The White Queen (S.Rogers)

Chapter 73

Steve was rotating the bottles of suppressors in his hand, watching the liquid inside rotate and catch the light as he tried to understand what Bruce was telling him.

Despite the time he had spent away from Brooklyn, his hormone levels weren't going down.

The bespectacled doctor was going on and on about causality and chemical reactions that Steve was barely able to understand, but the bottom line was clear. Without a vaccine, or something like that, Steve was always going to be affected by Brooklyn's pheromones.

In the time away from her, Bruce had run test after test on Steve's blood, as well as the sample of Brooklyn's that he still had. There were too much things alike, he kept explaining. And there was something he was missing. It felt like it was something so simple, that he was overlooking it.

All that Steve was hearing was that he was loosing Brooklyn over something that wasn't ever going to change. Something that, in reality, he didn't give a flying fuck over. Not when the major side effect of it was that Brooklyn was letting go of him.

His hand closed and tightened over the bottles, the glass creaking warningly. The pain in his chest was becoming a constant companion. Worse was the fact that he was terrified that it was never going to go away.

He missed her.

He missed her, so much.

When he woke up every morning, in his bed in the Tower, he would be reaching for her, across the sheets, his dreams filled with images of her. His ears were ringing, so similar to when he was too close to a blast, but it was her voice he was hearing.

He understood now, how Bucky had complained about his daughter haunting him. Bucky's daughter was haunting Steve now, as well. As surely as she was a ghost following him, he was being haunted by her.

And it wasn't even a haunting of the present sense. It was the haunting of the future Steve was so afraid that he was never going to have. The promises of what could be, as opposed to what was. The shimmering mirage of a man dying of thirst in the desert. It seemed like the closer he got to it, the further away it was.

If she would just come home, he might be able to fix this. He might be able to get them back on track.

If she came home, he would be able to sit her down, and lay it all out on the line. Explain that, despite what she had somehow thought up in her head, he had wanted her, needed her, loved her, long before her pheromones had started in on him. He loved his Babydoll, but goddammit, she could twist facts in her head to something that was so far off base, he had to give her credit for it.

Somehow, she had to have made up this fiction in her head, that the only reason he wanted to be near her, the only reason he had begun to sleep with her, was because of her pheromones. She was completely ignoring the time line, of course, but that was what she believed. And while he hated to disabuse her of anything she believed, because goddammit, he didn't want to be like anyone who had ever crushed her personal beliefs in the past, the truth was far simpler. He had seen a pretty girl. He had wanted to sleep with the pretty girl. Somewhere in between wanting to, and actually doing it, he had fallen in love with said pretty girl.

Everything else was immaterial. Everything else was simply a distraction from that.

He belonged to Brooklyn. She belonged to him. She was it for him. He was putting all his money on that horse in the race, and by god, he was going to see it to the finish line.

The minute details were just the things that needed to be worked out, as far as he was concerned. Where they were gonna live, once he put that ring on her finger. How many kids they were gonna raise, once she either worked out her issues, or worked with him to adopt. What she was gonna do with her life, once she got done with college. What they were gonna eat for dinner every Friday night. If they were gonna get their kids baptized. All of that was stuff that they had to work out, yes. But together. Together they would finalize the details.