... because I'm having a lot of feels about these two at the moment and I just want to smoosh them together.

The first time he thought about her that way, it was totally inappropriate.

Steve was filthy and sweaty from helping to clear the mess that Ross and his cronies had left and full of the restless energy that came from frustration with people who didn’t care and there was Jan, asleep on one of the dusty couches, a cup of tea precariously balanced in her hand.

He took a moment just to look at her. She was very different to Peggy. He felt bad, comparing them, really, but the list of women he’d said more than three words together to was not very long, and comparisons were inevitable. Peggy had been… tall and strong and just a little bit frightening and he’d felt unbalanced whenever he was around her, as though the world was tilted in her direction. It had been an exhilarating feeling, one that had made his heart beat faster and his hands shake.

Jan was tiny, even when she wasn’t shrunk, and delicate in a way that Peggy certainly hadn’t been. Yet he’d seen her whipping around a room blasting things with her stingers with the same sort of effortless grace that Natasha had when she was fighting. Despite the difference in their size there was a strength and determination about her that was very familiar, something that drew him to her, the reason he’d asked her to join them.

He knelt next to the couch and gently took the teacup from her fingers, hoping to let her sleep, but he was too big or too clumsy, or he thought, slightly mortified, too smelly and she startled awake, managing to splash the tea pretty much everywhere, including over him. She looked up and the expression of horror on her face was pretty darned adorable. He couldn’t help but smile.

“Gosh I’m so sorry!”

In that one second between saving the teacup and seeing her expression, he knew somewhere that something had flipped, some sort of instinct or attraction, and it was wildly inappropriate, because a few minutes later she broke down into tears over another man (whom he had a sudden, strong urge to punch). He put his arm around her, because grief, well…

things I draw in my history notebook

which I forget about

and then find later

and