(continued from here)
He’s not sure that he could have done this without Wanda at his side. It’s the strangest mix of pride and embarrassment, of that particular sensation of being not just conspicuous but blazingly on display: a little bit of side-show freak and a whole lot of curiousity.
But with Wanda there with him it was easier. And not just because he liked her company, and because he liked the feeling of her fingers laced through his as she held his hand, or the light touch on his arm when she tucked her hand into the crook of his elbow. He just likes her, and yeah, the fact that she was gorgeous and had showed up to meet him earlier in a knock-out black dress was great (good god that dress, there wasn’t a woman at the gala who was a gorgeous as she was on any given day and in that dress there was no chance for any of them to even come close). But it was Wanda, all of her, that he loves having at his side.
He listens politely to the old windbag standing in front of them for as long as he can, nods in a few places and does his best not to say anything that might get turned back around on him, and when did they get like this? The guy’s already trying to stump for the next presidential election, and it slowly dawns on Steve as the senior senator drones on and on that there’s going to be a lot of men like this one popping up in his life over the next two years -- men with ambition, men whose PR teams might just think that a personal relationship with Captain America would give them an edge in the polls. He realizes this with a slight bit of panic, and as soon as he finds a break in the Senator’s never-ending flow of meaningless words and pleasantries he smiles up at the man, his arm tightening a bit around Wanda as the band kicks into an old familiar tune and he uses the excuse of a dance with his girl to an old favorite as an opportunity to escape.
He leads her over to the dance floor, his hand on her lower back, bare in that daringly cut dress; the feeling of her warm skin under his fingers does him a world of good in pushing away the idea that it might always be like this, with the powerful looking to him whenever it was time for the public to get out and vote, wanting to use him as a symbol and trying to force him into shapes that didn’t fit him, forcing him hard if they thought they could get away with it. He’d known that; it wasn’t new information. He’d just . . . let himself forget for a while, in the face of all that had happened and the work they’d been focused on. Had let his guard down and let himself be surprised all over again.
The music is sweet; slow and romantic, a little reflective and a touch melancholy in places, but when it ached it was a good ache and there was always that sweetness to soothe it over. Or maybe that was just him -- maybe he was getting a little overwhelmed by all these people who were here not to honor and celebrate him (and he’d never thought it was going to be as simple as that, he was optimistic but not naive) but to figure out what they could get from him, how they could use him moving into the next interminable election cycle. How they could control him and who he was and what he stood for; how best to carve him up and pare him down into their thirty-second soundbites.
“You’re beautiful,” he tells Wanda, and he means it; beautiful in her dress, beautiful because she when looks at him she doesn’t see some patriotic symbol to trot out when convenient. When she looks at him she sees him, and when he looks at her he sees her; and by god what could be better than that?
He laughs at her compliment, shrugging a bit and holding her a little closer as they moved slowly across the dance floor, and he was even managing to ignore the fact that they had most of the eyes in the room on them as they swayed to the music. “I gotta admit, it’s a good look. And if you like it that much I might just give in when you try to tear if off me later back in the hotel.”
