BENEATH STEVE'S SKIN, snug inside his chest, encased in ribs and sternum and wrapped up in muscle, was his heart. And inside his heart, Steve carried, even still, the scars of rheumatic fever.
Because the scarring no longer made its presence known to him—because the constant labor of his heart was no great feat these days, and because he hadn't experienced cardiac arrest in many years—he thought about it infrequently. Almost never.
But he thought about the scarring now, as his heart hammered steadily, keeping up with him as he beat his unwrapped knuckles against a punching bag. He wasn't sure why the old heart let him get away with trying to exhaust himself all the time, or why it never had the decency to draw a limit for him. It never gave out, never let him collapse. It seemed reckless for it to let him carry on like this, practically encouraging him not to rest. He wondered if it was possible for the heart to beat out of his chest and fly itself into the sun.
He'd always felt a bitterness toward his heart. It had always been his weakest muscle. It would have been the thing that killed him.
Before, he'd resented it for being so relentlessly fallible. He thought about 1941. He thought about the time he'd tagged along to Bucky's boxing gym. There had been comments, he was sure, from the men around, but he couldn't remember what they'd said. He'd been angry—violently angry—with his own feeble, staggering heartbeat, and he'd swung until his body gave out and he collapsed onto the floor, gasping for air.
But now, he longed for that limitation. He wanted to collapse, to know that he'd done everything he possibly could, to have permission to rest if only because he couldn't physically go on.
A breaking point, he realized. He wanted a breaking point.
The Chitauri invasion, he thought, required less effort from him than he used to exert just unfolding his body out of bed, when he'd awake with a deep, painful stiffness in his skeleton, and half the time with surface level aches, too, from chronically getting his ass kicked. He'd prefer any fight over just the memory of those mornings, he thought, unable to clear his mind, with nothing but the thuds of his fists and heart to listen to. He couldn't stop weighing the way things used to be—that he'd much rather fight HYDRA and Redskull and whoever the hell else than ever relive the asthma attack he'd had at his mother's funeral, from some allergen in the chapel.
The chain of the punching bag, which was reinforced, made extra strong for him specifically, was far more likely to break than his body was. He swung a little harder, unrestrained himself like he was proving his own point, and watched the bag slam into the wall.
But it wasn't a breaking point—nothing ever was.
Five minutes later, he was freshly showered, relatively clean, relatively warm, and still restless, still dissatisfied. He'd changed into a tee shirt and running pants, which was all he had clean in his bag. He still had yet to return to his apartment since arriving back at the Tower. As he crossed the training room toward the exit, he decided he'd better stop by and at least put on real clothes—jeans or khakis or something, and a shirt with a collar and buttons or at least a jacket over the tee shirt—he'd feel more like a real person with a life and priorities.
And yet, his phone vibrated, and a rush of adrenaline had him digging it out urgently.
Ford
Here yet?
That was Tony. Steve hadn't thought twice about making his contact a last name—the name of a corporation, synonymous to Steve with mass production, consumerism, the start that he grew up with, which led into the end that he woke up to. It had never crossed Steve's mind to make Tony's code name a real scientist, a famous genius. He'd never even considered just code naming Tony after a classic rock musician, either. Ford was easiest to remember, the closest association—other than Howard—that Steve could make to Tony, a natural preface to America today as it was chronicled in his head.
As he stepped out again into the empty hallway, he called Tony, feeling too impatient to text. Tony answered, "It's a yes or no question, Victory Mail. It requires a one word text in response."
"I'm here," Steve said. "What do you need?"
"Why would you assume I need something from you?" Tony asked. "Seems a little arrogant. Is this about the new documentary series on you?"
"Is there a mission?" Steve pressed. "I'm ready now."
"I think the actor they got is too good looking for the role. Not punchable enough, either, but we'll have to see if he captures the righteousness on screen; I might feel differently then."
"Just tell me what you need," Steve said. "You wouldn't text me unless you needed something."
"You're right. I was gonna ask you to sign my tits."
Steve sighed, jerking open the door to the stairwell. "You wanna talk about the syndicate Nat and Sam were tracking, right? Are you in your lab? I'll come up."
"Yes, but the intern is here, too. And if we talk in front of her, she will almost certainly sell everything we say to a reporter. I think Dum-E might, too."
"Maisie's there?"
"Don't sound so happy about it. And don't get any ideas about signing her tits. I won't allow it!"
The comment shocked Steve to a halt in the middle of a flight of stairs. He didn't think he had old-fashioned sensibilities—no, it definitely wasn't that. He wasn't flustered. He'd reached out and grasped the handrail when he'd paused, but not because he needed it for support. He gripped as hard as it could take, focusing some of the tension out so he wouldn't crush his phone with the other hand.
"Are you there? Are you having a heart attack?" Tony said.
"Can she hear you right now?" Steve asked. "Did she just hear you say that?"
"The intern? She thinks it's funny."
"I doubt that she laughed."
"She communicates her feelings to me through our shared telepathic mind-link. You wouldn't understand."
Steve still hadn't moved. He shifted, facing the wall, moving off the handrail so he wouldn't break it. He pressed his palm flat into the concrete wall instead, half leaning into it.
"Tony, I've had a bad couple of days," Steve said. "If I get up there and you start talking like that, I'm gonna hit you."
"Can you say that again? I'm gonna record it and send it to that actor to rehearse. I want him to really nail the punchability."
"I need to take a walk before I can be around you," Steve said. "I'll be up there once I've cooled off. Don't text me. Don't call me."
He hung up his phone before Tony could say something snarky. And he turned around the other way, descending. He was nearly at the top of the building now. He figured just the walk to the ground floor and back up would be enough.
He stopped again a second later, though, when his phone vibrated once with a text. He took a deep breath, slowly. Then, when that didn't help, he decided to let it wait for a second. In his current electric, frustrated state, he didn't trust himself not to escalate if Tony said something worse.
Descending yet again, he dropped down each step with enough weight to feel the shock of it through his shoes, making his steps a little slower, harder to spring back off of. Could he be certain that had been Tony? He imagined it was Sam or Natasha or Wanda, someone telling him there was a crisis, that he needed to get somewhere because something was burning—he remembered that helpless feeling on the morning of Pearl Harbor, his witnessing through the radio, when the world was so big and he was so fucking small—
His phone vibrated a second time to remind him he'd missed a text, and he couldn't take it—he dragged his body to a halt again and dug the phone back out. When he saw the message, his heart jolted unexpectedly, completely on its own accord, before he'd really even processed it.
Rosie
Thank you, I'm sorry
This time, when he grabbed the handrail, it was for support. He read her message a couple of times. Why was she sorry? He tested it to understand:
You don't have to let him
talk to you the way he does.
I know, I'm sorry
That answered it for him. So he wrote,
Don't say sorry. He shouldn't
be treating you like that in
the first place.
No it's okay!! I don't care lol
I'll talk to him for you
if you want me to.
Please don't
Okay. Let me know
if you need me.
Thanks!!
Steve felt bad about the fantasy that followed the text exchange, about what it could look like, feel like, if she ever decided to need him—because there was something selfish in it for him, too. He remembered last week, on the stairwell, how he'd managed to ignore the texts and be late to the meeting for a little while, because he'd been focused on making sure she was okay. And he remembered how easy it had been to cheer her up, how easy it had been to help her to her feet—it really was a pretty spectacular feat of Tony's to manage to make her bored and miserable, he thought, because she always seemed so sweet to Steve. She was just scared, he thought, and needed gentleness.
Steve decided against the walk, finally, because the image of her in his mind felt urgent. He turned back up the stairs, although he passed the floor of the lab, too, and went to his apartment, hurrying to make himself presentable. He'd imagined her sitting on his lap, nestling into his chest. He thought both of their breathing would be slow, then, and that their heartbeats would be moderate and even. He imagined that would work just as well for him as a collapse.
★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★
MAISIE PLACED HER phone screen-down on the counter, just in case Steve texted her back, so Tony wouldn't glance over and see. Still, he asked, not looking up from the device he was tinkering with, but apparently noticing, "Did you just text Cap?"
"Hm?"
"You know you have selective hearing when I say 'Cap?'"
"I hear you; I'm just a bad listener."
"You were texting Cap, though, yes?" Tony asked.
She didn't want to answer. She didn't like when Tony drew attention to the fact that Steve was being nice to her out of some rivalry between them; that her place in the middle was coincidental and insignificant. She felt butterflies at his offer—Let me know if you need me—but now, at the recollection that he just couldn't stand Tony, and would like nothing more than to sleep with her to prove a point, all the butterflies had choked and died in a big disgusting pit in her stomach.
"I was checking the weather," Maisie said pointedly.
"Check that flood watch while you're at it," Tony said.
Maisie deflated even more. She'd been trying to reference his flood watch joke from earlier too. But she'd noticed sometimes when she made a joke—said anything remotely witty—Tony would assume it had been an accident, that she didn't realize what she'd said, and he'd explain it back to her like that.
She flipped her phone back over to actually check the weather, while she was thinking about it. She needed to know what time the sun would set for her walk home.
She saw Ghostface every afternoon on the walk home from work. On Monday, he hadn't followed her at all. At first, he didn't even seem to notice her as he leaned against a streetlamp, smoking a cigarette. But she felt certain he'd been looking at her behind the sunglasses. On Tuesday, he had followed her half a block, hovering next to her, almost in step, but far enough away that he could deny any intent. On Wednesday, she'd positioned herself in the middle of a group of much taller people when she approached the doorstep where he seemed to like to hang out, and he hadn't noticed her at all. She wondered if he ever thought about her when she wasn't right in front of him, the question of object permanence. She hoped not.
When she'd asked Sherry and Rosa for advice, they'd told her he was nothing to worry about so long as he didn't follow her anywhere without witnesses. But, they added, she could always take a different route home.
That was her plan then, as she anxiously anticipated the afternoon. She bounced the back of her shoes off of the stool as she considered it. She thought she might have been slowly bruising her heels through her shoes as the bounces became more like backward kicks.
She couldn't bear the thought of being lost in the city. It hung over her each time she stepped onto the sidewalk. Every corner she didn't know, every unfamiliar alley loomed there around her, some thick, dark cloud obscuring the rest of the city outside of her daily route. No, she couldn't bear the thought of an entirely new, strange route into the dark cloud. But she thought she could at least take a detour down the wrong street, walking an extra five minutes in a wide loop to avoid Ghostface's doorstep.
According to her weather app, the sun would be beginning to set at 5:43. That gave her time. A thirty-five minute walk. She got off at five, so she'd have to hurry. She desperately wanted that ten minutes of flexible time before sunset, as she worried that her detour might take extra time, that it might—
"Buttercup, were you faking that orgasm earlier?" Tony asked suddenly, as if the thought had just occurred to him. He didn't look up from the string of numbers he was scrolling through. "Felt a little theatrical."
Slowly, Maisie lifted her chin, clicking off her phone to look at him. "Kinda."
"Kinda's not an answer."
"I can't really come unless I'm alone," Maisie said. "It's no big deal."
"Hang on—you've faked all of them?" He glanced at her briefly, not in order to see her face, but in order to shoot her a look of shock.
"Kinda."
He groaned, as if disappointed in her, or perhaps just inconvenienced (Maisie couldn't tell which). He switched back to using the blowtorch. "That's counterproductive."
"I didn't want you to feel bad. It's just a 'me' thing."
"No one's ever made you come?" Tony asked. With a free hand, he typed something onto the screen next to him.
"No."
"Well, no one had ever invented an element before I did it," Tony said, as if he'd reached a conclusion.
"Cool," Maisie said. Elbow on the counter, she laid her cheek flat on her palm. Her eyes burned from lack of sleep. The longer it took for the day to slog toward the afternoon, the more she wished Tony hadn't kept her up so late the previous night.
"No one ever carried a nuke through a wormhole before I did it, either," he said.
"Uh huh," Maisie said.
"We are sitting inside the first skyscraper in Manhattan to run entirely on clean energy."
Maisie had forgotten that the conversation was about orgasms, because her thoughts had strayed, first to Isaac, then to Appalachia. She kicked the backs of her heels against the stool, hard, both at once in a single dull thud. "Did you ever see the bumper stickers about that?"
"Which ones?"
"The ones everybody had because of the coal mines shutting down," Maisie said. "After all the clean energy stuff you did."
She wanted to know about the bumper stickers specifically, if he'd seen them. They were everywhere in Appalachia, even now, years after the political discourse had died down. She'd never even really considered that the bumper stickers were words at all, so familiar in red and gold lettering that they were an image in her mind; she didn't have to read them to know what they said, and what they meant.
It was her last meaningful glance at Ohio, the day she left, just months ago. When she looked back at her dad's trailer, at his beat up, red Ford pickup, parked crookedly, half in the gravel and half in the grass, as far from the neighbor's place as he could maneuver it. With that last look, her eyes had swept over the bumper sticker again: I'M SO HUNGRY I COULD EAT A STARK.
"Oh," he said. "Not sure. Doesn't surprise me. I try not to please people who support coal mines."
"I don't think it's about supporting the coal mines, though, except for that sometimes coal mines support people?" Maisie said, tilting her voice up into a question to sound less confrontational.
"Sure, but clean energy creates jobs too, honey."
The way he said it, dismissive and certain, made Maisie's face burn. In that moment, she thought she really might have been dumb. How would she know any better about industry than Tony Stark did? She hadn't intended to sound like she thought she knew anything.
She'd been hungry, sure, for a while. But she hadn't starved to death. And her dad had found other work, eventually, on a pipeline through Ohio. Sure, leaving Kentucky years ago, in the passenger's seat of the Ford, twisting out of the holler for the last time, was the first and only time she'd ever seen her dad cry. And it was the first time she ever learned that places don't last and that you can't just hunker down and dig your heels into the dirt and stay—All that was true, but she hadn't starved to death. She was fine. She pressed her cheeks into her palms and stared down at the counter, hoping Tony wouldn't glance up at her again.
"Would you..." she mumbled the start of a sentence and trailed off. She wanted to ask him to hug her or hold her or something else dumb and delusional.
"What's that?" Tony asked. He hadn't even understood the two words she'd managed to get out.
"Nothing," Maisie said.
"Why are we talking about bumper stickers?" Tony said, not pausing for an answer. "I was saying I'm an innovator. I can give you an orgasm."
Maisie swallowed and spoke with her go-to lofty indifference, "It's not a big deal to me."
"What's been tried that doesn't work? You haven't let me go down on you," he said, rummaging through a drawer.
"I don't like it," she said. "It doesn't feel good."
"It might feel good if I do it."
"I just don't like it."
"So what's the problem?" he said. He tapped a screen, and a 3D, hologram blueprint levitated in front of him. He zoomed in with his fingers in midair. "I can build something. What are we talking, vibration? Suction? Pressure? Temperature? Help me help you."
"I don't really care," Maisie said. "I like making you feel good."
"I've noticed."
He dropped the subject, distracted by an idea about his project, typing rapidly. Maisie cracked the spine of her unread novel at a new, random spot. She thought about her dad. He had always liked Isaac. She imagined his reaction, if he could see her now, in New York City, in Stark Tower. All of the blood in her body rushed red and hot and thick with shame.
She just wanted to get out of this lab, away from Tony. She thought about the last text Steve had sent. What qualified as needing him?
★☆★☆★☆★☆★☆★
TWENTY MINUTES PASSED, and Steve's heart was hammering again. He'd changed, and he'd made sure his hair was lying flat, and as he'd hurried toward Tony's lab, Maisie had texted him again before he'd even reached her.
Are you far away? Or busy?
He paused outside the lab, typing.
No, why?
Can I talk to you?
Need me?
It's ok if not
They'd both second guessed and replied too quickly—he'd worried that "No, why?" wasn't enough of an invitation, and had added "Need me?" at nearly the same moment she'd asked as much. He thought her "It's ok if not" had been the same mistake, since it came in a split second after the previous one; she hadn't had time to read his before sending it. He wondered if that was a common problem. He barely ever texted. The pace of it was making his heart lurch into his throat, so he waited a second to make sure she wasn't typing.
Yes, come outside the
lab. I'm right here.
Actually never mind,
I'm sorry I asked
He wished Sam or Natasha was around to interpret that for him. He didn't think he was very good at intuiting feelings over text. Had he said something wrong? Or was she insecure? He didn't want to press her on it in case it was the former, but he didn't want to not press her on it in case it was the latter.
Instead of replying, which was only going to serve to further confuse him, he scanned his thumbprint and entered Tony's lab, where he found them both at a counter in the center of the room. Tony was working on something. Maisie was on her phone, looking bored and small and anxious, arms tucked near her sides, shoulders tense, her free hand wrapped around her stomach in a dusty pink sweater. Tony didn't look up at him. Maisie did—she smiled cautiously and with a soft, "Hi."
"Hi," Steve said, watching her bounce her shoes off the rung of the stool.
"God dammit," Tony greeted Steve. Then, to Maisie, "Take shelter."
She seemed not to hear Tony, on Steve's first glance, because she didn't acknowledge it. But Steve realized it must have been a reference to a joke that was embarrassing her—he didn't speculate about what it was—because she reached for her hair to twist around her finger, then let it fall and wrapped both arms around her stomach.
"I still haven't taken a walk," Steve said, ignoring Tony, still watching Maisie carefully. "Come with me?"
"I thought I was supposed to regale you with tales of crime syndicates," Tony said. "It's a little pressing."
Maisie glanced between them again. This time, unlike the last time he'd seen her, Steve was sure she didn't want to stay there with Tony. So he didn't drop it. "Just a walk," he told her. "It's nice out. There's a little sun right now."
"You're not busy?" Maisie asked.
"Crime! There's crime happening! It's all over the city!" Tony said dryly.
Then, Steve didn't have to reply to her question before she was nodding, as she jammed a book into her bag and slipped off the stool readily. He finally let himself notice how pretty she looked. He wanted to either collapse on the ground or reach out and touch her. Any breaking point would do.
Tony looked up with raised eyebrows, glanced between them, shrugged, and went back to his tinkering. "Bring her—"
"Don't, Tony. I can't right now," Steve said, only speaking to cut off whatever comment he was about to make—something along the lines of Bring her back by 9.
Tony snorted, but he chose not to escalate it either. Steve was a little grateful for that, holding the door open in peace, finally, as Maisie brushed by him closely—closely, almost touching him. As he caught the scent of her hair, and as his heart threatened to give up just at the near-contact, and as he glanced over her soft curves from behind, he could've sworn she'd done it on purpose.
A/N: :-)
ended up splitting this chap up bc it was getting way too long. weird place to end but hopefully I'll have the next one up soon since I've got a couple thousand words of it. Sorry I've been missing. Remains soon too. My semester is ending in a couple weeks anyway so I'll have much more time in the summer