Until I Found You

fourteen

~ STEVE ~

I feel like the biggest jerk on the planet.

In the past two weeks I'd read through Abby's file no less than thirty times. It had become a sort of habit, every night before I went to bed I would read through every page, desperately wishing that it would help me to understand, praying that there was something in that file that I had missed, something that would tell me who she really is.

I'd read every word over and over again, trying to make sense of the surface level details, and using those pieces to put together who Abigail Marie Dwyer truly was at her core. After all of that reading and re-reading, I had overlooked perhaps the most important piece of information she'd given me.

How did I not put it together? Her hesitation to get into the car in the first place, her asking me to slow down, her hand clutching onto the door handle for support... the signs were all there as plain as day. She was still terrified of cars. All of these years after losing her mom in the accident and it didn't even cross my mind as a possibility. It's clear to me now that she hadn't found a way past that particular issue. She had just found work arounds, moving to one of the only cities in the United States where it makes more sense to not have car than to have one. I'm beginning to doubt if she had even been in a car sense that day or if this was purely a reaction to me slamming the breaks at that intersection. I'd been so focused on getting on her back to the tower, I hadn't even considered that.

The second the news was leaked, her life was put in danger. Because of what I do, I have incredibly long line of people searching for ways to get to me. It's a problem Tony has faced with his soulmate Pepper for years, Clint as well, even Bruce and Nat have had their fair share of problems. When an opponent who wants to hurt you can't, they go after the ones you love. Obviously, love wasn't apart of the equation for us, but pretty much everyone would assume that it was. I had been driving around like a mad man, needing to make sure she was somewhere safe. I hadn't stopped to think about what my driving was doing to her. I hadn't even put it together when she had jumped out of the car.

Pretty much all of our previous interactions had ended with us arguing or her wanting me gone. When I saw how scared she was once we got closer to the tower, I figured her fight or flight response had been triggered after seeing we were there. She had been detained here, interrogated here. The tower certainly wasn't a place where she'd feel comfortable. I had just assumed that she had realized where I was taking her, had figured that she was doing anything she could to not return to that place.

It wasn't until I saw her leaning over the trash can that I put it together. Her fight or flight instinct had been triggered but not by being back at the tower like I thought. Apparently I'm not only the biggest jerk on the planet, but the biggest idiot as well.

I've never seen a reaction like that before, one that severe, that all-consuming. It's like her entire body had just shut down, as if she had been so overloaded by sensory input that she had no other choice but to just surrender to it, to give in.

I never want to see her go through that again.

Despite the fact that whatever I had done after seemed to help calm her down, I still feel terrible for being apart of what made it happen to her in the first place.

We're riding up to the penthouse in the elevator now. She's standing on her own and no longer trembling which is huge relief, but she definetly doesn't look happy either, not that I can blame her for that. Thanks to me, she just relived what surely was the worst event in her life. To be honest, I'm still surprised she's not running for the hills, that she's still standing next to me at all, really. She's clearly much stronger than I had given her credit for initially.