Maggie Stark and Steve Rogers got along with each other perfectly well. They'd known each other (or at least known about each other) for a while now, they had lots in common, and Bucky Barnes loved them both.
They felt perfectly comfortable teasing each other (Steve had gone bright red when Maggie unearthed the instructional videos he'd performed in for US schools and asked "Do you think Peter learned about his changing body from you?"), and worked well in a team.
But one day, Maggie found herself sitting at the kitchen table with Steve, Vision, Sam, and Rhodey as they chatted about Steve's short-lived and ill-fated romance with Sharon Carter. And though she'd briefly met Carter, had even witnessed her and Steve's first kiss, Maggie was quickly realizing that she didn't actually know Steve all that well. He made jokes that surprised her, referenced memories and stories that she'd never been a part of. It turned out he had a lot of opinions about Game of Thrones. As Steve and Vision traded theories about the ending of the series, Maggie eyed Steve closely. He kept up this stoic, straight-faced façade, but the closer she looked she could see the amusement glimmering in his blue eyes as he chatted with his friends.
Maggie rifled through her memories of Bucky's best friend – and she quickly realized that she and Steve had never actually spent much time together. Hm.
Steve, Vision, and Rhodey got called away to an intel meeting, and Maggie turned to Sam. He seemed content to relax at the table, rifling through a bag of Hershey's Kisses and keeping half an eye on the Oprah channel on the TV screen across the room.
Maggie had questions. Normally she might ask Bucky, but in this situation he was biased. Tony and Pepper were still on their honeymoon, so she couldn't ask them either.
"Sam."
He looked up and met her eye. "Hm?"
"What's the social protocol for befriending your romantic partner's friends?"
He pulled his hand out of the bag of chocolates. "This is about Steve."
"No, Sam, it's about you," she said with the air of one imparting a great secret.
He made a disgusted noise. "God, I hope not."
"Well?"
"What do you mean, well? If you want to be friends with Steve, be friends with Steve."
"How."
He put down the Hershey's Kisses and sat up straight. "You're worried about this, aren't you?"
Maggie frowned. "Bucky and I are still working out how our lives fit together. Steve is a big part of his life and I hadn't… hadn't factored that in before. But it's not just that, I… I don't just want to be friends with him because he's Bucky's friend. I want to be friends with him because he's Steve."
Sam cocked his head and smiled at her, his eyes filled with genuine warmth. "Well… I don't know, you don't have to be friends with your partner's friends, but it helps. Some people just don't get along – my uncle's husband really doesn't get along with his best friend, but they make it work."
She frowned again. "That seems like a complication."
"It is," Sam said with a shrug. "But I don't see why you and Steve wouldn't get along. I know he likes you."
"He does?"
"Sure, after you stopped trying to kill us." He grinned at her to soften the joke. "But if you want to get to know him better, then I'd suggest just hanging out, the two of you. That way you can be friend friends, instead of being two people who know each other through Bucky." He eyed her. "You really don't need to look so worried. Steve is friends with Tony, and if he can manage that then I'm sure you'll be a walk in the park."
Maggie chewed her lip. "Sometimes I don't relate well to other people. Something about not having a very standard upbringing."
Sam's mouth quirked up. "I think you might find that's a problem Steve shares."
She sat back in her seat and thought about it. "Okay. One-on-one hanging out. I can do that." She blew out a breath, and then eyed Sam more closely. "Hey, Sam."
"Yeah?" He'd gone back to the Kisses.
"I think we should be friends too."
His smile grew into a grin, and he leaned across the table to hold up a hand. "Agreed."
She shook his hand.
Three days later, after checking with Bucky, Maggie cornered Steve at the end of a team meeting and said: "I'm going to be in Manhattan this weekend for a conference, but I'm free on Sunday from mid morning. Would you like to get coffee with me?"
Steve blinked, clutching a StarkPad, and then glanced over at Bucky. "I, uh…"
"I'd like to get to know you," Maggie said with a small smile, and made sure her tone said very firmly this is in no way romantic, you idiot.
Steve relaxed, then went tense again. "I… I… that sounds good. I'll see you… then."
"It's a date," she said, just to make him squirm, then ducked out of the room after kissing Bucky's cheek on her way past. As she strode down the corridor, she heard Steve ask:
"Did you know about this?"
"I knew she wanted to hang out with you," Bucky replied drily.
"Why?"
"Probably something to do with how you've known me for nearly ninety years, punk, and she lives in the same building as you." A pause. "Stop looking so freaked out, she's not going to torture you."
"… Jerk."
When Maggie finished up at the conference she changed into more comfortable clothes, and then caught the subway to the little coffee shop that Darcy Lewis had recommended (Maggie had been bemoaning about finding a nice, quality coffee shop in central Manhattan that didn't have too much crazy stuff like 'paleo wheatgrass', and Foster's dark-haired research assistant had popped her head up and reeled off the names of three places she liked).
Steve was already waiting outside the hole-in-the wall coffee shop when she arrived. He leaned against the brick wall beside the shopfront, his hands in the pockets of his dark jeans and his head bowed. He wore a blue button up, along with sunglasses and a baseball hat.
Maggie smiled at the disguise, but had to admit that Steve was doing a decent job of hiding his identity – he held himself a little differently, and moved like a shorter, less well-built man. He made himself inconspicuous. Maggie suspected that Romanoff had quite a bit to do with his training.
"Steve!" Maggie called, because her training was still better than his and he hadn't spotted her yet. He turned and greeted her with a smile and a wave, and then they both… stood awkwardly in front of each other. Maggie wasn't really a hugger, and Steve didn't appear to be one either. Foot traffic flowed past them.
"Hi," Steve eventually said, and took off his sunglasses.
"Hi!" Maggie cleared her throat and then gestured to the coffee shop. "So this is the place, apparently it's been here since 1908 and they've got a coffee grinder that's older than you. I'm reliably informed that they have good coffee that won't poison us."
"Well I hope your intel's up to shape."
"It always is," Maggie replied, and smiled at Steve as he opened the door for her.
They wandered into the shop, settled at a little table by the window where they both had sightlines throughout the space and also a view of the New York traffic streaming by outside, and ordered their drinks from the waitress (it turned out Steve was a black coffee kind of guy). In the wait for their coffee they chatted about the weather and how nice the coffee shop looked. By the time the waitress came back with their coffees, they'd fallen into awkward silence.
Steve didn't seem to know what to do with his hands – he kept putting them in his pockets, then wrapping them around his steaming coffee, then folding them on the table. He looked too big for the small round table and his vintage wooden chair, and he was visibly uncomfortable. Bucky had told Maggie that Steve was awkward with women, but this didn't seem to be about that – he'd hung out with plenty of women since landing in this century. Maggie wasn't exactly at ease herself, but for her that translated to sitting very still and displaying no emotion on her face.
Maggie felt torn. She knew too much about Steve, but not enough. It would be weird to ask him something like "so, what have you been drawing lately?" because they'd never spoken about his art before, but it would be disingenuous to ask what his hobbies were because she already knew. She knew all the details of his twelfth birthday party, knew about every job he'd ever had, knew how worried his mother had been about his health for his entire childhood. And she was very aware that though Steve didn't have quite the same level of detail about her, he knew everything that had happened to her in her life and had been there for some of her worst moments.
"So…" Steve said eventually, and his eyes darted up to her face. "You and Bucky."
Maggie sipped her coffee. "Yep."
He shifted in his seat. "I didn't realize… back in Germany, I didn't realize you were… together."
"Wasn't exactly something we were trying to get people to notice," she replied with a shrug. She wasn't sure if this was an improvement on awkward conversations about the weather.
"I guess not. I only realized when… in Siberia, when…"
"Yeah, I know." Maggie shook away the memories of snow caught in her eyelashes and Bucky's bloody lips against hers. Then she took in Steve's uncomfortable posture. "Wait, is this… a shovel talk of some kind? An intervention?"
His hands flew up. "No, no! I'm not trying to… I didn't mean that at all, I swear–"
"– are you sure? Because I know–"
"You and Bucky are… great, just great, I'm really glad you have each other, he'd never really… before…"
"I know, which is why I wondered–"
"It's fine," Steve blurted out. "Really, I promise this isn't an intervention or anything." He looked pained. "I don't even know why I brought it up."
Maggie sat back in her seat and thought maybe because Bucky's the only thing we have in common, but she didn't say it. Instead she swallowed uncomfortably, said: "Okay. So, um…" and trailed off into silence.
The rest of the coffee shop suddenly seemed very loud – Maggie and Steve looked at each other to the soundtrack of cups clinking against plates and other people conversing in low tones.
Then Steve shifted again and said: "I heard you and Tony were working on some kind of energy shield?"
She picked up the conversational bone with relief, and went into a long detailed explanation of the tech and how it could be used in combat. But she was very aware that they were just talking about work now.
Desperately searching for a way to save the conversation from being purely about their work relationship she brought up the fact that she'd been to the Smithsonian exhibit about him. But then she had to admit that she and Bucky had gone there together, since Bucky had remembered Steve pretty soon after the Helicarriers and had learned about his own history from a museum plaque, and Steve's face twisted up in such a heartbreaking way that Maggie spilled her coffee in the process of desperately apologizing.
They asked for the check pretty soon after that.
As they made their way back to Steve's car for what Maggie was sure would be an awkward drive back to the facility, they walked past a narrow, graffitied alleyway and heard a laugh.
Maggie glanced toward the source of the sound and instantly stopped walking.
Midway down the alley stood a young man in a shiny grey suit and a yellow tie, laughing as he crouched in front of what at first looked to be a mound of fabric, but when it moved was revealed to be a homeless man. The man in the suit waved a bill in front of the homeless man's face, then lifted a lighter to the note and set it on fire.
As he dropped the burning note on the other man's lap and laughed again as the man frantically brushed it away, Maggie heard a sharp intake of breath to her right.
Without a word exchanged between them, Maggie and Steve strode into the alley and stormed up to the suited man.
"Son," Steve said in a low voice, "you better not be doing what it looks like you're doing."
The man, who up close Maggie could see had a doughy white face and excessively-combed, neatly parted hair, turned around. With laughter still on his face he took in the sight of Captain America and the Wyvern standing ten feet away and glaring at him, and went white.
The homeless man glanced up, snorted, and then muttered: "karma, asshole."
The man in the suit started stammering. "I… this isn't, didn't think you would–" he started laughing nervously. "It's just a bit of fun, I'm not hurting anyone." He edged backwards as he stammered, his eyes darting between Steve and Maggie's faces and his nearest exit, the end of the alley.
The next time he glanced over his shoulder at his escape route Maggie darted forward, seized his gaudy yellow tie, and with her other hand snaked his wallet out of his pocket. The guy yelped and tried to jerk away, but she held him fast.
"Steve, you got a light?" she asked.
"No, I don't smoke. Never have." He looked a bit sad about it.
The homeless guy piped up: "I got his, Ms Stark. He dropped it." He held up a rectangular silver lighter.
"Thanks, buddy," Maggie said with a smile to the homeless man as she took it from him. His face was mostly obscured by his beanie and scruffy beard, but his eyes glinted as he watched her let go of the other man's tie, step a few paces away and then flick open the lighter. The flame glimmered in Maggie's eyes as she held it up to a corner of the wallet.
"Hey now," the suited guy protested as he stepped forward, "what the hell do you think–"
His sudden burst of courage wilted when Steve put a hand on his shoulder and stopped him in his tracks.
Steve's posture was casual, but Maggie could see how tightly his fingers dug in to the guy's shoulder. "I thought you wanted to make a statement?" he asked. His face was set in hard lines.
Steve held the now bright-red guy still as the four of them watched flames consume the fake-leather wallet. Maggie waited until the last possible moment to drop it on the ground, and took a few moments to enjoy the sight of the wallet going up in smoke.
When the flames burned out, Steve peeled his hand off the guy's shoulder and they all looked at him.
"I think you might think twice about taunting people you see as weaker than you," Steve said. His face could have been chiseled out of stone. Maggie could imagine the kind of statue he'd make – she'd call it The Shield.
The guy's face was white and splotchy red, and he could only stare as Steve went to stand beside Maggie in front of the blackened hunk of wallet. His gaze lifted to Maggie's face.
"Now piss off," she said.
He turned on his heel and half jogged, half speed-walked away.
As soon as the guy left the alley Steve pulled out his own wallet, fished out all his money and offered it to the homeless man. The man eyed Steve cautiously, then accepted the notes with a quick reach of his fingers. There was dirt under his fingernails, and that small detail made something inside Maggie clench painfully.
She sat down right in the middle of the alley, a few feet away from the man, and his cautious gaze turned to her.
"Hey," she said.
He scratched his chin. "Hello."
She cocked her head. "What's your name? You seem to know mine."
His eyes narrowed incrementally. "George."
Maybe not his real name, but it doesn't matter. "Nice to meet you, George. What do you need?" She gestured to the money in his hand with a small, gentle smile. "Other than Captain America's cash."
George sniffed again and eyeballed her, clearly wary despite the enjoyment he'd shown in the wallet-burning. Maggie knew his kind, and she knew how their trust worked – it wasn't easily given, and it was very easily lost. She also knew that George and the people he shared the streets with often needed a whole lot more than money.
Steve watched Maggie and George eye each other for a few long moments, his face still etched from stone but beginning to display some confusion.
Eventually, George nodded and scratched the back of his neck. "There's a homeless shelter a couple blocks away from here."
"New Horizons," Steve said. "I know it."
George hunched. "They're no good there. They've been giving people shitty food and shitty beds. And they steal things. Tried to complain, they kicked me out saying I ought'a be grateful." He shifted and his eyes darted between them again. "And it might not be for me to say but it's… it's not a safe place for women. If you know what I mean."
"I do," Maggie murmured. "Thank you, George. Do you mind if I give you my contact details, in case you think of anything else?"
His lips quirked up. "I follow you on Twitter. If I think of anything I'll message you."
She returned his smile. "Sounds good. Can I follow you back?"
Once Maggie had got George's Twitter handle and checked that he was okay, Maggie and Steve walked out of the alley and back onto the main sidewalk, where New Yorkers strode obliviously past the two Avengers.
Maggie and Steve each took a long breath, then turned to look at each other.
Maggie took in Steve's straight shoulders and determined eyes. Something in the indignant, resolute expression on his face called to something thrumming under her own skin. She cocked her head at him. "Want to come to this shelter with me?"
His eyes gleamed. "Yeah. Yeah, I do."
Steve and Maggie returned to the Avengers Facility in the early hours of the next morning. They had a quick, tired conversation in the garage, hugged one another, and then went to bed.
When Maggie crawled into bed beside Bucky, he grunted sleepily and rolled over.
"Wondering when you'd get back," he said, his voice scratchy. "What did you two get up to?"
Maggie pulled the duvet over herself and settled into her pillow. "Well it was weird at first," she murmured, "but after some light arson we ended up annexing one of the biggest homeless shelters in the city, then started a police investigation into this real asshole of a women's doctor, and then we saw an ad for an art and technology exhibition so we went to MoMA."
Bucky yawned. "I refuse to get worried about this."
She grinned and wriggled closer to him. "Not even a little bit?"
His eyes were closed as he replied: "One of you is bad enough, I'm sure that the two of you together will actually give me an embolism. So I'm going back to sleep instead."
"That's fair." She shifted closer to him and he wrapped his arm over her so they lay together with her cheek against his metal shoulder and his nose in her hair.
With Bucky's chest rising and falling steadily against hers, Maggie reflected on her day. Something about stopping that asshole taunting George had burned away the awkwardness between she and Steve, and once they got going it was as if they'd been friends for years. While they'd investigated the shelter and got in a fight with the company running it she and Steve had started exchanging stories about Bucky, comparing notes and laughing at the similarities between 1930s Brooklyn Bucky and twenty-first century post-HYDRA Bucky. Steve had shared memories about his childhood and all the scrapes he and Bucky had found themselves in, and confided that he was really glad Bucky had found love and happiness with Maggie.
But they didn't only talk about Bucky – on the way out of the police station Maggie had asked about her father, and listened with rapt attention as Steve told her about the excitable, brave, flawed Howard Stark that he had known. He told her about brave, beautiful Peggy, and Maggie told him about her childhood before HYDRA and what Tony used to be like. Steve seemed so much more comfortable with Maggie now that he wasn't talking to 'Bucky's girlfriend' or 'Tony's sister' or 'the Wyvern', but to Maggie. And when she made him laugh with her odd, deadpan jokes or startled him with one of her many strange bits of trivia, she caught a flash of relief in his face, followed by more laughter. Because this wasn't hard at all. It turned out that for Steve Rogers and Maggie Stark, being friends was easy.
They'd chatted about books, and art, and Steve gave her music recommendations from a wide variety of decades. On the way to MoMA they traded stories about missions they'd been on.
And Maggie had come away with a totally new understanding of Steve Rogers. Steve's sense of humor was much drier than Bucky's, steeped in a century of putting up with people's shit. He had the same dark twist to his humor that Maggie did, the kind you got when you fought through years of trauma and loss and found yourself amongst friends. He hid so much of himself behind a stoic expression – he hid grief, and loneliness, but also hidden was the Steve Rogers who was still very much a scrawny, brave artist from Brooklyn who didn't back down when he saw someone who needed help. Maggie finally felt like she knew the 'little' Steve, who she'd seen in black-and-white photos in the Smithsonian. She got the sense a lot of people forgot about him.
Maggie smiled to herself in the darkness of Bucky's bedroom, soaking in Bucky's warmth after a chaotic day of fighting crime and drinking coffee with Steve.
A few minutes later, when she thought Bucky was asleep, he kissed the top of her head and said: "'M glad you had fun, Meg."
She smiled into his chest. "You've got good taste in friends. And girlfriends."
She couldn't see his smile, but she heard it in the tilt of his next words: "Damn right I do."