference was immediate.

You introduced the interview for the recording, and Steve stated his name before giving permission for the material to be used in your dissertation. When you asked the first question, his posture straightened almost imperceptibly, and his answers became careful in a way they never were when the two of you were talking over lunch.

This was exactly the kind of interview you’d spent months hoping to conduct.

Steve was articulate, thorough, and precise about the limits of what he remembered. When you asked about the bond tours, he gave you dates where he could and explained the distinctions between civilian and military audiences. He corrected assumptions without dismissing the scholarship behind them, and when he couldn’t remember something clearly enough to trust the memory, he said so rather than giving you an answer he wasn’t sure about.

It was probably the best primary-source interview you would ever conduct.

You hated it.

Steve sat straighter than usual, and his answers lacked the wandering asides you’d grown accustomed to, the occasional dry commentary that made you laugh when you were supposed to be writing, and all the small interruptions that had become familiar over the previous months. He didn’t steal the pen you kept rolling between your fingers or turn your notebook around when he wanted to see something you’d written.

You knew why. This mattered to you, so Steve was treating it with the seriousness he thought it deserved.

Somehow, that made everything worse.

Forty-three minutes later, you asked your final question. Steve answered, you stopped the recording, and the second the light went dark, some of the tension left his shoulders.

“You were terrifying,” he said.

You blinked. “Me?”

“You’ve got a professor face.”

“I do not.”

Steve smiled, and before you could defend yourself further, he reached across the table and took the pen from your hand.

The relief that moved through you was so immediate it almost frightened you. The careful distance he’d maintained throughout the interview disappeared with the recorder turned off, leaving behind the familiar ease you’d grown accustomed to without ever realizing how much it mattered.

Steve turned the pen between his fingers while explaining why one of your questions had reminded him of an argument Dum Dum had once started in a pub, and something inside you shifted abruptly into focus.

You knew Captain America.

You had written tens of thousands of words about him. You could track changes in his public image across newspaper circulation patterns and government messaging strategies, knew when his uniform had been altered for different campaigns, and understood how various agencies had changed the language surrounding him depending on the audience they were trying to reach.

None of that had anything to do with why your pulse stumbled when Steve smiled at you.

You were in love with your best friend.

The realization arrived with enough force that your hand slipped against the edge of your notebook.

Steve stopped talking. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Long day.”

His attention lingered on you for another moment before he let the answer stand. You reached for your pen, and Steve returned it without argument.

You spent the rest of the evening pretending nothing had changed.

After that, telling people you and Steve were just friends became considerably harder.

Your department had apparently reached its own conclusion months earlier. You discovered this when another doctoral candidate caught you alone in the hallway after Steve had dropped off dinner one afternoon.

“I didn’t realize you and Steve Rogers were together.”

“We’re not.”

She glanced toward the corridor where he’d just disappeared. “Really?”

“We’re friends.”

“He brings you dinner.”

“Because I forget to eat.”

“And waits until you actually start eating before he leaves.”

You opened your mouth, then closed it again.

Steve encountered similar problems on his end. Clint met you one evening when Steve asked whether you minded another person joining you for dinner, and the two of you got along exactly as well as he’d expected. What he hadn’t expected was the increasingly knowing look Clint directed his way whenever you leaned over to show Steve something or stole food from his plate without asking.

When you left the table for a few minutes, Clint waited until you were out of earshot. “You know everyone thinks you’re together, right?”

“We’re friends.”

Clint’s expression didn’t change.

Steve sighed. “Don’t start.”

He didn’t tell you about the conversation afterward, just as you never mentioned the one with your colleague. It became easier for both of you to avoid examining things too closely.

Until Boston made ignoring them more difficult.

You found out about the fellowship on a Wednesday.

Steve knew something had happened before you said anything because you were already at the café when he arrived, sitting perfectly still with your laptop open and an email displayed on the screen.

He sat across from you. “What happened?”

You looked at him. “I got it.”

Steve knew immediately. “The fellowship?”

You nodded.

For months, you had talked about a semester-long archival fellowship based in Boston. The program would give you access to a collection of private wartime correspondence that had only recently been cataloged, along with enough funding to spend the semester working almost exclusively on the final research chapter of your dissertation.

It was exactly the kind of opportunity you needed.

Steve smiled. “That’s great.”

“It is.”

Something in your voice made his smile fade slightly. “You don’t sound convinced.”

“I am. It’s just Boston.”

The words tightened something beneath Steve’s ribs, but he ignored it. “For one semester.”

“January through May.”

“That’s not bad.”

You looked at him, and for one dangerous second, Steve thought you might be waiting for him to say something else.

He wanted to.

He wanted to tell you that five months sounded significantly longer now that the fellowship was real. He wanted to ask how often you planned to come home, whether he was allowed to visit, and why the idea of walking into the café without finding you there suddenly felt unbearable.

Instead, he did what he thought a good friend was supposed to do. “You should take it.”

Your expression changed so slightly that he might’ve imagined it. “I know.”

“It’s perfect for your research, and you’ve wanted it for months.”

You closed the laptop and folded your hands over the top. “You’re right.”

Steve could feel that he had missed something important without understanding what it was. “Congratulations.”

You smiled, but it wasn’t the smile he’d expected.

“Thanks, Steve.”

You left earlier than usual.

Natasha came over a few nights later and found you still thinking about the conversation.

“He told you to go?”

“He told me I should take the fellowship.”

“And that bothered you.”

You looked down at your hands. “It’s what a supportive friend is supposed to say.”

Natasha was quiet for a moment before asking, “Is that all you wanted him to be?”

You didn’t answer, which was answer enough.

She watched you for another second. “Do you want him to ask you not to go?”

“No.” The response came immediately. “I’d be angry if he did.”

“Then what did you want?”

You hesitated before admitting the part that had been bothering you since Wednesday. “I wanted him to care that I was leaving.”

Natasha’s expression softened. “He probably does.”

“He looked happy for me.”

“He probably is.”

You looked away. “That’s the problem.”

Natasha let the silence sit for a moment before speaking again.

“When Steve bought your birthday present, he asked me whether a first-edition monograph you’d mentioned once would seem too personal. By then he’d already called three bookstores trying to find it.”

You turned toward her. “He called three bookstores for that book?”

“I’m not saying anything else.”

Your birthday had been three months ago, and Steve had handed you the book like he’d happened across it by accident. You had believed him because there hadn’t seemed to be any reason not to.

Apparently, there had been considerably more effort behind it than he’d admitted.

That knowledge didn’t solve anything.

It did make the weeks leading up to Boston more difficult.

Steve realized you were pulling away gradually enough that he could explain it at first.

You had fellowship paperwork, final revisions before the semester break, teaching responsibilities to finish, and an apartment in Boston to arrange. There were plenty of reasons for you to be unavailable, and Steve told himself he understood all of them.

Then he went four days without seeing you.

Then six.

You still texted and answered when he called, but the easy assumption that you would find time for each other somewhere in the week had disappeared.

Two weeks before you were supposed to leave, Steve walked into the café and found you at your old table. Relief came so quickly that he almost resented it.

You looked up when he approached. “Hey.”

Steve sat across from you and asked how the packing was going. You admitted that most of the difficulty was deciding which books you actually needed for the semester when taking all of them would’ve been much easier.

The conversation sounded normal enough, but the distance remained.

Steve wrapped both hands around his coffee. “When do you leave?”

“January third. I’m taking the train since the apartment’s furnished, so I’m mostly bringing clothes and books.”

He nodded, and silence settled between you in a way it never had before.

You rearranged a stack of papers you hadn’t touched since he arrived. “My advisor asked if my boyfriend was helping me move.”

Something unpleasant began collecting in Steve’s stomach. “What’d you tell her?”

“That I don’t have a boyfriend.”

He nodded again.

You let out a quiet breath. “Maybe we should stop giving everyone the wrong idea.”

Steve went still.

Since Chicago, Steve had kept quiet because he was afraid wanting more would change what you already had. Now things were changing anyway.

“What does that mean?”

You looked surprised by the question. “I don’t know. Maybe we’ve gotten a little too close for people not to assume things.”

“We are close.”

“As friends.”

Steve had used the phrase himself often enough over the past few months. Hearing it from you now made him dislike it immediately.

You looked down at your papers. “That’s what we’ve been saying.”

The fellowship conversation replayed in his head: your expression when he encouraged you to take it, the way you’d gone home early afterward, the growing distance between you ever since. Steve had thought supporting you meant keeping his own feelings out of the decision.

“I don’t want things to change between us.”

Your fingers stopped moving as you looked up. “They already are.”

That landed harder than he expected. 

Steve tightened his hands around his coffee. “Is that because of Boston?”

You hesitated. “Not because I’m going.”

He understood then.

“Because of what I said.”

You looked down at your papers.

Steve exhaled slowly. “I told you to take the fellowship because you worked for it. I wasn’t going to make you feel like staying here for me was something you had to consider.”

“I would’ve gone anyway.”

“I know.” His voice softened. “But I should’ve told you I was going to miss you.”

“I thought you wouldn’t.”

The words hurt more than he expected.

“Of course I will.”

“You looked so happy when I told you.”

“I was happy because you wanted it.” Steve leaned forward slightly, unwilling to let you misunderstand him again. “I’m still happy you’re going. I’m proud of you for getting it. None of that means I want five months without you.”

Your eyes dropped briefly toward the table.

Steve had given speeches in front of thousands of people and stood before soldiers, politicians, and cameras without notes. None of that made the next sentence easier.

“I’m in love with you.”

You looked back at him.

For several seconds, you said nothing.

Steve knew he had survived worse things than silence, although remembering any of them became increasingly difficult the longer you stared.

Then you laughed once, quietly, and lifted a hand to cover your eyes.

For one awful second, Steve wondered if he’d gotten this completely wrong. “That bad?”

“No.” You lowered your hand, and he realized your eyes were bright. “I’m laughing because I’ve spent the last two months convincing myself I was an idiot.”

He blinked.

“I’m in love with you too.”

Steve stared at you long enough that your mouth twitched despite the emotion still visible on your face.

“All this time?”

“I realized it during the interview.”

“The interview?”

“When you spent forty-three minutes sounding like Captain Rogers instead of yourself.”

Steve frowned faintly. “That made you fall in love with me?”

“It made me realize I already had.” You looked down at the table between you. “I’ve spent years studying Captain America. Sitting across from him that day made me realize how much Steve mattered to me.”

His expression softened, and he reached across the table and covered your hand with his, rubbing his thumb slowly across your knuckles.

“So,” he said after a moment. “Boston.”

You smiled. “Boston.”

“Can I visit?”

“You’d better.”

You stayed at the café a little longer, neither of you quite ready to end the conversation now that everything between you had changed. Eventually, Steve walked you toward home as he always did.

When you reached the corner where you usually separated, Steve stopped with you. For months, one of you had said goodnight here and the other had continued home. This time, the goodbye didn’t come.

You looked at him, still adjusting to the fact that you could look at him differently now without having to hide it. Steve seemed to be doing the same.

He smiled, small and almost disbelieving, and that was what finally made you kiss him.

Steve stilled for the briefest moment before kissing you back, one hand coming up to rest against your cheek. There was something almost ridiculous about how familiar he still felt when everything between you had changed in the space of an afternoon. When you pulled away, you were both smiling.

“I’m happy,” he said, before you could ask.

Any response you might’ve made disappeared when he kissed you again.

Not long after you left for Boston, Tony found out because Steve asked if he could borrow a car for the weekend. His motorcycle was fine for getting around New York, but a January ride to Boston was pushing practicality even by his standards.

“Where are you going?”

“Boston.”

Tony looked up from his tablet. “When?”

“Next weekend.”

“Why do you need a car? Take the jet.”

“I can drive to Boston.”

Tony stared at him for several seconds before understanding appeared with alarming speed.

“The historian.”

Steve immediately regretted asking.

Tony’s expression brightened. “You’re going to visit your girlfriend.”

Steve’s hesitation apparently told him everything he needed to know.

“You finally figured it out.”

“There wasn’t anything to figure out.”

“Capsicle, you spent months insisting you were friends.”

Steve started walking away, which only encouraged Tony to follow him.

“I’m serious, Steve. Take the jet. I’m not letting Captain America spend half a day sitting in traffic when you could be in Boston before lunch.”

“I can drive.”

Tony waved that away. “Go get your girl.”

Steve stopped long enough to give him a look.

Tony only looked more delighted with himself.

Steve took the jet.

Boston greeted him with snow piled along the edges of the sidewalks and enough cold that Steve briefly wondered why anyone had bothered claiming New York winters were bad.

He arrived at your apartment on a Friday evening carrying an overnight bag and a paper package from the café in New York. You opened the door and immediately recognized the logo on the paper bag in his hand.

“How are you here already?”

“Tony let me use the jet.”

Your eyes narrowed immediately. “What did he say?”

Steve handed you the pastries. “Nothing worth repeating.”

“That means it was terrible.”

“It was Tony.”

You stepped aside to let him in, still studying him suspiciously.

Steve lasted approximately ten seconds. “He told me to go get my girl.”

Your expression changed before you could hide it.

Steve smiled. “I’m never telling him you reacted like that.”

You took the pastry bag from his hand. “Then I hope you enjoyed your last flight.”

The semester passed faster than either of you expected. Steve visited Boston whenever schedules allowed, occasionally by plane but more often by Amtrak once accepting favors from Tony became more trouble than it was worth. You returned to New York twice, once for a meeting with your advisor and once simply because you missed home enough to justify the trip.

Distance changed less than either of you had feared.

You still sent Steve photographs of ridiculous academic claims and excerpts from sources that required commentary from someone who’d actually been there. He still corrected your footnotes, although he became better about distinguishing between corrections you had requested and historical grievances he simply wanted documented somewhere.

At night, you called instead of meeting at the café. Sometimes you talked for hours, while other calls dissolved into companionable silence with you working at your desk in Boston and Steve sketching or reading in New York.

Somewhere around April, your landlord emailed to remind you that your lease would expire at the end of May. You had mentioned it to Steve that night without much thought, already halfway through explaining that apartment hunting from another state was going to be miserable.

Steve was quiet for long enough that you finally looked up from your laptop.

“What?”

“You could move in with me.”

You stared at him through the screen.

He immediately looked less certain. “If you want to. I know it’s soon.”

It was, technically. You’d only been together since December, but the relationship itself hadn’t started from nothing. You’d known each other for the better part of a year and had already spent most of your free time together long before either of you admitted what it had become. Moving in together felt less dramatic when you remembered how intertwined your lives already were.

“Are you sure?”

Steve’s hesitation disappeared. “Yeah.”

You smiled. “Okay.”

Once the decision was made, Steve took care of the part you couldn’t easily manage from Boston. When your lease ended, he handled the move for you, packing up what remained, supervising the movers, and bringing everything from your old apartment to his. You still insisted on directing half of it over video call, particularly when he threatened to put your books wherever there happened to be shelf space. By the time the fellowship ended, your old apartment was empty and most of your life was already waiting for you at Steve’s.

Steve came up for the final weekend of your fellowship to help you pack the Boston apartment and travel back with you. You’d already shipped several boxes ahead, but five months had still left you with considerably more than you’d arrived with. 

When your train reached New York, Steve had claimed the heaviest suitcase, two boxes of books, and the bag containing most of your research notes. You stepped onto the platform behind him with the remaining suitcase and a tote digging into your shoulder.

“You know I can carry more than this.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you carrying almost everything?”

Steve glanced back at you. “Because I can.”

You caught up with him before the crowd could separate you, your hand finding the back of his coat as you made your way toward the concourse. For the first time, coming back to New York didn’t mean eventually splitting off toward different addresses.

Steve looked over at you as you emerged into the main hall. “Ready to go home?”

You smiled. “Yeah.”

And this time, you went home together.

Your dissertation defense took place three weeks later.

Steve didn’t attend the closed portion. He waited outside with several of your friends and people from the department, along with Natasha and, somehow, Tony.

You had specifically told Tony he didn’t need to come.

Tony had apparently decided that wasn’t the same thing as being told not to.

When the door finally opened, Steve was on his feet before anyone else. You stepped into the hallway and looked at the small crowd waiting for you.

Then you smiled.

“I passed.”

The hallway erupted.

Steve made his way through the small crowd and pulled you into his arms. Your face settled against his chest, his chin brushing the top of your head as he held you close.

For months, he had watched you build the dissertation sentence by sentence, argue with evidence, rewrite entire sections, defend interpretations, and threaten at least four separate printers. He had never doubted that you could do it.

Later, after dinner and enough congratulations to leave you visibly exhausted, you and Steve finally ended up alone.

You handed him a bound copy of the dissertation.

Steve took it carefully.

The title filled most of the cover.

Audience Reception and the American Hero: Measuring the Efficacy of Personified Wartime Propaganda, 1943–1945.

Your name appeared beneath it.

Steve ran his thumb across the lettering. “I get my own copy?”

“You contributed approximately eight thousand unsolicited corrections.”

“You asked me to read it.”

“I asked you to fact-check it.”

“Same thing.”

“It absolutely is not.”

Steve smiled and opened the cover.

You became noticeably quieter.

That was enough to make him suspicious.

He turned past the title page and found the acknowledgments a few pages in. His name caught his attention almost immediately.

For Steve, who reminded me that history is made by people before it is preserved by institutions, and who taught me the difference between knowing the record and knowing the person.

Steve stopped reading.

You shifted beside him. “I know it’s sentimental.”

He closed the dissertation carefully and held out one arm. “Come here.”

You smiled and moved into him.

Steve kissed your forehead, still holding the dissertation in his other hand.

“You like it?”

“Yeah.”

Your hand rested against his chest as you leaned back enough to look at him. “I had to acknowledge my primary source.”

Steve smiled. “Is that what I am?”

“Among other things.”

“Does boyfriend make the list?”

You pretended to consider the question until Steve kissed you before you could make him regret asking.

Nearly a year earlier, you had sat three feet away from him in a café and tried to determine whether Captain America had ever actually persuaded anyone of anything. Steve still wasn’t sure how effectively the government campaign had accomplished whatever the people behind it intended. He knew firsthand that the neat conclusions preserved in reports rarely captured everything that had actually happened.

You understood that better than most.

You had spent years studying the symbol, pulling apart polished stories and patriotic simplifications until you understood how carefully a person could be reduced to something easier for history to remember.

Then you had met the man behind it and never once asked him to remain that simple.

Somewhere between the footnotes, the dinners he brought when you forgot to eat, and five months of trips between New York and Boston, Steve had stopped being only the subject of your research and become something else entirely.

You had spent all that time studying Captain America.

You had fallen in love with Steve.

He thought that might be his favorite part of the story.