inspiration: mr. perfectly fine (taylor's version) by taylor swift
summary: 'cause you hear he's got his arm 'round a brand-new girl. you've been pickin' up your heart, he's been pickin' up her.
word count: 2,489
warning(s)?: angsty as hell, not really a happy ending?, steve's a bit of a jerk, discussion about steve's horrible ending in endgame
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Steve was a good man. That much you were sure of. At least, you were sure of that once upon a time, what felt like a million years ago. He was good man when you met him. He was kind, he was selfless. He was a little confused, admittedly. But who could blame him? He'd just come out of the ice to a world that moved on without him. Everyone he knew, everything he thought he knew, was different. The only thing that remained the same? He was still in a world that needed superheroes.
You were an agent of SHIELD when he met you. Your first meeting left much to be desired, him holding onto the most stoic of personalities. But you could hardly blame him. He risked it all to get rid of the Tesseract. And to come back, decades later, to find out the people in power were still using it? And that it had fallen into the wrong hands and now the world was at risk of becoming mindless slaves to the man who stole it? Yeah, you'd be pissed, too.
It wasn't until later that you really got to know Steve Rogers. You worked very closely with the Avengers following the Battle of New York. You trained alongside them, went on missions alongside them, even became their friends after a while. The only one who was still a tough nut to crack was Steve. He was always so cold, so detached whenever you spoke to him. And you could never understand why. To everyone else, he was a little more open. A little more kind. But to you? You might as well have been the one who stole the Tesseract for the way he was treating you.
After one mission, though, where you came back with three cracked ribs, a broken ankle, a concussion, and more of your body bruised than not, you finally cracked through the cold exterior that Steve always put on around you. You were out of commission for two months, and for those two months, Steve rarely left your side. You thought he was just not being assigned missions, but you later discovered he was turning them down to make sure that you were taken care of.
"You know, you don't have to stay with me," you said to him when you found out.
You were wrapped up in a blanket on one end of the couch, mindlessly flipping through channels, trying to find something that wasn't some cheesy Hallmark movie or trashy reality TV. Steve sat on the other end of the couch, never taking his eyes off of the TV, never once looking over at you.
"I know I don't, but I want to," he said. He still wouldn't look at you. "It's my fault you got hurt."
"You don't have to feel guilty, if that's what you're getting at. I know what I signed up for when I went on the mission. I knew the risks. There's nothing anyone could've done."
