Romanogers - Oneshots

𝔩𝔬𝔫𝔢𝔩𝔶 𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔰 𝔠𝔥𝔯𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔪𝔞𝔰

This references a previous Christmas story...

Steve knows he's bringing the mood down.

Not that it's particularly high anyway. Even after all these months, the musk of loss hangs so heavily over the washed up remnants of his family that it's almost tangible. He can almost smell it in the air ; bitter and biting and brisk, smoky in the way it claws at his throat, forcing out coughs to lessen the lump that rises, eager, whenever he looks at Morgan, or clenched his fists so tight the ring cuts into his palm.

He brings it up to the porch light. A promise. That's all it was. She hadn't worn it on her ring finger, and that wasn't his intention. There had been no romantic gesture, no one-kneed query, no sacred words. Even when they had binded every unspoken plan for an uncertain future to that tiny metal band that had been made to fit her, and barely slots onto his pinkie. But he hasn't taken it off. Not that he ever will. He's not ready to cast those plans aside.

Music penetrates his thoughts, but as if he's at the end of a tunnel. Or underwater. It's garbled and pitched and was just starting to jangle his nerves when he stepped outside. In the warmth, Pepper and Rhodey are holding determinedly onto a brave face for Morgan, but even the now-six-year-old seems subdued. Clint is spending it with his family down at the farm. Sam and Bucky are throwing bits of mince pie at each other. Wanda is...absent. Steve is worried, he is. Her disappearance after Tony's funeral was abrupt, more so when she hasn't surfaced since. But these days, he focuses on getting through one day to the next. Surviving the night alone.

For all his wallowing, he'd agreed readily to Pepper's invitation. Sitting in that dusty museum of their past lives - ironically, the compound is more empty now than a year ago - didn't sound appealing even to him.

Steve strolls down to the lake, the crunch of frosted leaves satisfying underfoot. The surface is clean cut glass, as if just melted, but probably cold enough to kill. His own reflection doesn't even surprise him anymore, as staring back beside his own morose expression is a shorter woman, red-haired and rippling. It happens with mirrors, too. She's always there, smirking at the corner of his eye, washed out residue from the weeks after the loss, the weeks he spent stumbling through a haze of pain and blurred hallucinations where he saw her everywhere. A flash of her hair in a swirl of autumn leaves. That purple dress she wore to that gala that one time where the blues and pinks of the dawn meet to bleed out violet syrup across the sky.

Steve stares back at his reflection, and then at his vacant side. The everpresent ache returns, the need to draw her against him overpowering. Christmas has never been the cheerful time it is painted as for Steve. More often than not his memories conjure unbeatable cold, insurmountable grief. Except for that one, secret evening. The one where they'd gotten lost down London alleyways. The one where the Winter Wonderland had made children out of them both. The one where Natasha made Christmas merry and bright again.

Read 'City of Lights' if you haven't