First Impressions

Can we talk?

Steve's POV

It’s been a little over a week since his fight with Freyja about bringing Loki to Earth and ever since then she’s shut him out. Going back to treating Steve like she had before they were friends. No, that wasn’t true. He couldn’t even say it was like before. Because last time he didn’t know what she looked like naked in his bed. What she tasted like. How she sounded when she came, crying out his name. Or the way Freyja’s beautiful body looked bathed in moonlight or the first rays of the morning sun. Now those wonderfully cursed images were burned deep in his memory and there was no getting them out. 

It’s why in all of their time apart all this last year Steve thought he was doing what was best for them both. Or so he told himself. With Freyja gaining control over her new powers, godhood and all of the duties required of her on Asgard he would only get in her way. As for himself. Well he needed to come to terms with how much he really was in love with her as well as the events that happened the week of his birthday. Steve had been so fucking innamored with Freya before their time together that it scared him when after it boardered on obsession. The way he felt for her was unlike anything he’d ever known for anyone else in his life. Not that he had a lot of experience in love. It was enough though that it terrified Steve with how desperately he needed her all of the time.

Sighing harshly with exhaustion of both the mind and spirit, Steve runs a hand over his haggard face. The stubble on his cheeks and chin told him that he was in desperate need of a shave but he had other, more important things to do first. Namely, he needed to talk to Freyja. To apologize to her for acting like such an ass. And not just because of their fight, but because of the way he’d acted towards her for the last year. His resentment at her not trying harder to talk to him might have come to the forefront when he’d nearly died back in May and she never showed up. 

Really thinking about it though. It might have been his fault that she didn’t come. Steve’s fingers rubbed his chest where the pendant once sat over his heart. At some point during his fight with Buck he’d lost the necklace Freyja gave him right after she’d gone to Asgard. So it stood to reason she didn’t know he was in danger. But she knew about it after the fact! And other than a brief visit when he’d been unconscious Freyja hadn’t said a word to him about it. Then again Steve had been overwhelmed by the fallout of the events that transpired with the exposure of HYDRA to the world. And Bucky..he was alive. Somewhere out there, his best friend was hiding from him not knowing who he really is or who Steve was to him… 

Again Steve’s mind went to the repetitive thought that if he hadn’t lost her pendant then Freyja would have come. And if she came when they were on the helicarrier then she could have helped him by going into Buck’s mind and maybe helping him remember their shared past. Then maybe, just maybe, Bucky would have joined them to stop their common enemy and he wouldn’t have nearly drowned…He had to stop doing this to himself. Stop playing the what if game because the past was done and over with. Besides, Steve had done that enough in regards to what his life might have been like if he hadn’t put that plane down into the ice. Any life he might have had was over the second he made the choice to get on that plane to put an end to Shmidt. 

It was time to live in the present. To move on and look towards the future. However, to do that, he needed to trust that Freyja knew what she was doing when it came to Loki, even if Steve hated the connection they had. The conversation Steve had with Natasha last week about the deal Freyja had made with her grandfather and Odin settled in his gut like a stone. The only thing from keeping her marriage to the trickster god from happening for another year was to convince them that she had a good enough reason to say no. Who agreed to a deal like that? It just didn’t make sense to him. Freyja grew up here on Earth, in a culture where arranged marriages went out of fashion around the time he’d been born. So why had she said yes to this?