Just Steve

T H I R T Y - S E V E N

The tower was seemingly empty today. Peter had come all the way here to meet with Tony but he and anyone else for that matter was nowhere to be found. He had waited in the lab for ten minutes before figuring he might as well go take a nap in his room in the meantime. The last few weeks had been exhausting and he still couldn't remember the last time he had a good nights sleep. Half way to his room he stopped short when he heard a noise, startled at the realization that he wasn't alone like he thought was. A muffled laugh came from inside one of the rooms. That was when he realized it wasn't just a room, it was her room. 

He stared at the door, his hand reaching out for the door knob instinctively. It shook slightly, hovering above the handle wanting nothing more than to open it and see his best friend but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He had barely survived seeing the look on her face when they spoke last without chasing after her and he didn't think he could survive it again. The disappointment, the betrayal, the damaged eyes and the crippled heart... Knowing he had been the one to put it on her face while remembering why he had gone through with it in the first place was enough to keep him frozen in place, not being able to open the door but not being able to walk away. 

"That's not her."

Peter turned quickly at the sound of the voice. Nat was standing a few feet away, her arms crossed tightly as she appraised him. 

"What?" He asked, arm snapping back from the handle. She raised an eyebrow, still unsmiling. Hm. Busted.

"That's probably one of Tony's cleaning ladies, (Y/n) moved out almost a month ago, I thought you knew."

"Oh." Peter shifted his weight back and forth awkwardly on his feet. So, she had moved out. He had assumed (Y/n) had just made it a point of being out of the tower whenever she knew he was coming over, not that she wasn't living there all together. He had known what he had said would hurt her feelings but he was beginning to think he had underestimated the depth of the damage he had done. 

"How is um- is she..." He began, bumbling around the question he wasn't sure he wanted the answer to. 

Nat sighed, pulling out her phone from her back pocket and beginning to type. Peter's phone buzzed as she put hers away, and when he looked at the screen he saw a message from Nat.

"What did you send me?" He asked as he clicked the message open. 

"Their address. You want to know how she is, go see for yourself." She replied simply. 

"Their?" Peter's head snapped up. 

"Yea, (Y/n) and Steve."

Peter's stomach lurched at this new revelation. It should have annoyed him that nobody had bothered to tell him that his best friend and one of his teammates had moved out of the tower and shacked up together. It should have angered him that nobody thought this was relevant information to him. Instead the reality of his current relationship with (Y/n) was settling heavily on his chest. He had been pretending to be fine for so long now he had started to forget who he was, ignoring problems of the past in hopes of a brighter future. He should have known it would catch up with him in the end. It always does. 

There was a time where (Y/n) would have texted him even the smallest things without question. Pictures of a weirdly shaped cloud, debates over what snacks to buy at the grocery store... Now she was changing her address and moving in with her boyfriend and she hadn't told him. She hadn't told him.

He shouldn't have been so surprised by this. This was what (Y/n) did when she was upset, she left. She was always leaving, always had one foot out the door. At least that's what it had felt like when she ran off for three weeks without bothering to answer a single one of his hundreds of texts and calls. All this time he had blamed her inability to trust for the end of their friendship but he was beginning to question if that was really what had gone wrong here. Had she really run away from this or had he pushed her out the door?