Don't You Worry Child

Fight For Your Right

Chapter Summary: The engagement party gets off to a bad start when Steve returns from a last minute mission battered and bruised. 

Soundtrack: Fight For Your Right (To Party) by Beastie Boys

The engagement announcement was fairly simplistic, quiet even, totally un-Stark-like. A simple announcement in the New York Times' Forthcoming Marriages section that read:

Mr S.G. Rogers and Miss S.M.J. Stark

The engagement is announced between Steven, son of Joseph and Sarah Rogers, and Samantha, daughter of Anthony and Pepper Stark.

It was simple, nice, short, a mere 30 words. The biggest decision they'd had to make was whether they put Audrey or Pepper down as Samantha's mother. They preferred it that way, no muss, no fuss. Their engagement party, however, was another story. Leaving it to her father was... a bad idea. It wasn't that it wasn't going to be a nice engagement party it was just going to be... big and crowded, very crowded. It seemed as though he'd invited every single person he knew and some he didn't to this party. Samantha had been forced to return the black slinky dress she'd bought from Barney's for the occasion and switched it for a cobalt blue gown with long sleeves and a cinched in waist. It showed off her figure without showing off her new scar – she still wasn't comfortable with its existence yet.

The day of the engagement 'charade', as she'd come to know it, Samantha was at a point of forcing herself into remembering that it was only the party and an interview – one that she was bound and determined to keep short – left (because apparently, Samantha Stark and her beau were the talk of the tabloids) and then she could go back to her normal life with her not-so-normal job. She'd worked it with Fury that she would be able to go back temporarily, still leading the team but not allowed to able to get in on the action. It was a compromise, one she preferred to days on end of paperwork which was what she'd have been forced to do were she stuck on desk duty. Plus, it would be easier to work on her continuation of the Dvoracek case from inside S.H.I.E.L.D. than outside of it.

You're late, where are you?

She flicked off the text to Steve, he wasn't normally late, he was actually almost always early for everything but Fury had put him on a last minute op – one he swore would be easy, over and done within minutes of its starting – but he wasn't at the tower, and she worried.

On my way, op ran longer than Fury said it would.

He informed her and she breathed a sigh of relief, he was okay enough to text. That was a good sign, right? Wrong. Five minutes later, he hobbled into the living room, bleeding from his nose and some sort of injury on the side of his chest. He was bruised too. "What happened?" she asked, concerned, well, more than concerned really, she was a little freaked.

He shrugged, an act that looked painful "You should see the other guy," he tried as she rushed off to the kitchen in search of the first aid kit. He stayed quiet as she searched around for the damned first aid kit. Once she found it, she took out some cotton swabs and antiseptic and went about dabbing the cuts "You shouldn't do this, you'll ruin your dress," he commented and she rolled her eyes.

"I've got a back-up dress in my room," she said shrugging it off, her concern for her fiancé greater than the concern she had over her dress. She dabbed the antiseptic onto the cuts on his face and he hissed at the pain. Men, the biggest hypochondriacs on the earth – even the super-soldier ones. "A lot of these are just superficial so you won't need anything else to go on them," she explained once she'd cleaned each of the cuts "Now take off your shirt," she ordered and he looked at her as if she'd just told him she were an alien "You've got a cut on your side, I'd prefer to check it out now over you getting an infection," she explained and he – with great trouble – removed the blue shirt from his torso to reveal the blood that consistently seemed to ooze out of a wound near his ribs. She bit her lip, trying to figure out how best to move forward. She grabbed the cotton swabs and dabbed at the area surrounding the wound, cleaning it as she ascertained the size of it. She couldn't guarantee that anything she did would be any good as anything other than temporary. She ran back to the kitchen and grabbed a tea towel and shoved it in Steve's mouth "I suggest you bite down on that," she said as she took a needle out of a packet and threaded some nylon string through the eye of it. She started sewing the wound shut and heard him howling in pain, there wasn't much she could do regarding it, they didn't have any anaesthetic cream or anything to numb the wound so she just settled for telling him that she knew it hurt but that he'd be okay.