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Putting his hands in his pockets, Steve tried to take a step back. Tried to look past the dust and the cobwebs and the way the ceiling tiles sagged. Tried to ignore the overly groomed realtor hovering obsequiously at his elbow. The economic climate outside had made for a tired one inside and it was obvious just by looking at the place that its appearance verified what the realtor had said about them having struggled to find a buyer for it for a few years now.
(“It’s a…difficult neighbourhood to canvas,” he had admitted in his office, white teeth flashing jarringly against spray-tanned skin in a smile that was probably meant to be reassuring. “You’ve got the college students to the east and new gentrification to the west and the street hasn’t quite decided which way to go yet.” Steve had made vague agreeing noises since he already knew all of this, he had done the reconnaissance like any good ex-military man, but that hadn’t dissuaded Lance (“Like the spear!”) from condescending to him. “If it’s at all reassuring, the last tenants almost got their pet yoga studio business in the green before they decided to move to Mauritius,” Lance had said, too cheerfully, and that was the point where Steve’s polite smile had started to hurt.)
A door squeaked. That was Carol coming out of the back and Steve recognised the dark look she sent the hinges as the one she wore whenever she was tempted to get out the can of WD40 she kept in her bag at all times. He grinned. She may not have cared about wearing odd socks or objected to drinking warm beer, but household glitches made her twitchy. It could have made taking her on viewings difficult, but this was Carol they were talking about. She took everything as a challenge.
“There might actually be a kitchen back there, buried under a tonne of junk,” she said, but her tone was more thoughtful than dejected. “A decent-sized one as well.” Some of Steve’s scepticism must have showed on his face because she grinned suddenly at him, pushing a hank of dishevelled blonde hair away from her forehead and leaving a streak of dirt behind. “I know, I was surprised too, but I got down on my knees to check the fittings and everything.” Her smile cocked up more at one corner than the other. “You owe me for that, by the way.”
“Add it to my tab.” Steve took a step towards her, which meant that Lance-like-the-spear took a step as well, but Carol did that stern Major thing with her eyebrows and that was enough to make even slick real estate types back off. People sometimes avoided Steve because he had broad shoulders and a low fat to muscle ratio. People left Carol alone when she gave them reason to because she could look surprisingly mean for someone with that nice a face. “Is that a ‘might’ we can work with?” Because, so far, there had been a lot that they couldn’t have worked with. This was the ninth site that they had seen since they’d cooked this idea up over lasagne, beer and adjusting to the noises of a big city again and Steve was tired down to his bones. He didn’t want to have to see a tenth. He was also more patient than Carol was, so he would bet good money that if he was tired, she would be downright frustrated.
Even if she was, she took the time to consider it. He saw her eyes go abstract the way they did when she was thinking an aerial manoeuvre through or imagining fighting Darth Vader. “There’s a kitchen, but it’s not big,” she said. “We’d struggle to fit a grill and a bread oven in there. And what’s already in there will most likely need replacing.” Steve watched her drum her fingers restlessly against her bare upper arm. More kitchen dirt ended up on her skin. There was the frustration, in her unconscious fidgeting, right up until they stilled and Carol smiled suddenly, wide and bright. “Screw it. We can knock down a wall and expand. And there’s a little courtyard out back—.”
“Catches the afternoon sun!” Lance-like-the-spear chimed in from behind Steve, but they both ignored him.
“—that we could put some herb pots in.”
“Herb pots?” It was so ridiculous that Steve had to grin. “The kitchen isn’t even cook ready and you’re thinking about herb pots?”
“Shut up, Rogers, it’s going to be all about the details and the ambience.”
“Details like herb pots.”
“Don’t forget the fun we’d have knocking down a wall.” Carol was grinning as well. “And have you seen the floors? That’s something to thank the pet yoga dudes for.”
Steve’s height made squinting at the floor whilst standing fairly unprofitable, so he saw no reason not to kneel down and examine it close-up. The dust was months old and almost solid when he ran a hand through it, but the grain of the solid wood underneath it was not invisible. It was dirty, but smooth and Steve looked up towards the large windows at the front of the building as he tried to imagine them clean and shining rather than opaque and cracked in one pane. He tried to imagine the large room lit up with sunlight, with art on the walls and booths and tables and a long counter depending on what customers felt like. He tried to imagine what it would look like when he and Carol were done pouring all of their restless, pent-up determination into it.
Carol moved into his vision with sturdy, familiar grace as she crouched down at his level. She too looked at the room with the eyes of someone seeing what could be if only a person worked hard enough. Steve had seen her look at an F-16 jet that way once before. He also hadn’t been sure if he would ever see it again.
When she turned back to him, she still had dirt on her face and on her arm, but she looked brighter than she had the entire time they’d been back Stateside. It was the focus in her eyes that cinched it for Steve. Watching Carol look lost inside herself had been harder than hanging up his dress uniform at the back of his wardrobe and feeling the weight of his company’s betrayed glares. So it was probably strange that this visually underwhelming building was the thing to put interest back into her eyes, but if it woke her up then Steve would have happily traipsed around another nine potential sites for their new life. Another ninety.
“Houston,” he said, earning another familiar smile, “are we go?”
Carol’s eyes were always blue, no matter what, but there was a light in them that had nothing to do with whatever feeble sunlight was managing to struggle into the room. “We are go,” she said softly.
(“Great,” said Lance-like-the-spear, clearly relieved and trampling all over the moment. “Let’s sign the papers.”)
Steve came home from Afghanistan with a tan, sand ground into the insides of all his shoes and a pilot who couldn’t fly anymore.
Carol came home from Afghanistan with less of a tan, none of the clothes she’d taken out there and a cat.
Steve moved in with his best friend from high school. Carol and the cat went to stay with her brother. That lasted for all of two weeks before Steve opened his door to go on his morning run and found Carol (and the cat, and a familiar army duffle bag) looking mulish and wary and not much like the pilot he had seen smile like a good-natured shark right before she flew rings around everyone in her squadron. “Joe has a girlfriend who treats me like unexploded ordinance,” she said before Steve had even opened his mouth, defiance driving her words out of her. As if she owed him any sort of explanation. “And my mom keeps coming around and looking at me and just crying.”
Steve’s mother died when he was fifteen and, truthfully, he would have quite liked someone to be there to cry over him when he came home from the war. He didn’t say that though. His pain wasn’t hers. Instead, he said “Bucky’s trying to make pancakes” and stood aside to let her walk in.
They gutted the kitchen.
Carol was pretty ruthless when it came to the fittings. If they weren’t to her exacting standards, they got tossed in the skip parked outside. Having eyed their budget with a gimlet eye, she’d decided they had enough practical experience (citing her own summers of construction work and, in her words, Steve’s irritating ability to pick up skills after being shown them once) to do most of the renovating themselves. And, to think, Steve had been worried about staying in shape without the Army’s punishing activity levels to keep him busy, but Carol could apparently give most drill sergeants a run for their money when she was focused on a goal, even a civilian one. The afternoon he spent lugging a greasy, stinking, heavy stove outside without the aid of anything with wheels almost made him think wistfully of the days when he’d been skinny and sporadically asthmatic and nobody had ever bothered asking him to help drag things around (even though he had invariably ended up offering anyway).
But the sweat was worth it. There was something strangely satisfying about tearing the place apart, breaking something down with the intention of building it back up to be better. Plus, Carol wielding a sledgehammer and gleefully taking down the wall as promised was something to behold even if Steve was still finding plaster dust in his ears two showers and a bath later. He was used to donating his sweat and blood to a cause. Granted, this one felt a little more selfish than fighting for his country, but it still felt good. Honest. Difficult as well, especially when sorting the wiring for the kitchen proved to be more complicated than disarming IEDs in the desert with enemy troops breathing down your neck along with the noontime sun. Steve had always felt most comfortable buckling down and working towards something though and Carol had his back. Or he had hers. It depended which one of them happened to be more panicked about throwing all of their combined savings into a fledgling business in the middle of a recession on that particular day.
That sense of being completely out of their depth was the most overwhelming at the point where the building looked worse than it had when they had just bought it. In the middle of construction, all Steve had been able to see were the bare pipes and the wires bundled messily everywhere, the walls ugly and parti-coloured because of the plaster they had used to fill in all of the holes they themselves had made, brick dust everywhere. At least that had been all he had been able to see until he had reminded himself (and a vaguely neurotic looking Carol) that there had been plenty of room for venting to be put in place, high ceilinged as the place was. Plus, Bucky had known a guy who had known a guy who had sold them most of their kitchen at a discounted price in return for Steve taking a look at (and subsequently rehauling) his vintage bike’s engine, and Carol had promptly fallen in love with her new stove, the one that was wider than Steve was tall and that produced more heat than he imagined a dragon had, so that had been that potential meltdown averted.
Then he and Carol had got gloriously filthy one day painting the walls white and the skirting Air Force blue because she had won that particular arm wrestling match. And, after a lot of mopping, scrubbing and having unexpected amounts of fun with a standing floor polisher, the boards the yoga people had put in gleamed in their original glory, like the warm, golden local honey for which Steve had already found a supplier. By then, coming as something as a surprise to Steve who had been the one to warily send off all their paperwork, their food and drink license had been approved and their health and safety certification had come through and they even had an accountant droning about profit margins and portion control at them several hours a week, so it was all coming together, miraculously, to the point where Steve could taste the menu he was planning for their opening party on his tongue.
The week before they were due to open, Carol looked around with a mixture of amusement, pride and fond exasperation at the front room, with its white walls and blue trim and red leather booths Steve staunchly claimed had been cheaper than any other colour so, no, the colour scheme was not deliberate, and said “We’re still not calling it ‘Freedom Eagle’.”
“Fair enough,” Steve said and went to play with the speeds of his brand new, shiny industrial mixer again.
Steve came home from Afghanistan because Carol did. She didn’t ask him to, but he did it anyway.
Steve stayed Stateside because Carol did. Again, she didn’t ask. Again, he did it anyway.
Steve applied for a small business loan with Carol because she did ask him for that. But, as she put it, the entire thing had been his big, dumb, inspirational idea in the first place and so, really, it was his fault. Plus, she said that if they had a spreadsheet to keep score in their competition over which of them had saved the other’s ass more times then she could probably trust him not to screw her around when it came to profits. And, you know, the baking thing. That was useful too.
Given that Steve had been in the middle of experimenting with a recipe for beer bread because he’d finally given into Bucky’s pleading, he hadn’t really been able to argue. And this was Carol. God damn Chair Force Carol Danvers, with her big pilot’s ego and her bigger American heart and a need to feel useful and productive that dwarfed even Steve’s own.
So what if the bit of the form where he’d signed ended up with batter on it. Steve thought that just boded well for the future.
Their future.
The diner opened the same week that the fall semester started and, in spite of Carol claiming that it would be the best way to drum up new business, Steve refused to go from sorority stall to sorority stall in a short-sleeved shirt with cupcake samples. Which, in Carol’s opinion, was just selfish of him. Her business plan had an entire section dedicated to the triple attack of his biceps, his earnest smile and the fact that he was a guy who knew how to make a lighter than air sponge. There were worse crowds that the diner could attract than groups of freshman giggling over Steve in an apron. As he’d pointed out, though, if she was going to exploit his physicality then in the name of gender equality she should join him and, firstly, Carol knew it had been a bad idea for Sharon to lend him her flash drive of Women’s Studies journal articles. Secondly, Carol’s last experiences with teenage boys had been at the Academy where at least she’d been allowed to slam them face down into the mats in an arm lock. She had no desire to deal with more college jocks than she had to, even if she’d basically been one herself when she was their age.
In spite of Steve’s disappointing lack of willingness to take one for the team by making himself a teenage heart-throb, their first month and a half of business was unexpectedly, improbably, ridiculously good. Carol would have counted covering just the costs of their raw materials alone to be a success. It wasn’t that she was a pessimist, or that she didn’t have faith in the food that they sold, it was just that she had done her research – she read faster than Steve did so she had ended up racing through more of the business books and The Economist articles, which meant that she had predictably ended up with the bleaker view of any small business’ prospects. Particularly restaurants and cafes. People just weren’t eating out as much anymore because they couldn’t afford to.
But, as Steve had pointed out even as he wrestled depressing broadsheets out of her hands by taking unfair advantage of his gorilla-like upper body strength, that was why they were a diner and not a full-blown, sit-down family restaurant with higher overheads. People could eat in if they wanted. Or they could take it out. They could have coffee or something sweet or the daily special Carol herself would be in charge of out back by the grill. They were going to keep it simple and unfussy, but most importantly they were going to keep it good and then quality would speak for itself.
(“Because that’s why they invented spray cheese, quality speaking for itself,” Carol had muttered, but Steve had just laughed at her and then Bucky had actually gone out to buy spray cheese to prove a point and the pair of them had effectively steered her away from worrying too much.)
So. Not pessimistic. Just…cautious. Realistic. But it turned out that Carol needn’t have worried. The books forgot to mention that little old ladies were more curious than cats and so were the first to scope out anything new in their neighbourhood. And little old ladies? Loved Steve. Even more than teenage girls loved him. He would have won them over by being polite and respectful and reminding them of ‘my [insert dead husband’s name here]’ alone, but he also genuinely enjoyed listening to people from their grandparents’ era reminisce about their younger years. The way Steve drank up stories from back then made Carol think he’d been born in the wrong century. And when he accidentally let slip that both of them were veterans, well, that was just the two-toned raspberry and pomegranate buttercream icing on his white chocolate studded cupcake.
Truthfully, it made something behind Carol’s breastbone hurt whenever she thought of herself as a veteran. But that was okay, because she was mostly out back sweating over their home-ground, grass-fed burgers and whatever the interesting sausage of the week was while Steve was the one taking orders and making coffee and being called a hero by admiring customers. He was bashful about it as well, but blushing looked good on Steve. Carol just looked like a blood blister or something equally unappetising. As a result, she pretty much hid where the customers couldn’t find her and therefore told everyone who asked incredulously about them already being ready to look into hiring some wait staff that it was Steve who was responsible for their inordinate good luck and narrow, but beautifully extant profit margins.
“It’s not like that at all though,” Steve protested, aggrieved, ripping the label from his beer bottle in long, neat strips. Bucky was grinning at him. “It’s not! It’s more to do with us attracting the meal crowd as well as people who just want something lighter. We’re serving what people want to eat and—Sharon, stop.”
The third blonde in the room tossed Carol an amused look, but did to her credit attempt to stop looking as if she found it all quite so very funny. Not that Carol blamed her. “You’re good with people, Steve,” she said. “It’s the wholesome, all-American thing. You attract them—not necessarily like that, Steve, don’t give me that look—so I’m not surprised that people are willing to buy things from you. Or to bring their custom somewhere that feels more…personal than somewhere that lets you pay with an app on your phone.”
“The fact that the stuff you make tastes brilliant doesn’t hurt either.” Bucky pointed with his glass at the platter surrounded by clingfilm remains and covered in powdered sugar (and not much of anything else anymore). “What did you call those again?”
“Pumpkin spice beignets,” Steve replied.
“See? You’ve got a gift, man,” Bucky said around the last piece, spraying a certain amount of crumbs Carol’s way, which made her wrinkle her nose at him and kick him in the thigh. He remained unfazed. “Told you I took the wrong job when we were kids.” Sharon made a questioning noise at that. She hadn’t known Steve as long as Carol, let alone Bucky, and the odd anecdote was still new to her. “Steve moved in with me and my mom when we were fifteen and he wanted to get a job so that he could, in his words, ‘earn his keep’.” He rolled his eyes at Steve and Steve rolled them back and Carol would have needed a quantum computer to accurately calculate just how many times she’d seen that particular exchange. “’Course, I took that as a challenge and I wanted to get one as well, so we both went job-hunting. I got a gig in an arcade because, hey, what was cooler than working in a place full of games? And Steve, I thought he was crazy because he found a baker and got up before dawn so that he could fit in his hours before we had to go to school.”
“Ohhhh,” Sharon said, enlightened, turning back to Steve. “And that was where you learned to bake?”
Steve shrugged one of those massive shoulders of his and looked bashful. “I already did the cooking when Bucky’s mom was working late. And since the football team kept being less than impressed by my try-out attempts, I figured I needed a hobby.”
“Steve was tiny back then,” Carol explained to Sharon before she asked, then chuckled at her look of incredulity. “I know, I didn’t believe it either. He was already a beefcake by the time I met him. Bucky loves whipping the photos out any chance he gets, if you want to see…”
Predictably, Bucky was already reaching for his wallet. Carol didn’t know if he actually had pictures in there or whether he was just trying to get a rise out of Steve, but the ploy worked. Used to the pair of them, Carol picked up her beer and Sharon’s wine so that their flailing limbs didn’t knock them over and calmly passed the glass to her. “Cupcakes gave him muscles,” she said cheerfully.
“Puberty gave me a growth spurt,” Steve protested from where he was currently trying to bury Bucky’s head under cushions stolen from the couch. “And Erskine did everything by hand. Kneading is harder than it looks.”
“I bet it is,” Carol murmured sotto voce to Sharon, waggling her eyebrows and making her spit white wine everywhere. While she gurgled, Carol leaned over and amiably thumped Steve in the shoulder. “Let him breathe, Rogers, you’ve made your point. You’re a big, butch baker now, we’re all very proud.”
Steve grimaced at her…but he did get up. When he was excavated, Bucky was red-faced but laughing and he slumped contentedly against Carol’s shoulder even when she complained that he was heavy. “Says the woman with better biceps than me,” he retorted and made ‘gimme’ fingers at his beer. (No one indulged him.) “Seriously though, much as I’d like to blame your lack of bankruptcy on Steve-o’s dimples, you guys deserve having done well. You make good food out of good ingredients and you don’t charge the world for it. People respect that sort of honest business more than you think.”
“Plus Carol’s pancakes,” Sharon said.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Carol’s pancakes.”
Across the table from her, Steve was sitting cross-legged on the floor and taking up remarkably little space for a guy of his size. He caught Carol looking at him and, while Bucky and Sharon competed over waxing embarrassingly eloquent over recipes both on and off their menu, smiled at her. In spite of her headache from pouring over accounts earlier that evening, Carol smiled back and didn’t need him to put into words just why they were grinning soppily at each other. She already knew he was just as relieved as she was that they were ticking over. That they were doing better than ticking over, actually. “Now we just need to keep it up.”
His mouth quirked. “Better look into hiring someone else, then, before you snap and start trying to murder people with an Andouille sausage.”
“If Basic didn’t drive me mad, I don’t think too many hours locked in a hot room will,” Carol replied primly. Then she thought about what the dinner rush was like. Relived that particular sense memory. “I’d at least make it the leg of Iberico.”
In all honesty, they did need the help though, even if Steve had been baking since his teenage years and Carol had ‘mad barbeque skills’ (Bucky’s words, not hers) because a typical working day went like this:
Steve was the one who got up at four in the morning to mess around with dough (Carol was aware that mixing, kneading, proving and shaping was more complicated than that, but she was asleep while he was doing all of this, so, ‘mess around’ it was) and that made him the first one in since camaraderie only went so far. On any given day he made wheat and rye, sourdough and granary, and the long, golden, fluted baguettes that were Carol’s particular favourite because she thought they made the best sandwiches. Then he had free reign over the special bread of the day, be that pumpernickel or brioche or even bagels on days when he felt like adding having to boil things to his already insane schedule. Carol, who was only imaginative where pancakes and aerial formations were concerned, didn’t know where the hell he got the ideas for some of his more esoteric combinations from…but she didn’t precisely care either, especially when he consistently came up with glories like the loaf with the crunchy, crispy onion blossom things and the one shaped like a flower where all of the petals were made out of a different sort of bread.
In between knocking air out of the first prove and doing complicated things with rounds of dough and both hands that he made look effortless the times Carol had seen him doing it, Steve made sweeter treats as well. Muffins filled with seasonal fruit and croissants and tray upon tray of cupcakes. He worked his magic with flour and butter and a dizzying number of varieties of sugar and by the time Carol arrived, yawning, to do her own prep he’d already be pulling the bread from the oven. Carol’s morning started with collaborating on whatever three pies they were serving that day – since pie seemed to be the natural meeting point between his specialty and hers – and then she went to oversee the churning of the vats of batter that served as the basis for the waffles and pancakes she’d be slinging out for the breakfast crowd.
Not that they ever stopped serving pancakes all day, actually, but people were more likely to order a stack for dinner than they were to ask for a stuffed hamburger for breakfast. It made sense to prep the breakfast foods first. Compared to what Steve had to do, Carol’s duties were less complicated in comparison. Making sure her grill was heated to her satisfaction. Chopping fruit. Pushing chunks of beautifully red meat marbled with fat through her hand grinder, mixing it with pork shoulder and finely diced herbs, bringing everything together with eggs and deft hands.
Carol didn’t count herself qualified the way that Steve was. Her particular talents just stemmed from the fact that she’d eaten enough hot dogs and cheeseburgers to love the idea and hate the typical execution. ‘Street’ food didn’t need to be bad for you and they didn’t need to be pretentious either. Her burgers were thick and juicy, even if, fine, she was a little bit precious about laying the ground strands of minced meat all in the same direction so that each mouthful practically fell apart when a customer took a bite. And she liked her range of ‘dogs to be an interesting one so that people could sample sausages from all around the world in one diner if they liked, though she had been quick to put Bucky in a headlock when he’d wanted to make dirty jokes about the way she’d phrased that (in hindsight, it was a little bit unfortunate).
Steve was an artist, Carol thought. She just cooked to feed people because she liked to feel useful and because, sometimes, you just needed a cheeseburger to make you feel better. But sometimes you needed a sandwich made with homemade bread instead, or a nutella cupcake, or a slice of apple pie, the one with the exact blend of spices she and Steve had spent six nights straight fighting over. That was why they opened at eight am sharp, to feed people. To make them feel better.
They mainly sold coffees and pastries the first hour they were open, with people occasionally looking ready to come to blows over the last of Steve’s maple syrup and pecan cinnamon rolls if they ran out early. Then the orders for pancakes and waffles and full fry-ups (meat, vegetarian or Total Cardiac Arrest With Wholemeal Toast On The Side To Pretend At Being Healthy) would slowly start to increase in number until Carol was wishing for extra arms, Shiva-like, as she wielded a spatula like a weapon. Out front, Steve would be running around taking orders and pouring coffee (they had outright given up on serving anything frothy and fancy based on the singular fact that, in spite of them both being practical, ex-military folk, the espresso machine’s loyalty had not been won by either of them) and boxing up baked goods left, right and centre.
Around eleven, requests for club sandwiches and ‘dogs with homemade slaw and Carol’s specialty, stuffed burgers (because her opinion was that the only way you could improve a cheeseburger was to double the number of patties and put something delicious and calorific in between them) would start to seep into the orders. When it was lunchtime proper, Carol would pull the one barbeque option of the day (much as she would have loved to have a real smoker to call her own, they hadn’t had the capital at the start, so the customers would just have to deal with pulled pork or brisket or ribs on any given day since there was only so much oven space that wasn’t dedicated to cupcakes) and by one Steve usually had to come out back and feed her mouthfuls of cured ham, rocket and provolone sandwich on dark rye because her hands were busy flipping things.
The afternoons were slower for her, though. People usually just wanted pie or a cupcake and a place to sit and gossip, so Steve dealt with those while Carol took the time to catch her breath and do her dinner prep. If orders were slow she even tried to take over cash register duty so that Steve could have a break though his endurance was legendary. She had always admired his unflappable calm and his ability to adapt to nearly every situation, which was why he dealt with the bulk of the customers out front. Well, that and the fact that she’d have been too tempted to eat half their stock of sweet things. Being out back was safer for her and, in all honesty, she liked the immediate urgency of cooking to order. It reminded her, just a little, of flying in gusty weather, the constant need to make little adjustments and to be ready for anything.
The dinner rush usually lived up to its name and came out of nowhere, so Carol pushed on through that, dishing up meatloaf and chilli and burgers, always burgers, because her flight instructor had clearly been psychic when he’d bestowed her call sign upon her. They closed, theoretically, at nine because with how early they opened and it being just the two of them they were pushing it if they stayed open any later. As it was, they weren’t too rushed to hurry stragglers out, though Carol always kicked Steve out to go home to bed so that she could do clean-up on her own because he had to be in earlier than she did. Luckily, her Academy days had instilled efficiency into her where mopping and scrubbing were concerned and she may have been dubious about whether an industrial dishwasher was necessary at the start but now she was ferociously grateful for it.
Carol went to bed footsore, exhausted and damp from the necessary shower to get rid of the grease and the sweat that was an integral part of being a grill chef, knowing she’d have to do it all over again tomorrow morning…and loving it. In spite of what it was probably doing to her blood pressure, she loved it.
(But at least she didn’t have to get up as early as Steve. She’d always have that.)
They did end up hiring new staff though because there were days that neither of them ended up eating all day, and because even if Carol had an almost supernatural ability to cope with high temperatures she hadn’t managed to sprout extra arms yet and keeping track of pancakes and burgers and the line dividing the vegetarian block from the rest during the dinner rush was starting to test even her now that their popularity was picking up. And unless Steve wanted to get up even earlier (or, conversely, have to stay later to put the dough on to rise overnight) the demand for what he made was starting to inch higher than what he currently had time to make. Especially since he served everyone as well.
No, Sharon had said sternly when she’d found out that the both of them had cancelled their gym memberships because they worked dawn ‘til dusk six days a week and were too tired on Wednesdays to even think about exercising, this was not sustainable. (Actually, her words had been ‘you idiots, go hire some students at minimum wage’, but Steve hadn’t found that ethically okay even if it was economically sensible and Carol was just ready to hand over toilet-cleaning duty to anyone at this point.) So she had handed out flyers to some of her classes at the college, the same way she had when they had first opened. Carol was eternally grateful for two things in the world – that Sharon, in general, existed, and that she and Steve had had an amicable enough break-up that she was willing to smilingly intimidate a few of her students into working for him.
The first person they hired was a whip-smart girl named Kate. Carol had looked enviously at a pair of suede boots that likely cost more than she spent on meat in a day and might have been dubious about taking on a rich kid when someone else could have done with the job more, but Kate was polite and she was driven and, most importantly, she knew how to use the espresso machine. She impressed Carol with her stock lists and Steve liked her immaculate manners where customers were concerned. Granted, she made them both feel painfully old, but then so did all of the crowds of college kids that hung out in the corner booths and Steve seemed happy to let Kate go and deal with them. The first time Carol stuck her head out of the kitchen in response to the first tell-tale sounds of belligerent escalation and had seen Kate crisply, politely and ruthlessly laying into a rapidly-deflating pair of frat-boys she had just smiled and resolved to give the girl a raise even if she was already keeping all of her tips on Steve’s insistence.
Carol herself would have hired Eli to help her out back with the grill orders based solely on the fact that he fell hilariously and hopelessly in love with Steve the first time the kid saw him. Steve, of course, was hugely embarrassed by the awed adoration that Eli displayed since he was always awkward when people treated him like the admirable person he was, and Carol figured that a young man like Eli could do worse than using a guy like Steve as his role model-slash-man-crush. If he hadn’t been so obviously awful when it came to anything to do with baking, he’d have probably chopped off his own leg to be Steve’s apprentice, but Carol wanted him in the kitchen with her because of his steady reliability, when Steve wasn’t around anyway.
No, Cassie was the one Steve hired to be his apprentice and that was because of the startling aptitude she showed for being able to go directly from tiny, delicate motions as she iced cupcakes to the wiry, confident strength she needed to knead bread dough. She was quiet and more than a little shy, but that was why Steve had been a good leader in the Army, Carol thought. He taught people the way they needed to be taught, rather than the way he thought they needed to be taught. So he showed Cassie gentle, quiet faith in her abilities, tolerated Eli’s hero worship because it was better to be passionate about something and over-enthusiastic than studiously apathetic and calmly presented Kate with challenge after challenge to see her rise to the occasion.
“So,” Carol said, a little wide-eyed and wary because they were actually having a lunch break in the little courtyard behind her kingdom and eating little spinach and goat cheese tarts whose edges Steve had deemed a little too well-done to sell to the customers, but that still tasted good so Cassie was clearly getting the hang of this, “we have minions now.”
“Pretty sure they’re called employees these days,” Steve said amiably, inspecting the crumb of one of the tart bases and deciding…Carol didn’t know what, actually. She was useless at pastry. Hot hands, or something, which she was okay with because Steve had palms like a glacier. Feet as well. He left off examining the tart to squint good-naturedly at her. “Why does that freak you out?”
“Because we’re responsible for them?” Carol hazarded. “Because that’s three salaries we’re paying now? Because they’re in our diner, Steve, right now, without supervision and, oh my God, they’re basically foetuses.”
Steve was possibly used to these brief moments of panic that Carol was absolutely not admitting to ever having and just patted her knee. “One,” he said, counting the points off on his fingers, the ones that were still a little bit floury and had what looked like jam still under the nails, “they’re all older than you were when you went to the Academy--.”
“Yeah, and look at the trouble I got myself into thinking I was a hotshot,” Carol muttered rebelliously, but Steve (perhaps wisely) ignored her quiet little mutiny.
“--Two, didn’t you say just yesterday that you made Eli cook and recite the text montage from the first Star Wars film and he still didn’t overcook the burgers?”
“Totally a valid training technique, everyone should know that speech anyway.”
“And, three, there are all of four people in there, Carol, and one of them has been making a pot of tea last for two hours now while she uses the free wifi.” He grinned at her, the dumbass, and she greatly resented how at ease he always made her feel. It wasn’t fair. “I think they can cope.”
The thing about implicitly trusting Steve as much as Carol did was that it left her free to be completely ungracious around him because he wouldn’t be insulted by it, so she just sniffed at him and stole the last tart. “Fine,” she said, “but if total power over the cash register turns Kate into a super-villain and she stages a hostile takeover from within the ranks, on your head be it.”
“So long as you’re up against the wall with me, sure,” Steve replied, far too happily.
“What’s the story behind the name then?” Kate asked boldly one slow afternoon when most of the town seemed to be at a football game and even Carol had the time to come and drink coffee behind the front counter. Maybe she was the one outspoken enough to actually ask, but Carol could see Cassie looking shyly fascinated to her left. Eli, as usual, was intently watching Steve’s hands, even if he was only putting cupcake boxes together. It would have been embarrassing if it hadn’t been so adorable.
“I told Steve it wasn’t acceptable to call a diner ‘Freedom Eagle’,” Carol replied, shooting Steve an amused look.
“And Carol’s suggestion was ‘Stars and Shakes’, which was just as awful,” Steve retorted mildly.
“Steve wanted to name it after his favourite artist.”
“Carol wanted to name it after her first plane.”
“Who’s your favourite artist?” Eli asked immediately while Cassie, to Carol’s pleasant surprise, giggled.
Kate just ignored him and displayed her usual persistence, the dogged determination that reminded Carol of a combination of Steve and Bucky and was why she’d got the job in the first place. “But is it a baking thing? Is it about your hair? Do you just really like Debbie Harry? Where on earth did ‘Blondie’ come from?”
Carol looked over at Steve and shared an amused look before they gave in chorus the answer they always gave when asked about what was stencilled neatly onto the front window. “Name, rank, serial number…”
Kate made a frustrated noise and went to wipe a table down to cool off, leaving the rest of them chuckling before a sudden invasion of cheering, whooping football fans aptly signalled the end of the game over at the college and which team had won, and Eli and Carol disappeared back into the kitchen while Cassie stayed to help Kate and Steve take orders. The next day, though, when Steve presented Kate with a double tray of blondies to sell and Carol wore her ‘Heart of Glass’ t-shirt, she thought the girl would explode.
(Everyone was glad she didn’t; health code certification had been hard enough without bits of college student in the muffin racks.)
Two months in and they definitely had regulars now, not to mention something vaguely resembling a shift system even if Carol and Steve both usually ended up in six days a week (seven if they used their day off to experiment in the kitchen) and this made Carol happy in the sense that she was no longer assuming every week would be their last. Sure, there had been a slight drop off once the novelty of a new business had lessened, but numbers had been steadier as well, which was more productive and reassuring where their long-term prospects were concerned. Between Sharon pointing out that Blondie’s coffee was cheaper than what was on campus at the end of every one of her lectures in something that was probably against the college’s advertising policy and Steve’s dimples charming everyone who walked through the door, custom was increasing as well, to the point where they had to adjust their stock orders to accommodate their new daily turnover.
Through luck or design, Lance-like-the-spear’s worries about the location had actually worked to their advantage. The soccer-mom types and the more bohemian crowd liked that they were staunchly organic and made a point of using locally sourced produce whenever they could. The college kids liked the cheap coffee and the free wifi. And the people who frequented the gym around the corner liked that they could sneak in after their light workout and feel as if they could justify having an elephant ear with their large ‘skimmed milk, please’ coffee.
Their proximity to Mjölnir nearly caused them as much grief as it earned them patronage though, notably because Carol and Steve had both been loyal, avid members before their lives had become diner-centric and they didn’t have half an hour to spare to watch Deadliest Catch anymore, let alone to work on their abs, but also because Thor Odinson was as passionate about exercise as Carol was about grass- versus corn-fed beef.
He and Sif, the ponytailed, statuesque head trainer at the gym who was also one of the few women who made Carol feel depressed about the muscle definition in her shoulders, ambushed them as they were opening one Monday morning. “Ah-hah!” Thor exclaimed in a way that managed to be both booming and disappointed all at once, while Sif loomed at his side like a particularly judgemental avenging angel. “Then the word in the locker room is true! You have indeed abandoned us for the world of refined sugar and fast food!”
“All our sugar is raw, thank you very much!” Steve protested, sounding stung, at the same time as Carol said “Oh, shut up, Thor, I’ve seen you eat four hot dogs at once and that’s because I ate five and you sulked afterwards.” Then a thought occurred to her and she narrowed her eyes at him. “Also, why are you talking about us in the locker room?”
“Because Steven’s inspirational presence is sorely missed!” Thor said, still basically yelling, which was enough to send a curious Cassie scuttling back into the kitchen when she came out to investigate where her mentor had gone, making herself as small as possible in the process. “And who is there to challenge Sif in your absence, Carol?”
“All the dude-bros who walk into your gym challenge Sif and it never ends well for any of them.”
“Precisely! And that is why you should return to us!”
“Thor,” Steve said in a way that let Carol know he was still insulted by the sugar accusations, “I’m sorry you feel as if we abandoned you, but we just opened a diner. Trust me, I miss working out since I only manage to go running twice a week now, but we just don’t have the time anymore.”
In any other setting, how horrified Thor looked by the idea of someone like Steve only exercising twice a week and outside at that would be hilarious, but Carol could vaguely see bits and pieces of their early regulars poking out from behind the two gym aficionados, waiting to get in. As aggressive as they could be where their first caffeine fix of the day was concerned, no one was apparently willing to argue with a long-haired blond guy who was even taller and broader than Steve was. And Sif was just wearing running shorts and a sports bra, which meant that her abs in themselves were distracting the line from deciding to turn into a mob. Nonetheless, something needed to be done before coffee addictions drove someone into recklessness and Carol went automatically into crowd control mode.
“Steve, Cassie is probably freaking out because you’ve left her alone with lemon meringue tarts. Kate—.” Who had just appeared and was eying Thor or Sif or possibly both at once with naked appreciation. “—start serving coffee, ASAP. You two…” She stabbed a finger at Thor and then Sif. “…come sit down and taste what we’re doing here before you act as if we’re inviting diabetes and heart disease in with open arms.”
And even though it was three minutes past eight in the morning, Carol went back to cook up two of every kind of specialty hot dog she had in house and after tasting her Medisterpølse Thor demonstrated a remarkable change of heart, to the point where she smugly left him and Steve discussing a potential discount that gym members could use whenever they bought anything in Blondie’s. Which, by the way, caused enough of an increase in revenue that Carol stopped worrying about whether taking on three new members of staff at once was a feasible financial decision or not.
It was also why Steve got a little bit excited over experimenting with kale smoothies and kept sneaking wheatgrass and coconut milk and carrots that didn’t end up as carrot cake onto their supply orders until Carol gave in and just bought him a fancy blender, at which point Sif and Thor basically moved in, which didn’t hurt business either.
Mjölnir wasn’t the only other establishment to have Opinions about Blondie and Carol supposed that was to be expected. The lot had been constantly changing for so long that anywhere that looked like it was going to last had the potential to have an impact on the entire neighbourhood. As a diner, they overlapped with a lot of other food places without fitting into any of their specific categories. They weren’t just a bakery and they weren’t properly a restaurant, but neither were they a food truck or a deli or a hot dog stall. And, in spite of serving coffee, they were not a coffee shop.
In hindsight, what happened with their closest competition of that sort was inevitable.
Carol was consulting with Kate about how much coffee they were going through per week when the goateed hurricane came whirling through the front door, barging right up into Steve’s personal space. To his credit, Steve suppressed his training and didn’t react as if the man was a potential hostile, blinking at him instead even as he balanced two stacks of pancakes, a plate of huevos rancheros with Carol’s best guacamole and the latest incarnation of what was becoming known as the house kale smoothie on long forearms. “Can I help—.”
“Me? Not likely. Can you give my store manager five thousand dollars? Sure.”
Steve frowned, visibly baffled, but he also wasn’t someone who liked rudeness, let alone outright belligerence. “I’m sorry, Sir, but I don’t know who you are or what it is you’re talking about.”
“He’s Tony Stark,” someone growled behind Carol. Eli, freshly from the kitchen if the apron and spatula were anything to go by, looked just about ready to leap between Steve and Stark like a well-trained guard dog and Carol contemplated collaring him, just to be safe. Instead, she raised an eyebrow in question. “He owns Starkbucks.”
“Starbucks?”
“No, Starkbucks.” Eli frowned even more and radiated righteous outrage like an angry little sun. “The coffee place on the other end of the street.”
“Oh.” Carol felt her eyebrow shoot up even higher at that particular revelation. “Egotistical much?”
“If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” Tony retorted. “Unless it’s the coffee then, yes, do fix it. Which I have. And which I’m about to do with the drop in my store’s pastry sales that happened to coincide with you opening your little coffeehouse knock-off.”
“Oh, like you can talk about knock-offs,” Eli said furiously, but Carol rubbed a casual knuckle against his temple, earning an affronted look from him.
“Down, boy,” she told him. “Back to the kitchen. Go on now.” He looked like he was going to argue, but she stared him down. “Those orders aren’t going to cook themselves.”
He stalked off, shooting her betrayed backwards glances as he did so, and Carol settled herself back down to watch the show. Steve was holding onto his composure, but barely. It was possible the other guy’s hot-tempered irrationality was catching if the way his left eyelid was twitching was any indication. “Mister Stark,” he said, “I’m sorry if you feel that our opening has in any way encroached upon your business’ territory, but it is a competitive market.”
“Don’t talk to me about it being a competitive market,” Stark interrupted again. “I don’t do competition. I do serving the best product.” He held out a hand, expectantly. “So let’s have it then.”
Steve looked confused and irritable at the same time. “Have what?”
“Have your coffee.” Stark’s face conveyed ‘duh’ without him having to say it and Carol could see the aggravated flush on Steve’s neck from where she was leaning on the counter. She could also see, however, the affirmative gesture he made in Kate’s direction and, when she in turn looked to Carol for confirmation, nodded. That left Tony and Steve glaring at each other while Kate hurried to pour a cup and take it to the pair.
“Isn’t this the point where you should be intervening?” The English accent and the empty teapot being put down on the counter belonged to the student who had been one of their regulars from the start, the one with the dark hair and the green eyes and the propensity to make a pot of tea last as long as possible. Carol didn’t know her name, but gave her a lazy smile nonetheless and took the teapot since Kate was busy.
“Steve can handle himself, especially against some corporate tool.” She looked in the pot and decided that, what the hell, she might as well give a regular customer new leaves on the house if people were going to barge in here and potentially try to steal them away. When she glanced back up, Stark was swilling a mouthful of coffee around his mouth like he was at a Goddamn wine tasting and making unnecessarily disgusted faces. “Emphasis on the tool.”
Steve clearly had the same response because he drew himself up to his full height, which was always an impressive sight to see, and looked down his nose at the shorter man. “Is there a problem with our coffee, Mister Stark?” he asked in his Captain Rogers voice, which meant sounding equal parts terrifying and courteous.
Stark spat the coffee back into the cup (making both Carol and the student let out quiet noises of distaste) and pulled a flask from his pocket. “Seven, actually, starting with how weak it is. It’s like you’ve never even heard of caffeol. Tell, me did you pick the blend because of some sort of lonely hearts ad? ‘Homely type, seeking bland relationship, likes cuddling better than sex’?”
“It’s organic.”
“It’s basically water.”
The plates Steve was holding made a worryingly loud clatter when he set them down on the table. The wrong table, Carol noted, but since people were watching the show instead of eating, she supposed it wasn’t important. “Look,” he said hotly, “you can insult our menu as much as you like, but I am grateful and proud that customers like what we serve. Clearly, we’re doing something right.” There was a muffled hear-hear from somewhere in the room and Carol saw the dark-haired student smile behind a hand, absently noting that it was the first such expression she’d seen on her. Steve wasn’t smiling though. Actually, he was outright scowling and that was rare for him. “I know your type. You sell coffee and you don’t care where it comes from--.”
“Screw you, I buy fairtrade.”
“Fine, then you don’t care about the people you sell it to, or about what else you feed to them.” Steve was outright snapping now and Carol whistled, impressed. She hadn’t seen him this angry since Afghanistan. And all over coffee, apparently. “Commercial guy hiding behind a knock-off of a corporate logo. Take that away, what are you?”
"A genius with genetically modified coffee beans that have more caffeine in them than should be technically legal and a robot barista," Tony shot back immediately. "And I fund college scholarships. How many impoverished prodigies have you sent to school, huh?"
“Robot barista, huh…” the student said contemplatively and Carol snuck her a sideways look.
“Are you that easily swayed by gimmicks?” she asked and passed her the newly filled and steaming teapot. “You don’t even drink coffee.”
The smile she got in return was unexpectedly wicked. “For a robot, I might learn.”
“Traitor,” Carol said, but it wasn’t unfriendly. She even smiled back. Then the exchange between Steve and Stark turned into an outright shouting match and she sighed as she finally had to pitch in, even as an elegant redhead with more freckles than Carol had ever seen on one person came running in yelling ‘Tony, what did I say?’ After that, it pretty much all devolved into chaos and coffee-related insults and the student’s teapot getting broken, and that was how Carol and Steve first met Tony Stark.
“He called our coffee weak,” Steve said sulkily.
“I know, sweetheart.” Carol hastily served him the mac-and-three-kinds-of-expensive-foreign-cheese that she saved for really bad days. “He’s just jealous because his pastries taste like sawdust. Eli went and bought some and that was his report.”
“François Payard could have baked them and Eli would have still said they tasted bad,” Steve replied glumly, apparently too morose to pretend that Carol’s helper didn’t worship the ground on which he walked. Unfortunately, Carol couldn’t argue with that. What she could do was double the amount of creamy, carby goodness on his plate. So she did.
“In all fairness, Steve-o, you don’t brew the strongest coffee I’ve ever tasted,” Bucky said.
“Not helping, Bucky,” Carol sighed while Steve scowled around a mouthful of cheese.
“Just saying.”
The thing about Steve, Carol had found, was that he was reasonable, irritatingly so, about ninety-eight percent of things. But where the remaining two percent was concerned he was an absolute lunatic. And usually a competitive one as well.
“Stop that,” she told him when he asked all of their coffee-drinkers whether they ever bought their pick-me-ups at Starkbucks.
“Stop that,” she told him when she found him and Kate huddled around their very basic espresso machine trying to come up with novel flavours of coffee, with some guinea pig customers looking a little green after the matcha-flavoured experiment samples.
“Stop that,” she told him, exasperated, when she caught Eli furtively bringing him a paper bag with a sample of every edible item Starkbucks sold. “Do not sink to his level.”
“I’m not sure that Stark’s even at this level,” Kate said, ignoring Eli’s outrage and picking up a danish. She took a bite, made a face and put it back. “That being said, ours are definitely better.”
Steve looked undeservedly cheered by that. “Don’t look so smug,” Carol told him severely. “You’re being a child and you’re competing with Starbucks.”
“Starkbucks.”
“Whatever.”
Luckily – actually, Carol wasn’t even sure if that was the right word here, but she was going with it – Kate was wrong about Tony not being at the same level of idiocy as Steve. Two days later, a shaggy-haired man in an ill-fitting suit claiming to be a health inspector came into Blondie and asked for a sample of all their ingredients.
“ID?” Carol asked while Steve hovered and the man visibly wilted.
“Bruce Banner,” he said when they were all squeezed into the courtyard. ‘They’ being him, Carol and Steve, with Eli, Cassie and Kate all jostling for space in the doorway, which begged the question as to who was cooking or taking orders or making sure no one was robbing the cash register, but hey. “Sorry about this. Tony…” Steve made a disapproving noise at the mere mention of his rival and Bruce blinked owlishly at him before continuing. “Tony tasted some of your cupcakes and now he’s developed a Thing.”
Over Bruce’s greying head, Carol could see Kate and Eli jostling in a not-so-silent battle of ‘I told you so’s and pointed wordlessly towards the front of the diner. Eli looked like he wanted to protest, but an eye-rolling Kate and a wistful-looking Cassie dragged him off with them. She looked at Bruce, then at Steve (who at least had the grace to look sheepish and vaguely ashamed of himself) then back to Bruce at whom she smiled beatifically. “I know how that goes.”
In spite of just having been caught impersonating an official government employee, Bruce’s sensitive-looking mouth quirked up at one corner. “He may or may not have done a survey of a sample of customers who have been patrons of both establishments. He also may or may not have concluded that there was a statistically significant preference in the sample for your baked goods.” He looked even more long-suffering. “He also may or may not have said that there was no way you could make things taste so good using organic raw ingredients, without any enhancements, and wanted to do some quality assessments of his own.”
Steve appeared to be torn between being pleased that his baked goods were coming out on top and insulted at both the attempt at subterfuge to discredit him and how half-heartedly it had been executed. Carol just figured Bruce had the look of someone who had been cajoled, or possibly bullied, into this.
“Why does he care?” she asked bluntly. “In all fairness, his coffee menu is far more varied than ours. If that’s what people want, they’ll go to him, unless price is an issue.”
Bruce just looked rueful. "I don’t even really know," he admitted. "The coffeeshop isn't even his main business. He designs medical robots for a living, and phones, and that new 3D game software."
("Oh man," Eli said excitedly from somewhere out of sight, momentarily forgetting his 'love Steve, hate Tony' way of life and also proving that he was incapable of obeying orders, "I've seen the reviews of that, it's going to be awesome."
"You have no loyalty whatsoever," Kate told him witheringly. Carol agreed, but she was still in trouble for not going back to work as well.)
"It's basically a write-off. And Starbucks keeps trying to sue him." Bruce, if possible, looked even more world-weary. "I think he enjoys giving his lawyers the practice."
In spite of herself, Carol chuckled. Steve turned an expression on her that seemed to imply she had just stabbed him in the back. “You’re both being ridiculous,” she informed him. “Of all the things to waste testosterone on. We don’t even want people to come and just have coffee here, we make far more profits from our food. And you hate the coffee machine.”
“I’m getting better at it,” he said, but even he clearly realised how defensive and lame that sounded because he sighed, ran a hand over his face and, oh, there he was. There was the normal, steady, sane Steve she was used to and Carol, watching his face, could pinpoint the exact moment when he decided to be the bigger man here. “If Mister Stark,” he said with stilted courtesy, “would like to come and have a personal tour of Blondie’s kitchen then we would be happy to oblige him.”
Bruce smiled slightly. “I’ll let him know,” he replied, equally polite. “And I’ll even try and convince him to leave his spectroscopy kit at home.”
“You’re a good man,” Carol said quietly, later, with one of her hips propped against the counter in the bakery. Steve, who was occupied with scrubbing out one of his massive mixer bowls, hunched his equally over-sized shoulders and made the awkward, wordless noise that was his usual response to any sort of compliment he didn’t believe he deserved, which amounted essentially to any. “No, really.” Steve would take self-deprecation to an Olympic level sometimes if he didn’t have his face rubbed in the compliment until he at least pretended to accept it. “Stark was an absolute dick and, okay, you were basically behaving like a crazy person for a little while there—.”
“Hey!”
“—but when it actually mattered, you manned up and put on your adult pants.” Carol took it as a victory that he was looking more aggrieved now than reluctant and grinned merrily at him. “You didn’t have to invite him into your Secret HQ of Flour and Other Sweet Things, but you did.” Carol knew Steve better than most, at least in terms of the imperfect, human side of him that generally got buried under the polite and forgiving side of him that anyone he did not know or who had not proved that they deserved otherwise got from him, and while he was not the sort of person to hold a grudge he had a surprisingly hot temper on him when he was provoked and could be idiotically stubborn on topics where he assumed he had the moral high ground regardless of any evidence to the contrary. She did not contest that he was a better man than pretty much anyone she knew, but the people who believed that he was better because he was perfect were wrong. It was the fact that he could be a dick just like everyone else and, most of the time, managed not to be that made him good in her eyes.
He still looked dubious (or was possibly just working out how many of his more breakable materials he would need to hide before Stark visited) so Carol settled for laughing at her perfectly imperfect friend and spontaneously hugged him from behind. Even if she did then get covered in flour, but that was one of the risks of being friends with a baker, and Carol could live with that.
Bruce, as agreed, acted as chaperone slash keeper slash mediator when he brought Stark along the next day and Carol, cheerfully ready to throw Steve to the wolves if the wolves were corporate sell-outs with too much money and overly-manicured facial hair, volunteered to work front of house with Kate so that her partner could go and explain their criteria for ingredients (locally sourced if at all possible, organic or at least free range if they could manage it, emphasis on seasonality to try and cut back on their food miles). Luck or divine intervention meant that Stark had turned up in the early afternoon lull, so ‘covering’ Steve mostly ended up as Carol and Kate hovering at the far end of the counter trying to eavesdrop. So far, there hadn’t been any explosions, which Carol was going to take as progress.
“You could just go in there you know,” Kate pointed out in exasperation after she’d nearly fallen off her perch trying to crane her head around the corner. “You’re an owner as well.”
“This is Steve’s thing,” Carol replied and she was rather proud of how unconcerned she sounded, even if she was secretly dying inside to see Steve’s face as Stark shoved his face into all the corners of his private sanctum. She happened to know for a fact that Steve had spent an hour and a half longer than usual cleaning up last night, which meant that he actually cared what the other coffeeshop owner thought.
“It’s also your thing.” That earned the black-haired, tea-drinking student – whose name was Jessica Drew, apparently - a warm look from Carol. She was somewhat surprised that Jessica was willing to abandon her laptop (which she had always previously been staring intently at from a hunched over position whenever Carol had seen her before) to come join in the stalking-but-pretending-not-to club at the end of the counter closest to the back part of the diner, but it was not unpleasant. She had the greenest eyes Carol had ever seen before, especially set off by messy but wonderfully thick dark hair, and it was just plain nice to be reminded that her stakes in the business were equal to Steve’s even if people saw more of him and therefore tended to like him much more than the crazy lady wearing a bandanna and wielding a spatula that they could only really see through the order hatch.
“The bakery is definitely Steve’s thing,” she said despite her pleasure, staunchly loyal to her partner’s genius when it came to what he could do with dough and batter. “I like the kneading side of things well enough, but my love affair with food started with street hot dogs and I suppose I’ve never really gotten over that.” She smiled. “They do say the first love hits you the hardest.”
Kate, who had heard the story about why Carol and meat were BFFs, just chuckled and went back to looking as if she wished she had extendable ears. Jess on the other hand seemed vaguely horrified. “Oh god, you don’t mean those awful little carts where the meat sits there all day and the condiments have who knows what in them?”
“Gets me hungry just thinking of them!” Carol replied cheerfully, unashamed of this. If anything, she found Jess’ look of fascinated repulsion adorable. It was something about the wrinkles around her nose. “My first serious boyfriend and I, we tried to sample every hot dog cart in our home town on our dates.” She had fond memories of Peter, but even fonder memories of searching for the best kind of hot dog. When she looked back at Jess to see her still appearing all kinds of bewildered, Carol just laughed. “Don’t let the kale shakes fool you, I was a fast food junkie at heart to start with. Just because I then wanted to make food that tasted just as good and was better for you as well doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten my roots. I was originally going to suggest that Steve and I buy a food truck before I realised that, with the shoulder span we have between us, working in a tiny metal box was going to be a dumb idea.”
“Steve does have very nice shoulders…” Kate said happily, then shrugged her own when Carol gave her a Look. “What? Yours are nice too. This shop has an over abundance of nice shoulders. I blame it on you being ex-military.”
If Carol did indeed flinch ever so slightly at the blithe lack of tactlessness universally possessed by the average teenager the bakery door swinging open luckily hid it. Everyone immediately focused on it whilst simultaneously trying to appear as if they weren’t invested at all. That just translated into Jess retreating off with her teapot and Kate scrubbing industriously at a perfectly clean bit of the counter and Carol studiously examining the highest part of the ceiling before giving up on the pretence and just grinning outright at Steve, Bruce and Stark. “Well?”
Steve looked harried. Bruce looked thoughtful. Stark looked like he had flour all over his probably expensive suit and didn’t care in the slightest. “—I mean it’s rustic because, seriously Steve, you’re wasting so much time insisting on kneading everything by hand when I could build you a perfectly good machine that would still have this ‘sensitivity’ that you keep harping on about, but it all tastes damn good anyway.” He talked very fast, which Carol had already noticed, but when he wasn’t being deliberately an ass it was almost endearing. Definitely engaging anyway. She raised a questioning eyebrow at Steve.
“Tony—“ Oh, so it was Tony now? “—wants to cancel his contract with his pastry supplier and use us instead,” Steve said. He sounded exhausted, which didn’t usually happen, even after a wrestling session with Thor. But Carol also knew that he was a sucker for people paying compliments to his cooking and enjoying what he fed them and could see that he was struggling to stay entirely unenthusiastic.
She hid a smirk and instead chose to pin Stark, fine, Tony with an assessing gaze. “Oh really now?”
“Have you tasted the man’s muffins?” Carol let him think about that one for a second. “Okay, fine, dumb question. But I’ve tasted his muffins. And I want them. Can I have them? Please, Bruce, can I have them?”
Bruce adjusted his glasses and tried to look stern, but Carol recognised his look of tolerant amusement as one she felt herself wearing fairly often. “We’d have to talk to Pepper.”
“And we can’t commit to anything without assessing whether we’d be able to supply it without Steve and Cassie coming in even earlier in the morning.” Carol liked the thrust of the idea – especially if it had the potential to give them another positive relationship with another local business – but she wanted to slow this down before Tony assumed it was a done deal.
Bruce seemed to appreciate her more cautious approach; Tony just looked crestfallen. Or potentially mulish. Steve, the big lug, hated to see anyone disappointed and so he reached into the display case. “Peanut butter and apple cake?” he offered consolingly.
Tony immediately perked up and took the proffered plate. “You are a god among men.”
Steve, ever one to be enthused by a positive reaction, even from someone he’d been having a strange and flour-related rivalry with for the past week, beamed down at him. “Want a kale smoothie to go along with that?”
“Let’s not get carried away now,” Tony said.
They didn’t end up making the pastry deal, mostly because the effort wasn’t worth the profit and, in the end, Carol wasn’t so sure about Steve’s homemade glories being served by robot. She had been slightly worried that this would reignite Tony’s grudge against them, but she needn’t have bothered; the end result was that he spent more time at Blondie then he did at Starkbucks.
“It’s fine,” Carol assured Bruce when he asked. “It’s like having the world’s most opinionated and best-dressed stray cat. And Steve already feeds the ones who are actually cats, so he wasn’t exactly going to refuse Tony.”
Bruce looked doubtfully at where Steve was, with laughing exasperation, closing the door of the bakery in a whining Tony’s face. “Well, if he’s ever a bother…”
“Oh, he’s always a bother,” Carol replied, chuckling. “But don’t sweat it. His Pepper has already been in to give me her number. Six numbers in fact. So she’s got it covered.”
“Oh good,” Bruce replied, obviously relieved, and then didn’t say no when Carol pressed a plate of her meatloaf on him again.
It was Carol’s day off, which was to say that she wasn’t going to be spending the day flipping burgers or doing increasingly wacky things with hamburgers. What was to say was that she still ended up doing a run to the bank to pick up more cash for the register since someone had apparently insisted on paying for their cup of coffee and slice of lemon and verbena tart with a hundred dollar bill, and it had been a choice between letting Kate murder him with a cake slice or Carol going to get more change.
Still, the disaster had been averted and Carol was free to tow Cassie – who was hers for the rest of the day now that her baking shift was over and Steve could handle the afternoon dessert demands – out of the shop with her. Or she would have been if she hadn’t nearly smacked into a doorway full of British grad student.
“Oh, hey Jess,” she said once they were done with the clichéd comedy of Cassie slamming into her back when she stopped abruptly, bouncing off and then peering around her without any signs of damage having been done. She piped up her own hellos, which Jess responded to with the automatically absent-minded politeness Carol assumed was hardwired into the English genome. “Here for the day?” she asked. The laptop bag and messy sheaf of papers certainly suggested so. “If you hurry, I think there’s still one of the cinnamon rolls left.”
Normally, that inspired an immediate sprint to the counter in people. Jess, though, just frowned. “You’re not working today.”
“Nope.” Carol didn’t feel too guilty about sounding cheerful about that even if Kate was probably glaring resentfully at her back. “Day off.” She made a face as she amended herself. “Sort of.”
“Ah…”
Carol was notoriously sceptical of her own ability to read people’s expressions, or at least people who weren’t Steve or Bucky or those who were as transparently honest as, say, Thor. But she could have sworn that Jess looked almost…crestfallen. Disappointed. It was as baffling as it was potentially upsetting. Then Cassie made a strange, coughing noise at about Carol’s shoulder level and, with an uncharacteristic level of forwardness for her, asked “Do you want to come pick pumpkins with us, Jess?”
“So what’s grad student life like?” Carol’s breath steamed as she spoke, but only a little. They hadn’t had any big freezes yet, which was precisely why they were doing this now, when the pumpkins were at their best. Carol actually quite liked this sort of weather, as unbothered by the cold as she was by the heat, and she had already caught Jess sneaking half envious, half aghast looks at the thin sweater she was wearing.
“Poor,” Jess replied promptly. She, in contrast, was wearing a collection of various, knitted layers and kept retreating inside the circle of her scarf like a particularly attractive turtle. “Anti-social. Will do anything to pay for pawning off my stats on someone else.”
Carol was aware that her academic interests had promptly ended as soon as they’d pinned the Second Lieutenant shoulderboard to her uniform and grinned ruefully. “Journalism major,” she admitted. “Not a problem I had.”
“I thought Kate said you were ex-military?”
“Still had to survive the Academy.” Carol shrugged and bent down to rap investigative knuckles against the side of one orange monster. “And not all of us chose to add even more science and engineering to our course load when flight school was going to have more than enough of that for me.” The sound wasn’t hollow enough and she stood back up, moving down the line of damp pumpkin vines. “I liked writing better than mechanics.”
“I thought your menu was rather immaculately spelled for a diner,” Jess demurred as she dutifully followed Carol down the row.
“I am choosing to ignore that implied slur towards diners,” Carol said with great dignity, “but only because I think we want this pumpkin and because you still haven’t really told me what grad school is like.”
“This one?” Jess pointed at the pumpkin with her foot and Carol nodded. They both bent down beside it. “I don’t know what there is to tell, really. I spend a lot of time in the lab.”
“And at the diner.” Carol smiled at Jess then because she jerked a little and looked as if she was worried that was a dig. It must have worked (she smiled tentatively back at least) but Carol wondered why she appeared to care so much about what people thought of her.
“That’s because if I didn’t spend the time at the diner, I’d have to spend even more time in the lab, and Hank and Jan are lovely but I’ve yet to work out whether science is the foreplay for sex or whether sex is the foreplay for science, but either way the diner is safer. So much safer.”
“Even with all the teenage hormones flying around?” As if thinking the same thing, Carol and Jess both turned towards the opposite end of the field where Cassie and her ridiculously tall, almost to Steve standards, boyfriend were doing the same thing they were. Carol knew he had a real name, but for the life of her she couldn’t remember it because everyone (Cassie included) just called him Viz. His very existence was somewhat unexpected – of their painfully young employees, Cassie seemed the shyest and Carol wouldn’t have necessarily expected her to have a boyfriend. But they’d been together since middle school, apparently, and in all fairness they were hardly responsible for the rampant unresolved sexual tension flying around the diner. That was reserved for the teenage boys (and some older, admittedly) who worshipped the ground beneath Kate’s stylish and wholly unaffordable boots and whom were treated with amused and completely callous hauteur by the girl in question. Eli alternately glared daggers at these potential usurpers of Kate’s attention and made calf’s eyes at Steve, maintaining the worshipful side of things just minus the sexual tension. Kate herself had apparently decided that having a crush on Thor was the best thing to do and flirted with him with all the assurance of someone who had been effortlessly popular at high school and the relentless determination of the average terrier. Carol was just glad that Sif had decided to find this funny rather than to actively consider her a threat and had, more than once, seen her egging Kate on. Probably in the hope of getting free wheatgrass and coconut milk juice out of Kate’s aggressive and very, very young brand of courtship.
“Are you kidding?” Jess was chuckling, a rare enough sound that Carol automatically tilted her head towards it. “Maybe I should switch my thesis title around so that I’m studying teenage pheromones rather than insect ones. At least I could put my tea under experimental expenses then.”
The pumpkin was stubbornly inconvenient enough to be lying half on its side, so Carol pulled her knife out of her boot top and handed it to Jess before she wrapped her hands around all that corrugated orangeness. “Do we get extra money for donating our teenage workforce to science?” she asked. “They would make adorable lab rats. No, cut it higher, it’ll last longer if it has more stem attached.”
Once Carol had kindly bullied Jess into being less ginger with the knife, they both got to gaze proudly at their prize. Or at least Carol’s gaze was proud. Jess looked more bemused than anything else. “It’s very…orange,” she said when Carol looked at her, clearly feeling as if she was expected to offer some compliment, even though all she had done was allow herself to be effectively kidnapped and driven to a choose your own pumpkin farm on the outskirts of town.
“She’s a beauty.” Carol patted it affectionately where it lay cradled in her arms, then hitched it up higher onto her shoulder so she only needed one hand to steady it. “But she’s only number one though. We still need twenty-nine more.”
“What does a person even do with thirty pumpkins?” Jess asked, a trifle plaintively, while they walked back towards Carol’s truck.
“Oh sweet summer child,” Carol said because there was only so many times a person could watch their Star Trek DVDs over and over, and Sharon swore by Game of Thrones, “you’ve never tasted Steve’s pumpkin spice beignets. Or his pumpkin and ricotta cheesecake. And, my god, the year he perfected his pumpkin eggnog I don’t think we left the apartment for three days…”
Carol had always been susceptible to diving headfirst down the memory lane of food porn and she lost a few moments to probably looking dreamy and smacking her lips a lot. When she remembered that the real world existed again she resurfaced to find Jess looking rosy-cheeked, messy-haired and surprisingly nervous in an affectedly nonchalant sort of way. Carol cocked her head in silent question because she was being hard to read again.
“Forgive me if this is rude,” Jess started, “but half the regulars are dying to know, and also Kate said she’d give a free slice of pie to anyone who actually asked…” Carol raised an eyebrow at her, but while it made Jess blush it didn’t deter her either. That wasn’t wholly unsurprising; Jess was awkward, but she was awkwardly bold as well. “You and Steve? Business partners? Or partners partners?”
Really, Carol should have been expecting that. She gurgled a little laugh and nearly dropped the pumpkin. If she’d had a dollar for every time that someone had asked her that then she wouldn’t have needed to sell her soul to the bank for a small business loan. While she was making noises like a particularly merry hippo though, Jess looked wary and like she was about to flee, so Carol contained herself. Mostly.
“No, sorry, that’s just…we get that a lot.” If she’d been less certain of where she stood in Steve’s life and he in hers then she might have been worried by it. Mostly, she was just amused by it, while Steve oscillated anxiously between embarrassment and then assuring Carol he wasn’t saying she wasn’t lovely but… “No, no, a thousand times no. Not even in the past, I swear.”
Jess didn’t look convinced. “Seriously?” she asked dubiously, pressing the fairly unique and one time advantage she had of having Carol alone in a frosty field with only pumpkins and two distant teenagers for company. “Never?”
This was the point where Carol usually started eye-rolling and making people run laps for being too nosy if she had authority over them (and occasionally those over whom she had no authority, but could shame into it nonetheless) but….she kind of got it. Why people looked at her and Steve and their closeness and assumed that there was only one natural culmination for that sort of affection. “I’m not saying that it was never a possibility. Steve’s Steve. I think it’s hard to not love him. If I make myself think about it…yeah, I could see it. Maybe I could even want it.” She could feel herself smiling a little, eyes gone distant, and it didn’t even seem to matter that this was a wholly inappropriate conversation to be having in a pumpkin field with a customer whose last name she didn’t even know. But a whole lot of Carol’s life was pretty damn inappropriate, so why ruin a good running streak? “And who knows? Maybe it would have been a good idea once, God knows I was as impressed by his shoulder to hip ratio when I first met him as anyone else. But for now…for now, Steve’s the person I want to be, not the person I want to be with. I don’t think it’s healthy to get into a relationship with someone you think is that much better than you. That’s either going to be a crap balance of power or someone’s going to get disappointed. And Steve’s problem is that he’s better than pretty much everyone else, so they get all upset when they realise that, actually, sometimes he’s not. Especially since I think he’s so focussed on doing right by people that actually working on his own relationships feels selfish. He can be kind of a lousy boyfriend, actually. Ask Sharon about it when she’s had a few glasses of wine, if you’re interested, it’s hilarious when she starts yelling about how his abs were too intimidatingly perfect for them to have stayed together. So…I guess we could have tried the dating thing. But, honestly? I’d rather just have him in my life. And so long as I do, I’m happy.”
That impromptu, unexpected, inappropriately rambling speech had been long enough that they were by Carol’s truck now and she grunted as she set the pumpkin down in the bed. That almost necessitated a break in all of the personal shit she’d been spewing and it was as if Carol had only just remembered that this was likely more than Jess had asked for. She snuck a sideways look at her, expecting awkwardness (or, worse, boredom) but instead Jess just looked…well, Carol didn’t know what that look was. Interested? Sad? A mixture of the both? Carol didn’t really do embarrassment, certainly not anymore, but she felt curiously on the spot for her, like someone had scraped away a little of her usually tough skin and left her uncharacteristically vulnerable. So she played it off, rolling up her sleeves and smiling lop-sidedly, like this was all completely normal for her. “Plus, have you seen us? As a couple, we’d look way too incestuous, even if our kids would kill in one of those all American toddlers and tiaras pageants.”
That made Jess laugh and make a dig at American television, which Carol saw as a fair opening to make a sly comment about the crap special effects in Doctor Who, and that argument lasted them until long after Cassie and Viz had joined them and they were driving back into town. But it also occurred afterwards to Carol, when she was wiping down the last pumpkin and carefully stacking it with its ginger brethren in the larder, that for someone who liked people in general but didn’t necessarily offer them that much insight into her, that had been a lot of talking. And she’d been a little bashful afterwards, sure, but nothing too painful. Jess was just that easy to talk to about the big stuff, not just the trivialities, and Carol hadn’t felt that with someone in a long time.
Not since Steve, in fact, all those years ago under the unforgiving desert sun…
The less said about the time leading up to Thanksgiving the better.
Actually, the less said about the time leading up to Christmas the better because it just never stopped.
Carol blamed the weather for basically not having time to stop and breathe, let alone sleep, because apparently the moment it started getting chilly then everyone and their mother and their second cousin twice removed wanted to huddle somewhere warm and gorge on carbs. She wasn’t entirely unsympathetic because even if she didn’t mind the cold, she had an unholy grudge against drizzle, and it meant that their profits took a cheerful leap into the comfortable realm ‘well, I’m fairly certain we won’t go bust this month at least’. But it also meant that Cassie and Steve were getting in at three-thirty rather than four to meet the demand for seasonal cupcakes (Carol had had to order in three times as much cinnamon as usual and she wasn’t even going to talk about the gross weight of dried fruit they’d gone through in November alone) and that the carefully balanced system of shifts she and Eli had worked out went out of the window they had to have open even when it was sleeting because of how furnace-like the kitchen got when they had this many orders to dash between.
They used up the pumpkins far too fast and Carol had to make another run to the farm, but Jess was squirreled away in her lab frantically making up the hours before it got closed for the holidays and so she had to take Bucky instead. He was more useful with the heavy lifting, but Carol felt strangely bereft nonetheless. She might even have thought about doing a bit of wistful moping if she hadn’t just been so damn busy, which was a good thing in the end even if she did start having dreams about apocalypses that had slouching, shambling stacks of sentient pancakes instead of zombies.
Carol slept through Thanksgiving because it was her first real day off since the middle of October. She and Steve would have tried to do the same for Christmas except Sharon staged an intervention by nearly kicking down their bedroom doors and dragging them out into the living room to eat Chinese takeout and drink one of Bucky’s mysterious vodka cocktails that tasted like winter and punched like a soldier.
(“I’m so glad that Steve didn’t permanently drive you away with his irritating perfection,” Carol said fervently around a mouthful of char siu pork and Steve made a half-heartedly wounded noise, but Sharon just laughed and put more crispy seaweed on his plate and then everything was alright.)
So even if the pious, guilty diet everyone went on in the New Year meant that a diner was the last place most over-gorged indulgers wanted to be and their sales reflected that, Carol was actually relieved for the chance to catch their breath. And at least Steve’s kale shakes were popular, for all that people usually furtively bought a cinnamon roll with them, ‘just this once’.
They were still alive.
Winter hadn’t even begun to think of thawing out yet when Carol heard a scream from out front. She burst out of the kitchen brandishing her second best boning knife to address the potential thief/sexual predator/pancake zombie and instead saw a dead deer standing in Blondie’s doorway.
“Ooh, gimme,” she said, handing the knife off to a baffled looking Kate, and advancing with delightedly outstretched hands. “Steve,” she bellowed, “Clint and Natasha are here.”
Steve, floury and lit up from within in with surprised anticipation, poked his head out from the bakery just in time to see the deer carcass shift enough to one side to reveal a sandy blond head and, further back, the slim ranginess of the red-headed woman who was countering Carol’s grin with a subtle smile of her own. “You’re early,” he protested with pleased accusation and bounded forwards like the world’s largest puppy.
“Blame the blizzard that drove us down south sooner than I expected,” said Clint, smirking and seeming not to mind the one hundred and fifty pound odd carcass slung over his shoulder, even if it was threatening to drag on the ground since he was actually an inch or so shorter than Carol. “Nat was all for staying out there and proudly fulfilling her Russian heritage or whatever, but I wanted to come back with the same number of fingers and toes that I had when I left.”
“Twenty seems excessive,” Natasha said lightly. She wasn’t carrying a whole deer, but neither was she unburdened. She held out a brace of ducks and Carol actually made what she unfortunately knew was the same noise that she’d whipped out the first time she’d seen Thor doing one-armed press-ups. She loved having game to play around with and she’d have hugged them if, a, Natasha had been the sort and, b, Clint hadn’t been more deer than man right now. So she settled for laughing, taking the ducks and pushing Clint in the direction of their walk-in refrigerator before Bambi’s mom made any of their patrons cry.
With the cheerful cruelty of the bosses, Carol and Steve delegated their respective shifts to Eli and Cassie and took over the corner booth closest to the kitchen. Carol outright refused to be stuck on the same side as Steve – their shoulders made any sort of sharing difficult. And, besides, Steve had always had a hilarious and unexpected thing for Natasha that everyone except the pair of them found way too amusing. Steve was atypically flustered by it and Natasha…well, who ever knew what Natasha thought, except maybe Clint, and he just grinned like the Cheshire Cat any time it was raised and pled the fifth.
So Carol ended up leaning companionably against Clint (who, admittedly, only had ‘small’ shoulders in comparison to Steve) smelling musk and frost and the beeswax he treated his bowstrings with. She hadn’t known him all that long – Steve was the one who had served with him on a mission long, long ago – but Clint was her sort of person, equal parts good guy and sarcastic douchebag, even without him and Natasha keeping them in stock with seasonal game to give her a wider variety of meats to play around with in her sausages and burgers. Across from them, Natasha was all serene, self-contained relaxation and Steve was trying to make himself as small as possible so as not to encroach on her space.
“Enjoying civilisation?” she asked, Natasha ostensibly, but it was Clint who answered, sounding long-suffering.
“Far too much, she’s had four baths since we got home,” he complained. “Long ones as well. It’s like she wants to morph into a prune or something.”
Natasha looked beatific, Steve blushed and Carol made her best sympathetic eyebrows, then promptly ruined it by asking “Is that why you don’t smell much better than the buck you brought in?” She laughed when Clint thumped her in the shoulder and held her hands up in mock surrender. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you smell likes roses and kittens and pot pourri.”
“Damn straight,” Clint sniffed and then stretched out as much as he could in a small booth with Carol tolerating his arm stretching along the top of the seat behind them. “God, I’m glad to be back in somewhere with wifi and Mexican food and coffee again though.”
“Are you staying for long?” Steve asked.
Natasha and Clint did that weird psychic communication thing again, the one where her face did nothing and Clint moved his nose, cheeks and eyebrows around a bit before a silent consensus was reached and he nodded. “For a couple of months at least. There are fewer permits than usual, but that actually suits us. I like being able to feel my nose and Nat has a dancing gig she can fall back on.”
In response to the question Steve was too polite to ask, Natasha inclined her head just so. “Ballet.”
Carol managed not to laugh at Steve looking twice as stricken by his polite devastation where Natasha’s attractiveness was concerned than usual. “Give us dates and we’ll make sure we’re in the audience,” she assured her. She even thought Natasha looked quietly pleased by the idea. That or it was just a trick of the light.
“You mean you get actual evenings off?” Clint asked, grinning like the little shit he was. “What kind of new business owners are you?”
“The kind doing better than your hipster Middle Earth ranger asses,” Carol shot back.
“We’re actually looking at hiring a few more part-time staff,” Steve said, more helpfully. “Kate and Eli are students, so there are only so many shifts they can pull, and Carol gets grumpy if she’s not allowed to have her monthly date with all of the Star Wars DVDs.”
Carol looked around for something to throw at him, but was distracted by Clint suddenly looking sly. That never boded well and she gave him the full weight of her suspicion. “I’d heard you were employing child labour,” he said blithely. “And that one of them wanted to have Steve’s babies.” Carol relaxed when Steve sighed at the reminder of Eli’s continued and unwavering idolisation of him, something that proved to be premature. “And that Carol was making googly-eyes at a student.”
Even Natasha’s quiet laugh, a rarity in itself, wasn’t enough to distract Carol from her lacklustre mortification. “One, Coulson is banned for life from here if he carries on texting you guys all the gossip and then he’ll have to go back to buying his doughnuts at 7-Eleven,” she said. “And two, she’s a grad student.” She hadn’t even thought she’d been that obvious, but apparently not, so there was no point in denying it. Though if this was irritatingly common knowledge, then maybe that explained Cassie’s weird little spark of bravery when she’d invited Jess along to pick pumpkins out of the blue…
“Which birthday did you celebrate this year again, Danvers?” Clint shot back, straddling the line between totally innocent and wicked as all fuck. “Thirty-three?”
“…Thirty-four.”
Clint looked victoriously across the table, searching for approval. Natasha just raised an eyebrow at him and Steve smiled apologetically at Carol like the adorable traitor he was. “I like Jess,” he admitted, and this was definitely payback for Carol finding his completely out of character crush on Natasha hysterical. “She tells me interesting things about spiders.”
Weirdly, Natasha looked approving. Clint just cackled. And Carol…Carol knew they were only joking, but the booth suddenly felt too small and there was that familiar sense of being backed into a corner, everything else looming over-large around her and an imaginary but nonetheless painful ache setting up in her head. It wasn’t their fault for teasing her the way that everybody did with their friends, but her shoulders hunched up nonetheless, unbidden but still definitely defensive. “She’s a customer, guys,” she said shortly. Too shortly for her, even if she was the brusque one out of her and Steve. “Don’t be idiots.”
The silence that followed was just long enough to be awkward, empty and loud in the way that uncomfortable quietness could be. Carol deliberately didn’t look at Steve because she knew that gentle, resigned look of not-pity-but-understanding-and-that-was-even-worse far too well. Instead, she fixed stubborn eyes on Natasha’s left temple until the dark red curls there shifted in a brisk movement and Carol was left surprised by the intensity of the calm in the other woman’s eyes, but also the degree of quiet understanding there as well. “A wild boar ran off with Clint’s clothes last week,” she said mildly and Carol could have kissed her then for the outraged squawk it wrought from next her.
“You promised you wouldn’t tell!” Clint yelped, outraged.
Natasha was all unrepentant easiness as she cut up one of the muffins from the over-flowing platter between them (because Steve overfed the people to whom he was indifferent, let alone those he harboured a secret-not-so-secret longing to run away to Russia with) and shrugged. “You also promised you wouldn’t go swimming in that stream and yet you did so it serves you right.”
Clint’s naked body wasn’t precisely something Carol normally wanted to think about, but it was a distraction, a glorious distraction. And the same way that she’d pushed through Basic, Combat Survival Training and the shitshow in Afghanistan that had resulted in a broken arm and three fewer fingernails than normal for her, she pushed through her discomfort now, but a pall was cast over her usual cheerfulness at seeing people with as many interesting stories as Clint and Natasha. And it was all her, her own fears, that oppressive sense of the future that made it hard to breathe when bleakness rolled in like a storm front inside her brain.
All her. Not them. Her. And even being given an impromptu butchery masterclass by Natasha couldn’t quite dispel the quiet, looming sense of despair that had denned down behind her breastbone and didn’t show any signs of thawing even with spring on the horizon.
“Hey,” Steve said after she’d called out ‘Yeah?’ in response to his polite knock on her (open) door. He looked as if he might have been trying to be unobtrusive, but given how much of her doorway he took up it was pretty futile and she rolled her eyes at him and pointed towards her desk chair. He bypassed that though to sit next to her on her bed, tall and solid and dressed in sweats she had a suspicion had been hers at some point. She half considered protesting, but she was just too tired to fight off his concern at this point and went back to staring mutely, blankly at the too-cheerful blue of her wall.
They sat like that for a while, the mood not in itself comfortable, but the silence between them wasn’t uncomfortable. They didn’t necessarily need words, they just chose to use them when they felt like being specific. Like Steve, like now, when he jostled her thigh with the long line of his own. “Sorry about the Jess thing,” he said and the knot behind Carol’s breastbone turned a little more Gordian. ‘The Jess thing’ he called it, like it was actually a thing, like she had any right to be upset about a pretty grad student she’d picked pumpkins with once and didn’t even see on a daily basis, no matter how increasingly and alarmingly fond Carol was becoming of her... Was the problem even Jess or was it just Carol’s entire, frustrated relationship with time?
She wanted a drink. But she also wanted Steve not to worry any more than he had to and she thought admitting to that would just deepen the furrows in his brow. So instead of going and challenging Bucky to do tequila shots until one or both of them passed out she sighed and brought one knee up to her chest. “Don’t be,” she muttered. “It’s not even a thing. Calling it a thing just makes it a thing and it’s not. A thing, I mean.”
Steve kindly didn’t comment on just how little sense that made. That was because Steve did everything kindly when it mattered, when she felt the mania chewing on the composure she held at bay with business and sausage recipes and the frantic lunch rush. Which was why he just…didn’t comment at all. Instead, he wrapped an arm around her and she leaned miserably into the sturdy strength of a man who would have still been a soldier were it not for her own particular brand of crazy. She didn’t cry – Carol had always saved her tears for other people rather than herself, or tried to at least since circumstances conspired against this particular resolution – but she did stay there until the fire alarm going off announced that Bucky had taken it upon himself to try and make dinner. Steve knew when to be quiet, but Bucky helped by not helping at all, not in the slightest, and that was probably why she didn’t yell too much at him for burning marinara sauce onto the base of one of her copper-bottomed saucepans.
It didn’t get easier, it just got worse. Or better, depending on how you looked at it.
It was better on Carol’s good days, when she actively enjoyed the smell of Jess’ hair or spent her breaks trying to make sense of whatever science crap it was that she studied whilst the grad student just laughed at her inability to pronounce the most complicated chemical names. It was better when Jess stayed after they closed to help clean up and Carol got her turn to feel superior when she saw quite how bad the other woman was at anything remotely related to food, which just supported every stereotype about British cooking she said, earning her an aggrieved hip-bump that sent shivers up her spine. It was better when she made Jess watch A New Hope for the very first time, which just ended up in Carol being forced to smother her with couch cushions because the little heathen didn’t appreciate classic masterpieces and instead insisted on pointing out every directorial and story-telling decision that she disagreed with (and the worst part was that Carol still forgave her for such poor taste in films).
It was worse, however, every time Carol looked at her life and remembered just how much she was failing at staying detached.
Kate, proactive little future world leader slash mafia boss that she was, suggested two of her friends as candidates for the part-time staff positions Carol and Steve were looking for, and they didn’t see the harm in giving them an interview. Business was just starting to pick up again now that people were slowly giving up on their New Year health kick and eating carbs again, so now would be the best time to train them up while a shift wasn’t hectic enough to send them screaming for the hills. (“Lure them in under false pretences,” Kate had said with no loyalty to her friends whatsoever and Carol had laughed and taken the numbers the younger woman had carefully printed out for her on a napkin.)
Carol and Steve were there because duh. Eli was there because Steve was, but also nominally to have a say in the short-order cook he might have a hand in training. Kate was there because of nosiness and also to take notes since her handwriting was better than Carol’s and Steve’s put together and Tony…no one knew why Tony was there (“You don’t even go here,” Eli had said accusingly. “I’m here to try and convince Rogers that robots are still the better option,” Tony had replied, which hadn’t justified his presence at all) but it would have taken more effort to get rid of him than to let him listen in, even if Steve was making Stern Faces at him in between smiling reassuringly at the two candidates.
Kate, who was getting dictator-like in her managerial role, had evicted some hungover frat boys from the largest table in the place, and now wielded a pen like she was some sort of political reporter. Her notebook was full of her transcript of the interview process, written alarmingly fast and yet in elegant cursive. The skinny one, Billy, all sharp angles and a twitchy sort of energy, was trying to covertly read what she’d written down and Kate socked him in the upper arm without even looking at him. The cook candidate chuckled and glanced fondly at him with a look that probably mean ‘you deserved that’. Billy’s mulishness and Teddy’s amusement aside, at least Carol could be sure that Kate would keep them in line, which wouldn’t necessarily be true if they employed someone older.
She definitely liked Teddy. He looked her in the eye, called her ‘Ma’am’ and had said that he had had kitchen experience beforehand. He was a little like Eli actually, but even calmer if possible, and without the Steve-worship. Billy seemed a little more erratic, a little more restless, but intelligent in an insatiable sort of way. Either he was going to get bored of the job in a month or he was going to start racing with Kate to see which of them could come up with the best business innovation. He seemed strangely reluctant to be there, but Carol was inclined to chalk that up to being interviewed in front of a friend who would out-rank him if he got the job since teenage boys were hardly the only specimens of their gender who got their y-fronts in a twist about being subordinate to women.
Natasha and Clint (who had come in this morning with Natasha limping slightly and Clint making snide comments about en pointe shoes before she had neatly kicked him in the shin with her abused feet) didn’t have a monopoly on silent communication. When Steve glanced her way, she knew he approved as well and she slanted her mouth in the way that meant he could speak for the both of them. He tended to sound more professional than she did anyway. “Well, there’ll be a probationary period of course, but I’m hopeful,” he said to them. “I’d like to organise a day for both of you to shadow Eli and Kate before we actually start your training, but unless you have any objections…”
Teddy was grinning like a blond Buddha, inspiring the same sort of expression in Carol. Kate had been right when she’d said that Teddy was one of the most immediately likeable people she’d met other than Steve. But she was also aware of Billy fidgeting, narrowing his eyes at where Steve’s dog tags were jangling accidentally outside of his t-shirt and turned to look at him when he abruptly squared his shoulders. “Not unless you’re planning on going against equal opportunity employment,” he piped up, voice young but sharp.
Steve – like most people would if politics, not to mention federal law and non-discrimination acts were brought up so candidly and without either warning or any sort of logical lead-in – looked baffled. “Well, it wasn’t on my list of things to do today,” he said, maintaining his usual good-natured quality, “so I don’t see us changing our hiring policy now.”
He was being polite, but Carol suddenly had an inkling of where it was going. Billy was holding himself like a freedom fighter and Kate was sending him looks that made Carol think that her murdering him was a very real possibility. Teddy just looked like he wanted to put his head in his hands and was only just managing to maintain a now rather forced smile. But, really, it was Billy’s rebellious sort of aggressiveness that gave it away. That and the brittle, desperate tension that Carol for once sensed underneath whatever internet petition soapbox attitude he was projecting and recognised as something she herself had once felt. It was the look of someone about to do something wrong for the right reasons and Carol was suddenly acutely remembered being a teenager and feeling like every conversation with adults was a battle for her rights to be herself.
Billy looked cautiously belligerent, proving her suspicions right, as he reached for Teddy's hand (who looked apologetically across the table at them, but didn’t stop him from doing so). "But you were in the Army, right? Doesn't that basically mean that you, like, endorsed 'don't ask, don't tell'?"
The kid, Carol thought, was extremely young. And green. And a bit of a little shit if he was ignoring the askance looks of his boyfriend to still be pushing Steve on this. But when she glanced Steve's way, she saw him looking extremely old and just...tired. As if he'd been asked this question too many times before. And it was suddenly worrying that, maybe, he had been that made Carol frown decisively and lean over to cuff the teenager round the back of his head. She ignored his startled 'Hey!' and just glared. "After I kissed my first girl and had my first freak out about it, Steve snuck me off campus and took me to a ladies bar so I could celebrate it. And then after I realised I still liked kissing dudes as well, he didn't ask me if that meant I was only half gay or if I didn't think I was just being greedy, which is more respectful of my right to love whomever the hell I want to than most of the baby gays running around with chips on their shoulder refusing to accept that bisexuality is a valid lifestyle choice."
At least the kid had the shame to drop his gaze. That meant Carol got a good look at where Jess was sitting in her usual corner, an odd expression on her face, and she mentally sighed. Next time, maybe she'd remember to adjust the volume control when she felt the impulse to share personal details like her clumsy, stumbling path towards working out whether she wanted a label at all, let alone the bisexual one. "The world isn't perfect, kid, and we haven't all got the luxury of raging at the machine when there are bigger things out there to fight for than being one hundred percent honest. But we're trying. And, for the record, Steve? A hell of a lot more perfect than the world generally is, I'll tell you that."
"Carolllll," Steve complained, but it was half-hearted. She grinned at him, unrepentant, and got a quirk of the lips back. For her, that was enough, especially since Billy was looking like a kicked puppy. She didn't regret having cuffed him down, but she could empathise - when you were young, discovering yourself was world consuming. It was all you could focus on. And you assumed the entire world was focusing on it as well, hence the defensiveness and the defiance. It was a seriously dumb thing to have done, shoving an agenda down the throats of potential employers who were far more likely to reject him for the job because of his attitude than because of his sexuality…but she also looked past his aggressive defensiveness to the frustration with a world that wasn’t as good as the one he could see just out of his grasp, the one he could have if only he fought these battles hard enough and changed enough minds, and she didn’t need to ask what had made him so prepared to be discriminated against, only trusted that it had happened and that it had sucked. Once, she might have been irritated with him. Now she just felt weirdly benevolent as she stood up and briskly tied her hair back with the elastic around her wrist. "So, how do you boys take your burgers?"
Billy looked more than a little stunned, like he’d already psyched himself up to storm out of the place, fuming about homophobia and discrimination, and now didn’t know what to do with himself. Luckily, his boyfriend proved himself to be the sensible one. “Kosher, no pickles,” he said, pointing at Billy, “and I’ve had your blue-cheese stuffed burger before and it was life-changing.” His voice was mild, but the gratitude was naked in his eyes. Carol let the corner of her mouth crook at him and he did the same. Then she ruffled Billy’s hair, said “Either you need a hair-cut or you need to find a way to keep it out of your eyes when you’re serving customers, and I’m making yours a double because you’re too skinny” and marched off to appropriate a corner of her grill back from Clint who had offered to take over while she and Eli conducted the interview.
“Don’t worry, you get used to her doing that,” she heard Tony say smugly, presumably to Billy.
“She’s terrifying,” the kid said, but it sounded awed.
“She is,” Kate chirped proudly, “but she’s also amazing. I want to be her when I grow up.” And Carol laughed softly to herself before the door swung closed and she went to indulge her genetic imperative to feed people until they cried for mercy. Maybe young people weren’t wholly irredeemable after all.
The end results of that exciting little interview were that Carol simultaneously gained herself a new and wonderfully competent kid to take shifts in the kitchen and a baby gay who insisted on regarding her with such wonder that she now knew what being Steve must have felt like.
(“You’re an inspiration to the infant,” Tony magnanimously lectured her, brandishing his beignet like an Oscar. “Take it as the compliment it is, Carol. Now I know it can be daunting, being a role model to an impressionable young person, but as someone who has vast experience with people wanting to be like me, if you ever want any help…”
Bruce chuckled into his chai tea and Carol rolled her eyes so hard that it hurt then threw a stale baguette end at Tony’s head, but he still insisted on printing out a pamphlet entitled ‘Don’t hate me because I’m awe-inspiring, a guide to being a shining example of exceptionality by Tony Stark’ and reading excerpts out loud until she threatened to call Pepper.)
“I am not marching in his first Pride with him like a PFLAG mother,” Carol muttered rebelliously into her meatballs after Billy had shown far too much interest in her romantic history and she had tried to deter him and ignore how painfully aware of Jess’ presence in that corner of hers she was.
“Aww, but you and Steve could hold his hands,” Bucky had said, singularly unhelpful as usual. “It’d be cute. You could bring the entire nest of ducklings with you and show your combined support.”
“It does occasionally feel like we’ve ended up a surprise batch of children,” Steve said ruefully, patting Carol supportively on the shoulder.
“Yeah, well, I feel cheated of their cute if pukey phase.” Carol was not mollified. “The phase before they start making dramatic statements about their sexuality.”
“It’s yours and Steve’s fault for being so wholesomely respectable.” Carol knew she was tired because Bucky was stealing meatballs off her plate and she wasn’t even fighting it. “If you were a little less representative of the All American Dream then maybe you’d stop accidentally adopting enough ethnically and sexually diverse teenagers that you could shoot your own United Colors of Benetton ad.”
“The moment they start fighting about whose turn it is to get the front seat, we’re firing them all,” Carol told Steve, entirely serious, but he ruined the gravity of her threat by smiling tolerantly at her and telling her to eat her creamed spinach.
Carol’s sense of unasked for parenthood was not helped by Eli turning twenty-one and Steve suggesting they throw a party for him in the diner, but at least she wasn’t so far gone that she felt at all reluctant to buy him alcohol. A lot of alcohol. No, really, so much alcohol because putting Bucky in charge of drinks was always a bad idea.
“How many people are you expecting to come to this?” she asked, aghast, when she saw just how many crates he had piled in her previously beautifully organised kitchen.
“That depends entirely on how many customers took the fliers Kate left out for them,” Bucky said, not at all sounding like he realised the doom-like movie sound effects he was setting off in Carol’s brain. “You only turn twenty-one once, Carol.”
“You only have to burn a building down once as well, Bucky.” But that sounded paranoid even to her and Carol sighed, shook her head and went back out front to go frighten the birthday boy’s friends into submission or something. Even in the fifteen minutes she’d spent helping Bucky out the crowd in the diner had swelled considerably. Kate, for once, had managed to completely drive thoughts of Steve out of Eli’s head for once by merit of wearing a retro violet number and some seriously envy-provoking boots. Even Carol did a slight double-take before she shoved Kate back in the foetus box and as for Eli, he looked like the war was not just won, but celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its armistice. The cat-with-cream look on Kate’s face as she imperiously organised the arrangement of the food suggested that she was well aware of this.
Cassie and Viz were looking unconsciously adorable as they chatted with Teddy and the look of fascinated terror on Billy’s face suggested that maybe he was about to make Sharon his new mentor in modern gender equality, which was fine with Carol. Meanwhile, Steve and Thor were taking up an entire corner all on their own while they created a singularity of blond muscularity around whom the rest of the guests had to squeeze past. And, oh boy, there were already a lot of them.
Plus two more, apparently. Since she wasn’t yet occupied with conversation, Carol went to say hi to Natasha and Clint when they walked in, though she narrowed her eyes at what he was carrying. “Oh my God, tell me you didn’t buy Eli a bow for his birthday,” she said instead of the intended and somewhat more socially acceptable ‘hello’.
“No, this is to show Kate,” Clint replied, making Carol’s eyebrows feel as if they disappeared immediately into her hairline.
“It’s not him suddenly developing a schoolgirl fetish,” Natasha said with a smirk. “Apparently, socialites do archery now. It’s all very Gossip Girl meets The Hunger Games.”
“It really, really pains me that you watch that show,” Clint complained and got the expected zero percent of shame from Natasha. “Nah, we got the birthday boy real Russian vodka from Natasha’s secret and potentially illegal sources.”
Having drunk with Natasha just once before (and that was definitely, definitely enough) Carol winced on Eli’s behalf and eyed the bottle in question with more than a little trepidation. “Between you and Bucky, we’re all going to die of alcohol poisoning,” she said resignedly.
“Oh, your roommate?” Clint asked, but before Carol could answer three things happened at once.
One, Steve spotted Natasha and his face lit up with a quiet, bashful sort of radiance as he excused himself from Thor and made to come over.
Two, Bucky banged noisily through the kitchen door, grinning fiendishly and holding a martini glass that looked like it actually had dry ice running down its sides.
And, three, Natasha went very, very still in a way entirely different from her usual quiet, stately grace, and said “James” in a queerly uninflected voice that still managed to have more potential emotion in it than anything Carol had heard her say before.
With the usual sixth sense a room full of people had for any sort of drama, silence quickly fell and Carol was automatically looking towards Steve, so she witnessed in excruciating detail the moment a man trained to assess a situation in a glance picked up on the tense undercurrents rippling around them all and his face fell. Beside her, Clint was equally quiet (for once) except he was looking at Natasha, then at Bucky, then back to his friend.
Carol wanted to be by Steve’s side in that moment, except there was some unwritten law in play that none of them could move until Natasha and Bucky did, and they were just staring at each other, Natasha closed-down and Bucky with such naked shock that it had actually wiped away all of his usual cockiness. Something nudged her hand and she looked unwillingly down to see the vodka bottle extended mutely towards her by Clint.
She took it.
“So, Danvers, spill,” Tony asked later, after Natasha and Bucky had disappeared out to the courtyard. “Tell me you knew that your roommate and your pet wild woman had some sort of torrid Arctic love affair in Canada years ago.”
“No one has torrid anything in Canada,” Carol retorted snappishly. Tony though, the bastard, was undeterred and just looked even more expectant. “…No,” Carol had to admit. “This is news to all of us.” And she sincerely wished it hadn’t been because Steve was staunchly talking to Sif about what looked like ab exercises, something about which he was normally endearingly enthusiastic to a comic degree, but Carol was aware that romantic disappointment was one thing, but that romantic disappointment because his best friend and his suddenly far less hilarious crush had…well, it wasn’t good, and Carol was having to quell every instinct she had to go and hover unhelpfully and protectively by his side.
“She called him ‘James’ though?” Kate said, frowning towards the back of the diner as if she could see through walls.
“He is James, technically. James Buchanan Barnes. Except Steve calls him Bucky and so does pretty much everyone else now.” Carol had called him James all of four times before giving up and just following Steve’s lead.
“But doesn’t Steve like…” Normally, Kate’s boldness was something that Carol liked about her, but she must have looked extra forbidding or something because the girl didn’t even finish that question, just trailed off and looked over at Steve with a stricken sort of understanding. “…oh.”
‘Oh’ indeed.
A little guilty about having shut Kate down quite so hard when the mess was entirely unrelated to her, Carol didn’t object when she took a beer, even if she wasn’t even twenty yet, let alone legal. The diner was technically closed, it was a private party and, frankly, she had bigger concerns than a girl who had probably been given wine with every family evening meal since she was ten having one beer. Besides, drama aside, this was Eli’s party and she was extremely conscious of Steve not wanting to be the sort to ruin that because he was a fucking trooper like that. If he could suck it up then so could she.
So she had her own beer, then another, and contended herself with just keeping an eye on Steve and being irritably conscious of how Bucky and Natasha hadn’t resurfaced yet. Especially since that presumably meant that they were still occupying the courtyard and about halfway through her third beer Carol suddenly, desperately needed some fresh air.
It was the middle of February, and a particularly nasty February at that, so the weather was frightful even for Carol. The cold hit her like a punch to the face, but breathing in air that felt like razors was still preferable to the claustrophobia that had surged over her without warning. Carol huddled on their front stoop, tucking as much of her out of sight of the party going on behind their wide glass windows, and tried to soak up as much solitude as she could before she made herself go back in.
“You’re really taking this tough, independent woman thing a bit too bloody far if you’re refusing to wear a coat at all,” a voice said and Carol looked up to see Jess appearing out of the sulky snowfall. In spite of her attempts at complete and total misanthropy there was still a silly little lurch of surprised pleasure at seeing her. There always was these days, which just showed how much Carol failed at pretending that the sight of Jess didn’t usually brighten up her day.
“Eli invited you as well?” she asked, shoving her hands under her armpits and, for once, enviously eying all of Jess’ excessive layers.
“I think Eli invited everyone,” Jess said, all wry self-deprecation and overt criticalness as she looked Carol over. “Is this an endurance thing?”
“It’s a too many beers, too many people, too little air thing.” Carol didn’t feel like explaining that she was having sympathy pains for the state of her business partner’s love life, or that feeling like everything was just too much to deal with was something she had increasingly started to suffer at the worst possible moments ever since she’d come home from Afghanistan. “I’ll go back in a second, once I’ve cooled down a little. But, God, go in, I know you’re a wuss about the cold.”
She started to open the door, but Jess vehemently shook her head in a way that set the bobble on her hat to shaking like it was suffering from a heroin withdrawal. “In a minute,” was her inexplicable answer and Carol looked dubiously at her. That was not the outfit of anyone who enjoyed spending time outside in the snow.
“Sure?” She made it a question, but Jess didn’t answer. She didn’t say anything actually and, unsure, Carol just mentally shrugged and went back to what she’d been doing before, watching the snow fall. That was increasingly difficult to focus on though because she could sense Jess’ tension like a palpable electricity in the air, rising and falling, gradually cresting towards…something. Carol, already frustrated and not a fan of being quite so shit at reading people, was about to ask what was wrong when--.
“Will you go out to dinner with me?”
Carol’s eyebrows did the hairline disappearing thing again. She was that surprised that it was involuntary. “I’m sorry?” she asked, having apparently spent enough time with Steve that she had absorbed his automatic politeness even when she was shocked.
Jess wrinkled her nose at her, flushing slightly, but seemingly patient as she repeated herself. “Would you like to go and get food with me some time?”
Even Carol understood the significance of that. She wasn’t that bad. But she just didn’t seem able to reconcile the three separate notions of Jess, herself and dinner in the same linear thought and, crap, she was staring at Jess like a bimbo, wasn’t she? “Dinner?” she repeated.
Jess, even faced with Carol being an idiot, seemed to find it amusing and chuckled. “Dinner, yes,” she said, only mildly awkward compared to how much of a fool Carol was making of herself. “I’ve been told that’s a fairly safe suggestion for a first date.”
And, oh God, it was actually a date, it was definitely a date, and Jess was being calm and sensible and quietly hopeful in those impossibly green eyes of hers about it. It was a date, a date with a beautiful, intelligent girl, a beautiful intelligent girl who was apparently into girls as well and Carol hadn’t even considered that being an option because she’d tried so hard not to consider it at all, because…
“I’m sorry,” Carol said, numbly, “I can’t,” and watched in close-up as Jess’ smile fell away from her face with the same miserable heaviness that the snow did from the sky.
It said a lot about Steve that even in the middle of his own horrific awkwardness he wasn’t so self-absorbed that he failed to notice something was desperately wrong with Carol. She’d thought she was doing a decent enough job of masking her dull misery to avoid drawing attention to it while they were cleaning up in the aftermath of Eli’s party, but apparently all Steve needed was the space of a single look to basically see into her soul because he was an inconsiderate, empathic bastard like that.
“What happened?” he asked after he had not so subtly chivvied her into the (relative) privacy of the bakery.
Carol thought about playing dumb and living up to the stereotypes about her hair colour. Then she caught the patient understanding in Steve’s eyes, bristled and just decided to play dirty instead. “What happened with you?” she retorted, proving that he wasn’t the only one who could play this game. “Are we actually going to talk about why you’d rather be picking up beer bottles than go back to the apartment?”
Steve’s mouth did a thing where it looked as if it was thinking about turning inside out, like it was either sucking on a lemon or doing a turtle impression. Possibly an impression of turtle that was sucking on a lemon. It would have been hilarious if they both hadn’t been so miserable. “The place needs to be tidy so we can still open tomorrow,” he said, which definitely didn’t answer Carol’s question, which was entirely her point.
“See?” she crowed, triumph as bitter as strychnine on her tongue. “You don’t want to talk about what happened either. And this is me respecting you not wanting to talk about it and backing off because I’m just that amazing a friend.” She made Significant Eyebrows at him and, either because of those or because he knew what she was like when she was being this stubborn and emotionally constipated, Steve sighed and let it go.
“Fine, but if you do decide you want to do the talking thing…”
“Yeah yeah, I know, you’re all sympathetic ears.” Carol turned away, nominally to sling a clanking bin bag over her shoulder and haul it out back, muttering “Just don’t count on it” as she did so.
In keeping with her pessimistic predictions neither of them did turn out to have a burning desire to spill their guts about their respective problems and admit why they were unhappy. In Steve’s case, it was just a massive elephant in the room because pretty much everyone already knew and so the point was moot.
In Carol’s case, she had god damn young people to spill her guts out for her.
“Oh my God, where is my bow, I am actually going to shoot Tony Stark in the scrotum.”
Since that was an atypically violent entrance, even for Kate, pretty much all eyes turned to her as she marched in in a righteous fury, all swinging dark hair and eyes that promised death and vengeance and sharp, pointy things. Carol made a mental note not to let her hang out with Clint anymore, raised an eyebrow and stepped between her and any of the aforementioned sharp, pointy things. “Firstly, hello to you too. Secondly, you’re late.” Which, in itself, was practically unheard of for Kate. “Thirdly, what did Tony do that’s made you willing to risk assault charges?”
“He’s stealing our customers again!”
As if on cue, all of the younger members of staff bristled and Carol sighed. Children, they were just so overly dramatic. Then she caught sight of the look on Steve’s face and, nope, apparently age didn’t protect you from stupidity. “Stop that,” she sternly told him, wanting to nip that tendency he had to still be unreasonable about Tony Stark whenever given the chance in the bud, and with the exact same amount of patience for bullshit (namely none) steered the outraged Kate towards a corner. “Explain.”
“Well, I was just in Starkbucks, and--.”
“Wait, what were you doing in Starkbucks to start with?” Billy looked peevish, mostly because Carol had told him he couldn’t leave until Kate had turned up for her shift.
“She likes to practice flirting with Tony,” Eli said, sounding all too resigned to this habit of Kate’s.
“Oh my God, Kate.” Billy sounded appalled. “He’s so old.” Which, really, was uncalled for given Carol was standing right there and Tony wasn’t that much older than her.
“He’s not old!” For a moment, Carol felt the urge to give Kate a raise. “Well, not that old.” The moment passed. “And, besides, older guys are hot. Look at Cassie’s dad.”
“Enough.” Carol felt it necessary to call this trainwreck into some semblance of order, if only to spare Cassie any further mortification, though she already looked as if her brain was melting a little. “Kate, you have one sentence and thirty seconds to explain this sudden shift from flirting with Tony to wanting to castrate him.”
“He’s stealing our regulars! And, actually, I was just there to ask Bruce for help with my Quantum Physics class assignment, but then I saw Jess sitting in the corner, and Wendy says she’s been in there pretty much every day this week…”
Carol’s stomach fell to somewhere in the vicinity of her kneecaps, violently enough that she didn’t even have the heart to point out that Kate had missed the one sentence summary thing. Well, that explained why Jess hadn’t been into Blondie since Eli’s party. Which wasn’t exactly unexpected, but it still drove another nail into Carol’s coffin of dejection and also made it apparent that she needn’t have bothered being a kitchen hermit as much as she had been lately. Jess hadn’t even been here for her to avoid.
The sad state of Carol’s love life aside, this was still only one regular. A beautiful, intelligent, dumb enough to actually like Carol regular, sure, but still only the one. One regular hardly amounted to poaching and theft and whatever other crimes her painfully young employees were currently accusing Tony Stark of, but the degree of outrage from them right now was positively off the charts. Carol was even pretty sure that Eli had just said, in scandalised tones, “Well I never!” which would have normally been hilarious, but something was throbbing irritably behind her left eye and she wanted nothing more in this moment than for them all to shut up and get back to work.
“Knock it off, kids,” she snapped. “One customer is not a good enough reason for you all to stand around slacking off when there’s work to be done.” And, seriously, they didn’t need to be giving her looks of shock or betrayal the way they currently were, she was allowed to be pissed off that they were messing around like this. Even Steve was in on it though, making surprised eyebrows in her direction, and that just made her even more defensive. She was not being unreasonable. She was not the one over reacting here.
…Except for the part where, maybe, she was.
That thought alone was enough for her to make a frustrated, wordless noise that felt like it originated in the minute space between her tightly clenched teeth. Her head throbbed like an open wound, and that was never a good sign. Carol pinched the bridge of her nose, hoping to ward off both the pain and the increasingly spooked looks of her colleagues. Neither venture was successful, of course, and Carol felt very much like she was only just holding onto her sanity by the barest tips of her fingers. Or not even that much which, in hindsight, was probably responsible for her snapping. “If Jess wants to drink her tea at Starkbucks then fine. That’s her decision. And it’s a decision probably based on her having asked me out and me saying no rather than Tony having wasted his time stealing her so, there, gossip about that instead of Natasha, Bucky and Steve because that’s clearly all that you do. Me, I’m actually going to go and do some work.”
So, breathing a little hard from all that unnecessary emphasis and wanting to be as far away from their collection of stunned and wounded expressions as soon as possible, Carol whirled on her heel and stalked off to try and not let her misery and burgeoning guilt contaminate her apple and blackcurrant pancakes whilst bitterly congratulating herself on her ability to keep it cool and rise above.
“So, that was a dick move. Saying that about you and Bucky and Natasha I mean. The dick move of all dick moves actually, so…yeah. Sorry.”
Carol said all of that to the ceiling because she didn’t really want to look at Steve just yet. Her insides were too busy churning with mortification at having lashed out earlier like that and her bedroom ceiling was safer than whatever look of pity or reproach or understanding was on his dumbly expressive face right now. She had enough of her own inconvenient feelings right now and looking at him would only make them worse. Looking at him would make her feel guilty because, in her own words, it had been a dick move to attack him with his own problems just because she didn’t want to face up to her own. So she didn’t. Look, that was. Unfortunately she’d already done the lashing out.
Her eyes were fixed studiously on the slightly grimy whorls of her ceiling’s paint (was cleaning ceiling a thing that grown-ups did? Had Carol missed that part of that magical lesson about how to be a functional and well put together adult) but apparently Steve Rogers required eye contact to be a good friend about as much as he needed his inhaler these days. She didn’t need to be looking at him to feel the way her mattress groaned pathetically underneath two blondes who wouldn’t know what a thigh gap was if it hit them in the face and she sighed before giving in to the fact that they were clearly going to have A Talk and that there was nothing she could do about it. So much for outright owning up to having been awful and hoping that would negate the need for discussing it in excruciating detail…
“I said I was sorry,” Carol said plaintively, turning her head to one and finally looking at him. “Do we still need to talk about this?”
“Well,” Steve said, sounding entirely too reasonable, “on a scale of one to ten, how has not talking about it been working out for you?”
Carol weighed up way their adolescent employees were currently tip-toeing around her, Thor’s bewilderment when she had snarled at him for leaving a punching bag to occupy one side of their biggest booth, Steve’s own wounded expression that she had been the one to cause…and winced, conceding the point. “It’s not cool when you play the reasonable adult card,” she informed him, but made herself sit up nonetheless.
“One of us has to.”
“Ouch. You’re lucky I still owe you because of the aforementioned dick move because that hurts, Rogers, that really hurts.”
Carol had been aiming for bluffly jovial. Apparently she’d just hit self-pitying because even Steve’s eyebrows were currently conveying apocalyptic levels of sincere sympathy. Carol was used to smugly (and, fine, proudly) watching from the sidelines as her friend beat even the most defensive of charity cases into submission with just how earnest and lacking in judgement Steve’s desire to help was, but receiving the full force of it must have been what being Catholic felt like, namely guilty for everything and desperate to spill her guts. She hadn’t wanted to talk about this, not even to Steve, because talking about it made it real. She’d already told him she didn’t want to talk about it, the night it had actually gone down, so what the hell had changed between then and now? When had she made the dramatic turnaround from telling herself she didn’t even deserve to be upset about this because it wasn’t even that big of a deal to start with to feeling as if she was just one shaky breath away from soaking his shirt with equal quantities of salt water and snot?
…Probably around the third day, actually, when it turned out that the smell of the green tea she was serving a soccer mom and the memory of Jess’ crooked, self-mocking smile and gryphon-green eyes were so irrevocably intertwined in her head that she’d only barely resisted drowning herself in the giant vat of marina sauce that was always simmering out back.
She missed Jess. Which was ridiculous because she’d never even had Jess and the point of all of this was that she couldn’t actually have anyone. Carol had thought herself resigned to this, to all of it, to the whole god damn conspiracy that her body had against her, but the look in Steve’s eyes and the tightness lodged behind her own sternum proved otherwise.
“Fuck,” Carol said – quietly, but with feeling – and scrunched her knuckles into her eye sockets. Behind them her eyes burned shamefully. Steve hadn’t even had to really say anything and she was about to cry. Some soldier she was. “She just asked me out. I just said no. I don’t know why I’m so messed up about this.”
“Carol, did it ever occur to you that it might be as simple as that you didn’t want to say no?” When she snuck a look at him from behind the cage of her own fingers Steve was smiling, but sadly. Wistfully.
“No, Steve, it never occurred to me that I might have wanted to say yes, I just happen to take offense whenever anyone wants to ask me out.” That was acidly spoken, far too sharply, but that was the trend for Carol right now, being mean when she never normally was. Biting sarcasm didn’t suit her, but then neither did actually admitting to hurting, and it felt safer to default to the former. Even if this was Steve.
Because he was an infinitely better person than she was, he didn’t get offended. He just raised an eyebrow at her. “So why didn’t you say yes then?”
Carol reared back like he’d taken a swing at her, affront and incredulity dominating her face even as her spine knocked painfully into her headboard. “You’re kidding me?” she said. “You’re kidding me, you know damn well why I can’t say yes.”
“I know why you think you can’t say yes.” Even though she currently felt so raw that the last thing she wanted was for any sort of physical closeness, Steve ignored her attempts to discourage him invading her space and laid a hand over hers. “And I’m on your side, you know I’ll back you up in anything you decide to do – or decide not to do – but Carol…” His eyes, several shades lighter than her own and with more grey mixed in, were so clear in their gaze and how obvious it was that he saw her down to her bones that it hurt. “…Understanding why you think you have to deny yourself this isn’t the same as agreeing with you.”
It was hard for Carol to swallow around how tight her throat suddenly was. She might have preferred him actually hitting her rather than just being left feeling as if he had. “Fuck you,” she whispered and meant it and didn’t mean it, because it wasn’t his place to say that, except it had always been his place. He was the one person in the world allowed to sound as if he knew her better than she did herself because he did. But it wasn’t reassuring for Carol to feel the full weight of that knowledge. It hurt having someone rip so completely through every façade she might have ever put up, every lie she might ever have told herself, every single coping mechanism she had desperately brought to life just to be able to carry on.
In that moment she hated Steve Rogers for quite how much he loved her.
She had just sworn at him, but Steve didn’t seem to care. No, he knew her too well, knew what those words really meant. He had to know because why else would have something cracked in his expression before he dragged her in close? Or maybe it was her face reflecting the despair choking her from the inside out that had done it. Maybe it was just that obvious that she needed a hug even if she didn’t want one. “What the hell am I going to do with you, Danvers?” he sighed into her hair.
That more than anything else was what made her eyes brim over. Part of her wanted to push him away because it was too much, far too much, but the rest of her – the bits that trusted Steve Rogers down to a molecular level – was what made her turn her face into the familiar broadness of his chest. “See? I’m this much of a pain in your ass and we’ve known each other for years. Why on earth do you want me to inflict that on anyone else?”
Momentarily his grip turned tight enough to make her bones creak into complaint, though he caught himself soon enough. Having to remember all the time that lesser mortals didn’t hold up well under his insane muscles had to be a real bitch. “You being a pain in my ass makes my life better,” Steve told her, and Carol at least believed him on that. It would have been hard not to when the raw honesty in his voice vibrated through her right down to her bones. “I’d never choose not to have whatever I can get with you. And that’s just me, I can’t speak for anyone else…but don’t you think you should let her get to make that choice herself?”
Carol didn’t have an answer for him on that one.
Probably because she didn’t have an answer for herself.
Later, Tony would speak in wounded tones of Carol being the first person in Starkbucks history to walk past his robot barista without even glancing in his direction.
In Carol’s defence, she’d already spent nearly fifteen minutes building up the courage to just make herself do this in the first place. She didn’t have it in her to be distracted by an AI whose sole purpose in life was to make overly complicated caffeinated beverages. If she didn’t do this properly she wasn’t going to do it at all, that had been her understanding of things. Which was why she’d taken a deep breath, willed her backbone to be made out of titanium and marched in there and right up to Jess’ table in the corner before she lost her nerve.
“Can we talk?” she’d blurted and, really, there were smoother ways she could have segued into conversation. But whether she’d been eloquent or not paled into significance really when faced with Jess having said yes and, well, there they were. Granted, it wasn’t ideal - the pokey courtyard behind Blondie was never comfortable at the best of times and the look on Jess’ face alternated between distrustful and outright inscrutable, which wasn’t heartening at all – but at least she was there.
’Well, no backing out now,’ Carol told herself. ’Go on then, punch holes in the sky.’ And it was with her own personal battle cry, the one she had once yelled inside her head before each and every mission, that she did the only thing she’d ever done wholly consistently in her life.
She dove right in, head first, no looking back.
“I owed you a better answer than just ‘I can’t’.”
Jess didn’t look as if this was a gift. Carol hadn’t expected her to. “Pleasant as that sentiment is, forgive me for not jumping up and down with joy just because you needed to say no to me in a more in-depth fashion,” she said, dryly but not with any overt hostility, something for which Carol was profoundly grateful, though it also shamed her.
“That’s--…” She hesitated, unsure how to wrap her tongue around her own thoughts or how to put into words the amorphous, nebulous sense of regret that swelled up inside of her. “…I didn’t want you to stop coming to Blondie.”
Jess shrugged tiredly, just a subtle up-and-down of one shoulder. “I figured we both needed some space,” she said. “Some time to lick our wounds and recover our dignity.” Her lip curled ever so slightly and Carol couldn’t work out whether it was bitter or just self-deprecating. “Well, I needed to recover my dignity after you shot me down.”
“Jess, God, no,” Carol said, horrified. Did she really think so little of herself? Had Jess even met herself? “It’s not…I mean…you get that you’re amazing, right?”
Jess’ expression turned immediately pained. “I really don’t need your own version of the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech right now,” she said. “You don’t need to explain in painful detail how I’m a wonderful person, but just not wonderful enough for you, which is what that speech means by the way. Seriously, this was why I wasn’t coming to Blondie for a while, just so--.”
“Jess!” Carol interjected. “Stop, okay? Just…stop.” She was surprised by how upset she was getting, just listening to Jess sound so cynical about herself. In hindsight, that was probably what distracted her from her own awkwardness – it was very easy to forget about your pride when you cared enough about someone else to risk humiliation simply because the alternative wasn’t acceptable. “It’s not that speech. Except, okay, fine, it sort of is because it is me and not you. But the problem with me isn’t that I don’t like you, I do. The problem is that it’s me who likes you. I’m the problem. The problem is me.”
Apparently there was something about Jess, even when she was regarding Carol with none of her usual reserved, sardonic affection, that made her physically incapable of sounding as if she had an education. Or even as if she could string a proper sentence together. Carol winced at her own verbal clumsiness and it was fairly clear that it hadn’t escaped Jess’ notice either. The other woman was staring at Carol with a mix of bewilderment and scepticism, but (and it was this component to Jess’ expression that gave Carol sudden hope that all was not entirely lost) also a grudging sort of amusement. “I am less and less convinced that you actually majored in journalism.”
Carol barked a hoarse, short, not particular humour-filled laugh, but even being awkwardly mocked by Jess was better than overt hostility or, worse, indifference. “It’s not like I wrote a script.”
“I thought it was a speech.”
“An ad-libbed speech. From the heart. So it’s all…genuine and shit.”
Jess’ lips quirked up at the corners in spite of themselves. “’Genuine and shit’? That’s really what you’re going with?” Carol couldn’t help but smile back and, for a moment, it was okay. Except it wasn’t okay because she saw the exact moment when Jess remembered it wasn’t okay and the familiar amusement faded from her eyes like the last vestiges of sunlight at day’s end. Reality settled back into the pit of Carol’s stomach, the gravity of the situation reasserting itself, and she sobered up. Put herself back on track. Tried to do this again and do it right this time.
“Do you know why I quit the Air Force?”
Jess looked as if she hadn’t quite expected that non sequitur and blinked at her. “I figured you just felt you’d served enough time?” she hazarded, cautious and bemused. Something alarmed flickered in her eyes. “Oh God, did something awful happen? Did a mission go wrong?”
“No, no, it wasn’t anything like that,” Carol was quick to assure her. Though, looking back at it… “Okay, fine, a mission did go wrong. A lot of missions, actually. But that was part of service. It happened. In fact, they’re probably part of why I stayed enlisted for as long as I did, they’re definitely not why I quit.”
A pain in her lower lip suddenly made Carol realise she was chewing on it really hard and she forced her jaw to relax before she drew blood. The rest of her stayed tense though and, really, she couldn’t help that. This was a subject about which she hated talking. It made her tense and miserable and unhappy. Normally, it was a topic she avoided discussing at all costs, one she hated sharing because she didn’t like people knowing it about her. Because when they knew it, something changed forever in the way that they looked at her. It was private for a reason.
But she was also telling Jess for a reason, and that didn’t make it go away and it didn’t make it easy…but it did make it right.
“I can’t fly anymore,” she said. “Or, rather, my doctors – all of them, which is far too many by the way – say that flying the sort of planes I used to pilot will kill me.” The curl of her lips felt bitter, so she couldn’t even begin to imagine how unhappy it looked. “I have an aneurysm in my brain. An inoperable one. And sometimes I think I might as well risk it and just fly again because they also say that it could burst at any moment, so why not just go out that way rather than sitting around holding my breath and waiting to drop dead?”
There it was, nearly two years’ worth of grief and denial and raging against the universe all condensed down into some surprisingly neat sentences. That right there was Carol’s mortality, Carol’s death sentence, and in the end it only took about twenty words to explain. But they were twenty words that Carol had shared with practically nobody, just her family and Steve and Bucky…
…and now Jess. Jess who was wide-eyed and stunned, her distrust forgotten. Jess who was staring at her now with such disbelieving horror that Carol felt the urge to comfort her, which she was aware was ironic. Jess who was clearly at a loss for words, incapable of working out what she was meant to say in the face of such a revelation and…yeah. Carol knew how that felt. She’d had nearly two years of that after all.
“I don’t date,” she said, sparing Jess from having to be the one to talk and, hey, if she was being painfully, embarrassingly honest then she might as well go the whole hog. “Not seriously anyway. I don’t think it’s fair. Not when I could be dead tomorrow or next week or next year. Because…what’s the point? In getting attached, I mean. It’s been hard enough for me to come to terms with it without dumping it on someone else, and then when it does happen…”
Carol wasn’t used to talking about her own death. Not saying it out loud anyway to anyone who wasn’t one of her too numerous grief counsellors. But now she was actually doing it…there was something strangely freeing about it. It wasn’t so much a lifting of a weight as leaning into it, like settling a pack more comfortably across the shoulders. Carol almost felt detached from the situation, as if she’d taken a step back so she could get a clearer view. And she realised that it was because it was out in the open now and all she needed to do was wait for Jess to change. The people already in Carol’s life, they were stuck with her, she was their problem. But Jess was a relatively new addition, however wonderful, and she could still walk away. She could look at all of that complicated messiness, look at all that inevitable sadness, and just…not let it in. She could walk away from all of it. She could walk away from Carol and Carol sure as hell wouldn’t blame her.
If she could have walked away from it as well, she wouldn’t have hesitated.
People avoided talking about death because it was awkward as all hell. By extension, talking to terminally ill people was even worse. Carol was all too familiar by now with the instinctive space that people put between themselves when they knew death lingered on the horizon. Your loved ones, okay, they clutched you tight. But the rest of the world almost automatically drew back to protect themselves from the loss they knew was coming. Jess was a smart girl, smarter than Carol definitely. She was a scientist. She was clinical, she was sensible. Steve was right, Carol realised, Jess needed to know why being interested in her was a lousy idea. Then they’d both know and they could both get back to living their respective lives. What was left of them anyway. So Carol waited for Jess to decide that this was way too much to deal with, strangely zen-like, and absently wondered whether this was what the mythical acceptance felt like.
Jess, however, had other plans.
“So, you said no to me because you don’t date? Because you’re trying to, what, minimise the damage when you do die?” Rather than looking uncomfortable as all hell, Jess just frowned at Carol.
That…wasn’t expected. Carol frowned back, but in a more caught-off-guard sort of way. Jess’ version of the expression looked more like the one she tended to give to her laptop whenever her stats programme wasn’t giving her the answer she wanted. And that was a rather more direct line of questioning than Carol was used to when she was telling people about the ticking time bomb in her head. “Pretty much.”
Jess’ frown got more pronounced. “So you decided not to date…but you also decided to set up a business with Steve, one that’s pretty reliant on you if it’s going to continue functioning?”
Carol was starting to feel defensive now. This was not how people usually reacted. “That’s—It’s different with Steve. I needed to do something. I still need to. I can’t just…wait to die!”
“So you’ll take a professional risk, but not a personal one?”
“The diner is personal,” Carol snapped, feeling the blood race angrily to her cheeks. “The diner is the last fucking thing I’m ever going to do with Steve. He left the Army when I had to quit the Air Force. He did that for me because that’s what we do, we watch each other’s backs. And I hate that me dying will mess up the business, but I just…I needed something. Anything. So when he suggested it—.” It was unfair of Jess, Carol thought furiously, to make her feel selfish right now. Didn’t she have a right to be? “I don’t know how to do any of this without Steve,” she said. “That’s the thing, I’ve always needed him more than he needs me, but when I d—…it’s still going to be hard on him. Harder than on me because, hey, I’ll be dead, I won’t feel anything. He’ll need to live with me dying and he’s just a friend. If it’s going to be that hard for him, then what right do I have to even think about anything romantic with anyone else?”
“You think it’s going to be easy on any of us when you die?” Jess asked and, wow, apparently at some point in Carol’s rant the dark-haired woman had gone from looking almost insulted to just stricken. There was a depth of raw unhappiness in Jess’ eyes that Carol simply hadn’t expected and it shut her up more effectively than any other question so far. “You think I’m going to care less about you dying just because you didn’t go on a date with me?”
“That’s…” Carol hesitated. “It won’t be the same. It’s one thing to lose a friend, it’s another to lose someone you love.”
“Carol,” Jess said, her gaze unflinchingly intense, “I love you.” Then, before Carol could flinch in disbelief, she went on. “Your staff love you. Your regulars love you. Pretty much everybody you see on a daily basis loves you because you are kind and brave and funny and generous. You are important. You matter. And don’t think for a second that any of us care about what will make it ‘easier’ when the end comes, or that we want any less of you.” Her voice softened, tenderness and grief vying for dominance. Jess’ eyes were very, very green in that moment and Carol couldn’t look away, couldn’t blink. “You’re my friend and I love you. If we were dating, I’d probably love you a different way, but if you wanted to make it easier on me when you die then you should have never marched into my life in the first place and served me the most amazing pancakes I’ve ever tasted.”
Carol went from not being able to blink to suddenly having to blink a lot and she blamed her aneurysm for that, for any weepiness she ever experienced, because she had never cried this much before. Though she was also staunchly denying that she was crying, her eyes were just kind of damp. And, really, could you blame her? “If this is you still trying to persuade me that dating is a good idea, you’re--.”
“This is me saying that I want to be your friend more than I want to date you,” Jess interjected swiftly. “Don’t doubt that. But this is also me saying that I still want to date you. If anything, I want to date you more because…” It made Carol feel a little bit better to see a glimmer somewhere behind Jess’ lashes because she wasn’t the only one with slightly damp eyes then. “…because now I know there’s a time limit.”
“You ran away to Starkbucks,” Carol said thickly, clutching at straws, at any argument she could find in the face of Jess’ care, of Jess’ intensity, of Jess’ refusal to give up. “That didn’t seem like you wanted to be my friend.”
“In my defence, you gave me a shitty, ambiguous reason for shooting me down,” Jess said dryly. “And, uh…” She looked sheepish. “I am…not the best when faced with awkward situations. My first reaction tends to be to run away. And, also, did you miss the part where I thought the girl I fancied rotten thought I was repulsive or something?”
“My entire payroll teased me mercilessly about how much I liked you,” Carol admitted, more candidly than she might have intended, but she wanted, needed to chase away some of the doubt that still lingered in Jess’ eyes when she even joked about that. “Me thinking that you were repulsive was never the problem. Quite the opposite.”
“So why does there need to be a problem?” Jess was suddenly very, very, very close and Carol couldn’t breathe very well in the face of such underhanded techniques. “If it was just that you honestly weren’t attracted to me, I could get over that, but Carol, you’re you.” Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were deadly serious as she looked up at Carol. This close, the height difference suddenly didn’t seem that great. “I’ll take what I can get. Even if nothing’s certain, for the chance of something good, don’t you want to take a risk? I thought that was what you specialised in.”
And given that Jess knew Carol because of one of those risks, she couldn’t even argue that there wasn’t logic in her reasoning. She wanted to, because she’d spent so long telling herself this was something she neither wanted nor could justify having, but…but it was so very hard to remember that right now, with her traitorous heart aching behind her sternum and Jess reaching Steve levels of earnestness in front of her.
Maybe Carol was just tired of holding back…
"But why do you even want to try?" Carol heard herself ask wretchedly and this was a new low, this was previously unexplored levels of humiliation, this was Carol staring an opportunity in the face and being terrified of it and since when had she become someone who let that stop her?
"Carol, I hate to come across as crass," Jess said seriously, "but the way that you flip burgers? Ridiculously sexy."
That flummoxed even Carol, and she had done some seriously irrational shit in her life. "That's it? That's your basis for wanting to date me?"
Jess looked bemused in a hugely British sort of way, like she thought Carol was being unreasonable, but was too polite to say so. "What's wrong with liking the way you look when you're cooking?"
That threw Carol a little, because it felt obvious and yet, on the spot, it was remarkably hard to put into words just why it was so. "...it's not very personality-based, is it?"
Jess chuckled and, oh, that was unfair because Carol's heart did a little, plaintive loop the loop in her chest. "I will be the first to admit that this relationship lark isn't exactly my forte - my last girlfriend called me 'emotionally damaged' and I can't say that I quite disagree with her, did you hear me mention the running away at the first sign of trouble thing? - but I don't think it's uncommon to first notice someone for purely shallow and selfish reasons. I thought you were sexy because I saw you through the hatch moving like you had six arms rather than two and being perfectly in control of it and it was hot." Her voice softened, turned huskier. "I wanted to date you when I talked to you and you didn't freak out about me studying spider pheromones for the past three years and also because you basically told the entire diner you were sometimes into girls when you were smacking Billy down and I like that about you, that you just completely forget to be scared about anything when you’re defending someone else."
Carol's face must have looked as confused and miserable as her brain felt because Jess hesitated and then grabbed one of Carol's hands in two of hers. "Carol, stop stressing. I can feel your headache from here. Yes, I would like to go on a date with you so we can eat food that you haven't cooked for me and have awkward conversations about our music tastes, and then maybe let you get to second base on my doorstep." That was an unfairly attractive prospect and Jess grinned unexpectedly at whatever Carol's face was still doing without any sort of direction from her brain, looking more confident by the second. "But it's still just a date. And if you say no or it doesn't work out, then it pains me to be clichéd, I'll still want to be your friend." There was something unjustifiably reassuring and familiar about the look in Jess' eyes, given how short a time they'd actually known you for. "What was it you said about Steve? That so long as you had him in your life you were happy?"
The very idea that Carol could be anyone's Steve was both terrifying and responsible for the warmest feeling of wonder she had ever had bubbling up through the empty parts of her, like champagne poured over ice. And the fear of the future was always there, the fear of an uncertain future, but it always would be, wouldn't it? There were no guarantees. None whatsoever.
...but did she actually need guarantees?
Carol squinted at Jess. "You don't seem particularly emotionally damaged to me," she accused.
Jess didn't look particularly sorry. "Oh, trust me, I am," she said, inappropriately cheerful for the situation. "But I figured it was your turn to be awkward and have an inconvenient emotional crisis, and I'm always better at being brave when I have someone to be brave for. Don't worry, you'll have plenty of chances to deal with my paranoia and self-loathing."
"We really need to work on how you sell an idea," Carol said, frowning, but she felt her mouth twitching.
Jess looked sidelong at her, nothing polite about her sly wickedness. "It got you to use the word 'we', didn't it?" she asked archly.
And this was the point where Carol could have still said no, where Jess had already said she'd stay her friend, where a date was just a date and it wasn't a big deal at all. This was where Carol could have been pragmatic about the time bomb inside her brain. This was where Carol could have played it safe and stayed conservative, except if she'd been that way then she'd have never even tried to get into a cockpit for the first time, she wouldn't have deliberately stalled her jet into a dive just to feel the soaring brilliance of free-fall and she certainly wouldn't have stared at Steve's back, squared her shoulders and said "I have a proposal for you" over a year ago now. She wouldn't have lost, but she also wouldn't have lived. And if there was only so much time left for the latter...
"...you really thought I was sexy slaving over a grill?"
Jess' smile was like the sun coming up, like the roar of a jet engine, like victory. "I don't even like tea," she said as Carol's hands wrapped around the jut of her hipbones. "I only walked in for the first time because I wanted to steal your free internet."
Carol laughed and they were close enough together now that the huff of exhaled air moved Jess' hair. "Came for the wifi, stayed for the girl."
"Actually, I stayed for Steve's cinnamon rolls, but the girl was an added bonus," Jess said, laughingly, then reeled Carol in by her belt loops before she could think of a retort.
The day that Blondie turned a year old, Tony tried to give them a robot barista.
Predictably, Steve objected. But he was also unreasonably proud of his staff members because they did the objecting first and so he didn’t have to.
“Blondie is not about gimmicks and technological bullshit,” Kate said in her poshest, haughtiest voice and Steve was aware he was probably failing to hide his extremely proud, extremely amused smile behind his hand. “We don’t need cheap tricks like this.”
“Firstly, wow, nothing cheap about this, do you know how much it takes to develop a genuine artificial intelligence?” Tony hugged the robot protectively and it wheezed and whirred at him in a way that almost sounded affectionate. “Secondly – I know, baby, don’t listen to the nasty lady, she’s just jealous - secondly, I think you’re protesting just because you’re aware he can do your job better than you can.”
While Kate spluttered at that, Cassie looked almost disapprovingly at Tony. “I can’t believe you’re giving Dummy away,” she said, reproachfully for her. “I thought you loved him.”
The robot beeped erratically and let off steam the way their espresso machine did. Everyone except Tony took a step backwards, but that was because Tony was too busy looking scandalized. “This isn’t Dummy!” Everyone, Steve included, squinted at him. “Oh my God, you robot racists you, assuming all AIs look the same, you’re definitely not having Butterfingers now.”
“…You wanted to give us a robot barista called Butterfingers?” Steve asked. He frowned at Tony, who was as cowed as usual, which was to say not at all. “This remains your weirdest attempt to sabotage our business ever.”
“No one is trying to sabotage anyone,” someone said behind him and Steve turned around to see Carol emerging from the kitchen, in the process of removing her apron. “Don’t go down the competitive road again, boys, I will get the water gun out again.”
“Kinky,” Tony said without missing a beat.
“In your dreams, Stark,” Carol shot back before frowning at Butterfingers. “…Tony, why is there a robot at my party?”
“Because he had to build himself a date.” That was Jess, also coming out of the kitchen and combing her fingers through hair that looked more tousled than five minutes before, when she and Carol had headed out back to check on the food.
“What’s a guy meant to do when your girlfriend turns him down, gorgeous?”
Jess snorted at Tony’s flamboyance, but grinned at him nonetheless from where she was tucked under Carol’s proprietary arm. “Seriously though, what’s with the robot?”
“It’s our anniversary present, apparently,” Steve said dryly, but felt betrayed when Carol proceeded to thoughtfully eye the gift in question, apparently considering it. “Carol, no.”
“What?” she replied absently. “We wouldn’t have to pay it. That immediately ranks it above all of our other servers in my books.”
“Hey!” chorused said servers, respectively indignant and plaintive depending on temperament.
Carol was unmoved. “Earn your keep then,” she ordered. “Go check on the smoker. Scoot. Don’t let my kitchen burn down, however nice the apple wood would make it smell as it did so.”
To Steve’s eye it looked as if Billy was going to argue, but Teddy – with the air of one used to being the diplomatic side of his relationship – dragged him away by one skinny arm. Eli did the same with Kate and Cassie and Viz followed with the calm serenity of the emotionally undramatic, leaving the adults alone.
Well. ‘Adults’. Steve wasn’t sure Tony deserved the word without quotation marks.
“You’ve got them so well-trained,” Jess observed, watching them go before slanting a look Steve’s way. “Are you two disgustingly proud parents?”
“Carol’s going to cry when they go away to college,” he said with mock seriousness.
“They’re already at college,” Carol pointed out, “which is why they’re willing to accept the hours we make them work. And screw you, Rogers, if anyone’s going to cry when they leave it’ll be you. You’re the emotional one.”
“It’s true, Steve, if one of you has to be the Mom, it’s not going to be Carol.” Sometimes Steve couldn’t remember why he was friends with Bucky. But it was because he was friends with Bucky that he knew to regard the multiple, clinking crates he was currently carting in with huge amounts of suspicion, so every cloud had a silver lining.
“It’s going to be a small party, Bucky!” he said, hearing the plaintive note in his own voice and not feeling that it was unwarranted. “Small.”
“So then there’s more to go around fewer people,” Bucky countered cheerfully and shoved a beer at Steve. (Since it was his favoured brand, he magnanimously decided not to protest too hard.) “Though if this is it then I think you need to take your ‘small’ and downgrade it to ‘tiny’. Did you not invite your horde of teenagers?”
“One of them’s twenty-one,” Steve pointed out, uncapping his beer and gesturing with it towards the kitchen. “They’re out back.” He smirked at his business partner, who just looked innocent. “Carol delegated all of the work.”
“That’s what employees are for,” she said placidly. “If they’re good, I’ll tip them.”
“They’re probably just making out,” Tony demurred. “Or having orgies. That’s what college students do, right?”
“What college did you even go to?” Jess asked with morbid fascination as she stared at him.
Tony just shrugged. “I was thirteen,” he said, as if that explained everything. (Actually, the more Steve thought about it, the more it did.) “I just assumed I was too young to be invited.”
“Carol and Steve seem to only employ disgustingly wholesome foetuses,” Bucky drawled. “Orgies are too radical for them. They’re probably just doing that disgusting paired-off coupley thing, you know, the one that makes anyone who wants to eat here lose their appetite.”
…Steve had to admit that Bucky had a point. An alarming number of their staff were dating each other. And Eli and Kate’s first, tempestuous ‘breaking up FOREVER’ (which only lasted three days) had been, frankly, horrific for the working environment at Blondie. He didn’t want to think about the ramifications of any of them actually splitting with any permanence…which probably wasn’t a sound approach to running a business actually, being concerned with the romantic lives of his employees. But then Steve wouldn’t have wanted to run a business where he didn’t care about the people he hired and he knew Carol wouldn’t have either…at that was the point of Blondie, having created something that they could both be proud of.
“I wasn’t aware the coupley thing was restricted to the kids,” Tony said slyly, looking significantly at Carol and Jess. The latter just rolled her eyes at him, the former gave him the finger and, in Steve’s opinion, the comment wasn’t justified. Carol and Jess were a couple, but they weren’t coupley. Sure, Carol had her arm around Jess’ shoulders now, but it was a casual thing. Carol draped herself over a lot of people, himself included. It was what she did. Jess, however, gave the impression of being far less comfortable with physical contact in general, or at least in public, and Steve could count on one hand the number of times he’d actually seen them kiss in front of people who weren’t their immediate friends. They weren’t sappy, they weren’t embarrassing and they weren’t overt in how much they cared for each other.
…well, unless you knew what to look for.
It was mostly Jess actually, but that didn’t surprise Steve. Possibly Steve was the only person who actually noticed the way she sometimes looked at Carol, like she was taking a mundane little moment of time and making a memento of it, committing every aspect of her to memory. He knew what that was like, going about his daily business and suddenly being struck with the remembrance that every day with her could be his last. He knew what it was like to treasure even the most ordinary of moments spent with Carol and so, perhaps, he was more sensitive to noticing it in Jess whenever she watched her girlfriend with a mixture of possessiveness and grief and a love made all the more intense by how it couldn’t ever be taken for granted.
Watching Jess watch Carol sometimes made Steve wistful and even slightly envious, because of their boldness and their taking a chance and their refusing to let a finite amount of time cheat them out of a good thing while they could get it. He was glad beyond words that Jess had managed to be the one to convince Carol to do what Steve had wanted her to do all along – namely to make the most out of what time she did have left rather than cutting herself off from the world out of some misguided attempt at selflessness – but his trend in how he acted in his own relationships tended to be the exact opposite of the advice he’d give someone in the same situation. After all, he’d never plucked up the courage to ask Natasha out dancing, had he? And then her past with Bucky – with James - had come to light and, well, it wasn’t awkward (he wouldn’t let it be) but it still sometimes felt like a missed opportunity, something he could have experienced if he had only been brave enough to take a chance. One he wouldn’t take now because he valued his friendship with Bucky too highly to risk it and because he admired Natasha too much to put her in any sort of awkward position.
…Maybe that just meant that he’d never wanted it enough to take that risk though. Maybe that was why Carol had finally opened herself up to the idea of letting herself love someone, even if it was just for a while. She had a better idea. Maybe, though there would never be a day when he didn’t wish he could change Carol’s prognosis, part of life was being able to see that there was good even in the worst of dealt hands.
Steve didn’t know what he would do when Carol died...but he did know that, while she lived, he wanted her to make the most of it. To love. To be loved. To be herself. And he was part of that with Blondie. Jess was part of it too, a big part, probably the biggest. And Bucky and Sharon, Natasha and Clint, they couldn’t be forgotten, nor could their painfully young employees. Hell, even Tony and his robots and the way he fell into familiar, sarcastic bickering patterns with Carol contributed to this life that they’d built here, the one that tasted the sweetest just because Steve knew he had to treasure each good moment as it came because it could be the last.
(“To soul food,” he said when he was asked to give a toast later.
Carol smiled, kissed Jess’ temple and clinked her beer bottle against his. “And the people we love to eat it with.”)