I couldn’t breathe.
I suck in air in short, quick gasps while I swipe my hands on my pants, the sweat building up making them slick so that I had to wipe them again.
He’d left.
The pang in my chest was deep, sharp, something I’d never felt before. Never, in all our time together, did I think that this conversation would end up with him leaving. Granted I hadn’t meant to leave this conversation until after he’d proposed, but, well, it just hadn’t come up.
I glance at the kitchen table and I catch sight of the ring box sitting so innocently on the table and that’s when the tears start.
I was late, running as fast as I could while juggling a coffee and my bag, and in dress shoes and a suit. I had a meeting with an editor and I needed to be there now-
“-Out!”
I slam into a brick wall. I’m dazed, and a little confused, because I knew this road like the back of my hand and I knew there wasn’t a wall here. Hands steady me as coffee sloshes everywhere and I realize it was not, in fact, a brick wall I had run into. It was a body.
“Did they cast you in cement when you hit puberty?” I blurt over his apologies, making him blink. He gives me a surprisingly shy smile for someone his size as he ducks his head.
“Er, no, and I didn’t look like this until much later, anyway. Sorry about your coffee.”
It’s only then I realize that I’m wearing my cup of hot liquid energy, but I suddenly don’t mind. Between the blond hair and blue eyes, I was captivated.
“It’s fine. I’ll clean up before- oh! I’m late!” I go to dash around him and I hear a shouted sorry again and I thought that was the end of that. I skid to a stop outside the office building and step inside, grinning at the assistant as I flick my wand to clean the coffee.
“Morning Mr. Potter.”
“Morning, Susan. I’m a bit late for my meeting.”
“Seeing as you own the company, Harry, I don’t think that’s a problem,” she says laughingly as I roll my eyes.
The tears finally stop and I pick myself up from where I had collapsed on the ground. I decided that I could do with a bath while I process this and head for the bathroom, running the bath manually. Like I have been for years. I never used magic unless I was in my office, hell, I didn’t know where my wand was half the time. I was safe here. I was mundane. It was normal.
Running into a solid mass of a man twice in a week was not normal. I was on instant alert. When he didn’t make more than the one apology I realize that he had run into me on purpose and I was- flattered, enough, to go for a cup of coffee.
His name was Steve Rogers. He didn’t seem to know my name, and in fact was very surprised I didn’t know his. When I asked what he did he was shocked, and I was fascinated to learn he was a superhero, something people in Britain called me.
“So you fought off aliens?” I ask in surprise, nibbling at the lemon cake slice I had in front of me. He nods with another bashful smile and I think again that it doesn’t look normal on a man his size.
“Among other things.”
I should have known.
THat’s the conclusion I come to while soaking in the bath. I was tempted to summon a glass of firewhiskey, but I knew if I did that glass would become the bottle and I couldn’t do that.
He was honest with me from the start and I had kept a secret, essentially lied to him, the entire time I was with him. How did I expect him to trust me, to love me, after doing that? How did anyone marrying a muggle do it?
I had just wanted someone to love me for me, not my name. And he’d done that. Unequivocally.
An entire year together. It was bumpy, not in the least because he didn’t want to tell his friends about us not knowing their stance on sexuality, but I was learning to take what I could get from him. Like now. Curled up on the couch after a round of heavy snogging and I draped over his large chest. He was here, with me, and was always here with me if he didn’t have a mission, and that’s all that mattered.
“Still awake love?”
“Mhm. Ready for bed?”
He’d agreed we could share a bed, but he had steadfastly refused to do anything more than sleep. He insisted he wanted to be married before any of that and I had accepted that. It’s not like I had that much experience myself.
When we made it to the bed I was shocked at the small box on my pillow. Too big to be a ring, but obviously jewelry.
Inside was a cuff, a silvery band with blue gems the color of his eyes in it. I look up startled when I feel his hands on my waist and he smiles down at me with that painfully shy look.
“I love you, and I want you to wear something to remind you of that.” he murmurs near my ear, turning my wrist so I could see the inside of the band I still held. I smooth my fingertips over the words on the inside and giggle a little.
‘Always yours and yours always, Steve’
A reminder of the blubbering mess he had been the first time he told me he loved me. He had an entire speech mapped out in his brain that had flopped, apparently, when I had stepped out of the bedroom in the silk button-down and slacks I’d picked out for our date.
“Thank you.”
I rip the band off after catching a glimpse of it on my arm, bruising the wrist it was graced on as I threw it across the room. It skidded and skipped across the tile and I didn’t watch to see where it landed. My eyes land on the bottle of apple and cider shampoo he always used and that went next, the lid snapping off when it landed at an angle and releasing the smell in the air. I groan, scrambling out of the bath to grab a towel. I vanish the bottle and the shampoo that had spilled out and then stumble for the bedroom. I stop dead at the foot of it, however.
“It’s not that hard o make your bed Harry!”
“I don’t want to and it’s my house!”
“Well, it looks awfully silly with my side made and yours a mess.”
I pivot away from the contrasting sides of the bed and fumble out into the hall, to the guest bedroom. I fall onto the bed, exhausted and wide awake at the same time. Without my consent, the tears start again.
“I’d like an answer love.”
The nerves in his voice made me jolt into action, sliding from my seat and stumbling to his side where he had propped open the ring box. The ring inside was a smaller replica of my cuff, a line of small blue gems in a silver band.
“We need to talk first.”
“Well, that’s not good.”
“It’s… not bad. I should have told you ages ago, but there are laws where I come from about it.”
Magic. I explained it as best as I could with the time he gave me, but the instant I’d mentioned it he had closed off, face stone. He’d at one point flipped the lid to the ring box closed with a snap.
The silence after I stopped trying to explain was deafening. He’d shook his head once.
“I- how could you keep that from me?”
“I had to. And then I was scared. you don’t have a good track record with magic.”
“You knew that and you still kept it from me!?” his voice is raised and I’m startled. He takes a deep breath and then grunts.
“And if I don’t want to know about this secret society of magic-wielding witches?” he asks defensively.
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes! I don’t want- how could you think I could possibly want that? I have enough secrets in my job, here was my one safe place to never have secrets, never have covert conversations and now I find out you’ve been lying this whole time!?”
“I can make you forget. Make you think we had an argument.” my voice is small, soft, but what could I say? I wasn’t going to lie, not now.
“Then do it. Make me forget. I don’t want this. I can’t believe…” he trails off and closes his eyes. When he opens them again I’m, for the first time, seeing Captian America and not my Steve.
“Do it.”
I’d drawn my wand and he’d tracked it like it was a gun.
“Are you sure?”
“Now, please.”
And so I’d raised my wand. It wavered in the air, shook with my hands.
“Do you really want this?” I ask again. How could he want to forget a part of me? But it was the secret keeping he wanted to forget. The betrayal. The knowledge that I was just as bad as the people he worked with. That I had magic like Loki.
“Harry. I don’t want this knowledge. I have enough secrets to keep.”
I lay in the bed as long as I could will myself, but at five I stand and get up. I set the pot to brew, and have to stop it and start again as I realize I had it set to make two, for Steves after morning run cup. I’m still in my pajamas, something I never do.
“I can’t undo this.”
“Good.” that one hate-filled word pushed me to realize he was truly serious. He didn’t want to remember me opening up.
“Obliviate.”
I sit in the living room all day. I don’t get up when the doorbell rings or my phone goes off, or my laptop. I sit in the lounge chair I had in front of the fire- I couldn’t stand to sit on the couch- a cup of cold coffee cradled in my hands.
The break up had to be bad. Something he wouldn’t want himself to come back from, something he wouldn’t ever think of me as a potential partner again. In my haste, the only thing I could think of was-
“You cheated on me?” he was standing, his voice already cold and distant as he stood like an archangel in my kitchen. I don’t speak, I can’t, but e takes me silence as confirmation. I try to call out to him but I’m silent.
It stays deafeningly silent as he walks out the door.
We’d planned the weekend to be just us, a quiet affair with the two of us catching up after being apart for a few weeks.
Now it was just me in this house. When I bought it it had just been me and I thought it was spacious but perfect for me. Lively. Homey.
So why, now, after he’s left, does it just feel.. Empty?
I’m sure it’s been several hours when I hear a key in the door. My heart leaps when I see the blonde hair, and when he just stops in the doorway it settles into a thudding rhythm. I catch a glimpse of blue on the couch and my heart plummets.
“Did you come to get your things?”
“Do it.”
He was still silent, his blue eyes piercing as he watches me clutch the mug in my hands so tightly my knuckles whiten. I couldn’t. Wouldn’t let my hands shake.
“I decided I’d like to talk this out. I was too… I’d just gotten off a mission with Fury. I should have slept before having that conversation with you. Not that I got much sleep last night.”
“Now, Please.”
“And it looks like you didn’t either,” he says when I refuse to open my mouth. He moves to sit on the couch and I glance away.
“Obliviate.”
“There isn’t much to discuss.”
“Well for starts I could have been a little more receptive to the fact that earth magic and Asgardian magic is completely different.”
I snap my head around so fast my neck pops and I hold a hand against the spot, grimacing a second.
“But I-”
“Obliviate.”
“Thankfully, my super soldier genes seems to have made me somewhat immune to magic. I certainly believed whatever you did to me for a few hours, long enough for me to go through a bottle of Jack, before my mind cleared. So I figured most of your other tricks wouldn’t work on me either.”
“I still lied to you.” I murmur into my cup, and I see his lips thin.
“You did. And we will be discussing everything you’ve been omitting. But you haven’t answered my question from before.”
I’m wracking my brain as I try to remember a question. He stands and kneels next to the chair, cupping my startled face in his hands. He quirks an eyebrow at my genuinely concerned look and the blank expression softens into My Steve again.
“I believe I asked you to marry me, and you never answered.”