#stcrk

@stcrk ; “So this is what the famous Captain America is like behind closed doors.”

He was so cold. So cold. The rain had been coming down - he didn't know how long, he realised, with a foggy distance that made it feel immensely unimportant. The icy sensation in his skin, the soaked clothes, none of it seemed important, although some distant part of himself was worried about just how stiff his joints were starting to get. He'd always struggled with the cold. No... that wasn't true, was it? Why was he ... where was he going? When he tried to think about - anything, his head pounded even more, waves of nausea crashing over him.

The doorway loomed. Reaching out, pressing his palm to it for a moment, he swayed. Exhaustion crashed through his narrow frame, now - he slapped his palm on it, again, three, four - five - ten - he lost track, slipping against the door and to the ground, huddling against it and coughing, waves of pain crashing through him. The numbness from the cold and the rain didn't seem to matter any more ... none of it did. Safety. Here, somehow, there was - was safety. He looked listlessly at the blood running down his arm, trying to remember where the injuries had come from... god, it hurt. It all hurt.

It had been hard enough when they had just stopped things between them because he’d wanted to work it out with Pepper. It was hard enough when he’d had a small taste of what his life could be like. But he’d filled his time with other things, missions mostly, until now and hoped the ache in his chest would go away eventually. Probably not though given how much he felt about Tony. He hated that. He hated being someone who felt so much but had no words to express all the things that he felt sometimes.

Now, he was sitting there playing catch up with someone who should’ve been the love of his life, and is just a guy he works with now. Small talk that he didn’t want to have because their entire world was imploding around them with this document. He had asked about Pepper to be polite and because he genuinely liked Pepper, cared for her, wanted her to be happy. 

Others happiness was more important than his. Still when he’d let the word pregnant slip out in a question, he had hoped to be greeted with one of those forced laughs, and then a ‘of course not’ and some spiel about how she was off on a business trip for the company.

No such luck. When he’d confirmed what he had never wanted to actually know in the first place, he tried to hide his feelings on his face, because that’s what you did right? Buried things deep down in a box somewhere without ever letting anyone know you were hurt. It still felt like this horrible gut punch that he couldn’t quite recover from.