These are the Hands of Fate - Steve Rogers x OC

Six: You Told Me About Your Past, Thinking Your Future Was Me

April 27, 2020

She'd taken a long weekend.

Marguerite Hall had willingly rearranged her week to take a Monday off. It wasn't what she'd classify as 'for pleasure,' but it was a start. A work-life balance had been easier to strike up since she'd actually gotten a life outside of her work. Though she still tended to stay a little later than her team members and spend some time at home working on reports and presentations, it was a vast improvement from just two years earlier.

Two years.

Who knew that so much could change in just over seven hundred days? It was only the second anniversary of The Snap but almost everyone that remained on the planet felt as though they'd aged an entire decade since that day in spring. Though grateful to have been spared, no one could deny the complete exhaustion that had seeped into their bones and become a part of them since.

A year earlier, Maggie had attended a candlelight vigil that had been held at Ben's hospital. Almost everyone had still been grappling with the loss and were deeply entrenched in the depressed stage of grieving as they wept for the ones who were no longer there; it was hardly even fair to say they'd died. They'd merely ceased to exist; there'd been no bodies to mourn or bury. It was still difficult to try and rationalize the event and if she tried too hard, Maggie knew she'd spiral back into the dark place that she'd been in before hitting rock bottom on the kitchen floor.

Since then, most people had graduated from the denial and depression to the stages of bargaining and anger. There were people who still believed that they could get them back and those who blamed the government and any enhanced individual that played a part in the fight against Thanos. Emotions were high, feelings intensified as the day was upon them once more.

Aside from leaving the compound, when necessary, Natasha and Steve still mostly tended to keep to themselves. Though Maggie would never know what it was like to feel that crippling blame that seemed to follow them, she understood why they'd sequestered themselves away from the world. Even after all this time, there were still so many people that believed it had been their fault.

Sighing softly as the morning light finally bled through her eyelids, Maggie's eyes remained closed as she reached over to the nightstand, her hand clumsily grasping for her glasses to transform the blurred room into something more decipherable. Blinking slowly as she adjusted to being awake in the newly familiar room, she spotted Steve on the couch.

From the corner of his eye, he watched as his girlfriend pushed herself up to a sitting position, still surrounded by the mass of blankets that she insisted upon whenever she stayed the night in his quarters. Setting aside the box of photos on his lap, he ran a hand over his manicured beard as his baritone broke through the serene silence, "Morning, sweetheart."

Stifling a chest-rattling yawn, Maggie waved her hand at him in silent greeting; she figured that he'd already be up and about, the significance of the day notwithstanding. Waking up before Steve was a near impossibility, especially for the night owl. His daily five-in-the-morning alarm rarely took a day off—it was typically only silenced if she'd managed to keep him up late into the night, in bed, before.

As her eyes drifted to the box that rested like a weight on his lap, her head tilted just slightly at the unfamiliar item, her bird's nest of a bun falling lopsided as she asked, "What's that?"

"Uh," He swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing just slightly with the motion as he paused with a small frown, "Just some old pictures."

Before living with him, Maggie never would have known how sentimental Steve could be. He had several boxes of old photographs and a handful of scrapbooks that were tucked in the back of his closet in addition to the hundreds of letters he'd been sent over the years from his fans. Though a few dozen had been from admirers seeking a love connection, the vast majority were written by children, addressed to their hero, and Steve had somehow managed to respond to every single one.