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darsynia · 1 year

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Just Right | Ch 5

(Steve Rogers x F!Reader, post-Ultron Multichapter)

gif from @steverogersdaily

Summary:

You’ve been in love with Steve Rogers for at least a year, but he treats you the same way he treats every other member of the team– with respect, but nothing more. It takes an inter-dimensional mistake and a whole second, more assertive, actually interested Steve for you to realize that you don’t want just any version of Steve Rogers– you want the one you’ve been pining for all this time.

Length: 3,169

FIC MASTERLIST | LAST CHAPTER | NEXT CHAPTER

Want to be tagged on this or any other Steve fic? Please ask!

@ronearoundblindly @munstysmind @tiny-anne @themaradaniels @starryeyes2000 @chickensarentcheap @isasalom

Excerpt:

“I’m going to ask you again. Am I dead in your universe?”

“Yes.”

The words sever the strings of courage that had been holding you upright, and you sway sideways, prompting Gold Steve to get up and help you sit on the bed. He drags his chair over for himself and leans forward on it, eyeing you with the care and concern of a person who has no idea how to fix what they’ve just broken.

“I didn’t want to tell you, not if I could avoid it,” he says. “Part of why I’m here is to reverse what happened, if we can.”

“What?” you gasp, shaken. He’s hopped universes to--

Gold Steve swiftly reaches over to take your hand with an encouraging squeeze. “It happened to a lot of people. More than you could ever imagine. Please don’t be upset, you’re--” He breaks off, looking at you with exasperated warmth. You feel buffeted from all sides, your ability to master your emotions at its lowest ebb. This man would throw himself into any void if he thought it would save a life, but this?

“Did you seriously just try to make me feel better by saying more people died?”

Chapter Five

Tony seems reinvigorated by your conversation, and he heads back to his lab. Either he’s too caught up in his conclusions or it’s too dark in the room for him to see how shaken you truly are, but you’re grateful. You… need a minute.

You lay back in the chair with your eyes shut, trying to find a way to calm your racing mind so you can sleep. All that does is swirl your thoughts deeper, a cyclonic storm front being fed a steady diet of awful futures and horrible alternatives. Eventually, you stand up and head toward the residence hallway.

Adrenaline makes your knock louder than you’d intended, but now that you’ve done it, there’s no taking it back. You tell yourself that if Gold Steve doesn’t answer after this one try, you’ll give up and try to talk to him during the dayti--

The door opens, faster than you would have expected it would if he had been asleep.

Before he can say anything, your fear bubbles over and you say, “Am I dead?”

His eyes close tightly for a second, and he drops his head. “What time is it?” he asks, his voice low and wary.

“Sometime after three. I can’t sleep, I--”

“Shh, it’s-- Come in? This isn’t a hallway conversation.”

The implication that it’s not a dining or rec room conversation floats between you for a second before you nod, and he backs up to let you in. As you suspected, his bed is still made. There’s a paperback open next to the wrinkles in the coverlet from where he’d been sitting, and a lamp is on. Gold Steve opens a folding chair and then sits on it, meaning he wants you to sit on his bed. You hesitate, and he scrubs a hand over his face.

You have a sneaking suspicion that the only reason Steve Rogers would sit down before a guest in his space is to make that guest pick the more comfortable option. Even so, it feels too intimate to sit on his bed, so you stay standing, wrapping your arms around yourself for support.

Steve’s brows furrow when he sees how uncomfortable you are, but he doesn’t push. Instead, in a soft voice that makes your heart ache, he says, “What makes you ask something like that, ‘Dine?”

“Tony told me about his breakthrough, the molecular fingerprint thing. He didn’t go into the why, but said if he was looking to send someone through dimensions, he’d want to use an anchor.” You hope you make sense, because even after a half hour, comprehension of what Tony had explained to you is slipping through your mental fingers. “He thinks you used me as an anchor, and that you did it because I don’t exist in your universe anymore. That way you could show up before whatever bad thing happened to kill me.”

His expression is both stunned and regretful. It makes you wonder what your Steve’s expression will look like when that bad thing happens sometime in the near future. The room suddenly feels very cold, and the thing you’re asking may be inflammatory, but it won’t warm anything up.

“I’m going to ask you again. Am I dead in your universe?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t want to tell you, not if I could avoid it,” he says. “Part of why I’m here is to reverse what happened, if we can.”

“What?” you gasp, shaken. He’s hopped universes to--

“Did you seriously just try to make me feel better by saying more people died?”

“Are you upset at the thought that I’d do it just for you?” Gold Steve whispers your name, your real one, the one almost no one uses, and the tone of his voice leaves nothing to the imagination.

“Don’t,” you plead, pulling your hand away, pressing it to your chest over the heart his counterpart lives in. “You asked me if I had feelings for him, and I do. But whatever difference between our universes that brings you here capable of looking at me with so much affection… That hasn’t happened to him, okay? It’s confusing, and in a really awful way it’s making me dissatisfied with the life I have.” You can’t stay seated anymore, so you get up, backing into the blank space beside his bed where a second nightstand would go. Gold Steve’s giving you his full attention, and the words spill forth, all of them, before you can stop yourself. “And now you’re telling me I’m going to die, that a lot of people are going to die, and you’re you, so obviously it’s something terrible enough to move time and space, and I just--”

Steve gets up abruptly, the fierceness of his action knocking the chair sideways. It collapses down, but he doesn’t stop pacing away from you, the stiffness of his posture illustrating how upset he is.

“I don’t know how to do this anymore,” he grits out, facing the wall across the room from you, head down.

“Do what?”

“Be less than honest with you.”

You don’t feel unsafe, but you do feel unsure. Still, this is a version of Steve, and you love him, even if you aren’t in love with this him. In a way, you feel like you haven’t earned being in love with Gold Steve. The two of you have slotted into some sort of emotional shorthand by accident, and it’s fucking you up.

“So, be honest.”

“You’re going to wish I hadn’t been.”

“Sometimes life is like that, Steve,” you say. It’s the first time you’ve called him that, and you watch the name strike him from behind like a literal cupid’s arrow-- because when Gold Steve turns around, it’s obvious how much it means to him.

“You’re right,” he sighs. “Something terrible happened. We weren’t even sure if we could fix it, but the pieces fell into place…” He looks down at the floor, and the regret painted across his features is somehow beautiful in the half-light. “The cost was too high.”

The two of you abide in the shadow of those words for a moment before he continues.

“We came up with a way to fix it. Tony had already mostly designed the device; he was confident that every Tony Stark could create it, given time. The real question was whether to risk sending me to a universe without him. That’s where you come in.”

“Tony’s the one who got me this job,” you realize aloud. “Isn’t that risky? How could you know every version of me worked with Tony?

“We didn’t have a lot of time to worry about that. There’s more, ‘Dine, but I need you to keep this to yourself. It’s important.”

“I won’t tell anyone if you ask me not to, but… what are you afraid of?”

“That someone would stop me from going back.”

Your heart clenches in your chest. Gold Steve’s expression is best described as dire. “What happened?” you whisper, genuinely frightened. By all reports, Steve had been ready to die in Sokovia, and that had been the latest in a long line of similarly life-threatening events he’d faced with stoic bravery.

He steps toward the middle of the room, the angular shadows from the lamp tracing across his chest. “The… event that took the lives of so many people, it was made possible by a set of powerful artifacts. They’ve been hidden across the universe, and one of them is held on a planet that asks a horrible sacrifice.” Gold Steve falls silent, and you can’t tell whether he’s searching for words or fortitude.

Did he say ‘planet??’ you think to yourself. Aloud, you say, “The one whose cost was too high?”

His smile is lopsided. “Yeah.” He avoids your gaze, looking around the room before seeming to make a decision. “Out of necessity, I lied about some things. My coming here wasn’t a mistake, and we do have this complex, with some variations in the architecture.”

“What don’t you want to tell me, Steve?”

Gold Steve had been avoiding your eyes until you said his name, and the look he gives you makes your breath catch.

“I didn’t tell you that story about loss because I wanted anything from you. I need you to believe that,” he says hoarsely. It’s deflection, but it’s also maybe a confirmation of the thing you hadn’t allowed yourself to conclude.

Imagining yourself as someone he’s loved and lost is too much for you right now. All you can do is nod.

“We gathered up a team, went to get the... artifacts I told you about, and when we all came back, we didn’t all come back. To get one of the stones, there’s a--” He breaks off. “Anyway, we weren’t going to let that stand. We don’t leave anyone behind-- in fact, those were the exact words used. When Tony made a joke about that in Romania…”

“Steve, it’s three in the morning,” you whisper, unable to follow. “I want to understand--”

“No, you’re right,” he says, tone turning confident. The team leader in him is taking over. “Head to bed, we can talk another time.”

It’s only once the door opens and you both move through to the hallway that your mind finally realizes something. It’s an effort to keep your voice quiet.

“Oh my God, Steve, if you get this right, if you reverse what happened, do you get her back?” It’s close to vocalizing a shared secret, the secret: that you are the One Who Got Away.

He closes his eyes and nods. “If we reverse what happened, she comes back, yes.”

“Oh, I hope it works!” you breathe, ducking under his arm to give him an impulsive half hug. Gold Steve tenses up for a second before that arm slings around your waist and squeezes, and he sets his chin against your hair briefly.

“Thank you,” he says, pulling in a breath as though to say something else. You wait, but his silence tells you he changed his mind.

“What is it? You owe me,” you tell him, and his puff of surprised laughter scabs over some of the wounds your conversation inflicted.

“I’m going to say this, even though I shouldn’t meddle,” Gold Steve says, “--but Brigandine, if any part of him is part of me? Then he wants you.”

He steps back and shuts the door, and you’re left in the hallway, shaken to your very core. Deep in your heart, in the places you’d built high, careful walls to prevent heartache, there are vines growing.

You fall back against the wall, heart racing. You’d hoped his story had been about you, but hadn’t dared let yourself think it. After all, you hadn’t met Steve until a year after he’d found out his childhood best friend was the Winter Soldier, and that doesn’t match Gold Steve’s narrative. After a year of loving Steve Rogers, you’d learned the hard way that making assumptions only leads to disappointment. There’s no mistaking what he’d just said, though, and the language he’d used -!

If any part of him is part of me? Then he wants you.

Wants.

There’s no way in hell you can sleep.

You want to talk to Steve now.

You want to hide in your room until you figure out what the hell to say to him.

You want to ask him to teach you how to spar and then beat on him for a while until he admits maybe he thinks you’re cute.

You want to ask Natasha to teach you how to spar and ask her a million, million questions.

Most of all, you just miss Steve. You’d been hiding from the disparity between the two men’s reactions to you for long enough that your heart aches a little. That thought makes you imagine what it must be like for Gold Steve. Sure, he’s got a plan, but there are many steps left on it-- and the person he loves isn’t just a few rooms away. She’s dead, and by all accounts, has no idea how he feels.

You kind of want to knock on his door and tell him the inverse of what he’d said to you, because there’s no way in hell it’s not true. Any version of you is by her very nature completely gone over Steve Rogers. The next best thing you can do for Gold Steve is to make sure that your story doesn’t end the same way.

You hug your arms around yourself and do a dizzy little spin of happiness, anxiety, and hope.

When you come to a stop, an impulsive, sleepy, recalcitrant part of you offers an idea, one you reach for with greedy hands. Three times a week, Steve gets up very early to run, and it’s one of those mornings. You’d only have to wait ninety minutes, which is probably the same amount of time it would take you to fall asleep in bed with your mind racing like this!

You find Steve’s door and settle into a position across from it on the floor, your phone in hand. It’s got enough battery to last a while, and best of all, this gives you time to prepare for what you’ll say.

You wake up in your own bed.

You sit up in utter surprise, scrambling the blanket out of the way to find that yes, you are wearing the clothes you were wearing the night before. You don’t see your shoes anywhere, but they’re not on your feet or in the bed.

“FRIDAY?” you call out, standing waif-like and confused in the middle of your room. “How in the heck am I in my room?”

“Captain Rogers carried you to your room from the hallway just after five in the morning--”

“WHAT?” you shout over her form of address. “Show me?”

You throw yourself into your desk chair and open the laptop, grateful that FRIDAY is integrated enough to take care of the mundane nonsense-- the surveillance camera feed opens right away.

“I can display the footage in whatever order you wish,” FRIDAY prompts.

“How about backwards from when I got in here?”

The display in the window flickers for a second, then starts playing footage backwards. When you see Steve ohmygodhisarmsarebare Rogers back up through the doorway carrying you bridal-style, you slam your hand down on the spacebar to pause the video. It’s hard to breathe as you stare at the frozen image. Steve is wearing a white tank top, facing away from the camera in the process of shouldering his way through the door, careful to keep you from striking the door frame by turning sideways.

You’re certain it’s the Steve from your universe, but ask the question in a stunned whisper anyway. FRIDAY’s response is definitive: this is ‘your’ Steve.

Carefully, you hit the spacebar to unpause.

The blessed hallway camera gives you a front-on view of Steve’s backwards walk, including a moment where he stops and looks down at you. It looks like he’s checking to see if you’re waking up-- but the look on his face is absolutely everything. Your goosebumps have goosebumps as you watch the moment lengthen; Steve tips his head to the side and regards you fondly before starting to move again.

It’s confirmation of what Gold Steve said, in glorious pixelated technicolor.

Excited to rush over and talk to him in person, you get up and start looking for the clothes you’ll change into after your shower. As soon as you open your underpants drawer, though, you’re racing back over and hitting spacebar to play the video again, desperate to see more.

The Steve in the video backs up, then turns, looking down at you for a long second before leaning over to settle you onto the floor. You’re stunned, enraptured, overwhelmed.

Nothing about the video you’re watching contains the kind of jerky movements you’d expect from watching it in reverse. Steve is gentle, careful, and smooth. He’s clearly doing his very best not to wake you up. You’re actually conflicted, because waking up to see him looking down at you so tenderly would have shot up to the top slot in a list of happiest moments of your life, no question.

“Oh my god, I am literally going to combust,” you whisper under your breath. The video is still going, showing you curled up onto your side with your phone propped up onto your hand. This reminds you to look for your phone. You finally find a charge cable sticking out from the drawer of your nightstand-- Steve had clearly looked for your your charge cable, despaired of finding a place on the messy surface to set down your phone without risking it falling, and stuck it in the drawer.

Is there a chance that Steve Rogers doesn’t know that nightstand drawers are for things guests should never see? You're lucky yours were tucked farther back and out of sight.

It’s mere chance that has you looking back over at your laptop to see that the video has reached the moment when you'd spun in complete glee in the hallway. You walk over and sit down, smiling indulgently and wrapping your arms around yourself in a mirror of video-you’s movements.

You watch as you back up into Gold Steve’s doorway, and then you realize how different those last moments are when you can see his face.

Gold Steve’s expression is etched with longing as he tells you those world-changing words. That light pressure against your hair was a kiss, and his hands shake a little, as he responds to your hug. There’s grief in every movement he makes.

You’re dumbstruck and worried, rewinding and watching those moments twice, your heart breaking for him more each time. This doesn’t feel like concern about the plan not working. This feels like mourning.

You were already going to go straight to talk to Steve as soon as you got dressed, but now? Now you throw on the clothes you picked out and head out the door. Something is wrong, and the two of you are going to find out what it is.

Next chapter...

#steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x f!reader #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers fic #captain america x f!reader #captain america x reader #captain america #steve rogers #mcu #mcu fanfiction #marvel #steve rogers imagine #steve rogers x you #captain america x you #romance #pining

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darsynia · 1 year

Text

Just Right | Ch 6

(Steve Rogers x F!Reader, post-Ultron Multichapter)

gif from @steverogersdaily

Summary:

Length: 3,274

FIC MASTERLIST | LAST CHAPTER | NEXT CHAPTER

Yeah, this is pretty quick after the last one, but I simply could not wait. !!!

Taglist: @ronearoundblindly@munstysmind@tiny-anne@themaradaniels@starryeyes2000@chickensarentcheap @isasalom @whiskeytangofoxtrot555

Excerpt:

“Everything ok?” It’s Hannah from Aeronautics. They’re scarfing their food at a pace that they’ll probably regret later, and you wonder what’s up.

“Yeah, Rogers was testing out some of the new fabric I got, and it occurred to me I didn’t talk to him about it. Was hoping to catch him at lunch.”

“Oh, he and the other Cap are doing a whole ‘Rumble in the Bumble’ thing,” they answer through a mouthful of sandwich. “No one told you?”

“What?” you ask, standing up to gather your lunch things right away. You’re already rushing to the kitchen when you hear Hannah call out behind you.

“It’s on screen four of the surveillance cams. Been going for at least a half hour by now. You must not be on the Eye Candy email list!”

You head straight there. On the way, you wonder what the heck could have happened in the two Steves’ conversation that they decided to settle it like this.

Chapter Six

It’s eight-thirty in the morning and you’ve had four, maybe five hours of sleep, but you are on a mission: find Steve Rogers so the two of you can save Steve Rogers. Even though you don’t exactly know what you’re saving him from.

You’ve checked the dining areas and every single sparring room before it occurs to you that maybe you are going about this the wrong way.

“FRIDAY, how long were you going to let me look for Steve before you mentioned that you know where he is?”

“The Boss has me on a protocol. I am not to interfere with certain interpersonal events.”

You stand in the hallway processing this for a minute, and then understanding hits you with the strength of Mjolnir striking Cap’s shield.

With your heart in your throat leaking enough adrenaline to overdose on, you walk toward the end of the hallway, the door to your domain here in the compound. When you get there, you lean in, listening; it’s a restricted area with a large number of authorized users, all the better to encourage people to test the things you and the others on your creative team come up with. Sure enough, you can hear sounds of exertion, and when you open the door, you see Steve.

He’d gone to the one place he knew he could find you, and waited for you there.

Because he’s Steve, he’s working; you’d stretched a few replacement fabrics in a frame, and he’s got it mounted at chest level. As you watch from the doorway, he kicks out into each of the three squares with expert precision before leaning down to pull something off of his boot. He settles the object into a pouch hooked to his belt and walks around to examine the other side of the fabric, which positions him to see you standing there.

Something in your expression prompts him to say, “FRIDAY told on me?”

He has to be talking about the surveillance from last night, but you can’t help but wonder if he knows how perceptive Tony’s AI is about the conversation you’re about to have.

“Something like that,” you say, stepping inside enough to shut the door. Behind you, you hear a second click, and something tells you this is FRIDAY’s ‘interpersonal events’ protocol. “No pressure or anything!” you grumble, looking at the ceiling.

Without the context, Steve looks concerned. “I figured you had something you wanted to say, but if it’s not a good time--”

“It’s well past time,” you say.

Steve processes this with the kind of keen interest that sends heat to the pit of your stomach and lower. He walks around the fabric frame into the middle of the room, consciously or unconsciously positioning himself like a soldier waiting for a lecture from his superior.

“Go on.”

“Do you want the short version or the long version?”

It’s a bluff. You have nothing prepared.

“Start with the short version, and we’ll go from there?” Steve suggests with a gentle turn-up on one side of his mouth.

You’re suddenly struck with how absolutely and completely you have botched this. Steve isn’t looking at you any differently than he ever has, but you can see it, everything he’s hidden, everything that Gold Steve promised you is under the surface. You can see it in the anticipation behind his eyes as he waits for you to continue, in the patience he’s offering you during that wait. You wonder how many times you’ve overlooked his quiet affection, so certain nothing was there, judging him by the metric of every other man in the room, even though he’s worth a thousand of them.

It’s entirely possible Steve has been looking at you like this for months, and you never realized. Hell, you’ve been looking at him like that for months, you know you have.

The two of you really are a pair.

“Okay, so, I miscalculated the amount of courage needed to say the short version,” you groan.

“We have time, ‘Dine. You can work up to it if you--”

“About that,” you interrupt, remembering Gold Steve’s distinct agony in the surveillance video. “We don’t, but there’s that saying-- the best time to do this was a year ago, and the second best time is now? Well, here goes.”

You walk further into the room, into the stretched-out panel of morning sunlight beaming down from the window behind Steve. There’s something symbolic about that, stepping into the light, letting yourself be seen after so long.

“I think a lot of girls dream of the perfect romance movie moment, the one where the guy has this big long awkward or poetic speech about how they feel, how things have slowly built for a long time. They name-drop the little moments the two characters have shared that the viewer got to watch happening, and it feels like a big arc from beginning to end. This isn’t that,” you say with a nervous little laugh. “I’m starting at the end, and I’ve got the roles all wrong, but Steve, I’m in love with you. I have been for a long time.”

You let out a breath, one you’d been holding for the whole speech. Across the room from you, Steve sucks in a breath, and it’s like you’ve given it to him, like the two of you are in sync already. It’s absurd and poetic, but it gives you the courage to keep going.

“You’re you and I’m me and honestly, I could tell you I stayed quiet for all sorts of reasons, and yeah, some of it was fear, but the truth is? I was afraid you’d decide it wasn’t morally right to spend time around someone who had unrequited feelings for you, and then I’d lose the little of you I got to have.” The images of those precious moments with him swim in front of your eyes along with the tears that are welling up there. Through them, you can see that Steve’s entire attention is locked onto you, like he’s hungry for every new word. It’s emboldening. “Holding back wasn’t worth it-- and it took meeting a version of you that made the same kind of choices and regretted them for me to see how unfair that was. How much I was accidentally giving up. So--” you stop twisting your hands in front of you and spread them out, an offer, a plea. “I love you, and I’m sorry I stole some of the time we might have had together by not being brave.”

Steve is such a picture of stunned happiness that you could very easily see him as a renaissance statue in slightly altered dress, frozen in the moment before everything important begins. He blinks and starts toward you, still silent. The speech had burned out of you, and you’re actually grateful that you’re being given a little time to teach your senses how to work again.

His hand comes up as he gets closer, and you don’t understand what he’s doing until he reaches you and sets it, warm and gentle, against your cheek, his thumb smoothing away the one tear that escaped your self control. That seems to break his spell, because Steve relaxes, so much so that he lets out a little tiny noise, half-laugh, half cry.

“I’ve dreamed this. More than once,” he says, voice right on the edge of breaking. “I always wake up when I touch you.”

That’s it. You burst into tears, and he crushes you to his chest. You can hear his heart racing under your cheek, and it’s real, it’s real. Steve’s holding you and it’s ripping away all of your deep-rooted fears, tearing them out right through your chest. That’s got to be why it hurts so fucking much.

“It’s been such a strange few weeks,” he says, lips against your hair. “You seemed so comfortable with him, and I wanted to understand, but I couldn’t stay around long enough to watch. Then I saw you outside. You looked up and saw me and the expression on your face was-- but you thought I was him.”

So many words rush up from your heart at once that they clog your throat, so all you can do is hold him as he continues.

“The two of you came in smiling and he pulled out a chair for you-- I broke the arm of the chair gripping it. I didn’t even realize it until I got up.”

“No, no, you have it all backwards, and I’m an idiot, I wasn’t seeing you the right way at all!” you protest, turning your head to kiss his chest, his neck, his chin, and suddenly Steve’s hands slide up your back and into your hair, and he’s kissing you. You can tell he’d wanted to restrain himself, that he’s trying to be a gentleman, but as soon as your lips meet, that’s it, you’re both gone.

You’ve reached the flashpoint of desire with the barest touch; it’s like every single loving thought you’d ever had about Steve is burning through your bloodstream. He’s warm and solid against you, and it’s got to be a testament to how he feels about you that his hands are rough, because you know how careful he can be. The idea of sending Steve Rogers into a frenzy is intoxicating, and you lift yourself up on your toes, needy for the feel of his hair between your fingers.

He’s been kissing and teasing your lips like he’s got a list of kisses and he can’t bear to leave any out-- but when you drag your fingernails against the nape of his neck, Steve groans and traces your upper lip with his tongue. The chemical reaction that sparks up prompts him to send his hand down to your hip to drag you against him, angle his head, and actually taste you-- but this is still Steve Rogers, and this is still, unbelievably, your first kiss.

After a few seconds of deep, devastating porn kissing, Steve pulls away to rest his forehead against yours. “Wow, that-- Wow.”

Everything is still so new, but hearing the gravel in his voice, knowing you’re the one that put it there-- it’s overwhelming.

“Well put,” you whisper, and immediately bury your face in his chest, delighted and entirely embarrassed.

He rubs a hand along your back. “Something tells me that’s not what had you waiting outside my room at five in the morning.”

“If it was, I would never have fallen asleep!”

That has Steve stepping back, his face obviously red. He walks over to the fabric frame to put it away where he’d originally found it, but your perceptive gaze tells you he’s adjusting himself in his pants. The ego-boost that gives you might well be enough to send you to the moon.

You mentally slap yourself back into coherency, because yes, what just happened is the happiest moment of your life so far, but it wasn’t the only thing you wanted to talk to him about.

“You were the third person I went to talk to after hours last night, actually. The first one was Tony.”

“Ahh, he finally got you to switch names. Good. He’s got that fifty bucks earmarked for a really good bottle of booze, and he’s been working hard,” Steve observes. He comes over and stands with a hand in his pocket. “I heard Tony was burning the midnight oil, did he have any news?”

“That’s a bit of an understatement.” You tell Steve about the concept of a molecular fingerprint, and how Tony thinks his counterpart had been sent to yours. “And, okay, don’t freak out,” you say, biting your lip.

Steve’s brows furrow, but he nods, unconsciously shifting his stance to one you’d describe as ‘battle ready.’

“Tony thinks his universe is years ahead of ours, and that something really awful happened. AU Steve confirmed as much when I confronted him about it. Part of why he came, and yes it was on purpose, was to reverse that awful thing.”

“How awful?”

You look down at the floor. “A lot of people died, including his version of me. Hearing him talk about it, it’s obvious he has feelings for her--”

Steve's eyes widen, but the first thing he says is to emphasize, “For 'her.'”

“Just remember that as soon as I left that conversation, the first thing I did was sleep outside your door, so I could be the first person you saw this morning?”

Steve’s tone is begrudging, but serious. “All right, what exactly did he say? About deaths?”

As you expected, Steve doesn’t think telling him counts against Gold Steve’s prohibition on ‘telling anyone,’ and when you’re done explaining everything you know, he’s just as worried as you are.

The clock chimes for 9 AM, which is the start of your working hours. You can tell that Steve has a lot on his mind, so you feign concern about a file on your desk and shoo him out as though you’re going to be able to get anything done.

It’s lunchtime when you come up for air. The compound doesn’t order supplies very often, but when you do, it’s with a meticulousness that borders on insanity. You’d spent every minute since Steve left documenting the things you need and getting FRIDAY’s help to fill out the requisition forms. You’re grateful, because anything requiring creativity would have been a complete no go, today.

You get to the dining area to find that someone (Tony) has ordered pizza, and he must be in a good mood, because only 25% of the pizzas have niche, borderline inedible toppings.

You’d been hoping to see Steve at lunch, but as you pull out your phone to see if he’s sent you anything, you realize that the two of you have set absolutely zero parameters for this shift of yours. Can you consider someone your boyfriend if you say you love them and they talk about it being a dream come true? Does he even have your phone number?

“I am truly stellar at this,” you mutter under your breath after scrolling through your entire contact list looking for his number. That’s when you remember you’d deleted his number eight months ago during a bachelorette party that involved alcohol. You hadn’t sent anything, but just the thought had sobered you up completely.

You can’t help but wonder what he would have done if you had called.

“Everything ok?” It’s Hannah from Aeronautics. They’re scarfing their food at a pace that they’ll probably regret later, and you wonder what’s up.

“Yeah, Rogers was testing out some of the new fabric I got, and it occurred to me I didn’t talk to him about it. Was hoping to catch him at lunch.”

“Oh, he and the other Cap are doing a whole ‘Rumble in the Bumble’ thing,” they answer through a mouthful of sandwich. “No one told you?”

“What?” you ask, standing up to gather your lunch things right away. You’re already rushing to the kitchen when you hear Hannah call out behind you.

“It’s on screen four of the surveillance cams. Been going for at least a half hour by now. You must not be on the Eye Candy email list!”

You head straight there. On the way, you wonder what the heck could have happened in the two Steves’ conversation that they decided to settle it like this.

‘Bumble’ is the name of the largest sparring room. Tony had designed it to be large enough and structurally sound enough to have all of the Avengers fight in there, with moderate use of their powers. It’s two stories high and hexagonal, and thanks to the gold and black color scheme, earned the name the Bumblebee, and then later, just Bumble.

As soon as you get in the parent building, you call out. “FRIDAY?”

“I know what you’re going to ask, but the feed is locked. Seems the Boss found it entertaining.”

“Goddamnit, Tony!” you mutter under your breath. If he’d used an override on the room’s video broadcast, that probably means you won’t be able to get in the door. You doubt the two men are fighting over you or anything, but if it’s been going on for a while, the specter of that kiss on your forehead might show up in a comment or two. You’re almost there when a horrible thought strikes you. Hannah hadn’t given an indication, but--

“FRIDAY, please tell me the feed doesn’t have sound?”

“Sound is off, but being recorded.”

It’s a subtle warning that you're probably going to deal with a nosy Stark sometime in the near future.

“Is there a way you could keep me off the video? I need to break this up, but I do not want that on my CV.”

“I’ll take care of it,” FRIDAY promises.

There’s a pair of employees at the door tugging on it when you get there, interns, by the look of them, and you send them back to work with a warning that the video feed would probably become boring very soon, and they probably shouldn’t bother with it. It’s wishful thinking-- especially since the door opens right away when you try it.

As soon as you get inside, you can hear thudding sounds. It’s more an arena than a room, and you have to look around to see where they are. When you find them, your mouth goes dry.

One of the Steves is bare chested, his sweat pants low on his hips as he dodges and weaves. As you watch, he kicks out with his bare foot and catches the other Steve squarely in the chest, knocking him off of the platform they’re standing on and against the wall.

“Nice!” that Steve says, leaping back and punching out twice. The second fist connects with the bare-chested Steve’s chin, and he goes with the momentum, twisting his body to follow the blow and therefore soften it. It’s the Steve wearing a shirt and his uniform pants that catches sight of you, and he holds out a hand to warn the other, who had been warming up for another attack.

“Hey, ‘Dine!”

“What the actual flames on the side of my face are you two DOING?” you scream up at them.

Bare-chested Steve scratches the top of his head, sweat glistening on the bulging muscles of his arms. “There was something.”

“Definitely something,” the other Steve agrees.

You cannot tell them apart, and you’re conscious that there’s at least twenty, maybe thirty people who are very disappointed in your interruption right now, even if they can’t see you.

“I didn’t get enough sleep for this,” you realize aloud. Every stressful choice and agonizing possibility is hitting you all at once. “Can you just-- why are you fighting?”

The Steve wearing a shirt starts toward you, while the bare-chested one does a little parkour off of the ramp over to a corner, picking up his shirt to put it on. As the gray-shirted Steve approaches, he holds up both hands in a kind of surrender.

“Okay, I admit to asking a few leading questions at the start, there, but mostly we wanted to test out fighting styles, maybe learn something. Forgive me?”

It’s your Steve, and he’s looking at you like a priceless treasure. “Do you have any idea how much money a video of you fighting you would pull? It’s going to be a logistical nightmare to--”

Steve’s lips brush yours lightly before he pulls back from his unexpected interruption. “You were right,” he whispers. “It’s worse than we thought. We’re going to have to talk to Tony.”

Next chapter...

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