These are the Hands of Fate - Steve Rogers x OC

Eighteen: Every Scrap of You Would Be Taken from Me

October 22, 2023

Five days.

It had been five days but somehow, for Maggie, it felt as though the costly victory had only taken place hours ago. She hadn't even made it off of the battlefield before the fuzzy edges of her vision had finally faded into a sea of blackness and she'd collapsed on the raw earth beneath her feet. She was exhausted; the fight had been won and, for once, she'd given herself permission to give up. It was over.

The dark, quiet solitude wasn't as welcoming as it had been before. There was no one to see that time, nowhere to run to. For a brief moment, she'd existed only in her mind, floating above the clouds as her brain slowly healed and the skin and tissue of her body knit themselves back together. Her injuries, overall, were relatively mild compared to some suffered by others, especially compared to the others who had paid the ultimate price in the end.

As she woke in her bed, in their miraculously unharmed home, the date on her almost-dead phone told her that two days had passed. The room was dark, the only sounds were the low mumble of the television in the living room and the crickets outside the window that was cracked open, ruffling the curtains with the night's soft breeze. She could feel a little device squeezing her finger and tracking her vitals. It was sometime before dawn but instead of finding Steve lying next to her, she was reminded of one of their first meetings when her eyes found him in a chair beside the bed. In the dim light, she could barely see his head resting on his folded arms on the bed.

When she'd fallen to the ground, just a step ahead of Steve as they tried to gather with the rest of the survivors, his blood had run cold. Picking her up carefully, her body had gone completely limp. It was only then that he'd finally gotten a good look at the deep cut on her side that she'd tried to keep hidden from him. Dust and dirt and whatever else had been caked in the dark red, barely dried blood around it and stuck to her skin; the wound that showed deep into her tissue was still wide open to the air. Not typically one to be squeamish, he'd felt sick as he realized how pale she'd gone and that the wet warmth that covered her suit, and now his hands, was her blood.

Calling for Bruce, he'd taken off in a sprint as he carried her to where emergency services had begun to arrive just beyond the wreckage. In the makeshift field hospital that had been set up as they tried to tend to their wounded, thirty-eight stitches had sewn the jagged edges of the skin on her ribs closed; a scar would soon begin to form where they had been. The laceration on her temple, that had resulted in her concussion, had been glued shut and seemed to already be mostly healed as she brushed a finger over it tenderly.

A hiss slipped from her as she'd tried to sit up, the pain shooting deep into her side and pulling a quiet cry from her chapped lips. Steve's hand on her leg tightened as he was jolted awake at the first sign of consciousness since carrying her to safety. With a sigh, his sad eyes found her's and he laced their fingers together without a word.

What was there to say, anyway? Neither of them could have ever expected their mission to turn into a full-blown war, but it had.

"We won." Maggie had croaked, her voice hoarse from disuse, as her hand squeezed Steve's tightly. He gave her a small nod. Trying to remember everything that had happened, in detail, was an impossibility; it seemed as though, as soon as the adrenaline had stopped pumping through her veins, her body had finally caved from its injuries, both physical as well as emotional.

Though, she couldn't remember much, the last visual that Maggie could recall had been seared on to her retinas; when her eyes drifted shut, it was all she could see on the back of her eyelids. When they were open, it was like a framed picture of the moment had been hung on the wall of her skull, the sharp nail hammered into the bone firmly and refusing to be relocated anywhere else.