InsaneJournal

Sharon Carter’s evening was pretty ordinary. Sure, she’d spent the last week in Spain decapitating decaying vikings; her Sunday afternoon stopping looters in midtown and her Sunday evening finding out just how articulated the Iron Patriot armour was -- but tonight was quiet. Take-out vegetarian pad Thai and two glasses of Barefoot Moscato. She was in bed just after eleven and it felt nice. Really, since she’s jumped worlds and away from a registration war, everything seemed to have just slowed down.

Sometimes that hurt as much as it helped. Having more time meant feeling absences a little greater and missing friends a little more. She missed Sam, and her old job and position in SHIELD. She missed the men and women she knew as field agents. She missed Steve -- God, did she ever miss Steve. Even before he’d left the first time he’d been off, distant. And that had never changed. Now he was gone again.

But she still had her wine and her box of noodles and bean sprouts, so to hell with him.

She picked up her phone, discarded beside her on the sofa and scrolled to her contacts. Her thumb hovered over Tony Stark’s name, but she shook the idea (blamed the wine), turned off Jon Stewart and went to her room. She just needed to sleep off whatever it was she was feeling or bad ideas she was considering. She was with Rhodey, she liked Rhodey and crawling into bed with Tony Stark had never ended well for anyone, and she really wasn’t about to test her luck.

When she started dreaming about the war, about the conflicts in SHIELD and about Steve, Spider-man and the superheros who refused to register -- she still had the wherewithal to know what was happening. Fury and Rogers had told her that this would all happen, and she’d seen enough people on the network who’d dreamed their memories to understand that this was what was happening.

So the first thing she did, was try to wake up. She kicked; thrashed against what she was seeing, tried to tell herself that it was a dream that she was seeing, that none of it was real. It worked until about the time she looked down and saw a gun in her hand. Before Captain America was shot.

Steve had told her that she’d been brainwashed when all of this had happened to him. That eventually she’d fought back against the programming and that she had helped Bucky and the rest of the Avengers get him back. Sharon had to wonder, though, that if she’d been brainwashed -- maybe she wouldn’t remember things as vividly as she did now, when she didn’t have the luxury or someone else controlling her thoughts.

She watched Steve Rogers die. And then she stopped fighting. The memories that followed gutted her. Sitting on the side of her bathtub with a gun under her chin, the kidnapping, the fight with Sin -- the knife.

Becoming re-acquainted with the Winter Soldier, the man who’d kidnapped her who’d really turned out to be Steve’s old partner. Working with him to bring Steve back, while Norman Osborn took over the Avengers. GNN station and mind control of the masses abduction to a HYDRA geostation satellite. Burying Aunt Peggy.

Asking Steve to marry her.

Steve’s abduction. Dimension Z. The explosion... resonating and blending into the sound of her alarm blaring up from her StarkPhone. She hit it off, rolled onto her stomach and buried her face into her pillow. She knew what she’d seen, what it meant and... what was coming. In fact, she was pretty sure she’d just witnessed how she was going to die. The end for her was death in another dimension, letting Steve get away. Letting Steve live. She’d kill for him, she’d die for him.

Oh God.

***

All she was wearing was a tank dress. The kind that was just a bit too short to wear without tights. It was Tuesday. The back of her throat was dry and she’d come down from her room in Potts Tower without even bothering to put on shoes. She hadn’t texted, she didn’t care. She was practically shivering with the memories from the night before and all she wanted was to feel something that had nothing to do with the past -- or the future -- something new and familiar all at once. Tony was that. And he was someone she could hurt too. She smacked his door with the side of her fist. When he opened it, she shoved him back into the room with both hands and slammed the door shut with her naked heel.

***

It was the sound of running water that finally woke Sharon up, she opened her eyes only to shut them again when she was blinded by the fucking blue light of Tony’s RT Node. Bastard. How did she even manage to fall asleep that close to it? She pushed herself up along his body, knees pressing into the mattress as she moved her thighs against his waist and shifted to cross her arms over the centre of his chest to somewhat block the light. She put her chin down on the back of her hand and waited until Tony stirred enough to suggest he was at least somewhat awake.

“Did we break the bathroom sink?”

She smiled softly and moved a little higher, dipping down to give him a kiss on the corner of his mouth. Friendly, but more sincere than anything else she’d done so far that day. It was a thank you, really, for everything that had just happened (especially that thing on the kitchen counter). Carter thought, for a moment, about trying to get off of him, find something to wear and go home but she really couldn’t bring herself to move, not only because she was still exhausted but because there was something that lingered, unspoken between them.

Because all their flirting and teasing aside, he wanted to know why. Why now, that morning, after everything. She knew he was asking, she could tell just by looking into those fantastic blue eyes of his, and she knew if she didn’t tell him, he’d think it was just about --

“Tony, I have to tell you something.” She shut her eyes. Sure, Sharon was naked, in an apartment that her and Stark had almost destroyed with their -- er -- feverishness and it seemed almost stupid to get shy about anything now, but she couldn’t help it. She was worried about admitting to her dreams because it meant accepting that it had all happened. Before, when other people had told her what was coming (or some of it -- it seemed everyone had wanted to spare her the gruesome details. Something that, truly, hadn’t done her any favours) she could cross her fingers and hope maybe it was some different universe; a different future. If she told Tony now, it made it real. She sighed. “Last night. I don’t know how it works, or why it happens, but I got all my memories. Everything... Everything I missed, right up until -- well. Where Steve was when he came back that second time.”