He didn’t tell her, I’ll die if you leave me, even though it was quite literally true.

This most wonderful and unexpected of all days, the first day after the end of the world.

“You can’t really be this sad over him,” Lucifer said a little desperately. “He’s missed your birthday, twice!”

“No!” she said immediately.

“You want to fuck me!” he said gleefully.

“No, and also we’re not even having this conversation,” she said in desperation, while her treacherous brain went right on vividly imagining every single minute of banging that smirk off his face so hard—

The Raft never got dark.

“The Resistance needs you,” she says, urgently. “General Organa needs you. We all need you. You have to come back.”

He doesn’t answer her for weeks.

“TONY I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD—”

“It just seems like—it should mean something,” Steve said plaintively.

“Well, I guess it does,” Sam said, after a thoughtful moment. “Means you’re not a virgin anymore.”

Where the grass is greener.

The first week after Steve walked out of SHIELD, he went clubbing.

There wasn’t anywhere else to take shelter when the rain hit.

“You know, whatever you’re planning to do to me,” Sam said, working hard to keep his voice steady, “I’m not going to be using it for you.”

“Who sent you?” Steve said.

“Colonel Rhodes tapped me, specifically,” Wilson said. “But pretty much all your friends were behind the idea.”

“All my friends are dead,” Steve said.

“I’ve sent you keys,” Tony said. “I’ve emailed, I’ve texted, I’ve called. Pepper called. There is an entire floor of Stark Tower waiting for you to move in. And instead here you are living in a two-bedroom shack out in the open with your — extremely hot, by the way, nice job there — boyfriend. The paparazzi are going to eat you alive, Rogers.”

Sam kept holding him, stroking gently. “Don’t worry, man, we’ll get through it,” and Steve believed that, suddenly and deep; that he and Sam would find a way to figure everything out.

They were about fifty miles from Atlanta when Sam stirred and yawned awake in the passenger seat. “Morning,” Steve said: the sun had come up, but the two-lane road was still pretty empty, a little morning mist hanging low over the asphalt and in the trees.

“I didn’t even know I liked cake,” Steve said.

Sam folded his arms and glared at him. “Okay, you know what, now I’m starting to think you’re not even trying.”

“Okay, man,” Sam said, the day the new wings arrived. “Let’s go.”

Steve leaned over to peer into the bathroom. Even the tub was heart-shaped. And full of rose petals. “We’ve got to give them points for consistency?”