Steve was well acquainted with loss well before Wanda put a sea of it in his head. He lived a full year of it as a crash course when he lost Natasha to Vourmir. They’d lost their friends five years before that. He lost best friends, lovers — and all the collateral in between.
But it was different to live there. To exist somewhere between the dark spaces of someone else's grief and your own, while you masked a smile on your face and kissed a stranger to bed every night. It was like drowning with an audience, except no one helped you. They fed their applause and waited until your lungs filled up. And that played on a loop until wanda had cut them all free.
Steve stared at their ceiling, disoriented. The dull light coming from the street outside reminded him he was in their apartment in brooklyn, where the window was opposite of where it’d been in his room in Westview. Even so, he still had to consciously force the tension back out of his muscles, but it didn’t fully leave them.
The spent feeling that wore his bones hollow after a fight was a different breed of monster from the one that left him feeling mentally drained now. Sitting upright, he closed his sandpapery eyes and inhaled a slow steady breath. He could feel the warm weight of nat in the bed next to him, but it was the smell of her shampoo in the sheets that convinced him.
Though he knew some part of him would always have a love for Peggy, he found love in someone else too. And what he hated most, was that whatever Westview was meant to be, soured whatever had been left of peggy and steve. It turned it into something foregin and wrong, out of time and place. Wedging an idea of something that had never really gotten the chance to grow into a garden that already had flowers. He appreciated Peggy for what she meant to him, and for the time that he had her in his life, but he didn’t yearn to be with her. His heart had belonged to the black widow for some time now and he had no intentions of asking for a return.
So, really, while his marriage to a faux peggy in westview would never sit well with him, it was mostly that it left him feeling like he’d cheated on his wife that churned his gut something rancid.
Looking at the clock, he noted that the sun was due to rise in a little over two hours and he’d quite literally been waking up every ten to fifteen minutes on the dot. He’d considered asking natasha to hit him over the head just for a solid three hours of peace and quiet. but instead he leaned back against the pillows and rolled over to drape an arm over her waist, pressing a kiss to her shoulder.
