[Steve Rogers x OC]
Book 2 of the Andrea Stark series.
Newly assigned as a SHIELD fire team, Andrea Stark and Steve Rogers work out the kinks of their professional relationship through numerous missions, both undercover and overt. Andrea's hesitati...
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The sweatshirt that I stole from Agent Barton smelled a little funky.
I sat in the break room, one foot propped up on the seat, my knee pinched between the table and my body. After morning PT, I'd finally found the time to relax and eat something before reporting to my station on the bridge. The New York Times lay spread out in front of me, open to a spread dedicated to the recent attack on New York. The reporter had delivered a scathing criticism of the Avengers as a response team, citing the cost of the extensive property damage and lives lost during the battle.
The words made me so frustrated that I couldn't even appreciate my sandwich. What the self-assured New York Times writer either didn't realize or didn't report was that a massive SHIELD clean-up operation, funded for and fronted by Stark Enterprises, had immediately begun hauling out debris and doing repair work on the damaged buildings. And no amount of sweeping could make up for the lives lost, but the body count would have been exponentially higher had the Avengers never arrived on the scene.
"That's, what? The third piece they've done on the Battle of New York in the past two weeks?"
I leaned back as Steve sat at the table across from me, his own freshly-assembled sandwich on a paper plate.
"It's only going to make you mad."
Ever since we started working together, the Captain and I have trained together every morning, alternating between weightlifting and fight training. That morning had been fight training.
I took a sip of my sparkling water. "Yeah, but it's this sort of PR nightmare that leads to a congressional hearing. The more flak the Avengers receive from the public, the closer the team gets to being branded as criminals." I pushed the newspaper over so he could get a look at it. The Avengers needed a lawyer and a PR representative, which would be hard to pull off for as long as they were under the authority of SHIELD. As far as legal technicalities were concerned, they were all criminals already.
Steve took a massive bite out of his sandwich and paused, eyes flashing back and forth across the page.
I took the moment of silence to work on my own lunch, feeling my tired body seem to sink heavily into my chair. Back when I'd started weightlifting regularly, I was sore all the time. My body always ached painfully, like it did during the Battle of New York. Now that my muscles were conditioned to the intensive labor, I didn't get as sore, but I was hungry all the time. I just couldn't seem to figure out the proper ratio of fueling my body with food to the extent that it needed for what I put it through. Somehow waking up every morning was even harder since my body thought it was dying of starvation.
