Get a life!
The next morning, I found myself called into Promotions, sure I was going to get a scolding for my performance in my individual appearance. When I saw Natasha and Wanda there, I wasn't sure. And I could hear somebody talking in the next office.
"Am I in trouble?" I asked bluntly, and Marketing blinked owlishly at me.
"No, why?"
I relaxed. "I thought because of that individual appearance..." I explained.
She flashed me a smile. "Oh, no. You did well. That sort of candor is not what we'd have advised you to do, but it really worked. This meeting today is related to Comic Con, so your performances are responsible for getting you some really interesting offers, which I advise you to do. It will help people have a favorable opinion of you the next time there's a public relations disaster."
"I don't know what you were thinking," PR said loudly from the next office, clearly audible through the wall. "Whatever you do, it cannot look like you're using and tossing Paladin." I flinched. Everybody looked at me. "She is solid gold after the convention; people view her more favorably than anybody on the team right now, including you. I don't care what you were thinking, kissing her in public. If you weren't going to go public on a relationship, you should have kept your lips off her. And now that you tell me there's nothing going on...well, the internet's on fire with speculation. You need to be sure you're not seen in public with another woman for awhile; then if anybody still cares, we can say it just didn't work out, no hard feelings exist." There's an irritated murmur in response.
"Um...We were just contacted this morning with an offer from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. They're mounting a major exhibition of historic clothing and jewelry, mostly from their own collections but also borrowing some important pieces from private collections and other institutions. They would like you to put a face on the exhibition for the public; you'd be photographed in some of the dresses and jewelry--" Marketing plowed on.
"You need to learn how to manage your fans better!" the man next door said sharply. "The fans may be cruder and more demanding than what you'd prefer, but they aren't going away. It won't kill you to sign the top of some girl's breast, you're not going to be groping her. And kissing random women doesn't help your image--"
Wanda glanced at me and held up her hand. "Sounds fun. I'm in." Natasha and I also voted in favor. Anything to get out.
"And one more. The GIA is also doing...something... they want you to model important pieces of jewelry for some publication." We agreed to that one too, and scuttled out before we heard any more.
By mutual agreement, we walked in silence for a bit. "Geeze. They need thicker soundproofing in those offices," I said, provoking Wanda into giggles of nervousness, which broke the ice.
"I wonder what we just agreed to do," Natasha said.
"I have no idea," I confessed. "Clothes and jewelry, I think. You don't suppose this was a ploy by Promotions to make us more docile, do you?" Everybody laughed at that, and the topic was abandoned.
I said goodbye to the others at the turnoff for the obstacle course and gym. Since I knew Steve was otherwise occupied, I ran it myself. And discovered that he'd had a whole new obstacle put in while we were in San Diego. It was a mud pit, for some reason. Probably because of the landslide from the Yucatan mission. It must have been fifty yards long and so deep it came past my knees. I lost my footwear in it and was pooped when I got to the other side. It was hard to extract myself from. When I got out, I quit the course, showered, and went to medical. It had done a number on my knees, which weren't as young as they'd been. After I spent a couple hours on and off with ice packs, I made a sign and stuck it in front of the pit. "Mud Trap! Save yourself!" it read, and just as I finished tapping the post into the ground, Tony and Bruce burst out of the trees on the path, and stopped, looking from me and the sign to the pit of doom.
"So, that looks new," Bruce observed.
"How deep is it?" Tony wanted to know. I indicated a spot over my knees. "I'd be flying over that, anyway," he said. I restrained the urge to flip him off.
"I think I'd let the Other Guy deal with that," Bruce decided, and they ran around it. I shook my head and went to work. Afterward, I went up to the rec room for some...I was going to go with Guinness, but I wasn't too fond of thick brown liquids for some reason, so I thought that if Natasha was around, I'd have her mix me up a martini. When I got upstairs, (I had to take the elevator today) Natasha (yay!), Bruce, Thor, Sif, and Sam were listening at the door. Sam gestured for silence, and I joined the group. Tony seemed to be having a conversation with Steve.
"Look, I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life, but I've got to agree with PR on this one. If you don't want to date her, just let it die down. The fankids are swooning over the thought of the Avengers' power couple. But frankly, she's a better match for you than Sharon Carter."
"Oh?" Steve's voice was glacial.
"Seriously, you might want to rethink going out with Peggy's, what? Great-niece? Great-great niece? It looks like Sharon's picking up her auntie's leftovers and you're taking whatever you can get. There's having a CIA contact, and contacting the CIA, if you know what I mean." Steve didn't bother to answer that. Verbally, anyway. I left when I heard the first punch being thrown.
Next day, I didn't say anything to Steve about his bruises, but I had to go at a slower speed to save my knees; when Steve nagged me about my pace, I handed him the doctor's note saying I had to take it easy and excusing me from the mud. It exacerbated his still-pissy mood. He yelled at me for the sign I'd put up, and I yelled back about the length and depth of the field. We finished the run in silence, and fortunately in the gym it was upper-body day, which was also done in silence. Bucky excused me from poleaxe practice since I couldn't bend my knees very deeply, fan practice since I couldn't move very swiftly, and let me concentrate on the urumi since that was mostly upper-body work. Materials had made me a man-shaped target out of a plastic that was highly resistant to the blades of the urumi, so I got to whip my bad mood out at that.
"So I guess you heard last night," he said.
"It's why I shouldn't eavesdrop," I said, with an especially wicked crack of the metal blades.
"Steve was chewed out earlier, I guess."
I let the sword wrap around my leg to still it, then coiled it up. "Yes, in the PR office. Natasha and Wanda and I were there talking to Marketing. The walls aren't thick enough." My cheeks flushed. "This is way out of control," I said to Steve's best friend. "So he kissed me, and it was seen. Big deal. Everybody need to just take a deep breath and relax. It will blow over when there's nothing else out there about it. And frankly, it's nobody's damned business, anyway. Both of us are adults."
"But it kind of is," Bucky said, surprising me. "He's the team leader, you provide the heart of the team. If there's a problem between the two of you, it affects everybody." I rolled up the sword tighter in a temper.
"There's a problem because people are making one," I stressed. "There's no problem between Steve and me."
"We're a small group. We don't get out much, so yeah, we're probably overly interested in each others' goings on. And personally, I'd like to see Steve have a girlfriend; before the girls never looked twice at him and now they just see somebody famous. At least you know the real Steve. You could do a lot worse."
"This is just great," I snapped. "Steve's getting all sorts of grief because he made a dumb call and everybody's telling him not to dump me publicly because my q rating is momentarily high. You can't dump what isn't even a thing," I said, grinding my teeth. "And I'm not some innocent who has to be protected from a predator by the big strong men. And now there's you, saying I should settle, implying that it's the best outcome from a bad situation if I just bite the bullet, like we're both charity cases. Everybody just needs to butt the hell out."
'I didn't mean it like that," he started, and I shook my head.
"Look, my vanity's taken a beating from the weeping and wailing over this horrible, nightmare scenario. I don't honestly think I'm so awful, and it pisses me off to be treated like problem that has to be fixed, like I'm some sort of bomb that made a huge mess. It's going to fade away if people just let it go."
I turned and headed for my workshop. And when it was time to leave, I was glad that I lived off-campus. When I got home, though, I was restless and kind of resentful, truth be told. So after wandering around the house, I got in the car and took a little trip to the biggest sporting goods store I could find. A couple of hours later, I returned home. Wrestling the big box out of the SUV and up the stairs to the porch was the hard part; from there, I just used the entryway rug to scoot the box over to the basement stairs and slid it down. The dogs followed it down as I got the cordless drill with the screwdriver tip and a stepladder. I bolted the hanger into one of the big, solid beams on the ceiling and stripped the box off the heavy bag. Huh. I looked at the distance from the beam to where the bag was on the floor and recalculated. In the end, I brought down a chair and several of my old and thickest textbooks, propping the bag on this assembly and securing the ring to the hanger. Then I eased the chair away and the bag swung free, just waiting for me to hit it. I smiled and took everything up, then came back downstairs for the box, taking it out to the recycling bin in the garage.
I changed into shorts and a t-shirt and bounced downstairs to try the punching bag when I had to divert to the door as the doorbell chimed. It was Steve. I opened the door and stood aside.
"I'm not interrupting anything, am I?" he asked a touch nervously.
"No, I was just going to try out my new punching bag," I said, hoping that he wasn't going to give me any grief about it.
He laughed. "Can I see?" I led him downstairs. Seeing how this was Steve, I didn't fuss as he inspected the hanger, explaining how I'd bought longer, better quality wood screws. His lips quirked up as I explained how I'd gotten the bag hung, but he didn't say anything.
"Do you know how to start?" he asked neutrally. I held up my cell phone, which had a YouTube tutorial cued up. "I could show you," he offered, extending an olive branch. I took it, and he helped me put on the handwraps and the gloves and showed me how to punch. I took it easy, not wanting to overdo on something new.
"Feel better?" he asked, crossing his arms.
"I do," I confirmed. "It's very satisfying." He snorted.
"I often feel that way."
"If you'd like to take a break from the gym sometimes, you could come here," I offered. "One of the dogs can let you in." He looked at me through his ridiculous eyelashes. "I am not going to assault your virtue," I said, hanging on to patience. "It's just an offer to punch something on your own."
He relaxed and smiled sheepishly. "I'm a little skittish," he said.
"I know," I mumbled, then pulled back the Velcro on one of the boxing gloves with my teeth. He shook his head and peeled back the closure on the other.
"It's been pretty bad the past few days," he said. "I'm sorry for putting you through it. And the mud obstacle. Somehow the measurements were greatly exaggerated."
"I don't understand why we have to have a mud obstacle at all," I said, looking around for a place to put the gloves.
"It was only supposed to be a foot deep, to get everybody accustomed to uncertain footing."
"Good, because if it was a rescue scenario, we'd be looking at a much bigger problem." He started to laugh, and all of a sudden it felt ok. I leaned against his arm, and after a moment he put it around me.
"Maybe we should have a joint strategy if anybody says anything else," he said and I thought it over before agreeing. Ultimately, we decided, we would just tell anybody who said anything that it we were done talking about it.
"So how will the dogs let me in if you're not here? I'm kind of fuzzy about that," he said, dropping his arm, so I stepped away.
"The dogs have a key on their collar, so the locks buzz open when they get close. And the key has to be at the right height, so somebody can't just take it off their collars. I don't really know details, it was something Tony came up with," I said, and we headed upstairs.
It took a couple of days, but after Steve and I just kept saying that we weren't going to discuss it anymore, even Tony stopped twitting us. A good thing, too, since the thing with the Met came up pretty fast. Asking us had been last minute, and it was easy enough for Legal to handle the contracts; our fee went to a fund to help with admissions and everybody involved signed a non-disclosure agreement to protect my identity. Additionally, the photos would be photoshopped if necessary to obscure my face other than my eyes. We would be bringing hair and makeup stylists with us; they were already in discussions with the museum about the styling. They sent our measurements so they could find clothing that fit; when that was finalized, the museum sent patterns for the correct undergarments for each dress so that it would look as the designers had intended. It turned out that it was an exhibition for the Costume Institute specifically, but the photos would be shot throughout the museum.
Finally, the time came and we took the quinjet to New York with Tony, who was going to drop in on a school thing Peter had. We went into the museum after hours and were hustled immediately to a staging area. It was harder work than I thought, even though most of the time was spent being styled with historical accuracy. We were each assigned a photographer; I got along great with mine. He was funny but demanding, and although it turned out to be interesting, I was glad to board the quinjet several hours later and go home.
Several days later, we were all hanging out in the rec room when Marketing came up and handed each of us women a thick interoffice envelope. In that was a large envelope containing the photographs from the shoot; we each had our own set, and they were the best that each photographer shot. We made the guys clear off one of the sofas so we could sit together and compare. The boys got tired of listening to us laugh and 'ooh' over the photographs, and Tony plucked some out of my hand. Bruce looked over Natasha's shoulder and Vision sat on the arm of the sofa and looked at Wanda's, but ultimately they were all passed around. They'd done two scenes with all three of us in Worth ball gowns; Wanda and I had worn black and white ones while Natasha wore an all-black gown. Then we were put into Charles James gowns, each in different colors. For individual shots, Wanda had been put into an Edwardian gown and an Empire masterpiece. Natasha had worn a cream and pink robe a l'Anglaise and a slinky 30's satin bias cut slip dress. I'd been put into a magnificent Callot Soeurs flapper dress and a vivid purple tea dress. I'd been shot in the temple of Dendur in the flapper dress and walking in the Arms and Armor gallery in the tea dress.
"This is a tea dress?" Bucky said, studying it. "It looks like a nightgown and robe."
"Not with the train," I pointed out. "It was surprisingly comfortable, though."
"They gave you that one out of pity," Wanda said slyly, smiling broadly.
"I thought we weren't going to discuss that," I said primly.
Natasha took some glee in relating how I'd passed out after too long in the corset for the Worth dress. I couldn't breathe enough. The waist on that thing had been itty, and I'd been cinched in as tightly as they could make it. I swatted her good-naturedly, and for the first time since Comic Con, things really felt back to normal.