for Martha, my new friend :)
Steve never felt like himself at formal occasions. He’d been gifted a kind and caring family that just so happened to be stupidly rich, making him and his siblings very interesting to the public eye. Especially when Steve Barnes-Rogers, son of Stephanie ‘Stevie’ and James ‘Bucky’ Barnes-Rogers, was getting married to Margaret ‘Peggy' Carter, woman of steel and firm believer of breaking all gender stereotypes except looking fabulous 24/7.
So with a fake smile on his face, instead of the scowl he wished he could pull, he excused himself from talking about house prices with the founder of the Wakandan Children’s Charity (Sam's boyfriend T'challa), to go and stand by the reason for this unnecessary party, his fiancée.
After a few pleasant exchanges between Howard Stark, his friend Tony’s dad, he pulled her away and into the beautiful garden, muttering in her ear sensually and letting his hand rest on her hip. They got a few sideways looks and winks from guests who thought they knew where the two were getting up to, and Peggy flushed pink at what he was saying in her ear. When the two got deep enough into the garden to not risk being overheard, they pulled apart and Peggy doubled over laughing, her crisp English accent echoing around the beautiful roses littering the ground in every direction.
“Really, Steve? ‘I want to take you home and play Mario with Sam and Tony until you beat our asses and Tony gets wasted on thousand-dollar whiskey'? You’re definitely something, you could have at least said something that wasn’t utterly ridiculous? Do you have no libido?” Steve grinned, and clutched his chest dramatically. “My own fiancée, accusing me of having no sex drive! Well excuse me, Miss got-the-waitresses-number-at-her-own-engagement-party!” Blushing, Peggy pushed him lightly and he stumbled back teasingly, both of them grinning.
It was no secret between the two of them that Peggy was definitely into girls but if she wasn’t she’d totally do him, a running joke seeing as they are engaged, after all. Steve himself was bisexual, but made it explicitly clear he saw her as nothing more than a close friend.
Arranged marriages were uncomfortable for a lot of people, the two were glad they could fake being a loving couple ‘going upstairs for a while' to hang around in Steve’s room chatting about cute girls and the lack of quality in modern TV.
Recently, though, after Steve had worked up the courage to tell her, he spilled everything about how he crept out of the house every night to paint walls with pictures he never planned but always left more satisfied than anything he did during the day. Instead of telling him to stop, she wiped an imaginary tear and called him ‘Captain America' after a friend, even getting him a matching American flag bandana to cover his face. ‘Go, be street Picasso’ was her favourite phrase to date, and she grinned as she repeated it, surrounded by frostbitten blooms in the dead of night.
*
The next morning, a new painting appeared on the side of the veterans centre where Sam volunteered. The silhouette of a woman, with her hair in perfect curls, her arms crossed and her head held high, her dress WWII finery. The only splash of colour was her startling red lipstick, fashioned into an oh-so-familiar smirk.