Archive of Our Own ^beta

Eve had always been tall. Her mother let out the seams for all of her dresses, ironing the hems flat and re-stitching them as narrowly as she could, scraping for every extra quarter inch of fabric. Even then, they rode up too short, showing her thin calves and knobby ankles, the skin perpetually mottled blue-ish and ruddy with cold.

The top half of her clothes never fit right, either. She'd been flat all over, a beanpole with baggy dresses and a bum leg and a period that wasn't ever coming because her body knew it didn't have any blood to spare.

The only boy who ever paid her any mind was Gary Richards, sweet and red-headed and less handsome than he was pretty. Eve liked him so much she'd thought she might burst.

"Don't punch ‘em, Evie," he'd say, sitting by her on the stoop while she ineptly stitched a seam back together where the boys from the new Brooklyn Technology school had grabbed it and yanked until it tore. She was getting a little better at sewing, which was good because her mom was going to have her hide if she noticed the mending and found out that Eve was getting into fights and ruining her clothes.

"It's my one advantage," she'd say back. "They can't hit a girl."

"They sure do push you down a lot," Gary had said, but Eve just shrugged. Then she pricked her finger on the needle because he'd distracted her, and said a bad word that made him laugh.

Bucky wasn't like Gary—he'd taught her to keep her thumbs on the outside so she didn't break a finger when Eve caught Dickie and his gang trying to look up the skirts of the nice-looking girls in class. "Don't use all your knuckles," he'd told her. "Just the first two, like this." He hit the pillow Eve held up four times with quick jabs, left left, right right. "Now you."

Bucky had been the one to lend her men's clothes and bandages so she could bind her chest and go to the recruitment office. He backed her up when she told her ma that she'd fallen asleep with chewing gum in her mouth and gotten it all in her hair, so bad she had no other choice than to cut it off real short.

"They're gonna notice you just got a sock down your pants when you go in for the physical," Bucky warned.

"I gotta try," was all she said.

She tried four times, and on the fourth one Doctor Erskine had sat her down, said a lot of things about female hormones and interactions and experimental treatments, and they made her strong. Six months of surgery and hypodermic infusions, and at the end Doctor Erskine was dead and Eve's body didn't hurt anymore. The military doctors wanted to see her run, so she jogged around the track, marveling at how easily her legs propelled her.

When she came to a halt, the man who had replaced Erskine was frowning at his stopwatch. "Faster," he said, after each mile.

"Sir, that's faster than I've ever run in my life." It had been faster than the cadet running beside her as well; she'd lapped him on the home stretch, not even breathing hard.

He shook his head. "You need to stop running as fast as you think you can, and start running as fast as you actually can. Again. Faster."

She was still tall. Dresses still didn't fit her. But she got to fight for her country, and that was what she cared about.

In the end there was a bomb, and the needling cold of the arctic ocean, and salt in her eyes. Captain Rogers died like a good, brave soldier.

And then she wasn't dead any longer.

Eve sat next to Tonia in a SHIELD helicopter, bloody and wet, aching from shattering terrorists' jaws over her knee. Tonia'd taken the armor half-off; her head and one arm were free and dripping green impact gel. The suit looked lopsided like that; Tonia's body too-small and fragile, like the foot of a child stepping into her mother's heels.

In the past sixty years, the back of a helicopter hadn't gotten much more comfortable. Tonia didn't fit in the bucket seats when she was suited up, so she was sitting on the floor, her still-armored hand latched onto a gear tie-down. Eve had extended the straps about as far as they could go, and they still chafed at her neck, not sitting right across her chest.

Tonia scratched at the port in the base of her skull with her free hand and came away with a tangled hank of dark hair.

"Worst part of my hair falling out," she complained. "It gets stuck in my sexy biomods and starts to itch."

"You could cut it short," Eve said, eyeing the curve of Tonia's skull where it met her neck and how her hair clung to it. It would be different, if it was short. Neater. It wouldn't absorb the reek of cigarettes and alcohol that dogged Tonia everywhere, even on missions. Eve wouldn't be burdened with the sight of Tonia's stupendous bed head during early-morning video conferences, wouldn't be distracted as Tonia talked around bobby pins held in her teeth, explaining new weapons specs while she pinned her hair into a wild pile atop her head.

Tonia flicked the wad of hair onto the metal floor. "Don't you think it would make me look mannish?" she asked, pulling the corners of her mouth down and wrinkling her brow in a passable imitation of the strike commander.

Eve laughed. Tonia sighed and leaned back with a clang of armor on galvanized steel railing. "I'm ready to go home, take a bath, and relieve some stress, if you know what I mean."

Eve did not know what Tonia meant. She frowned, trying not to be annoyed that she'd missed another joke. Tonia raised one eyebrow and made a filthy gesture, jerking her fist up and down over her crotch. Someone across the aisle whistled, and Tonia responded by exaggerating the pantomime, rolling her hips into it and licking her lips.

"Don't make fun of me," Eve said, reaching out and grabbing Tonia's armor-less bicep so she'd stop being gross. "I know women don't do that."

Tonia stared at her, almost as appalled as she had been when Clint took Tonia's good single malt, the proper stuff that was for people she liked—a very exclusive list, darling, and you're not on it—and mixed it with diet soda. "Women definitely do that," Tonia said seriously. "I know the forties were a sex education wasteland but surely you've done something. Not even a little extracurricular spelunking?" Tonia tried to make another obscene hand motion, and was stopped by Eve's grip on her bicep.

Eve went red. She was inexperienced next to Tonia, fine, but that was perfectly excusable. She was always busy, and for a lot of her life there was a war on, and she'd been firmly advised that she keep her pants buttoned around other soldiers.

She'd never seen a woman orgasm before. Presumably she could have watched Tonia's sex tape with Natasha to the end, but Eve had resisted, even when it was blown up six feet high on the living room wall. During the war, she had turned a polite blind eye to the occasional soldier taking care of himself behind the privy, but whatever Tonia said, she still felt that women didn't do this kind of thing. Eve certainly hadn't before. Gary had been lovely, sweet and kind that one time in bed, and it hadn't hurt, and he'd held her afterwards. That had been the best part. Out on the front she clasped hands and clapped shoulders; dragged wounded bodies; arm wrestled every grunt until they admitted she really was the strongest—but it wasn't the same kind of touch.

Presumably it happened. The magazines sure thought so, garish and crude covers promising seven tips for a better orgasm alongside their fad diets and makeup trends for spring. Hell, Cosmopolitan used to print stories. Sure, the ladies on the covers had always been pretty. Eve's ma used to buy cigarettes at the magazine stand, and Eve would hang onto her hand and wish she had thirty-five cents to take one home. Now the magazine cost four entire dollars and said things about sex in hot pink right on the front.

So Eve didn't read the articles, and orgasm just hadn't happened for her. Not that it was surprising. She'd only had sex the one time.

"Damn," Tonia said. "There goes about half my spank bank. Shit. Shouldn't have said that. Sorry. Please don't look that phrase up on Urban Dictionary, I don't want to get written up. But, um, there's resources, if you want to educate yourself in...this arena. Second wave feminism turned the road to the female orgasm into an entire cottage industry."

Still blushing, Eve dropped Tonia's arm. "Thank you," she said stiffly, absolutely not imagining Tonia naked, hands busy between her legs, doing something mysterious and pleasurable.

Tonia would know exactly what she was doing, obviously, because Tonia slept with women all the time. That had been one of the shocks of the future; women and women together, men and men. Some of the factory gals rooming together hadn't just been strapped for rent, Eve learned. The French prostitutes on the front hadn't just been having a laugh at her expense when they invited her inside for whatever she wanted off the menu.

Eve wondered what it would've been like if she'd taken them up on it. Probably she'd have gotten some kind of lezzer VD and would've had to explain to Gary how she'd caught the clap.

"Hey," Tonia said, pitching her voice lower to keep the nearby grunts from hearing. "If all the sex stuff makes you uncomfortable, I can knock it off. I have some self-control. Not a lot, but enough."

Eve knew she should say that Tonia needed to stop. Instead she said, "It would cripple your conversation skills. I'm not gonna listen to you fill in the voids lovingly describing your own tech."

Tonia laughed and punched Eve in the shoulder. "My tech is fascinating! You're just Otzai the Ice Woman and don't appreciate my genius."

"I best appreciate your genius in the quiet."

"You wound me, Rogers," Tonia said around another laugh, not sounding wounded at all, sounding like the brightest thing in the room.

A few days later the Ultimates were scheduled for training exercises on a US aircraft carrier; Thor, Hawkeye, Captain America and Iron Mantle stunting for the crowd and SHIELD's goodwill. Eve tried not to begrudge the servicemen a little spectacle. The training was good for the Ultimates, too, with the dumb kids on the Avengers biting at their ankles.

It went well, even with Eve still unused to her new shield. Iron Mantle dove under water and came up in a gout of froth on the other side of the ship, shaking salt water like rain over the craning faces of the troops below.

They had a half hour break afterwards scheduled to give Tonia time to get out of the suit, followed by a press conference.

Tonia was late.

Colonel Danvers was unimpressed. She'd organized the whole thing, including brow-beating Clint into not saying anything distressing and suicidal, scolding Tonia into showing up sober, and persuading Thor to tone down the Norse God stuff in favor of hitting things with his hammer. Eve didn't envy her the task, but she also thought it could have been easily avoided by not putting on a monkey show. Danvers had shown Eve a video of female soldiers saying that Captain America rising from the dead to fight alongside them once more made them believe they'd get to come home too, no matter how bad it looked. It was enough to make Eve grudgingly agree to brush up her gymnastics routine and practice trick shots with Clint until they had something presentable. The airborne team members didn't have to work to look spectacular: they could zip past, wowing the audience with lightning and sonic booms. Eve hit things with her body until they were dead. It wasn't pretty to watch. It was just her job.

Danvers frowned at the clock. "Looks like our resident lush has decided to go have one of her little drinkies instead of being timely."

"I'll go find her, ma'am," Eve said. Tonia was annoying and handsy when she was drunk and feeling obstinate, but Eve could always sling her over her shoulder and carry her up to the bridge if she had to. Anyone else might go and try to browbeat her into accepting responsibility, which would make her sulk. A sulking, inebriated Antonia Stark in front of the press was a nightmare Eve would rather avoid.

Eve trotted toward the room where Tonia had set up an impromptu disassembly rig for her armor, hoping that Tonia had at least gotten all the way into normal clothes before getting distracted.

She found Tonia bent over a garbage can in the hallway, puking her guts out.

"Hello darling, I'll be just a moment," Tonia called, head still bent.

Eve hurried to her side, reaching out instinctively to offer support.

Tonia retched and vomit hit the side of the black trash bag. It was mostly liquid; black coffee, if Eve wanted to venture a guess. There were worse things to throw up, and better. Eve wished Tonia ate more.

Tonia shuddered, sniffed, and threw up some more.

"This reminds me of all the sweet girls at frat parties, holding my hair while I ralphed up jungle juice," Tonia said, flashing Eve one of her brave, face-splitting grins. "I do hold my liquor splendidly these days. I promise this is one hundred percent thanks to chemo." She leaned one shoulder into Eve's chest, bracing the rest of her weight on the edge of the garbage can. She kept smiling, big and disarming, unconcerned that it made her eyes squint and pulled wrinkles into her face, the smile that made the paparazzi around her call her candid. Tonia for the cameras was natural, earthy, unconcerned with how she looked as long as she looked happy.

Nothing horrible could be growing inside the skull of someone so blasé. Nobody even asked the question.

Eve stroked Tonia's hair a bit, tucking pieces of it behind her ears and peeling it up away from the sweaty nape of Tonia's neck. Tonia's back heaved again, not bringing much up. Tonia ran her tongue over her teeth, coughed and spat.

"These super-villains need to up their game," Tonia said. "I need one of them to kill me before the cancer does, and right now the useless fucks are getting beat by a goddamn tumor."

I don't want you to die, Eve thought miserably.

"I think I'm done," Tonia said, patting Eve on the bicep. She straightened, shaking off Eve's support. Then she listed to the side, colliding with Eve's chest. The facade she'd been keeping up slipped, and for a moment she looked desperately scared. Subtly, Tonia lifted both hands slightly to check for shaking.

"Let's sit you down," Eve said, grabbing Tonia by the armpits and lowering her to the floor. Tonia stretched her legs out in front of her and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. It came away smeared with lipstick. Her feet were only covered in thin stockings—Tonia had kicked her heels while being sick. They lay drunkenly against each other a few feet away, lurid red and six inches high.

Tonia leaned her head on Eve's shoulder. She smelled like antifreeze, harsh and sickly-sweet. Then she pulled out a Blackberry, scowled at her email, and tapped out a message to Danvers to postpone the damn press event for another twenty minutes because the technicians provided to unsuit her were useless incompetents.

Eve coughed and Tonia rolled her eyes up at her. "Those technicians will get reprimanded if you say that."

"They were incompetent."

"Tonia."

"Fine. Only for you, peaches," Tonia said, erasing incompetent and replacing it with unfamiliar with the advanced StarkTech.

"Thank you."

Tonia looked thoughtful, or possibly nauseous. She glanced sideways at Eve, evaluating. Eve found herself desperate to measure up in Tonia's eyes. She wanted to meet the exacting standards Tonia applied to everything from circuit boards to press releases. Tonia had a lot more control over her company and her tech than a lot of people gave her credit for. They thought some man was doing it all behind the scenes, leaving her free to party and sleep around. The Wall Street Journal repeatedly predicted that Stark Industries was going under, while it repeatedly failed to do so.

"I want you to do me a favor," Tonia said.

"Anything you need," Eve said immediately.

Tonia waggled her eyebrows. "Anything? In that case, send nudes, baby."

Oh. It was like that, then. She should have predicted that Tonia was just winding her up for another joke. "You don't need more porn."

"True, I already have quite the collection. Some Captain America lookalikes, even, which are very unpatriotic," Tonia said with a lascivious grin. Eve flushed and wondered why she'd given Tonia carte blanche to be a foul-mouthed pain in the ass. It was just—Tonia was the only one who didn't treat Eve with kid gloves, like she could be trusted to take a joke. And if that meant that some of the jokes stung more than expected, that was the price Eve paid.

"Honestly, though," Tonia continued, "I need you when my head gets bad. I have a DNR signed and lawyered up, but—I know I'm one to toot my own horn, but I'm serious about this—Iron Mantle means something to people, and I don't know if anyone will listen to a little piece of paper when Antonia Stark is dying under their hands and they think they can save me."

Eve wasn't able to stifle the sound she made. That wasn't—it wasn't what she had expected.

Tonia didn't talk about the cancer very often. Eve had asked Tonia how come, once. "Because it's boring, and it makes everyone around me into an instant downer. It's the same shitty problem and the same shitty platitudes every time," Tonia'd said. "I'm not subjecting myself to that more often than I have to." If Eve was hearing about it now, it had to be a worse day than usual. Eve hoped Tonia hadn't thrown up in the suit as well as in the trash can. She'd seen the aftermath of vomit inside of the helmet and it wasn't pleasant.

Tonia sighed and patted Eve's knee. "I know, it's rotten. It's asking too much to even make you think about it, but, hey, you know me. I've made asking for more than I deserve into a business model. I won't be able to tell all the doctors to fuck off myself because, well, the obvious. I need someone with clout to make sure they don't bring me back."

"Don't you want to live?" Eve asked.

"No," Tonia said. "Not really, not a lot of the time. But I have to keep going until I'm done. And when I'm done—I want to be done, understand? I don't want to limp along, drooling around a ventilator while dear twin Georgia cries alligator tears at my bedside."

"I understand," Eve said, even though she didn't, because that was what you were supposed to say. Because it was her job to follow orders she didn't understand, and this was just that on a different scale; one life instead of hundreds. Because she was used to it.

"You don't, not really," Tonia said, with another one of her painfully real smiles. "But you'll do it? You'll throw the weight of good ol' Captain America behind me?"

Christ, Eve wasn't ready for this. She was so clumsy with emotions. "Yes," she promised.

"Good," Tonia said, and she sounded so, so tired. All Tonia's genius and all Eve's strength, useless. They'd solved a hundred thousand aliens storming Earth, and were stymied by a single clump of cells sitting in Tonia's brain.

"Can I—can I give you a hug?" It was the best Eve could offer.

"Fuck, yes, I would adore a hug. Wrap me up in your big beefy arms and don't let go, flag girl."

Eve pulled Tonia half into her lap and awkwardly put her arms around her, tucking Tonia's head under her chin. She could feel Tonia's bones when they were like this. Eve knew exactly how much force it would take to dislocate Tonia's shoulder, and exactly how fast she could sprint while carrying Tonia's extra weight, and how long she could hold Tonia's hand to keep her from falling before her grip started to slip. The answers were not very much at all, almost as fast as without it, and as long as it took.

"You're so warm," Tonia whispered into Eve's chest. Eve wasn't sure if she was meant to hear or not.

Eve always wore clothes that matched the Captain America uniform. People didn't ask questions about what she was wearing or why she was wearing it if it made her look like their Cap. Jan had asked if Eve wanted a dress, back when the Ultimates were publicity darlings, back when Jan was alive. Eve had tried to say yes and ended up saying, Thank you, but that won't be necessary. Jan had considered her more carefully than the answer deserved and asked if Eve would like a tux instead. 

Eve had balked at the idea. 

"Tonia wears my menswear sometimes," Jan explained. "When she's not swanning about in McQueen's latest, dripping beads all over the banquet hall."

"I'm not Tonia," Eve said. 

Jan sighed. "Nobody is Tonia. I have too much in the hips for half of what she wears, and not enough for the other half. No idea how she does it."

Jan had looked Eve up and down, and then smoothed one hand from the shoulder of Eve's simple white t-shirt down to the crook of Eve's bare elbow. "But you certainly don't need to worry about looking good next to Tonia. You have the shoulders for something just stunning, honey."

Eve shivered - at the touch or the praise, she couldn't recall. 

Jan made a point of taking Eve out to fancy dress restaurants after that. She coaxed Eve into department stores so she'd have something to wear to charity dinners, and tailored the shirts to fit over Eve's embarrassing barrel chest. 

Eve didn't know what to talk about while they ate. She sometimes mentioned the war, but it made Jan uncomfortable and sad; superhero work was combat but it wasn't the same as being shipped out. 

Sometimes Jan leaned in close to whisper something mean about what the people dining next to them were wearing, or smugly report that two people were sleeping together who shouldn't be. Eve could smell the perfume Jan wore while she whispered, and because Jan was shorter than her she always had an unavoidable view of Jan's enviable cleavage. But it wasn't nice to gossip like that, and Eve's responses always seemed to leave Jan disappointed.

They'd only talked about Hank twice. Once when Eve had beat him bloody out back of a bar in Chicago, and once while Jan sat on a weight bench in Eve's boxing gym. It was a ratty old place that hadn't let girls in back when Eve was a kid, and wouldn't have let a fragile thing like Eve inside even if she'd been a boy. Women didn't come there in the future either, but it wasn't because of a rule. It just wasn't a place for normal girls, unless some boxer's honey came by to appreciate his muscles while he sweated through a workout.

"I knew men sometimes hit their sweethearts," Eve had said. "But Gary—I never wondered if he would. It wasn't a question that occurred to me. He wouldn't. I wasn't afraid. That's how it should be."

"I'm happy for you. Gary and Bucky are lovely," Jan said, shaking her head. "But that's naive. Every man might, that's just how it is."

Gary and Buck lived together in the little yellow house Eve had always wanted, surrounded by foster kids and cut flowers from Gary's garden. She didn't envy their friendship, she swore she didn't. She always wanted Bucky and Gary to be friends. But it ached, that she'd missed all those years, being the one who raised kids with Gary, while Bucky found some gal of his own and came over for dinner on Sundays.

"Not every man," Eve insisted, but Jan had changed the subject, and it didn't come up again.

Eve had told Gary that she'd still marry him. He'd said no.

"I have Buck," he said. "And someday you'll have someone who fits you too. I promise."

"I don't care that you're older than me," Eve said, staring into his face and seeing the man she'd loved still there under the rheum of his eyes and his softening skin. "You're still my Gary."

He'd held her hand then, his palm rough against hers, and said, "I'm not, Evie. It's been fifty years, and all that living changes a person. You're so young. I look at you I almost can't believe how young we were back then."

Eve wanted to bristle at the rejection but instead she felt tired and lonely and horribly lost. Gary hugged her, and then Bucky hugged her, and they told her to come by for Sunday dinner.

The summer faded, and then it was fall, and then October. Eve hated October, because that was when the Sexy Captain America and Sexy Iron Mantle costumes started appearing in shop windows.

Tonia wore the cheapest, trashiest, skimpiest Iron Mantle costume she could find to her Halloween party every year. Last year it had been a red and gold bikini with blue LEDs on the nipples.

"They're taplights!" Tonia had crowed, downing another neat whiskey and slapping one. It blinked off, and then on again when she hit it a second time.

She'd spent the rest of the party trying to get people to "activate her repulsor beams" and cackling in delight. 

Eve politely abstained the first four times Tonia sashayed up to her and told her to test out the latest technology on her chest. Finally Tonia offered to donate fifteen thousand dollars to the wounded warrior project if Eve would just do it one time. Eve made Tonia write the check and hand it over first.

"Touch my boob and save me from the dark," Tonia sang atrociously, once she was done signing. Eve didn't think that was how the lyrics went.

Tonia thrust her chest towards Eve and waggled her eyebrows. Eve sighed and picked up a mostly-empty champagne flute from the nearest high-top table. She flipped it upside down, causing the leftover champagne to splash onto her hand, then used the foot to gently tap Tonia's offered light.

Tonia's eyes went wide with outrage. "You cheat!" she shouted. Eve smirked as the watching guests laughed.

"Got the job done, didn't I?" Eve said. She put the glass down and shook her hand dry. Some of the champagne still clung to her fingers. There weren't any napkins within arm's reach, and Eve didn't think this was the kind of party where anyone would complain about table manners so she licked the last drips of bubbly off her skin. No good being sticky for the rest of the evening.

Tonia had blinked, slow and owlish with drunkenness. "Wow. You know what? Worth it."

Tonia was so cavalier with money. Fifteen thousand dollars for a joke at a party. Eve could have bought the entire building her ma lived in for that much. She hoped the veterans appreciated it.

The costumes grated even more than usual this year. Hawkeye and Thor never had to look at men in mesh versions of their uniforms. Eve scowled at one where her star had been replaced with a cut-out window. She hadn't gone to war to have people walk around showing their tits in her name. Some smartass had arranged that mannequin and another one wearing the obligatory Sexy Iron Mantle costume (the chest repulsor picked out in rhinestones glued in the center of the wearer's cleavage) so they were nose-to-nose, mannequin-Iron Mantle's plaster hand raised to bump against Sexy Captain America's thigh.

Eve knew that some men thought it was hot when two women did sexual things together. It made sense—why have one blue lady when you could have several? But it seemed unfair to push it onto her when she hadn't asked for it.

The thing was, men hadn't looked at her much when she was a scrappy plank of a gal, and they didn't look at her now either. That suited her fine, usually. But it was strange, looking at this parody of herself in her underwear, selling sex, when she wasn't getting any. Gary had been a long time ago. Eve felt trapped by loneliness, her soul all pent up and chewing on the bars until its teeth wore down to the gums.

Eve knew what Tonia would say about this bout of self-pity. She'd tell Eve to stop being a little bitch and get laid, sis.

"Not happening," Eve growled to herself, and stomped off home. She walked past four construction sites and nobody even bothered to wolf whistle.

If she'd been married to Gary, everything would have made so much more sense. She wouldn't have to think about sex; Gary would be too old to want any, even if there were pills now that were supposed to make men virile well into their eighties. She'd be faithful and celibate. She wouldn't have to learn any new rules.

She sure as hell wasn't picking up anybody in bars.

Eve had watched Tonia pick up chicks. After Natasha, all Tonia wanted to do was drink and find a warm body to tumble into bed. For some unfathomable reason, Tonia almost always wanted to bring Eve along. 

"Wingman duty, come on," Tonia had said, on one of those many post-breakup weekends, smacking Eve two times in the bicep with the back of her hand. 

Eve had been used to the ritual by then. "Whiskey bar or vodka club?"

"New place called Pelt," Tonia said, grinning like a fox. "Definitely on the vodka end of the spectrum, but I bet the nice bartender will give you a beer if you ask pretty. They have go-go dancers!"

Eve scowled - at least it wasn't strippers. Tonia had learned fast that taking Eve to a strip club meant getting left alone at the bar while Eve called a taxi home. It made Tonia pout, but Eve was absolutely not engaging with that kind of activity. 

The next step in Eve's wingman duties was to help Tonia pick out her undercover outfit. Tonia preferred to cruise partially incognito, to ward off the gadflies. Eve understood the impulse. While Eve sat on Tonia's bedroom settee—only Tonia's kind of bedroom had a settee—Tonia held out a chin-length wig, threaded through with a tiara of pearls. 

"Twenties flapper tonight? No, you're right, too theme-y. It's not a costume party." Eve hadn't said anything passing judgement, but Tonia was already back in her closet, rattling through the hangers. 

She pulled out an emerald green number and an auburn wig done up in victory curls. "Hm....retro is the right track, I think."

Gussied up like that Tonia would be the fantasy of a dozen factory girls all wishing the war was over and they could wear nylons again. A real perfect dame. 

"This one, huh?" Tonia asked, smiling indulgently at Eve. 

Eve coughed and studied the pile of discarded dresses on the carpet. "It's too low cut, but I suppose it'll do," she allowed. 

Tonia stripped right there to put it on. Eve sighed and kept her gaze glued to the floor. 

"Now you," Tonia said. 

"No dresses," Eve said for what felt like the thousandth time. 

"Wouldn't dream of it, tootsie-pop. Here."

Tonia produced a ribbed white tank top, scuffed-up black pants, and a heavy leather jacket. Eve had protested, at first, that they couldn't share clothes because they weren't the same size. She'd learned, however, that Tonia always mysteriously had something that fit her, "laying around, someone must have left it—can't recall who, you know me, I don't do names."

"That jacket is gonna be too warm," Eve protested. 

"Then you'll take it off and give it to me, don't fuss. No, absolutely not with that bra, I can't fix that, go without."

"Tonia," Eve warned.

Tonia looked at her with lidded eyes and slid a pack of smokes and a long cigarette holder into the jacket pocket. "My wingman doesn't wear Under Armor. I would never forgive myself."

Eve relented, like she always relented.

At the club Eve leaned next to Tonia with her back against the bar, arms crossed over her chest, and funneled intel to Tonia.

"Your five o'clock, tall with big hair. She's writing a phone number on a business card."

Tonia, conspicuously not looking in that direction, snagged a toothpick from an uncovered jar and used it to spear the cherry in the bottom of her drink, and then ate it in a way that was absolutely not appropriate.

The curly haired woman reacted the way everyone acted when confronted with Tonia being impossible, and sashayed up to them. Eve watched her swaying hips out of the corner of her eye. The lady insinuated herself between Eve and Tonia, leaning across the bar and waving the tattooed bartender over. Eve could see the texture of mascara on her eyelashes.

Her shoulder brushed Eve's, skin dragging against skin slightly tacky from the sweat of dancing.

"Whiskey sour," she ordered. "And—" 

Eve inclined her head towards Tonia. "My friend is drinking Manhattans. With extra cherries."

"Oh," the woman said, oddly crestfallen. "Okay, and a Manhattan for her friend. With—three cherries?"

"Four, actually, if you're amenable," Tonia requested, and all of her attention slammed into that evening's mark like a furnace blast.

Eve nursed her seltzer while Tonia worked her magic. That night Tonia had been determined to get an impulse tattoo—"I've never gotten one before, Evie, I want something stupid!"—and she was asking her new friend where to get it, lifting the hem of her dress to sketch a circle on her thigh, wondering aloud how much it would hurt as if she didn't take sledgehammers to the face as Iron Mantle, touching the other woman's back to trace the outlines of inked letters there.

Tonia hadn't gotten an ill-advised tattoo that night; instead she'd taken the leggy woman with the overdone mascara home to fuck. Eve was glad. Fewer lasting consequences that way. Tonia seemed to like it.

Sometimes Tonia did strike out. Eve remembered a particular time, standing outside to smoke because some absurd law had been passed that said you couldn't have a cigarette indoors, not even at a bar, when a slick woman in a white pantsuit came up to join them.

Eve had paid her no mind—lots of people came out looking for air—until she glanced at Eve, then looked Tonia up and down and purred, "You two looking for a third?" in a tone that left no question what kind of activity she was offering. 

"We're not together," Eve had said sharply. She disliked the implication that she was likely to do that—any of that—and also resented being treated like including her was an acceptable compromise to get a leg over with Tonia.

"Every day I pray to god for a threesome with this woman," Tonia sighed mournfully. "Alas, it is not to be."

Eve ignored her and turned to scowl at Tonia. "Don't make fun of me," she said, petulant and doing a poor job of hiding it, not up to being reminded that Tonia loved sex and got it all the time.

"I'm deadly serious," Tonia said, face deadly serious. Eve punched her in the shoulder, very carefully so she wouldn't leave a bruise. Tonia never looked serious when she was actually telling the truth. With Tonia, real things were always couched in pointed jokes and misdirection; the genuine parts of her needed to be uncovered like dinosaur bones with a pickaxe and a paintbrush.

"Stop it," Eve warned.

"In that case..." the businesswoman said, cutting in. Eve had forgotten that she was there until she spoke again. Eve felt something curling and covetous slide over her, prickling on her neck like sharp, narrow teeth. The woman's eyes flicked from the lit coffin nail between Eve's fingers, to her belt buckle, and then up to her face.

Tonia casually dropped her cigarette and stepped forward to stamp it out with her narrow heel.

Tension rose in the air with an acrid flash of silent battle, and in the blink of an eye the woman shrugged, smiled indulgently at a pack of underage bar patrons giggling over their fake IDs, and disappeared into the bar.

Eve had never known what that was about, but Tonia didn't go home with anyone that night.

Tonia was unfazed by her occasional failures. She'd tried to pass her wisdom along to Eve, as if that was going to work.

"When it really gets down to it," Tonia had confided, some other night, some other bar, some other outfit, "the real way to get laid is to tell her you want it. Dance around too long and everyone's feet get tired. Get a no before you're worn out, or get a yes, hop in a cab, and have sex on some extremely expensive sheets. Two thirds of everyone wants to bump nasties with a beautiful woman but is too scared to say it. That's what you have to remember, apple pie. To the crass go the spoils."

"If you say so," Eve said, and buried her nose in her drink. It had been beer that evening—Eve got tired of seltzer, and beer was a good American industry, even if there were too many craft flavors, and they'd changed the way Guinness tasted, a betrayal Eve still hadn't forgiven.

Really, Tonia just liked to hear herself talk. Eve wasn't a beautiful woman. It didn't work like that for her.

The most human contact she'd had in the past month was holding Tonia while she recovered from chemo, first during the aircraft carrier debacle and then again a couple times afterwards. And if that wasn't pathetic—treasuring the moments of closeness that Tonia only allowed because she needed someone to comfort her when she felt like she was dying—Eve didn't know what was.

One morning Eve caught Tonia brushing her teeth furiously in the ladies' room of the Trisk. There was purseful of makeup dumped across the counter, heavy stage stuff that Eve recognized as the same thick grease-paint Betty Ross used to smear on Eve's face when she had to go in front of a camera right after a goddamn alien kicked her in the lip. Tonia's makeup was worn off in places where she'd wiped her face, and underneath the skin was ashen.

"Wanna go sit on the couch in the break-room for a bit?" Eve asked.

Tonia stopped brushing, toothbrush hanging out of the side of her mouth like an oversized cigarette, and looked Eve up and down. Then she said, "yeah, Cap, love to," removing the toothbrush from the pocket of her cheek. "Just lemme put my face back on first."

She painted her makeup on with a brush, using the back of her hand as a palette. There were more layers of it than Eve had imagined, smoothing Tonia's skin into a flat mask. She drew life back onto it with pink and brown powder. Eve liked her bare face better, the one she saw in early mornings and after combat. The fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth made her expressions look bigger, brighter. Covering the pallor of illness also covered the way her skin threw light back warmer and more golden than before.

The lipstick was last. Tonia did that with a paintbrush too, a little thing with bristles smaller than Eve's smallest fingernail. Lipstick was okay, Eve thought. It drew attention to Tonia's mouth, all the clever ways it twisted in mirth and thinned in disapproval. It was always shockingly red, like Iron Mantle, or the twin bands of color around the rim of Eve's shield.

Once Tonia's face passed muster, they settled in the break-room. Eve glowered at the SHIELD agents by the television until they made a tactical retreat to get more coffee and surrendered the remote control. Then she let Tonia snuggle into her side and turned on General Hospital. 

"You have the worst taste," Tonia laughed when she realized Eve was really, seriously going to make her watch soaps. "Who are these people? I don't know what's happening."

"You don't have to know the plot to enjoy the drama," Eve explained placidly. "Imagine you're listening in on someone having an argument in one of your fancy restaurants. It's like that, but on the TV."

"I do love to eavesdrop," Tonia admitted, and was blessedly still for twenty entire minutes, like a small venomous snake basking on a rock in the sun until it had stored up the energy to go bite some more hikers.

Eve liked to think she was one of the select few let in on Tonia's dirty little secret. Billionaire "That's Billion With a B" Industrialist Antonia Stark was miserable one week in three, and sometimes two.

Tonia threw a party after they changed the law so gay people could get married in Massachusetts. "One down, forty-nine to go!" said the custom invitation cards. She invited Eve. 

Eve wasn't sure she wanted to go. 

It felt—not quite right, for marriage to be for two men or two women. That wasn't what marriage was for. Tonia was allowed to be happy—she'd donated a lot of money to the cause and it hadn't gone completely to waste—but it wasn't like Tonia was going to marry any of the ladies she had sex with. There wasn't any point. A gay man could marry any woman he wanted, and if he didn't want that, it was fine. They hadn't needed to change the entire definition.

She asked why Tonia had spent so many thousands on gay marriage in a state she didn't even live in, a state where they'd already been given civil unions, which were basically the same thing. 

Tonia sighed.

They were out to lunch, sitting at a two-top eating tall sandwiches on chewy white bread. Danvers was busting the team's balls, again, and Tonia had gotten so fed up she stormed out of the war room, dragging Eve by the sleeve behind her. 

"Want to know something uncharitable?" Tonia asked. Eve wasn't sure she did, but Tonia didn't give her time to respond. "When Fury defrosted you and said he was putting you on the team, I was prepared for some potent homophobia. Real vile stuff. When you have a childhood hero who's been dead for half a century, you don't usually have to ask hey will they be cool with the whole gay thing? So I braced myself, and was pleasantly surprised when you didn't look at me like I was dogshit after googling me for the first time."

Tonia was right; it did feel uncharitable. Eve didn't like knowing that people were passing judgement on her after she died, without even having the chance to meet her.

Apparently, Tonia wasn't quite done. "Which is to say: I was kind of hoping this shoe wasn't going to drop."

"I don't have a problem with you being—you know. How you are."

"A lesbian," Tonia said. "You can say lesbian, it's not a naughty word."

"But you're not going to get married," Eve said. She wanted to understand, not get called a homophobe.

Tonia's mouth twitched as all the muscles in her cheeks tightened. Her face sat mask-perfect and still for a moment, then broke into her practiced playboy grin. "Of course not, darling. Marriage is an oppressive institution invented by men, for men. I'm swimming in pussy like I'm Michael Phelps and the dyke population of New York is the four-hundred-meter relay. You can't expect me to quit."

"So then why?"

The ambient noise of the cafe clattered loud in Eve's ears while Tonia rearranged her sandwich and didn't answer. When she did, the cavalier glitz had fallen from her tone, and she was gentle again, the way she got when she had to tell Eve something difficult about the future. The Rwandan genocide. Global warming. JFK.

"Don't you think Bucky and Gary should be able to get married? After all those years together?"

Eve blinked.

"Why would they want to?"

"They've been together since the fifties. Generally, a couple is ready to get married after several decades and a small tribe of adopted children."

"Bucky and Gary—they're friends," Eve said. "They're not gay."

Tonia coughed on a bit of dill pickle. "How is this happening to me," she muttered. She sounded like she might be beating back hysteria. "Did I really just out a WWII veteran who's been living with his partner for half a century to his best friend? What did I do to you, God?"

"Gary can't be gay," Eve said. "He—we—I know he's slept with women. And Buck was a real lady-killer back in the day, you should have seen him after the gals."

"My dear, sweet Captain Oblivious, hold onto your ass and your pearls because someone has to tell you and I guess that poor fucker is me: your friend Bucky and your ex-fiancé have been boinking since at least 1945."

Eve was beginning to feel spectacularly stupid.

"In my defense," Tonia was still saying, "I thought you knew. I figured you'd all had nice sit-down chat and that was how you got around to having such a modern take on me and my fellow thespians."

"Is everyone I know a homosexual?" Eve wondered aloud, aghast despite herself.

"Carol's just bisexual," Tonia said helpfully.

"How do you know, you can't know that!"

Tonia leaned forward, propping her elbow on the table and resting her chin on her fist. She raised one well-groomed eyebrow. "I know because I'm fucking her seven ways to Sunday, obviously."

"You hate Danvers." Colonel Danvers wore her jumpsuit zipped up to her chin and spent a lot of her time telling the Ultimates no. Tonia despised being told no. Hell, they were having this lunch because Tonia couldn't stand being in the same room with her.

"And yet, heinous bitch that she is, she's still a smokin' hot babe," Tonia said.

Eve wasn't sure how she felt about that. She was trying not to be a homophobe but at the same time she didn't like the idea of Tonia sleeping with someone she hated. This feeling didn't crop up the same way when Tonia rolled some spiky-haired leather-clad punk into bed, not really; surely that meant she wasn't being a bigot this time. Surely, Eve thought, Tonia could do better, could find someone steady and honest, someone who wouldn't use her for her influence or her money, who wouldn't twist her around their finger for their own goals. Someone safe, who wouldn't try to kill her. Who wouldn't leave.

It hurt Tonia so much, every time someone left. She hid it admirably; she grabbed opera glasses and peered down from her thirty-story window to point out the next red-headed vixen she wanted to catch; she posed for the cover of Vogue in a blazer with no bra, no shirt, chrome sunglasses encrusted with rhinestones hiding her eyes; she drank in secret and pushed circuit-boards under her skin to make Iron Mantle move faster, sharper, deadlier. Antonia Stark was blood and nerve under steel.

Eve was saved, in the end, from making the decision about Tonia's party. Covert ops high priority deployment. Captain America, key personnel. Iron Mantle, not cleared. 

Tonia left a voicemail at two in the morning eastern time, while halfway across the world Eve sweated through a quarter mile hands and knees crawl through a storm drain, praying that the threatening clouds she'd seen gathering at dawn didn't start dumping rain and drown them all. 

Eve listened to the message when she got back, picking gravel out of half-healed scrapes on her knees. She could hear the party in the background, and the low chuckle of someone nearby, the too-close squeak of damp skin on leather.

"I am...wow...so drunk, darling. Not normal, I think I might have an alcohol problem drunk but really, catras—catasr—very drunk. And I thought to myself, why not call you, I have a phone, and now I'm calling you, ‘cause, look, I see a way to hurt myself, I take it. Straight girls, every time. Girls who think they're straight, that's worse. You—you're the worst. You're terrible and I like you so much."

"Who're you talking to?" the too-close someone asked, and, oh, it was Carol. Eve flushed with impotent emotion.

"Wouldn't you like to know," Tonia slurred. Eve wished Tonia didn't have so much sex when she was drunk. It made her sick to her stomach, a queasy slide of body-deep wrongness, or maybe that was from taking a razor blade to her shin to get to the jagged rock fragment underneath, the skin closed over it too fast to wash clean in the thick of fighting.

"Stepping out on me, Stark?"

"What is it you spies say? Don't ask me no questions, won't tell you no lies? Go powder your nose, I'm on the phone."

"Don't be me, Rogers. Don't—don't take what the world says you are and throw it back at them by being it more than they could have ever imagine. Call me a monster, I'll be the best fucking monster they've ever seen. I kill a lot of people. You know how it is. It gets so easy, doesn't it? I don't even care that I hope you're not here because you got called away to tear peoples' limbs off because I'm selfish and I miss you. I think it's bad for a person to get so used to killing. I think you're unhappy all the time. I bet you try to never think about that. Sorry. I'm very drunk."

Eve scrubbed at her knees with a washcloth, one last effort to get the dirt out, then got up and went to the sink, wringing the cloth out under freezing cold water until it ran clear.

Eve's knees healed, and then a through-and-through gunshot wound in her thigh healed, and then a broken wrist from taking a railgun payload to straight to the shield healed, and a concussion healed, and friction burns on her palms healed, and none of it left a trace.

Between combat, Eve kept long hours at work. It wasn't like she needed the sleep, and her choices for nighttime quarters were the impersonal room at in the Triskelion or her apartment in Brooklyn. Sit in her sterile, surveilled quarters or be slowly cooked by the banging radiators in her building. Neither was much more appealing than paperwork, and it made Fury happy to get her reports in on time.

Eve didn't even realize it was late; the lights in the Triskelion were always on, hard and fluorescent with a faint, perpetual whine that made Eve's teeth hurt. She had a question about Ultimates jurisdiction, and Danvers was just down the hall. Eve figured she'd be around without considering the time. SHIELD hours were never nine-to-five.

She rapped quickly on the door and opened it without bothering to wait for a response. If Danvers was on the phone Eve could just excuse herself.

Eve poked her head into the office. The jurisdiction question fell out of her mind with a thud. She couldn't have come up with what she'd come to see Danvers for with a gun to her head.

Danvers was there. She wasn't on the phone.

Tonia was also there. She was on her knees.

Eve jerked backwards. She stopped herself a hairsbreadth from slamming the door and managed to shut it silently. She should go. They hadn't seen her.

But—there were two narrow windows flanking Danvers's door, reinforced with metal mesh but largely unobstructed. Anyone walking by could catch a glimpse of them naked and compromised. Eve could—she should—she should stand guard, and make sure that anyone coming down the hallway kept on moving.

Eve glanced through the window. Danvers was in her office chair, one leg thrown up over the arm. Her bare knee was pressed up against the edge of the desk, and had been in that position for a while; Eve could see a crisscross of red where the pressure had left marks.

Tonia had one hand splayed wide over Carol's inner thigh, pushing her open. The other was tangled in Carol's light pubic hair, holding her still while Tonia buried her face in the junction of her legs. Tonia's shirt was still on, but barely. It was unbuttoned, pushed off her shoulders so it bunched around her elbows. The bra she had been wearing dangled uselessly around her armpits, unclasped in the front by someone's desperate hands.

Carol stared down at Tonia with heavy-lidded eyes. She was touching her own breasts, lazily thumbing her nipples as Tonia sucked on her.

Her mouth moved. The offices in the Triskelion were soundproofed, but Eve had better hearing than other people.

"You're fucking infuriating, Stark, but you're good at this," Carol said, voice enviably even. Eve couldn't have formed a coherent sentence right then, and she was separated from Tonia by at least ten feet and a steel-core door. If Tonia'd been between her thighs, her breath hot and heavy and her hands strong, yanking, holding Eve where she wanted and showing her all the places that—

No, Eve told herself sharply. She would not allow that kind of thought. It wasn't an option.

There was lipstick on Carol's stomach, smeared from her navel to the crease of her thigh, rubbed off of Tonia's mouth.

In response to Carol's taunt, Tonia rose and planted one hand at the base of Carol's neck, wrapping her fingers around it in the hint of a threat. Carol stroked Tonia's hair and raised one eyebrow—what next?

Tonia used her new leverage to slide two fingers into Carol and started to fuck her. Carol's unaffected smirk turned into a delighted, feral grin as the chair squeaked in time beneath them. Tonia gripped Carol's neck harder, and one of Carol's hands came up to lock onto her wrist. They were both skilled martial artists; they knew where every vulnerable tendon and artery lay under the skin. This was play-fighting, jockeying back and forth in a game Eve hadn't even known existed.

Tonia's shirt slipped farther down her elbows. It started obstructing her movements, so she took her hand out of Carol—out of her—and tugged her shirt all the way off. She dipped her head to deliver a biting kiss to Carol's mouth, and then she was back at it, her forearm flexing with the effort of driving into Carol. Carol was Tonia's superior, this had to be immoral—and Carol was arching up, using one of her own hands to rub herself while Tonia held her throat and pounded into her harder, chair shaking Tonia's knuckles hit either side of Carol's opening.

"Pinch your tit while you come," Tonia said. She sounded almost like she did after taking a hit in a fight, rough and punch-drunk. Carol obliged, grabbing a nipple and pulling it, pink flesh twisting under her sharp nails, and her mouth fell open in pleasure as she reached some sort of destination.

Tonia laughed in triumph, hand still quick between Carol's legs. She didn't stop until Carol grabbed her by the chin and yanked her up for a long, messy kiss.

"I want to watch you get yourself off," Carol said.

"You're such a pillow princess, I love it," Tonia said, still laughing a bit, and Eve didn't know what that meant but she could guess, and it was intoxicating to imagine that Tonia liked that, liked running her partner through their paces and making them take the pleasure she gave them. Eve wouldn't have to know what to do. She'd just have to feel. Maybe Tonia would look at her with that same possessive delight.

Eve looked guiltily down the hall. Nobody coming. Nobody else was invading Tonia's privacy, playing Peeping Tom like a filthy pervert peeking into the ladies' showers.

It wasn't really sex, was it? It was just like watching people necking. Two women couldn't—neither of them had a dick! Sex couldn't happen if you didn't have all the parts.

Tonia made do just fine with her fingers, Eve's traitorous thoughts informed her.

Eve squeezed her eyes shut, but it just meant she could focus harder on the sounds Tonia was making. The office chair creaked in protest as someone leaned more of their weight onto it. Tonia took a harsh breath. Carol whispered, Yeah, yeah, yeah, you gonna squirt? They teach that in lesbian sex workshops alongside how to be an ethical slut? C'mon, do it on me.

Eve ran.

She bolted for the New York City streets, not even bothering to swing back by her stupid cubicle to perform the stupid security procedure on her computer and log out for the night or pick up her coat and bag. She jogged all the way to the subway before realizing that leaving her bag behind meant she didn't have her metro card, or any cash.

To hell with it—Eve leapt the turnstile and ducked into a mostly-empty train downtown. There weren't any women in her car with dark hair twisted up messily to sit on top of their skull. She was safe.

Eve hopped the seven feet up from the pavement to catch the railing of the fire escape and took the stairs up to her apartment. She shoved the window up from the outside to get in without her keys.

Alone. She'd made it.

Eve flopped onto her rickety mattress. It creaked, reminding her of Carol's overburdened office chair. She hadn't been able to see Tonia's face. Maybe that made it less wrong. She resisted watching until the end; maybe that meant she'd saved herself.

She squirmed out of her shirt without getting up. The white star on the chest crumpled out of view as she dropped it next to her pillow. Eve shoved her khaki pants down, unwilling to get up off the bed to change properly into pajamas, got them tangled in the boots she hadn't bothered to take off, and thudded back flat on the bed in a huff.

Her underwear were soaked at the crotch, chilly over her snatch now that the cotton was exposed to the air. When she moved she was too aware of the way things slipped and slid against each other between her legs.

Thinking about some extracurricular spelunking? Tonia smirked in Eve's thoughts. Instead of a smear of green impact gel making Tonia's cheeks glisten in the dim helicopter lighting, Tonia's face was wet with something else, shiny from the tip of her nose to her chin.

Eve could be a modern woman. She worked her hand into her underwear and felt around. A muscle in her stomach jumped as she dipped her fingers down, a guilty twitch under her skin.

She closed her eyes. Time to get down to it. If she was going to try this, she didn't need to spend time pussyfooting around. She found where her body opened and stuck a finger inside. It was warm and slippery, strangely rougher inside her than outside. She probed deeper, looking for the feeling she'd seen on Carol's face as Tonia thrust into her. It mostly felt fine. A little achy if she pressed too deep. Maybe one finger wasn't enough.

Eve shoved another finger into herself and was startled by a nasty tugging pinch as her entrance stretched too far. Carol had taken two fingers without struggling. Eve rubbed at the offending spot until it felt less sore and tried again. It still twinged with a narrow, warning pain that told her she shouldn't do anything too rough, but it was less bad now that she was being more careful.

There had to be more. Eve tried touched her nipple through her bra, rubbing at it until it was stiff. That felt good, sending urgency prickling down to her cunt. She pulled her sports bra up to bare her tit and wet her fingers between her legs, then teased her nipples with the added slickness.

The feeling made her arch up off the bed. She had the wild thought that someone could put their mouth there, hot and wet while their tongue took the place of her fingertips. Lipstick smearing all across her cleavage, sharp white teeth and clever tongue locking onto her, pinching and pulling until she was a bruised, jerking mess. Dark hair tickling over her stomach, all unwound under Eve's hands.

Eve grunted, desperate for something she wasn't getting from pumping her fingers in and out. Faster, maybe. Upping the pace brought back the sharp pain at the edge of her opening, but Eve ignored it, trying to make the dull fullness feel as good as the hand she had on her breast.

It wasn't having the right effect. Eve started to feel chafed inside and out. Her wrist got a crick in it. Her fingers were pruning up. There was some skill she was still missing, something that all the other women knew that she didn't. Or maybe her body was just broken, a side effect of the serum that nobody told her about.

Eve pulled her hand free and wiped it on the sheets. She felt clammy and cramped, too big for her skin and too small for the room.

She got up, took off her pants properly, washed her hands, took a piss, washed her hands again, and pulled on pajamas. Her cunt was sore, in a twisty, unsatisfying way.

It had been enough failure for one night.

Eve knew she was being surly. She knew it and couldn't stop. She didn't want to think; she wanted to lose herself in work, in violence, in the animal fear of death. Instead, it was one of those awful hurry up and wait weeks; everyone on high alert for hours and hours and no action to show for it. 

Domestic terrorists, protesting the treatment of mutants, were issuing a couple bomb threats a day. So far, they hadn't shown up to make good on them, but the Ultimates were to be mission-ready until someone caught the bastards.

Tonia had spent thirty of the last forty-eight hours in her armor, which did wonders for her mood as well. "Time to empty the piss bag!" she'd started to announce whenever she had to tromp to the handicap stall in the restroom to deal with the consequences of a suit that didn't come off without a team of mechanics.

And now she was picking a fight with Colonel Danvers. Eve wished they weren't doing it in the break-room while she was trying to read the newspaper and drink SHIELD's gut-rot coffee, but it was too late.

Tonia's faceplate was tipped up like a misshapen metal baseball cap, and in the armor she was several inches taller than Danvers. She was using the height advantage to loom. With the current iteration of the armor painted in gunmetal and dark blood red, it should have been effective, especially with the way Tonia was shouting. Danvers was unmoved.

"You cut me out one more time and I'll return the favor—do you know how much your engineers benefit from having my tech without intellectual property limits in place? I'll lock down the specs of everything, down to the last goddamn Allen wrench! You won't be able to change so much as a lightbulb without getting a certified Stark repair team in here!"

"Cool it, Stark!" Danvers yelled. "Go drink a vodka or five. Maybe then you'll be able to understand how need to know works."

Tonia stepped even farther into Danvers's personal space, but Danvers held her ground. "I'm smarter than you," Tonia said, sweet and dangerous. "I'm smarter than anyone you have on your staff. I could be falling down drunk, and still solve the problem they've covered five blackboards downstairs trying to untangle."

"That so?"

"Yes."

"Then why are you still dying?"

Tonia went pale with rage. Eve swung around in her chair so her knees wouldn't get caught in the table legs if she had to spring in between them. She didn't think Tonia would punch Danvers while in the suit, but if she did it would be very, very bad.

"Sometimes I want to slap you," Tonia hissed.

Danvers reached up and traced a curving path across the chest of the armor. "I don't think you'd like the consequences."

Tonia was breathing hard enough that Eve could see it in the side plates of her suit, shifting against each other to allow her ribs to rise and fall. Eve's gut twisted. Tonia licked her teeth and flexed her hands inside the gauntlets. "You gonna slap back, toots?"

Danvers's answering smile was sharp. "Only if you don't fall in line, babygirl."

Eve flushed hard and pushed abruptly to her feet, making the chair scrape horribly against the linoleum. Tonia's head turned at the sound to meet Eve's gaze. Regret flashed across her face before her attention was drawn inexorably back to the fight.

They were going to fuck after this, Eve knew it. Tonia didn't even need to take off the suit. They'd storm into an unattended conference room and slam the door locked, not bothering to flip the lights on before Tonia lifted Carol bodily onto the table. She could hold Carol with ease; Tonia was strong when she had the armor, almost strong enough to overpower Eve. If Eve wore herself out first, Tonia might really be able to take her.

Tonia would shove one metal-clad finger into Carol, wouldn't she? Pinching seams and all, drinking in Carol's winces. They'd touch each other like it was a competition to see who could best blend pleasure and pain; each of them fucking to win.

"More coffee," Eve said, tipping her mostly-full mug vaguely in the direction of the kitchenette, an excuse in case anyone was watching her retreat. Nobody took notice.

Eve dumped her coffee down the drain. It slid away, leaving a film of creamer. Safe, she leaned her forehead against the cupboard over the sink, breathing hard. It was nothing, she told herself. Tonia was allowed to sleep with whoever she wanted, and Eve wasn't supposed to care about it!

So Tonia had a lot of gay sex. So what? Eve didn't mind. This wasn't different than all the other blatant flings Tonia had. 

Maybe Eve was just jealous that Tonia knew more than her, that Tonia didn't have to hide the awkward secret of almost-virginity, but that was it. She wanted Tonia's ease, her brash beauty, wanted to be able to move like a woman one moment and like a brawler the next. Everyone wanted to be Tonia—even Jan used to say so.

Eve knocked her forehead against the cabinets—thud, thud, thud. She should rinse out her mug. It wasn't polite to leave dishes in the sink.

"Hey peaches," said Tonia behind her.

Eve jerked and dropped her mug. It bounced harmlessly into the sink.

"Whoa there," Tonia said, raising her hands disarmingly. "Didn't mean to startle you."

Tonia hadn't been gone very long, and—Eve sniffed discreetly—didn't smell like sex. She hadn't done anything in the interim, just finished her fight and come nosing around for coffee. Eve felt stupid and guilty for assuming the worst.

And for imagining the worst in graphic detail, Eve's brain supplied, and Eve felt her nipples tighten under her sports bra at even that glancing thought. She looked down to check if they were visible through her shirt and saw, horrified, that they were. Quickly she crossed her arms high across her chest, but that felt awkward, and now she'd waited too long to respond and Tonia was looking at her with mild concern.

"It's fine," Eve said tightly.

"Help me make some fresh mud?" Tonia asked. "I'd make my own but—" she waggled her gauntlet-clad fingers—"can't scoop coffee grounds worth a damn with these things on."

"Of course," Eve said, still stiff. She'd been thinking about what Tonia could do with those fingers and now they were in front of her and Eve couldn't push the images away. The articulation was smooth over Tonia's knuckles, the metal polished until it gleamed.

Eve had a terrible thought, which was that she wanted Tonia to put those fingers inside her instead of inside Carol. She wanted Tonia to spread her open and she didn't care if it only felt okay, and it wasn't any better than what she'd tried with herself, she wanted Tonia close and naked and hers.

Stop it. That's not allowed. Stop it now!

Tonia was still waiting for Eve to get coffee going. She was fucking this up—she needed to stop thinking and start acting. She needed a bomb to go off somewhere. She needed a fire escape to leap onto.

"It's okay if you don't want to," Tonia said. She lifted the coffee pot and stared into the dregs that were left, then wrinkled her nose. "It's such sludge that it's hard to tell the fresh stuff from the burnt."

"It's fine," Eve repeated, and reached up to get the coffee filters.

"Mmmmmm, nice view," Tonia said, leaning back against the counter, wearing the infuriating self-satisfied smile she always did when she teased Eve. "Thanks for the gun show, darling."

"Quit that," Eve said, unable to take the joke. Not right this second.

"Can't help it," Tonia drawled. "I'm an all-American lady-killer, and you are an all-American lady."

Eve slammed the cabinet shut, coffee filters crumpling in her hand. "Can it, Stark! If you're gonna make eyes, go do it at Danvers. She's more than receptive."

Tonia's eyes widened. Eve's heart sank—Tonia had never seen a situation she didn't want to escalate. This was about to go from unbearable to excruciating.

"My, my, we're cranky today," Tonia said, laden with mock-sympathy. "What's wrong, baby, do you need to play a round of flick the bean?" She pursed her lips, raking her eyes up and down Eve's body. "You're so tense you look fit to pop. Have you thought about going pearl-diving to bother the bearded clam? A little visit to the kayak shop to buy a slippery pink canoe? Fixing yourself some fish tacos for one?"

"Don't," Eve said, knowing she sounded humorless, knowing she was proving Tonia's point.

"That's a no, hm?"

Tonia just didn't know how to let things go.

"I tried," Eve snapped. "I tried and it didn't work. Now drop it."

Tonia's mouth rounded in surprise. "Didn't work?" she echoed quietly, breathy with shock.

"I can't do everything; does that make you happy?"

"What?" Tonia said, still all soft and confused around the edges. "No—I—Jesus, Eve," she said. She went to rub her face with her hand, saw that it was covered in armor, and let it fall.

"Don't—don't make fun of me," Eve said. "You can call me stupid and backward and broken, but do it somewhere else."

"I'm such a fuckup," Tonia said, not exactly in reply. "Christ, Stark, make things worse, why don't you."

Eve didn't know what to do with that. She still had a stack of crushed coffee filters wrinkled up in her hand; she dropped them onto the counter with a puff of deflated plastic wrapping.

"Somebody else can make you coffee," Eve said, which was the wrong thing, because it made Tonia's face crumple into open sadness, and that wasn't what Eve had meant to happen, she just had to get away, she couldn't manage the shame and the twisting gut-deep yearning, not where Tonia could see her, not like this.

She was saved by the shrill ringing of a priority alert coming across her Ultimates line. People were in danger. Thank heavens.

Eve got home hours later. She had subway grime ground into her fingernails and post-combat adrenaline burning through her blood. The battle high churned inside her, mixing with filthy thoughts about Carol and Tonia and guilt over those same thoughts.

It was unbearable. She needed something to drain it away, a purge like the ones she'd been prescribed as a kid, emetics and diuretics to flush the sickness out of her.

Eve was relatively certain that Fury and Danvers monitored her quarters at the Triskelion, so she still kept her apartment in Brooklyn for anything...private.

Which included her next experiment.

Eve went and stripped naked in the bathroom. Looking at her body and thinking about sex at the same time was strange. She kept her hair buzzed short on the sides because it made for faster showers, and didn't bother shaving her sparse body hair. Her skin was good, free of blemishes—provided she'd hadn't gotten her face beaten in recently. Heavy jaw, unremarkable lips, clear blue eyes. Tonia had blue eyes too. They were deeper than Eve's, which were so pale they edged toward silver.

She palmed her breasts, lifting them and letting them fall. They weren't very large compared to the breadth of her shoulders. She thought that might have something to do with the serum; steroids that shrank her hips and flattened her chest. She certainly didn't have a shapely bottom. She twisted around, trying to find an angle that wasn't all hard, flat planes. No use. Mannish, that's what she was.

Maybe that was why men didn't like her—they'd have to be fairies to find her attractive at all, and that kind of guy wasn't going to be interested in a lady.

All the more reason to get with the times and learn to take care of herself.

Eve tried touching between her legs. It scraped, rough and dry, not even mildly nice the way it had been before. Why was this so complicated?

What had worked before was watching. She could replay the memory and it would be almost as good as being there, it didn't hurt anyone if it was just in her own head.

Eve caught herself on the edge of conjuring flashes of flesh and harsh, lustful gasps. 

No! That had been wrong, a mistake, and here she was, rationalizing away her morals because she wanted it again.

Maybe she would just grab her laptop and cruise the internet to find some tips, the way she'd searched what is a laser? and why is dish soap different from dishwasher powder? and a hundred other things.

How do women masturbate? Eve typed.

The answers provided by the search engine were instantaneous, photographic, and would have curled her hair if she hadn't spent the past few years getting used to what Jan had called "sexual liberation."

Eve sighed. She supposed that visual aids were helpful in this arena. She clicked through to one site and discovered that it had a video.

A lot of videos.

The women were tan and leggy, with nails that looked fresh from the salon. They spread their thighs to the camera, revealing that they didn't have a lick of hair down there.

It wasn't that much worse than the skin mags passed around by her fellow soldiers. There wasn't any...male anatomy, so to speak. Just lithe bodies sprawled on nondescript beds, a camera between their knees and hands on their—ah—centerfolds.

Eve picked the one with the least intimidating title—no thank you, MILF has mindbowling SQUIRTING orgasm, she didn't even know what half of that that was supposed to mean—and tried to arrange herself on the bed similarly to the woman on screen.

That felt weird and exposed, so Eve threw a sheet over her bent knees, which made her feel like she was at the gynecologist. No, that was—no. She kicked at the sheet until it was bunched over her hips and covering about half her thighs, which was good enough.

"Oooooooh, look at my wet pussy, so wet wanting your dick, I'm so wet," said the porn actress.

Eve made a face. The dialogue was going to leave something to be desired, apparently. The video was only eight minutes long; she could endure some overblown gasping until it ended and then she could strike understand how orgasm works off her to-do list.

"I want you so bad, mmmmmmmm, your big fat dick inside my wet pussy."

Eve muted the video. She could learn the technique without the commentary.

She watched carefully as the actress slapped at the top half of her cunt, rolling around in ecstasy, then tried it herself. It was largely unsatisfying. Next the woman licked her fingers and rubbed up and down, spreading herself open so her slick pink insides were on display. That was—well, that was something. The camera zoomed in so she was practically nose-to-nose with the stranger's pussy. She'd never seen anything like that so close up. Eve catalogued the dips and crevices and wondered if that was what she looked like down there.

With Tonia and Carol, she hadn't been able to see anything in detail, really. Just color and position and movement. Now she wondered what it tasted like. Surely not like stale piss, or nobody would ever bury their face between a woman's legs. Eve rubbed a finger up and down herself, trying to pick up a little wetness. Then she licked it.

It tasted almost like sucking on a penny, almost like her own sweat, and a little bit like the aftertaste of a tequila shot, lingering salty acid-sweet on her tongue after she'd bitten the lime Tonia provided and sucked salt off the web of her thumb.

Tonia had been the one to teach Eve all the creative ways people drank liquor these days, one night when the team had wanted to see if she or Thor had the better alcohol tolerance.

"We're not doing this with straight vodka, Jesus," Tonia had said after Clint dragged a bottle of Ketel One out of the mansion cupboards, "and not with my nice scotch either. Let's have a little fun with my full bar and the bartending certificate I got when I was twenty-two and thought it would be a good way to pick up chicks. Which it was," she added with a wink.

It had been fun. Thor had won, but not before Eve had worked through just about every drink Tonia knew how to mix. They'd all been roaring drunk by the end, Tonia loose and handsy, draping herself all over everyone but Eve.

Eve almost wished someone else was here to—to—God, she was being silly. The porn video that was still playing would be plenty instructive. The naked lady was rubbing back and forth with all four fingers flat like she was frantically wiping at a bit of glass until it came clear.

Trying that still chafed and dragged dryly over her delicate bits, but it felt better and less goofy than the earlier light smacking.

It had to turn into something brilliant soon, or else why would anyone spend all this time at it? This way of rubbing was at least starting to wind up a knot of impatience in the hollow of her pelvis. It was like bunching her muscles before the swing of a punch, the ache of penned-up anger waiting to burst free into motion. Her hips yanked upwards of their own accord when her hand slipped and she ground the heel of her palm up between her legs instead.

Eve tried to repeat it, but she couldn't replicate the feeling consistently. Every fourth or fifth attempt got her that bolt of pleasure, drawing forth an undignified grunt and another jerky thrust.

Okay. She had a thread to tug on, and soon the whole thing would unravel. She waited for the video to move on to the next thing, to the touch that would tip her over into the mysterious orgasm she could feel building beneath her fingers.

But the woman was already throwing her head back in silent paroxysms of bliss, still doing the same flat sawing across her cunt, and when Eve unmuted the movie she was shouting, "Oh! Oh my god I'm coming! Fuck! I'm coming so fucking hard, baby! Oh, oh, oooooooooh, fuck, it feels so good!"

"Dammit!" Eve yelled at the empty room, snapping the laptop shut. A small piece of plastic casing popped free and flew out of view. Eve expected she would find it later by stepping on it.

"God fucking dammit."

Eve avoided Tonia for a week and a half. She spent most of her time in her Trisk quarters, only leaving to work out and pick up more protein powder. But this afternoon she'd wanted to sit somewhere with natural light, maybe read more of the new Tolkien book, so she was in the team's open-plan common space, two stories of unbroken picture windows at her back and a massive sculpture hung over her head like the sword of Damocles made from riotous blown glass.

"Think fast, Independence Day," Tonia called from the doorway, and lobbed an orange at Eve's head.

Eve caught it easily in one hand, then tossed it up and down, once, weighing the ripeness. It was perfect. "What's this?"

"Present," Tonia said, thumping down onto the couch next to Eve. She was damp from a shower, smelling of rosemary and vetiver and underneath that, doctor's office disinfectant.

It had been chemotherapy today, then.

"I can buy my own fruit," Eve said cautiously.

"Yeah," Tonia said, crossing her hands behind her head and leaning back until the buttons of her shirt gapped over her chest, "but you don't. You're always saving it for a special day."

Eve hadn't thought Tonia would notice that sort of thing. She dug her thumbnail into the rind of the fruit and was struck by the sweet, curling scent of citrus oil. "I don't want to get used to having them."

"Wait long enough for the perfect time, and you don't get to have them at all," Tonia said. She said it carefully and deliberately, and Eve could recognize the peace offering couched in a gesture when it was literally under her nose. Right. She'd been avoiding Tonia since watching her have that fight with Carol, and Tonia must have thought it was her fault. Eve was a scumbag in more ways than one.

Eve steeled herself. Tonia deserved the truth, there wasn't anyone else around, and that meant it was time for her to come clean too.

She'd just—let herself finish this orange first. She wanted one perfect, bright thing before she gave it a brave ending.

"Stay a bit, will you?" Eve asked, and the way Tonia's answering expression warmed the entire room almost broke Eve's resolve.

She peeled the orange slowly in one unbroken ribbon. Tonia read something from Eve's body language and declined to start up more conversation, instead curling up on the other end of the couch with her feet tucked up underneath her thighs. She had her phone out, reading something in miniscule text on the screen. Eve chewed a section of orange and marveled at the sight of Tonia absorbed with her work. Everything else fell away from her—the pinch of headache between her brows, the subtle posture she maintained to keep the eyes of a crowd pointed at her face and not her cleavage, the affected crude humor—and all that was left was the taut line between her mind and the problem in front of her.  Her free hand twitched against her thigh, drawing small unseeing patterns across her loose slacks, diagramming her thoughts in a private, unparseable language.

Eve read a few pages of her book, alternating between bites of orange and passages describing a high golden keep and the white stars of flowers scattered over the hillocks of overgrown tombs.

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow.

The last section of fruit Eve offered to Tonia. Tonia came up out of her focused trance to demur. "It's your orange, Eve."

"It's a really perfect one," Eve said. "You don't want to miss it."

Tonia looked at Eve for a long beat, then took the piece of fruit delicately from Eve's fingers and ate it in two neat bites.  She closed her eyes and licked her lips once, savoring. Eve savored the sight in turn, one last stolen moment before the consequences of her actions landed on her shoulders.

"What is it?" Tonia asked, catching Eve's stare. "You look like you're about to tell me either that my cat died or that my tits ended up on a billboard in Times Square again, and I don't have a cat. Not that kind of lesbian, thank god."

Eve swallowed. Guilt sank like twisted wires into her jaw, lashing her throat shut.

"Nothing."

She was tired of walking the razor-wire tightrope of mysterious sexuality. She liked to have her feet on the ground, and all this stuff with Tonia was confusing and amorphous, all tied up in things she shouldn't be burdened with trying to understand. The world was simple. Eve said yes ma'am, I was proud to die for my country, she said no sir, my presence did not interfere with team cohesion, those were the right answers because everyone agreed they were.

Eve was putting this mess to bed. She was going to spend some time looking at pictures of men. A lezzer wouldn't like them, obviously. If a lady was a homosexual, she wouldn't even be able to make herself like them.

So, Eve was going to look at some randy photos of men and prove that they were just as fascinating as the memory of Tonia and Carol. She went to the internet, purveyor of infinite sinful material, and sent up a quick prayer that Nick Fury didn't have a backdoor into her search history. Maybe she could ask Tonia to make her computer safe from that, although that would mean admitting to Tonia that she looked at—at things.

Eve shuddered with guilt and unsettling longing and decided she would do some push-ups before looking any farther.

She did four sets of a hundred; one set one-handed on the left and right, one set on her knuckles, and one with her feet braced a yard or so up against the wall. Then she went through her grip strength routine because she'd lost a handhold on the back of a truck a few fights ago and scraped her knees almost down to the kneecap before she flipped herself back up off the asphalt onto the hood of a passing SUV. She'd rather not leave any more skin on the pavement of the Lincoln Tunnel.

Eve was fourteen minutes into holding a plank when she finally admitted to herself that she was putting off her dirty pictures experiment.

Resigning herself to feeling like a ninny, Eve sat down on the couch. Sweat ran down between her traps, tickling through the fine hair cropped short at the nape of her neck. Eve got up to get a towel. And then a drink of water. And then a protein bar.

You're being a little sissy coward, Eve told herself firmly. She went back to her laptop, and, with her eyes firmly shut, typed sexy naked man and pressed enter. Then she cracked one eye open.

The images provided were—well—certainly very muscular. Showy, inefficient muscles, at that. Eve was halfway through designing a significantly better workout routine than whatever these men were using before she made herself look at their proudly displayed erections.

Those were very large, she thought. And, um, sexy. Yes. The naked men seemed very confident about that, especially the ones holding their hard-ons up towards the camera to better display the flushed, purpling heads. Eve squinted critically at one particularly well-endowed specimen, trying to figure out if it was digitally enhanced, a prosthetic, or just nature placing him on the farthest end of the bell curve. How did it fit?

Eve wriggled a hand into her pants, checking for the tender slickness she remembered. No dice—her downstairs felt resolutely closed for business.

Five more minutes, she promised herself. Just a little longer and then she could look at some women.

Eve could even—it was wrong, but—there were sex tapes featuring Tonia on the web, both real and semi-convincingly faked. Eve's breath picked up at the thought. Her fingers dug a bit deeper and found the wetness she'd been hoping for. Eve scowled at the bare chests and jutting cocks and tried to connect the new urgency between her legs to the images on her screen. Maybe she could watch one of the ones where they found a woman who looked vaguely like Tonia and had a man fuck her—then her traitor cunt would connect wanting Tonia to wanting a man and she could prove that it was all some silly fluke, a miswiring in her head that could be repaired with a little gentle re-direction.

If only I had a genius engineer handy, Eve thought near-hysterically.

Five minutes of dutifully observing the contours of manly asses later, Eve gave in. It was terribly easy to find the kind of video she wanted. The woman in the thumbnail bore a passing resemblance to Tonia; the hair was the right color, and they'd put in the effort to glue washers to her skin where Tonia's body mods sat. They'd missed some of them, and put a couple in lewd but inaccurate places, but Eve could forgive it. She supposed not everyone spent as much time as she had trying their best to avert their eyes while Tonia stripped unceremoniously in the Quinjet. The eyes were almost right, and the lipstick color matched perfectly.

The man was forgettable; the title made it sound like he was some kind of celebrity. Eve didn't recognize the name.

The two porn stars rolled around in bed for a bit, gasping theatrically and peeling off fake-Tonia's skimpy clothes. She found herself leaning closer, trying to imagine what it would be like to be tangled in those sheets with Tonia, with the man about to fuck her, to have Tonia dig her narrow, scarred fingers into Eve's hair and hold her face in between her legs, just like the actress was doing with her partner. He reached up to squeeze her tits (larger than Tonia's, with nipple piercings that Tonia definitely didn't have). Eve remembered running wet fingers over her nipples, how good it had felt, how she hadn't let herself imagine Tonia's mouth there, nipping and sucking, looking up at Eve through her eyelashes and smiling with her lips pressed into Eve's skin so Eve could feel as well as see the grin. Eve palmed her breast, letting herself sink into the fantasy.

Eve knew she was playing the wrong part in her mind. She was a woman, she was supposed to want to be the woman in the scene, not the handsome fella—surely he was handsome, he wouldn't be in this kind of movie if he wasn't handsome—propped on his elbows above her.

But every time she tried to focus on his big hands and his hairy forearms she fell into comparing them to her own. She could hitch Tonia's knee up over her shoulder just as easily, and could do one better; could lift Tonia up off the bed completely and rock their hips together with no regard for gravity. The real Tonia, not some busty simulacrum.

But she couldn't have that, could she? Tonia didn't want anything she had on offer. She couldn't imagine—what would she do, catch Tonia in a hallway late at night and ask to go home with her? What would she say? Tonia, I want to have an orgasm, will you help me?

Tonia would laugh. She'd look at Eve's hopeless ignorance and her utilitarian body and say, Try looking it up in a book, pumpkin. Colonel Danvers is waiting for me and she can do this thing with her tongue that you wouldn't believe.

Ridiculous.

There was porn playing on her laptop, and the only man in the world who'd ever loved her was living with her best friend, and she was half-making plans to proposition the richest woman in the world.

Eve started to laugh, shaky unhappy giggles wracking her chest. It had gotten so fucked up so quickly after she woke up. She was supposed to go down with that bomb.

The panel covering the guidance system had been riveted shut and she hadn't been able to get a grip on it with her gloves on. She'd pulled one glove off with her teeth and tucked it under her chin for safe-keeping, as if it mattered at all that she didn't drop it into the ocean, as if she was going to need it later. Then she'd peeled the metal open with her bare hands. She remembered one of her fingernails tearing off. There'd been blood on the wires. The sharp edges of circuit boards sliced into her from knuckle to wrist as she shoved the grenade deep into the guts of the missile. They cut on the way out, too.

When they chipped her out of the ice her hand was healed. She'd flexed her fingers, remembering how dead they had felt as she'd fallen, tendons and nerves all cut up, silvery fascia visible under the blood. That had convinced her, more than the strange cars and unfamiliar city, that something had gone terribly wrong.

She should have learned then that you can't ever go back. But she'd hadn't—she'd thought looking at some puffed-up men and their cocks would prove that she was normal. Eve flipped the laptop closed and covered her face with her hands, still laughing horribly at the mess the future had turned her into.

She was a dagger, a dyke, a goddamned homosexual.

She was like Tonia.

The odd thing was that it was barely a surprise. Eve waited for her new sexuality to be shocking and instead it bloomed deeper into her past, until she'd always been this way and had always known. It just turned out that knowing something and thinking it out loud were two different things.

Eve wiped her eyes. Her lungs hurt like she'd been crying.

"That's that then," she said to her quiet apartment. Now it was her job to figure out what to do about it.

The next mission was supposed to be an easy organized crime bust, but it went supervillain-bad faster than Eve could bring her shield up.

Tonia dropped Eve on the west side of a huge, empty warehouse in Jersey, then flown around to the north side to close off the giant bay doors. The criminals inside were performing the final exchange in the sale of a nasty parcel of weapons, including a trio of dirty bombs that the Ultimates were tasked with bringing in.

The goons arrived on time; so did the armored truck full of explosives. And then a canister of tear gas hit the ground at Eve's feet, and as she sprang to slap her shield on top of it, a hypodermic dart hit the meat of her thigh.

Whoever set this up tailor-made their attack. Eve had lost the the serum a couple of times. It had been a shitty experience then and was a shitty experience now. Her strength drained away in moments, and then over the course of a few days her muscles would atrophy and she'd be stuck, all small and useless, until a doctor figured out how to fix her.

At the same time, Tonia shouted as someone inside the armored truck opened the nozzle of a fire hose and sprayed something that hissed and spit at the armor. The metal bloomed with corrosion, paint blistering and joints shrieking as Tonia scrambled out of the way.

After a harrowing sprint across open ground, Eve's old bad hip unstable again, threatening to pitch her sideways onto the concrete floor, Eve made it to Tonia. Tonia immediately threw up a force barrier, shimmering blue over their heads. Eve lay flat, useless. Bullets slammed into the energy field with dull thumps like a fist hitting a pillow.

"Lots of guns out there, huh?" Tonia said. "And you're looking pretty squishy, babe. Don't think we're going anywhere for a bit. Too bad, I had dinner reservations."

Eve rolled onto her back, panting.

Tonia dropped to a crouch, rust grinding harsh against rust. "I got a distress beacon out, but it's going to take an hour before help comes. Hope you're not dying too fast."

Eve grunted. "Weak, not dying."

Tonia shrugged with a squeal of unhappy metal. "It was a reasonable assumption. You look like a corpse."

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

A grenade bounced drunkenly to the edge of the force field. Eve recoiled, flailing for her shield. She felt like every movement was dragging through sludge. Her nerves were dull, unreliable things. Tonia didn't even flinch.

"Cool down, cucumber. Fancy bubble is grenade-proof," Tonia informed her, and knocked her knuckles against the barrier with a hollow thump. "I'm not an amateur. This is basically a slumber party now. Relax. Let's braid each other's hair and talk about kissing boys."

"First one's going to be difficult," Eve said, scooting to a slightly more seated position. Her bones hurt. "You, in a helmet. Me, with a buzz cut."

"Boys, then," Tonia said, and Eve could almost see the smug grin behind Iron Mantle's angular, insectoid mask.

"You already told me my ex-fiancé is a queer," Eve said. "And I don't have any other boys to talk about."

"Me neither," Tonia said. After a pause, "I'm winking, but you can't see it," followed by another pause before Tonia made the light behind one eye-slit blink on and off.

Maybe the impersonal mask of Iron Mantle would be easier to talk to than looking Tonia in the face. With the armor's paint boiling up off its surface like a chrome rash, she wasn't even attractive. It was almost impossible to imagine the heavy metal fingers of Tonia's gauntlet pushing hard and cold into the entrances to Eve's body.

Frail as she was, maybe it wouldn't make her whole body feel ill-at-ease from the contrast between the confident power of her muscles and the delicate membranes of her cunt. She was vulnerable all over, like this.

Eve grimaced. Apparently nothing was enough to keep her from being a blatant homosexual in Tonia's presence.

Maybe she should bite the proverbial bullet now anyway. It was only going to get worse the longer she put it off. Her head felt light; she'd forgotten what it was like when her lungs had half the capacity, how she'd never had enough air to keep her mind clear.

"What's your opinion on deathbed confessions?" Eve asked.

"Hate ‘em. Too late for data gathering to be any good. Knowledge is power, yadda yadda, but power is useless without time to wield it."

"Not gonna like this then."

It was impossible to tell if Tonia was appalled or apprehensive. The armor concealed it all.

Eve dropped one hand over her face. Now she had a mask too. "You're going to think I'm a pervert and never speak to me again."

"Okay, inauspicious start, but honestly not the one I was expecting, points for originality."

Of course Tonia had more jokes. Getting this over with was going to be even worse that Eve had imagined, because in a few seconds the jokes were going to come to a sharp halt. Maybe forever.

A spray of fire from a tank-mounted minigun raked across the force barrier. Tonia, horribly, shifted closer to Eve, exuding uncharacteristic gentleness even through the broad movements of the armor. She looked like she wanted to touch Eve, to fold her into an embrace and make it all go away. It clawed a terrible hole in Eve's chest because that was exactly the type of thing that would make this a thousand times worse.

"Me being upset about someone else being a perv would be quite the pot calling kettle, darling," Tonia said.

Eve shook her head. This was far worse than whatever Tonia was thinking about, more than some hanky panky in the ladies room or a game of slap and tickle. Tonia hadn't done anything that made her a bad person, unlike Eve.

It made her want to curl in on herself, like she'd taken a sucker punch to the gut, an instinctual reflex to be small again, to go back to when she could shrink into a seat on the subway, wrapping her arms around herself until she was squeezed into nothing.

"Not like that," Eve said miserably. "Worse. Unethical."

The armor's head dipped down, still horribly sympathetic. "Oh, honey. I'm getting an idea what this is. You don't have to say it out loud if you're not ready."

Eve's throat spasmed, and then she couldn't correct Tonia because her body seized with a fit of inconvenient coughing. Dust in the air; asthma returning.

"It's okay to have a hard time with it, you know. I'd have to be a shithead to judge you for all the twisted-up stuff inside your head. Fuck, I had that too. I shouldn't have told you off about homophobia—that can't have helped."

"You don't understand," Eve wheezed. "I saw you having sex, and I violated your trust."

"Oh, that. Don't fuss; everyone and their hot step-mother has watched the Natasha sex tape," Tonia said, waving a hand dismissively. "Our team played it in the living room at max volume."

"I didn't watch your damn video!" Eve said, and yelling hurt but maybe it would make Tonia stop being wrong. "I watched you. You and Colonel Danvers."

Tonia jerked in surprise. The quick movement made corroded metal flake off the armor in a shower of rusty dandruff. In another situation, Eve would have laughed. Not expecting that one, huh Mantle?

"You were—um—"

"Doing the horizontal office tango?" The words were flip, but Tonia's tone was breathy with shock. "Caught a little glimpse of me and Carol en flagrante?"

Eve gritted her teeth. The next part was the hardest. It made her skin crawl with sickening inadequacy. "More than—I—I couldn't stop," Eve admitted.

Tonia checked the force barrier—still getting pummeled, still holding—and unclipped the front of the helmet. Instead of horror, her face was painted with intent, blue gaze laid dark and heavy on Eve.

Somehow she wasn't understanding. Couldn't she hear what Eve was saying? That she needed to get as far away as possible? Eve was disgusting. Taking Tonia's privacy from her, just because she wanted. Because she'd told herself she wasn't a queer and tried to make it so that meant it didn't matter. She'd touched herself, afterwards, to images of Tonia that she hadn't been freely given.

"So, my little voyeur, did you like what you saw?" Tonia asked, voice low. "Did you want to come in and have a taste?"

"No," Eve lied. "Of course not!"

Tonia gave her a look that spoke clear as day: we both know that's bullshit, darling.

"I apologize," Eve said stiffly.

"You're a mess, Rogers, I'll give you that. But you're a hot mess, and that makes you so, so easy to forgive."

Tonia leaned in so Eve could hear her tongue hitting the back of her teeth on every consonant as she whispered, "You can watch whenever you want."

It was too much. Eve shut her eyes, but it didn't help; it just made the image clearer: Tonia naked over Carol, turning her head to meet Eve's shameful gaze, and pushing into Carol's cunt with a wicked smile, never breaking eye contact. She was guiltily, horribly aroused from Tonia's close mouth, suffused with queasy relief that Tonia wasn't repudiating her and tight with desire from thighs to ribcage.

Impossibly, when she opened her eyes Tonia was closer, bracing herself on one heavy arm, bowed in an arc over Eve's failing body.

It was different than other times being close to Tonia. She'd touched Tonia's face before; had even swept her fingers through Tonia's mouth on one notable occasion, checking for airway obstruction after she found Tonia slumped unresponsive on the couch, too many empty bottles and pills on the coffee table.

Tonia had woken up with Eve's clumsy, frantic hands on either side of her head. She'd blinked, groggy and stupid.

"Hey gorgeous," Tonia had said, then smacked her lips together and grimaced. She sat up, shaking Eve's hands loose, bent, and spat thick saliva on the carpet. Tonia had been slow, dampened, and Eve had been horrified to find that Tonia was easier this way, simple, the terrifying intelligence behind her eyes dulled to a whisper.

"What did you do?" Eve had asked, furious with fear.

Tonia had rubbed her head, then stroked Eve's shoulder. "Hmmmm, ill-advised experiments to see which pill bottles meant business when they said Do Not Mix With Alcohol. Found some. Unfortunately."

Eve had thought her heart was hammering with simple worry over a teammate. She'd thought that the miserable, aching longing while she sat with Tonia post-radiation therapy—out of remission again, another loop of cancer's horrible cycle—was simply the dread that came with knowing she was going lose one of her only friends.

Now that she could identify the feeling as being a homosexual, now that she knew it had always been about wanting, it sharpened into a knife-point.

Tonia loomed closer and closer, and Eve tipped her chin up into the coming kiss, ready to shove aside the shame and confusion so she could just have this. Eve found herself lifting one hand to press into Tonia's armored chest, bubbly paint sharp under her palm, and her head swam with possibilities.

Instead Tonia ducked to the side at the last moment, pressing cheek-to-cheek instead, and pressed her lips to Eve's temple. Eve lost the breath she hadn't known she was holding. It didn't feel quite chaste. It wasn't overtly romantic either.

Being a lesbian was confusing.

"We had better not die here," Tonia breathed into Eve's ear. "God, Eve, you dirty bird."

Grey nothing closed in on Eve's peripheral vision. She felt the lurch of oncoming unconsciousness, inevitable as a train rushing past the entrance of a tunnel. It struck her that she might be lightheaded from more than lust.

Damn, Eve had time to think, more drugs in that dart than I thought, and then she passed out cold.

Eve hated the ICU. The place made her feel like she was defrosting all over again; every time she woke up was a shock. Nothing was familiar. Everyone important to her was old or dead. She glowered at doctors, refused to eat her Jell-O cups, and tried to check herself out the second she could stand.

Fury threatened to tie her to the hospital bed until she was recovered enough to tear through the leather straps herself.

In exchange for cooperation, she extracted the details of the ambush from Fury, which was how she learned about Red Skull, followed by a series of horrible revelations about the US military making a test tube baby out of her skin cells while she was in the ice. They'd roped in poor Gary as well; the rot spread in every direction.

Eve had assumed, as a child, that she'd eventually be a mother. She'd thought about what kind of parent she'd be—better than her father, unable to live up to the example set by her ma—and if she wanted boys or girls. Then she got older, and her health worsened, and she was forced to confront that even a normal pregnancy would likely kill her. If she ever got knocked up at all. Her monthlies never did come in. First she was too thin; then the serum took over and negated her cycle for good.

She'd put the question of offspring aside. It had become something to consider when the war ended, and then Eve woke up and her country was still at war, half a century later. Family remained a faint shape on the horizon, ever receding.

Still, in her vague musings, Eve imagined her children growing up strong and upstanding.

In reality, Eve's pseudo-daughter had carved her own face off with a kitchen knife. 

It took almost a week to reverse the poison Red Skull had shot her up with. Then another week of blood and lies and a neat gunshot to the forehead in another hospital bed. Eve shouldn't have had time to think about Tonia's mouth. Somehow she still managed it.

The next time Eve got Tonia alone—really alone, not just snatches in between fistfights with her maniac daughter—found Eve in Tonia's fabrication workshop with the top half of her uniform in her hands. She'd changed out of her bloody undershirt and was wearing yet another t-shirt adorned with stars and stripes. Tonia had a point when she said Eve always looked like a party store a week before the Fourth of July.

"You tore that thing one hundred percent to shit," Tonia said, watching as Eve stuck four fingers out through a hole in the chest of her uniform, slashed right across the star.

With classic one-thing-after-another timing, AIM had come at the Ultimates with a swarm of angry, genetically engineered lizards. The little bastards were fast, too; they'd climbed up Eve's legs by the dozens and it had been all she could manage to keep their razor-sharp claws away from her face. The scratches to Eve's skin had been mostly superficial—bleeders, but not deep—while the damage to her gear was extensive.

Eve was tired in the familiar all-over way that followed any time after she lost some blood. She wanted to curl up somewhere out of the way and silence all the tiny beeping devices that seemed to be an inescapable part of the future.

"You gonna repair it for me or you just gonna talk about it?" Eve asked, wadding up the tattered canvas and Kevlar shirt and tossing it at Tonia.

Tonia caught it with one hand and rubbed the material between her fingers. "Do you one better. To be honest, I've been itching to get you in something better than this monkey suit."

The several minutes that followed were incomprehensible engineering gobbledygook, but Tonia seemed to enjoy saying all of it out loud. She popped up off her stool halfway through the monologue to go rifling through some shelves and racks, muttering while she tossed bits and bobs onto the nearest worktable.

Tonia in her workshop was an incredible creature. She darted from place to place, going after items she wanted with uncanny certainty, stubby draftsman's pencil stabbed through the messy pile of her hair. Eve suspected Tonia had memorized the location of every wrench, fastener, and wire in the wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling riot of shelving and tiny plastic drawers.

"...boron carbide scale mail," Tonia finished, presenting Eve with a chip of hard black material with a flourish like a magician asking is this your card.

Eve took the little flat rectangle and tried to bend it between her fingers. It had no give at all, even when she applied real force.

Tonia grinned. "Good stuff, huh?"

Eve nodded.

Tonia tore a giant sheet of butcher paper off a roll mounted to the wall and started drawing up plans in swift, blocky lines.

"Get over here," Tonia said, beckoning with one hand while she sketched dimensions with the other. "I need to measure you."

Eve let Tonia go at her with her measuring tape. Tonia needed a tailor's usual numbers—inseam, bust, neck, shoulder, waist—and more esoteric ones, including careful study of her hands and the contours of her face. For a mask and gloves, Eve assumed, trying to be still as Tonia's hands moved confidently and professionally across her body, barely brushing against her except for the long strip of pressure applied by the measuring tape.

Eve had assumed that Tonia would have wandering fingers, but she was focused on Eve's body with an engineer's mono-focus, absorbed in the new project.

It was embarrassing, how much Eve wanted Tonia to break from propriety. Even more embarrassing was the interest building between her thighs. Tonia nudged Eve's stance wider with a brisk press of her hand and wrapped the tape around Eve's upper thigh, and Eve couldn't—she made a sound, a bitten-off hiss of desire.

Eve hadn't said a single thing to Tonia about the whole thing in the force field. She'd been afraid, as if saying it out loud would make Tonia take it back. If she said it out loud, Tonia would really know that Eve was a homo. Tonia would remember that Eve spied on her and she would change her mind about it brushing it off like it was nothing.

Tonia rocked backwards, turning careful and still. "You need to tell me if I'm hurting you," she said. "I know you hide injuries sometimes because you think they'll heal fine on their own."

"No," Eve said, hot all over.

Tonia looked at her with a critical eye.

"I'm—I'm all wound up from today," Eve said lamely. "I just need to relax."

"I have a fix for that," Tonia said. "C'mon."

Eve went where Tonia led her, unsure what Tonia was thinking. The fantasy of Tonia relaxing her in a carnal way was inescapable, and it made her so wet she was afraid Tonia would be able to smell it. Where Tonia wanted to go was, apparently, up the elevator and into her well-appointed den, drenched in mahogany-tinted light and the glow of well-polished wood.

Tonia shooed Eve into a leather chair. It was the most comfortable thing Eve had ever sat in. Then Tonia swung around to stand behind her. Before Eve could wonder what she was doing, she ran strong hands over Eve's shoulders and—oh, oh wow—rubbed in a way that felt incredible. Eve's chin fell to her chest as all her muscles melted.

"Feel good?" Tonia asked.

"Really—real good," Eve said roughly. Tonia hit a particularly perfect spot and Eve rumbled satisfaction deep in her chest.

Tonia hummed a positive assertion and kept digging her thumbs into the places where Eve's back was most knotted. She didn't stop, kneading and massaging until Eve's head buzzed with soft pleasure. Tonia scratched over Eve's scalp, sending tingles across her skin.

It was hard to form arguments when Tonia's hands were so amazing. She'd tugged the neck of Eve's shirt down and Eve could feel the scrape of calluses across the base of her neck. Tonia's hands were tools. She kept her nails short and natural, except for at galas and charity dinners, where she arrived resplendent in long wigs and press-ons, all glittering masks and talons. That was its own kind of tool.

"You should extract the ram-rod from your spine more often," Tonia said. "It's a hell of a look on you."

"You're too damn busy to do this every night, so enjoy it while it lasts."

"There's some things you can do on your own, darling," Tonia purred.

Eve snorted. "I wish."

Tonia's sure touch hitched to a stop for just a moment before it resumed again. She didn't say anything out loud in response.

Eve felt like she had to explain herself better—she couldn't just leave her sex issues dangling in the air like an unexploded ordnance.

"It's just—I can't do it by myself. Touching—my—it doesn't work. I don't know what I'm doing wrong."

She felt Tonia's breath stutter, close across the curve of her skull. Eve lost her nerve. She'd stared down a Panzer with nothing but the boots on her feet and the shield on her arm, but asking for lesbian sex tips—that was beyond her.

"It's too much, forget it," Eve said, trying to sit up straight. She was too backwards and too strong and took up too much space, and Tonia didn't have to deal with all of that.

Tonia's grip turned steely on Eve's shoulders, keeping her where she was. "You're not too much for me," she said. "I didn't say anything like that.  And you know how I am: shit bothers me, you hear about it. At length. Repeatedly. I make blunt a virtue."

Eve took a big steadying breath. Blunt, huh? Eve could be blunt. She'd sure been told enough times to learn a little delicacy. Tonia had kissed her—sort of; maybe she could just ask for what she wanted.

"I wanna know how to have an orgasm," Eve said.

Tonia made a noise that sounded like guh.

Eve waited, silent and stubborn. If Tonia wanted to be an ass, that was Tonia's prerogative, but Eve wasn't going to make it easier for her.

Tonia coughed. Her hands were still warm and heavy on Eve's shoulders. "You looking for literature recommendations or something more hands-on, here?"

Hands-on, Eve thought desperately, but she suddenly remembered Carol, and she didn't know if the thing she had with Tonia was the kind of—she couldn't ask Tonia to cheat. Even if Tonia didn't have the same sort of rules as other people, given historical evidence. "You don't have to—you're with—you're not available. So it's fine."

Tonia's touch disappeared and Eve resigned herself to disappointment. But Tonia was just swinging around to be in front of Eve, perching on the arm of the big leather chair and staring into Eve's face with unguarded awe.

"I am so, so, extremely available," she said. "I am available literally any time you want, for as long as you want, especially if what you want is one-on-one, expert tutoring on how to get off."

"I said what I said." Eve wasn't backing down now.

"Okay, I—fuck, okay," Tonia said, less composed than Eve had seen her in a long time. "I'm going to take you to bed, all right? And then I'll show you some stuff."

Tonia's master bedroom felt more familiar that Eve expected. She thought the new context would make it strange again, but it was the same rich drapes she'd seen in a dozen conference calls, the same door to the en suite she'd leaned on while Tonia retched into the toilet.

"Shoes off," Tonia said, kicking her scuffed-up workshop loafers towards the walk-in closet. "Make yourself comfortable; I need to get the vacuum grease out of my pores before my face erupts like Mount Vesuvius."

"Gross, Stark," Eve said, but she bent to unlace her boots and tried not to think about how that made the seam in the gusset of her pants grind up against her, which was silly to be concerned about when she was going to—touch herself? She supposed? Under Tonia's supervision?—in a matter of minutes.

The prospect of touching was exciting and nerve wracking and insufficient all balled into one.

Eve sat on the bed and contemplated her feet. Then she took off her socks and stuffed them into her boots.

Tonia emerged from her bathroom wrapped in painted silk, her hair damp and curling at the margins of her face where she'd splashed water as she washed.

"How do you want to play this, slugger?" Tonia asked, while Eve stared at the skin bared by the low vee of Tonia's loosely belted robe. "Usually if I'm playing teacher it's more of a sexy professor thing, ooooh Dr. Stark, I need to pass this exam or I'll lose my scholarship, surely I can do something to raise my grade, not so much—" she waved at Eve—"practical education."

Eve realized that Tonia was nervous. That made her feel better; she knew how to deal with nervous people. Confronted with a handful of flighty civilians, she acted confident, even when the entire operation was coming down in flames around her ears. She gave them a concrete thing to do, even if it was something barely helpful like, go stand over there and don't get hit by any rocks. Once they got moving, people were generally self-organizing. Eve thought of the smallest step she could ask of Tonia.

She wanted Tonia to be closer—wanted her sitting on the bed.

"How about you come over here so we can make a game plan," Eve suggested.

"Christ, the Coach Rogers voice shouldn't be hot," Tonia muttered. Then she hopped up next to Eve, crossing her legs so the robe gaped open over her thighs. "This is my fault for using a sports metaphor, isn't it?"

"Looks like it," Eve said.

"Okay then, let's get down to troubleshooting your vagina," Tonia said, then fell silent to think for a moment, tapping one fingernail against her teeth. Her lips were bare, soft pink. "First step of troubleshooting is working out what you've already tried. What have you done with your bad self so far?"

It was Eve's turn to be embarrassed. "I—uh—put in a couple of fingers? And tried rubbing, like this," she said, then made an awkward pantomime of wiping back and forth between her legs.

Tonia's eyes widened. "Eve? Honey? That is so much worse than I thought," she said in dire tones. "You should have called me ages ago."

Eve scowled at Tonia.  If she'd known Tonia would be so willing to help, she would have asked. Probably she just wants me to be less of a grouch and this is her new strategy. "I watched some porn and that was what they did. It's not my fault it didn't work."

Tonia looked torn between sympathy and amusement, and landed on sympathy. "I know it's not your fault. I think it's time for an anatomy lesson. Take off your pants."

Eve did, kicking them off the edge of the bed onto the floor. She felt awkward in just her undershirt with her ass hanging out.

"Do you mind if I—?" Eve asked, tugging at the hem of her top.

"No, nope, not at all, go for it," Tonia said.

Eve pulled the shirt over her head and tossed it away to join her pants. She could leave the bra on; that felt okay.

"Logistically, I think you should go here," Tonia said, pointing up by the headboard, "and I'll sit here so I have the best access." She gestured to a spot that would be more or less between Eve's knees.

Eve nodded. Sound strategy.

In practice, leaning back against the pillows at the head of Tonia's bed with her legs splayed out wide so that Tonia could kneel between them felt less like good tactics and more like a ploy to make Eve feel horribly uncovered and unbearably horny. Her cunt was right out on display for Tonia to look at. Eve found her chest heaving and her belly clenching.

Tonia rubbed Eve's bare knee, her grasp firm and comforting. "You want to get a hand down here and map out the terrain?" she asked. Eve bit her lip and reached between her legs.

Her outer bits were dry and rough with sparse hair, but when Eve split herself open with her fingers she met slick, sensitive flesh. Tonia's grip on her knee tightened as she shifted to get a better vantage. Just friends helping friends out with bedroom problems, Eve told herself. Nothing to get that excited about, Rogers.

Friends who kissed their friends on the battlefield, sure, but Eve had watched people do weirder things when they were worried they might die. Friends who watched friends have sex and weren't too bothered by it, okay, also that, but everyone knew that Tonia had an exhibitionist streak. The point was—Tonia was doing Eve a nice favor, and it wasn't like Eve had to get all excited about it. Tonia was looking at Eve's slowly moving fingers like they were the most fascinating engineering problem she'd encountered in months; and that explained a lot, didn't it? Tonia loved solving problems. She wanted to help Eve out by solving her inability to get herself off, and when they were done Tonia could congratulate herself on a job well done. Another tick in the genius column.

Tonia shifted again, a few inches closer. "You're looking for your clit, okay? It should be a little bump, should feel good when you touch it."

Eve felt around. It felt like there were a lot of little bumps, and they were all slippery, unwilling to stay steady under her fingers.

"Higher," Tonia said. "Follow the midline up, there—nope, too high."

Eve reached down and tried from the bottom again, trying to ignore the tugging emptiness as her fingertips grazed her opening, then up and up, watching Tonia's face for approval or disapproval. Tonia's sharp intake of breath let her know that she had brushed close, and she stayed there until she felt a semi-familiar jolt. It wasn't very relaxing—not like sinking into warm bath or the first bite of food after a long march. The feeling reminded her of the first moment after pulling a ‘chute, stomach protesting the sudden change in g force, only without the rush of wind pulling her skin. It was intense and not quite straightforwardly pleasant; that aside, she wanted it to happen again.

Tonia huffed out a breath and squeezed Eve's thigh, her fingers having somehow crept higher without Eve noticing.

"C'mon, you've got it, now stay there," Tonia said, and then let out a small frustrated hiss when Eve's fingertip slipped into no-man's-land again. A bit more rubbing around and she found it again, then lost it, then found it once more.

Tonia's grip flexed on Eve's skin as she fidgeted. Eve recognized the face she was making—it was the same itchy expression she wore while watching someone inexpertly wield a socket wrench. And inevitably, any moment now, Tonia's patience would run out and she would—

"Do you want—I can just—move your hand and let me show you," Tonia said, resolve breaking.

Eve laughed.

Tonia looked up at her, frowning. "What?"

"You can't stand it when someone is inept in front of you."

"You're not inept, you're just—" Tonia said, then stopped. Finally, she'd found a lie too big for Tonia to spin.

Eve wiped her hand dry on her thigh and chuckled. It was endearing, watching Tonia struggle against the impulse to do everything herself, but Eve wasn't going to torture her any longer. "Go ahead. I'm all yours."

Tonia twitched in relief and blew out a long breath.

She didn't dive in all at once. Tonia ran one finger around the dry edges of Eve's cunt, bending low so her hair tickled over Eve's open thighs. She used one hand to spread Eve wide, and Eve couldn't help how her muscles tightened under Tonia's gentle touch. This wasn't like her own hand, not at all. Her chest hurt with anticipation.

Tonia licked the first two fingers of her free hand and placed them, very lightly, over the place she'd been guiding Eve toward.

Eve made a stupid-sounding noise and twitched like a horse that'd gotten bit by a fly. She expected Tonia to roll her eyes at her overreaction, but instead Tonia groaned long and low in appreciation and moved her fingers, striking the same spot repeatedly in an even rhythm.

"Fuck," Eve said, because if hitting her clit once every couple seconds was electric, having Tonia stroke it steadily was something else entirely. It made her feel hot and liquidy, spreading brightly across her skin.

"So that's clitoral stimulation," Tonia whispered. "You like it?"

"Yeah," Eve said. The delicacy of Tonia's touch was starting to drive her mad. She wanted Tonia to shove closer, harder, deeper.

"Do you want to give it another try?"

Eve knew she should go back to giving it a go on her own. There was no way to learn without practice. It would be rude if she didn't work on becoming independent. That's what Tonia was here for. But Tonia's fingers felt so much better than her own, expert and intoxicating, and she didn't want to go backwards. She wanted it to keep becoming more, not back to blind fumbling. She strained for virtue, but Tonia's touch was still dancing over her, slower now but still achingly persistent.

"Not really," Eve said, honesty winning out. "Can you just—just help me out for a bit? I'm tired of messing this up. I'm so tired, and I just want you to make me feel good."

"Okay," Tonia said roughly. All the teasing from earlier was gone, leaving behind something soft and earnest. "If that's what you want, I can do that. It'd be my pleasure."

Eve wasn't sure what kind of pleasure Tonia could get out of doing all the work for Eve. Tonia must have been banking a lot on Eve being nicer to be around after she'd gotten off. And that was nice, that Tonia was willing to do this to make Eve more relaxed. Eve would be lazy this one time. She would let herself have what she wanted for just a little while.

"Thanks," Eve said. She dared to tuck a loose strand of hair behind Tonia's ear. "It's real kind of you."

Tonia coughed on nothing, then cleared her throat. "Uh. Kind. Yeah. Don't mention it. You're welcome."

Then Tonia's hand quickened, making small circles that had Eve clamping down on the impulse to gasp and writhe. She made herself be still; this was for learning, she was supposed to pay attention to how Tonia was doing it. The technique was more delicate than she'd expected: accurate, slick touches, not heavy grinding.

And there was more, something winching tighter and tighter under Tonia's fingers. Eve searched for something to grab and ended up with one hand twisted in Tonia's duvet cover, the other on her breast, squeezing her nipple through her sports bra. Her thigh muscles corded tight, straining to hold herself together.

She didn't know what was going to happen. She couldn't make a plan to maintain control, to stay dignified. Maybe she should have kissed Tonia first. Maybe she was supposed to be making noises. Maybe Tonia was bored.

The winding climb towards orgasm plateaued, leaving Eve more and more certain she was wasting Tonia's time. It still felt fine, but she wasn't—she wasn't doing it right.

Eve took a shaky breath and sat up a bit. Tonia's hands fell away immediately.

"I'm sorry," Eve said.

Tonia twisted her hands in the hem of her robe, practically sitting on them. Her eyes flicked toward the cut crystal whiskey decanter on the nightstand. Her expression turned carefully light and neutral, the kind of thing she wore when she wanted attention to slide off of her "No problem, pumpkin, don't be sorry. We'll stop. Ring ring, that's the bell, class dismissed."

"No! No, it's not you. I—I'm doing it wrong. I don't want to waste your time."

"What?" Tonia asked. "What makes you think that?"

Eve wrinkled her nose. "Well, I'm not—you know." She waved at her body, all the blocky unfeminine lines of it bare on Tonia's bed. "We're friends, and you want me to be more modern, but it's not like I'm the usual kind of gal you take home. Not much to look at, really."

Tonia raised an incredulous eyebrow. "That's what you're worried about? Oh, sweetheart, you gorgeous, stupid hunk of all-American beef. I am perfectly happy to be here. I am, in fact, very dedicated to our mission to get the Stars and Stripes off for the first time."

Right. A mission. We could do it properly, she almost said out loud. We could just make love. Tonia wouldn't want to hear that. Instead she tried to arrange her body to increase their odds of success; she lay back, hitched her butt down, pulled one leg up to give Tonia easy access again.

"There you go," Tonia said. She bent and kissed the junction between Eve's hip and her thigh. Then she pulled back, glancing guiltily at Eve like she thought she'd done something wrong. Eve rolled her hips up, chasing Tonia's mouth.

Kisses weren't very teacherly. Eve was willing to steal them anyway.

"It's okay if you do that," Eve said.

Tonia grinned, then shuffled around so she was lying propped up on her elbows with her chin level with Eve's cunt. "What about this?" she asked, then turned her head to kiss the thin skin of Eve's inner thigh.

Eve bit down on a gasp.

"And this?" Tonia worked her way higher, licking and nipping.

Eve made a strangled noise that came out mostly through her nose. Tonia's robe was pulled all out of order, the belt tangling ineffectually around Tonia's waist as the silk bunched to the side, revealing most of Tonia's ass.

Tonia made it the last few crucial inches to her goal and rested there, hovering over the wet, delicate skin around Eve's clit, her breath hot and damp. "And how about here?" she asked, so close her lips brushed Eve as she formed each consonant.

Then she laid her mouth over Eve's cunt and ran her tongue around the root of her clit.

"Oh, fuck," Eve rasped.

Tonia worked her like she loved it. She alternated between licking in broad strokes and sucking Eve's flesh like she wanted to pull Eve's pleasure down her throat, as though it was spring water and she'd been living on nothing but hard tack and salted meat.

Eve carefully laced her fingers into Tonia's hair to hold her close. Tonia rewarded her by moving her tongue faster, focused again on Eve's clit. Bright pleasure balanced itself at Eve's core, a spinning top staying upright in a blur of motion, a long high battle cry, the still apex of a leap before the drop, and held, and held, and held—

—and spilled.

Eve cried out in inarticulate shock, while her back arched and her hands tightened in Tonia's hair. She shook, barely able to breathe. This was it, orgasm, oh, it was good, it kept going, unbearable and dizzying; she felt herself open into it like a flower, her body finally surrendering and simply letting itself be. Tonia didn't stop, and just when Eve thought she must be done the determined rhythm of Tonia's tongue brought her to another sharp peak and she came again, or kept coming, the distinction was impossible.

She had been moaning, she thought, juddering and loud. Her core clenched through aftershocks as Tonia finally slackened off, gentling until she was resting against Eve with her lips closed in a chaste kiss.

Tonia ran an open palm across Eve's stomach; Eve's abdominal muscles shivered again at the caress.

Eve stared at the ceiling. Her thoughts felt slow.

"Good trick, huh?" Tonia asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist.

"Nngh," Eve said.

Tonia rolled off the bed, poured herself a drink, and sat back down next to Eve. The bed sank under her weight, and Eve let herself slide downhill until her cheek was mashed up against Tonia's thigh.

Tonia tugged her robe mostly shut and took a pensive sip. Eve didn't know what was meant to happen next. With Gary she had kissed him and gone to sleep. She couldn't kiss Tonia. That would mean—it would mean—something. Tonia would taste of Eve. She would be soft and perfect, no beard to scrape Eve's lips.

But Eve would be bad at it. If she was bad at having an orgasm even under Tonia's expert fingers, there was no way she could please Tonia. Tonia had sex with experienced, attractive women all the time. Natasha could do things Tonia had only seen in porn! Eve could never meet Tonia's standards. So it didn't matter that she wanted to run her hands up Tonia's thighs and nuzzle up into her.

Tonia'd offered a lesson, not a romantic evening. Tonia was a problem-solver. She didn't want Eve to be crabby and tense, and this was a solution to that. She doesn't want you, Eve reminded herself sternly. America made you to serve. They didn't build you to be wanted.

They lay there skin-to-skin until Eve felt Tonia pulling away, preparing for the polite dismissal.

If there had ever been a window of opportunity, Eve had missed it.

Tonia stared across the room, fixated on a point in the middle distance, as if looking at Eve would burn her.

Then Tonia smiled, tight with levity. "Aside from being wildly inappropriate fraternization between teammates, I think we can call that mission accomplished." Her hand was tight around the rocks glass. She took a long drink, brow furrowed, fortifying herself.

It was sweet of Tonia to feel bad that she was about to kick Eve out. Tonia could be terribly gentle sometimes.

"That was my first one," Eve said.

"Oh Jesus," Tonia said, draining her glass. There had been two generous fingers of scotch in it scarcely five minutes ago. She got up again to refill the drink, movements jerky and exaggerated, over-accelerating, wasting energy. "Should have guessed that, huh?"

Eve shrugged, but Tonia's back was to her—she wouldn't be able to see that. "I'm in my eighties," Eve said aloud. "Most people have figured this one out by my age."

"You've had sex before, right? Please tell me you've done that," Tonia said, sounding frantic.

"Once," Eve said. "With Gary." Gary, my gay fiancé. Two homosexuals trying it out on each other. No wonder it wasn't much to write home about.

"Thank fuck," Tonia whispered.

Tonia didn't want this to mean anything. She wouldn't want Eve to act like this was some kind of big deal. It might have been fifty percent of Eve's entire sexual experience, but it was less than a hundredth—a thousandth—of Tonia's.

Tonia wasn't going to want to do this again. It would just be Eve, alone, trying to replicate tonight and failing every time. That sounded dismal.

It's not like she loves me, Eve thought. Tonia cherished the women she loved, and had plenty of meaningless sex with women she didn't.

Eve wanted—God help her—she wanted to cherish Tonia in return. Come back to bed, she thought helplessly. Please come back. This wasn't how she ought to be feeling right now. She wanted to feel satisfied, content that she'd learned a new skill, not bereft. Eve wished she could cover herself. Unfortunately, they'd done it on top of the sheets instead of between them, and Tonia's bed was still neatly made except for a few rumples. If she wanted her pants back, she had to get up.

Time to bite the bullet. Lingering in Tonia's bed would make Tonia come back and ask Eve to touch her and love her and never leave. Eve picked herself up reluctantly and went to fetch her clothes. "I really appreciate the help," Eve said.

I really appreciate the help? Really, Rogers? That's what you're saying?

"Anytime," Tonia said brightly, back still turned, fingers turning the crystal stopper of her decanter over and over between them. "My pleasure."

The next morning Eve got to the Trisk only to discover that Tonia had been called away to Tokyo for business and wouldn't be back until the end of the week.

Colonel Danvers had a bee in her britches about it. She'd snarled at some hapless ROTC kids getting a tour, and tore into the IT crew for getting lazy about their database hygiene.

Eve herself felt magnificently surly. She itched to kick someone's teeth out through the back of their skull. Walking next to Colonel Danvers out of a briefing, the strike of her combat boots on the floor rang almost as loud as the click of Danvers's shoes. Tonia was allowed to jet off to Japan whenever she wanted. Tonia could do as she pleased, and made sure everyone around her knew it. It wasn't like Eve held any claim to her anyway.

"I'm headed to the gym," Eve said, hoping to bleed some energy out by punching things.

"Great," Danvers said through gritted teeth. "We can spar."

"With me?" Eve asked.

"You can wear the resistance suit," Danvers replied.

Eve huffed a breath out through her nose. She hated the resistance suit. It was a modified wetsuit that would have kept anyone else rigid as a board. All the joints were wrapped in stiff elastic, which made moving into a constant battle. Plus, it was heavy: there were sandbags sewn into the limbs for added workout. Wearing it brought her fighting ability down to barely above standard human levels.

"Not scared, are you, Captain?" Danvers needled.

Eve grit her jaw. "Never."

Danvers changed into loose workout clothes; Eve put on the horrible suit. The Trisk gym was relatively quiet at eleven in the morning, but by the time Danvers had put in a mouth guard and wrapped her knuckles, a healthy pack of onlookers had gathered by the weight racks.

Eve flexed her fingers and wrists, trying to gauge if the elastic had gotten somehow tougher since the last time she'd worn the damn thing.

They warmed up with simple exercises, trading off who held the pads and who punched. Eve worked some flexibility back into the rigid suit, and also built up a healthy slick of sweat down her back and up under her tits.

Then Danvers came at her, hammer and tongs.

Eve blocked a vicious gut-punch and feinted left. She got clipped in the chin as she leaned back from a blow not quite fast enough, and retaliated by planting her feet and throwing heavy punches into Carol's block until she could gain some ground.

Every movement dragged. Carol was whip-fast and unafraid of hurting Eve, so the fight was even enough to stretch on and on.

Carol was flushed with exertion, sweat dripping into her eyebrows, hair stuck to her face where it escaped its ponytail. If she'd been Tonia, Eve would have been entranced. Tonia's muscles working under her skin were gorgeous. Eve could spend an entire afternoon watching Tonia's forearms flex as she heaved on a wrench, covered in grease and swearing at a sticky bolt. Tonia moved like she was trying to show the world how it was done, and was unimpressed with its progress.

Carol, on the other hand, was trying to punch Eve in the face, which was annoying.

Eve finally got a hit in and boxed Carol in her left ear, pulling it just enough that it probably only left it ringing, not bruised. The extra weight at her wrists made it tricky to judge momentum, so it wasn't perfect. Carol shook her head to clear it and circled right.

Eve's body was working but her mind wasn't sinking into calm the way she was used to when she pushed herself. If it had been just her and a heavy bag, she could have let all the frustration bleed into impact. She wouldn't feel miserable that Tonia had left her here with Danvers and a mountain of paperwork without giving Eve a chance to say something. Not that Eve had anything to say, it just—it rankled, being in the same boat as Carol, having had meaningless sex with Tonia and still getting nowhere fast with it.

Carol didn't seem happy either, and she didn't know the half of it. There was a lot Carol didn't know: she didn't know that Eve had seen her having sex with Tonia, or that Tonia had taken Eve to bed, in a way, or that Eve had her first orgasm under Tonia's mouth.

Eve realized, while she ducked to slam Carol in the ribs, that she hadn't fessed up to Carol that she'd seen her en flagrante without permission. She would have to do that after they sparred. She hadn't even thought about that. It wasn't like Eve to forget to put something on her ethical to-do list, but she'd been so wrapped up with Tonia that it had hardly mattered that she'd had a partner.

"Put your back into it, Rogers!" Carol spat around her mouth guard, and promptly punched Eve in the side of her head.

Eve blinked sweat out of her eyes and made an effort to focus. She danced back, out of range, and took a moment to re-evaluate strategy. Carol had solid footwork, precise form, and the advantage of not wearing fifty pounds of rubber and sandbags.

But she didn't hold a combat role, and when she fought it was with a sidearm. She obviously trained hard, and had benefited from it—but it was training. Regimented. Built from rhythm and pattern. Eve had learned hand-to-hand via the liquid-gut terror of night raids, no flashlights, no radio, frozen ground unforgiving under her boots except for where it gave way to ice-cold mud. She had tracked the enemy by muzzle-flashes and animal intuition, then killed them with her hands. Carol hadn't lived that.

So Eve stopped humoring Carol's practiced timing. She struck instead in syncopation, then grinned as it knocked Carol back a pace.

Now it was properly on.

Eve made a habit of fighting in silence. Carol stopped taunting her and saved her breath. The sound of knuckles striking vinyl pads was like a heartbeat entering disorganized tachycardia. Eve's resistance suit squeaked against her skin, the damp rubber leaving friction burns that would heal by the time Eve finished showering and left the locker room.

She hated Carol, she realized. She was filled with burning, horrible jealousy and she wanted to beat her.

Carol was pretty, with her long blonde hair and her faux-military dress code and her nasty come-and-get-me smirk. Eve couldn't have that, and she was angry.

There was a cut in Eve's mouth from her lip hitting her teeth. It wasn't bleeding, just a distracting sting. She should've put in a mouth guard. Probably should have worn any protective gear at all.

Carol's left ear was swollen from one of Eve's meaner shots. She wasn't getting an earring back in that.

Good, good, Eve could take that from her. She could make Carol less perfect, and she could win Tonia, and everything would be okay and she wouldn't be lonely and she'd get to have more than one stupid wartime failure of a romance.

Carol swayed, pushed off the ropes, fists up, and then her left knee buckled under her and she was down on the mat in a panting heap.

Eve rocked back, letting her weight rest on her back foot but not quite dropping her stance in case it was a trick.

But Carol didn't get up, just coughed and spat her mouth guard out on the mat. Viscous, dehydrated spit followed it.

Carol had run herself absolutely ragged trying to best Eve, and she hadn't won. It had never been a fair fight. Nobody had a fair fight against Eve, not in this arena. What was the point, when Eve was always going to come out on top?

"Draw," Carol gasped. "Good fight."

Eve twisted an arm behind her back to grab the zip at the nape of her neck and shucked the resistance suit off her torso, unconcerned that the onlookers would see her sports bra. It wasn't like there was much under there anyway.

She extended a hand out to Carol.

When Carol took it, Eve heaved her back to her feet, only flexing a little more than necessary to show off that Carol's weight was nothing to her.

"Yeah," Eve said. Being mad at Carol wasn't worth the effort. "You too. Good fight."

"Feeling like less of a surly meathead?" Carol asked.

Eve changed her mind about being mad at Carol: it required minimal effort and she was going to keep doing it.

"Not really," Eve said through gritted teeth.

"I still feel like an uptight bitch," Carol said. "Too bad hitting you didn't solve all my problems. It was worth a try."

"I'm taking a shower."

Carol followed her into the locker room, and they sluiced off sweat in the showers in stony silence. Eve glowered the entire time, until Carol shut off both Eve's showerhead and her own and cleared her throat pointedly.

"Do you have something you want to say?" Carol asked, raising a sharp brow.

Hell with this. I don't care.

"I caught you and Stark having sex a few months ago," Eve said bluntly, throwing a towel over her head to dry her hair and also to make it clear that she wasn't looking at Carol's breasts. "I apologize for not mentioning it earlier. It was inappropriate of me."

Carol snorted and crossed the locker room with a slap of wet feet, then turned on the hair dryer. Eve strained to hear over the loud noise as Carol replied.

"I thought you'd never bring it up," she said. "I saw on the security tape the next day."

Eve made a strangled sound and dropped her towel. It landed in a puddle.

Carol switched the hair dryer off for a moment to add, "I never figured you for a dyke, you know."

Eve bent to pick up her towel and tried to reconcile the conversation she'd expected with the one she was having. She didn't have enough emotional energy left to sort this out.

Eve was certain about exactly one thing: people in the future really ought to care more about violations of their privacy.

Tonia got back from Tokyo on Friday evening. Eve made a point of meeting her helicopter on the landing pad.

Eve had taken some time to think.

In her Trisk quarters, after hitting Carol for an hour, after shaking two packets of electrolyte powder into a liter and a half of water, after sitting down on her SHIELD-provided beige couch with her water bottle between her knees, Eve thought about what she wanted.

So: Eve was pining like an idiot after an unattainable woman. Tonia was a glamorous, rough-edged genius who drank like a fish and had fucked her way through NYC's entire lesbian population, as well as most of Seattle's. She'd been on the cover of GQ, twice, and they hadn't made her wear a bikini either time. Tonia Stark was a legend.

Captain Eve Rogers was a dinosaur who only had two types of friends: the ones who did black ops and the ones who went to bingo night.

And what am I supposed to do about that? she'd asked herself, gulping down more salty-sweet sports drink.

Tonia liked her company. They were friends. Tonia had kissed her on the cheek one time, and fixed her uniform, and ate her out last week.

Eve could live with that.

She pulled rank on the SHIELD grunt who was supposed to be bringing Tonia the last week of confidential info that wasn't fit for wiring overseas. The manila folder filled with state secrets—and worse—gave her an excuse to see Tonia right away.

Tonia didn't notice her on the tarmac. Through the window of the helicopter, she was frowning at her phone, jaw clenched, thumbs darting furiously over the tiny keyboard. The rest of her face was obscured by bulky ear muffs and mirrored sunglasses.

Eve ducked instinctively as she walked under the slowing rotor blades to meet Tonia, who threw her headset onto the opposite seat and shoved the door open. Eve considered offering an arm to help Tonia down and quickly decided that was a good way to get slapped.

Tonia noticed Eve and her face twisted into a series of unreadable expressions, landing on piqued.

"I have another party for you to skip," Tonia said, under the roar of the helicopter. Eve read her lips and wondered what that was about. Tonia grimaced and shouldered past Eve and onto the tarmac.

Eve smacked the folder of confidential info into Tonia's chest, forcing her to take it, then fell in half a step behind her.

"Party?" Eve asked, once they were somewhere she could hear again.

Tonia nodded without turning to face Eve.

"I might not die. Seemed like a good reason."

"Really? Jesus, Tonia, that's fantastic, how—"

"I don't feel like explaining right now, cupcake. If you're so curious, you can come to the penthouse at nine. My current priority is to acquire something with gin in it. Lots of gin. Little bit of ice. You can help me with that or you can trot along."

As heartfelt returns went, it could have gone better.

Eve dug around in the back of her closet until she came up with one of those outfits Tonia had dressed her in for wingman duty and never taken back: clingy cotton t-shirt, motorcycle pants, low-heeled boots. It would do.

Eve slid a pack of Camels into the back pocket. Party ready.

She liked watching Tonia smoke. She knew the habit was frowned upon these days—hell, Buck had lung cancer, by all rights she should disapprove. It wasn't like they hadn't known back in the war that the things would kill you. They'd always been called coffin nails.

Tonia's cancer—Eve was afraid to think of it. She couldn't let hope be real until she was sure it wouldn't be taken away.

Instead she imagined the smudge of red lipstick on the filter of Tonia's cigarette. There was the confident way she flicked away ash with her thumb, and how she gestured with the arc of a hot coal, and sometimes she leaned close to raise a dart to Eve's lips, dancing zippo flame at the ready.

Maybe Eve could draw Tonia out onto the penthouse terrace to share a smoke. They could talk and pass a cigarette back and forth and undo everything that had happened since the moment Eve got out of Tonia's bed with inadequate thanks.

Eve arrived at Tonia's penthouse exactly on time. Not-Jarvis—damn, now she'd forgotten his actual name as well, came from spending too much time with Tonia—opened the door of a largely empty penthouse.

"Captain Rogers," Not-Jarvis said, face twisting into an awkward smile. "We're almost finished setting up the party, if you'd like to wait, ah—"

Eve remembered with a sinking sensation the concept of arriving fashionably late.

"Is that catering?" Tonia shouted from somewhere deeper in the apartment, getting closer and louder. "Fuck, I hope they didn't skimp on the burrata, I specifically asked for the buffalo milk variety and I know Gianni has some, he just doesn't like to give out the good stuff because he's a skinflint and thinks I don't know my soft cheeses. I know my soft cheeses, Jarvis! Tell him that!"

Tonia was audibly already drunk, and Eve thought—perhaps this wasn't the moment. From the way he pulled the door farther shut and shifted his body in between Eve and the source of Tonia's voice, Not-Jarvis also thought that perhaps later would be better.

"I just remembered that I—uh—didn't pay the meter," Eve whispered. "I'll be back in—an hour?"

Not-Jarvis shook his head slightly.

"An hour and a half?" Eve amended.

He nodded.

Eve made a break for the elevator, while Not-Jarvis—what was his name, she should be able to remember—called something to Tonia about a delivery boy needing directions for how to park, not to worry, the cheese will be here soon.

Then she walked a four-block loop around the neighborhood, and found herself back in front of Tonia's building less than five minutes later. She hadn't noticed waking faster than the other foot traffic—but—well—the next circuit would have to be a bit longer.

An hour and twenty-five minutes later, Eve crept into Tonia's party. The place was—Eve thought the twenty-first century word for it was bouncing.

Tonia—oh, for goodness sake—Tonia was standing on her couch in a gigantic, snow-white mink coat, bottle of Dom Perignon in one hand, an honest to god sword in the other. She squinted in drunken concentration, applied saber to bottle, and, to Eve's surprise, the cork flew cleanly off, bottle neck broken perfectly.

"Still got it," Tonia told the assembled crowd, taking a proffered flute and dumping champagne into it.

"Speech, Boss, speech," said someone Eve vaguely recognized as Happy Hogan.

Tonia swayed, nodded, and took up an exaggerated oratory posture. "Dearest assembled—coworkers, friends, bimbos—we are gathered here today to celebrate that Tonia Fucking Stark might not die!"

An uneasy cheer rose from the room. Tonia downed half her flute of champagne and continued.

"Reed Richards, spectacular nerd, too much of a square to come to a party that's thirty percent in his honor, has taken some time out of his weird physics lab to figure out brain cancer. How cool is that?"

Eve felt weak-kneed with relief. She hadn't let herself hope until now, not exactly. Tonia's mood on the tarmac had been mercurial, not in line with what Eve expected from someone given a reprieve from certain death.

The ticking clock on Tonia's life was reset.

There hadn't been anything Eve could do about a tumor. She didn't even know what cancer looked like; she'd been imagining it as a slimy black leech squirming behind Tonia's brow, even though she was sure that wasn't accurate. It was agony, watching something she couldn't control take Tonia away by inches.

Now, just maybe, all she'd have to worry about was not letting Iron Mantle get punched to death by Loki or whoever else came at them, and it could—it could really be okay. Eve knew how to protect people from bombs and bullets. She was made for that.

A selfish part of Eve was also glad that if Tonia died it would be in combat. No decisions made in a hospital room. No doctors to fight with. No need for Eve to make good on her promise to give Tonia her clean death.

"Carpe the goddamn diem, everyone," Tonia shouted, then fell down on the couch with the boneless grace of the very, very drunk.

Eve drifted around the edges of the party. Now that she had arrived, she wasn't sure that Tonia would actually want to see her.

The people were loud. All the food was tiny. Eve felt like she was a sack of shoulders and elbows. She shouldn't have let the wait staff hand her a glass of wine and a plate of cheese at the same time; she had no free hand to eat and no desire to drink wine that probably cost upwards of a hundred dollars which she wouldn't appreciate anyway.

Loneliness grew thickly at the back of Eve's throat, and she fled for the terrace to have a cigarette.

Outside, stunted trees in decorative urns whispered in the breeze, while a fire pit lined with bricks crackled merrily to itself. Fifty stories below, headlights lined up like ranks of fireflies.

What am I doing here?

This party, this future, this unruly body made by man instead of God—none of it made sense.

Eve tapped a cigarette out, thought about lighting it, and ran out of energy instead. She'd hit the last step of her plan and didn't have anything to show for it. This was it. Dead end.

Through the picture windows, she could see Tonia weaving across the crowd. She was smiling, kissing the air next to everyone's cheeks as they came to greet her, all shimmer and sloppy glitz. As Eve watched, Tonia stumbled, caught herself on the shoulder of a beautiful woman, and laughed it off, nuzzling the woman's hair, whispering something in her ear.

Leave, Eve told herself. Leave before it starts to hurt worse.

She'd thought she could—what? Win Tonia's heart through the power of friendship and pity?

Tonia waved her hangers-on away and headed to the bar to fetch herself a drink. As she poured scotch into a glass, she stared out the window, almost directly towards where Eve was standing. Eve flinched, then realized that with the lights so bright inside, Tonia wouldn't be able to see much besides her own reflection.

Tonia's public face sloughed away, leaving behind slack despair.

That couldn't be right. Tonia should be happy! She was at her own survival party, surrounded by drinks and food and people who adored her.

Tonia pulled her ever-present blackberry out of an invisible pocket and typed something into it. Then she stared at the screen, pinched the bridge of her nose, pressed a few more buttons, and shoved it away again.

Eve's phone beeped.

I hate these people. Come to my fucking party or I'll never talk to you again.

Eve thought, horribly, that she might cry. It didn't make sense, but it built behind her eyes anyway, all the misery and wanting coming out as stupid pressure behind her eyes. She was still holding the unlit cigarette, and she couldn't work her phone keyboard with one hand, so she stuck it behind her ear. She wanted to say something that conveyed—any of it. Something worth saying. Anything. It didn't come to her.

I'm out on your terrace, Eve replied.

Not very poetic.

After a few desultory rounds of the party, Tonia made her way outside. When she saw Eve, her face flicked through the same complicated set of expressions it had outside the helicopter that morning. She opened her mouth, shut it again, then squinted. 

"You have a bruise on your cheek," Toni observed.

Eve rubbed the side of her face. She hadn't noticed that Carol's little sparring souvenir wasn't all the way gone. Probably because she'd been avoiding her reflection to keep away comparisons between her appearance and the appearances of everyone else Tonia had ever slept with.

Eve shrugged. "Can't make my ugly mug much worse."

Tonia rolled her eyes and made a rude noise with her mouth. "Spare me from the Captain America humility routine just this once. It offends my carefully constructed veneer of self-assurance."

Eve didn't follow. 

Tonia raised her fingers in exaggerated air quotes and continued in what Eve supposed was meant to be an imitation of herself. "These ridiculously cut abs are property of Uncle Sam, good citizens. You wouldn't blow your load into our honored flag, would you? I'm an ordinary American, just like you, a real plain Jane."

Tonia dropped her hands. "Fuck, Rogers, someday you're gonna have to learn to take a compliment."

Eve was pretty sure Tonia hadn't given her any compliments.

"I don't get compliments," Eve protested. "Not on my looks. Not even cat-calls."

Tonia squinted drunkenly into Eve's face. "You think I stuck my head between your thighs out of the goodness of my heart?"

That was exactly what Eve had thought. She nodded carefully. 

"Oh my God," Tonia said. "You—what? What the fuck, Eve, you think I'm some kind of sex philanthropist? Nobody thinks that!"

"Why else would anyone sleep with me?"

"Why—Christ. Okay. Eve Rogers, you're a grade-A pussy-wetting hottie, and I suckered you into banging me under the flimsy guise of carnal education. Obviously! How is that not obvious!"

"I'm not—you know—feminine."

Tonia looked her up and down and snorted. "No shit, Evie."

"You're a homosexual! You're supposed to like women!"

"Last I checked," Tonia said, wetting her lips, "you're a woman."

Eve shivered from the base of her neck to her cunt. She hadn't tried to take care of herself while Tonia was out of town. She hadn't wanted to muddy up her time with Tonia with more fumbling, frustrating masturbation attempts. Right now was an entirely inappropriate moment for a tingling flesh-memory of orgasm, but Eve couldn't not notice Tonia's mouth. Tonia thought she was a "grade-A pussy-wetting hottie," which was certainly...colorful, but difficult to misinterpret.

This meant that Eve needed to re-evaluate several interactions.

To buy some time, Eve retrieved the smoke from behind her ear and lit it, absorbing herself in the rasp of the lighter and the first draw. She only wished she was still in the habit of rolling her own cigarettes. She could have busied herself with tobacco and rolling paper for a good thirty seconds, more than long enough to find her footing in this new world where Tonia wanted her.

Tonia gestured at her in outrage. "See? This is what I'm talking about, how is a dyke supposed to handle watching this, not go home and jill off for an hour?"

Eve ignored that. She was still working on getting the lay of the emotional land in the wake of this conversational earthquake.

Of all the people Eve knew, past or future, Tonia was the best at armoring up. Her mind wandered back to the sprawling voicemail Tonia had left, honest sentences sliding around at the bottom of another bottle.

Most people didn't matter to Tonia. But when they did—Tonia took rejection hard. Natasha was proof enough of that.

Girls who think they're straight, that's worse. I see a way to hurt myself, I take it.

Tonia should be happy. Her brain wasn't going to turn itself into mush! And, sure, inside she looked happy, but Eve knew how good Tonia was at masks.

If Eve decided that Tonia was unobtainable—if Tonia would never want her back, would blast her half across the room for being a peeping tom—then all the lezzer stuff didn't matter. It wasn't an option anyway. And that sure was a lot more comfortable. A lot less brave.

Eve could have made things go a lot smoother if she'd thought about what she wanted a little sooner. She wasn't good at wanting things; it had always seemed selfish. Easier to keep her head down and her goal in sight and block out the periphery.

Ignoring the perimeter was a surefire way to get your men killed by Jerry snipers.

Say that Tonia really did want Eve. It still felt unreal, but Eve could sketch out tactics for multiple scenarios, likely and unlikely. Tonia'd seen her chance for a roll in the hay, and taken it, and then Eve got up and left as soon as they were done, like an absolute moron.

Tonia would be stung. She'd stiffen up, get a drink, and run away from her problems. She'd hide in work and alcohol and parties and other women.

That all matched up pretty well with what had actually happened.

I'm an idiot.

Eve would have liked a couple of days to figure out what to do next. Instead Tonia was right there, frowning at Eve as the silence between them stretched toward a breaking point.

"Maybe I should have gone about that differently," Eve said.

"Gone about what differently?" Tonia asked waspishly.

The first step in any briefing was to bring all parties into alignment regarding the facts of the situation. The second step was to outline the mission goals and parameters. The third was to describe the plan of action.

If Eve had the time, she would not be modeling this conversation on battlefield tactics.

Unfortunately, she did not.

"I'm not real smart at this stuff," Eve said. "I think I made a hash of things. And might have hurt your feelings."

Tonia rolled her eyes. "I'm famously devoid of genuine emotions. Don't worry about it."

"Noted. Now would you listen?" Tonia was like this in briefings too, she never wanted to get the full picture before making a call. "We went to bed together, and it was weird—" Tonia snorted in agreement—"and I wish we'd done it properly instead. Kissed. Made love, I guess. If two women can do that."

Tonia fell silent. Eve looked at her toes and focused on smoking.

"You're an idiot," Tonia said eventually.

"I'm aware," Eve said.

"I'm an idiot," Tonia continued. "That's far more alarming; I'm used to being the most intelligent human being in the room, and right now I'm tied with you for last place in the dumb-dumb sweepstakes!"

Eve offered Tonia a cigarette to calm her down. Tonia waved it away.

"I need my mouth for something else, actually," Tonia said. She took Eve's cigarette instead, took a long drag, and dropped it on the ground. Before Eve could protest that she hadn't been finished with that, Tonia ground it out neatly with her heel.

Then she fit her mouth, still full of cigarette smoke, over Eve's. Eve was hard put to restrain herself, not to crowd into it, not to blindly take. But her lips still fell open and Tonia's tongue swept into her, gently invasive, taking something of her own. Eve found herself lifting one hand to press into Tonia's chest, not to push away but out of the need to touch something, to have another sensation other than Tonia's soft, insistent mouth.

Tonia pressed close and drew away in turns, ghostings of teeth and breath. Being kissed with skill was new to Eve; all her young fumblings with Gary felt pale and dry in comparison.

Or maybe—maybe it was because Tonia was a woman, and Eve's nature thrilled to have found its kin. Her world narrowed to Tonia, only Tonia. She whined in desire. Please, please, closer, please.

"Let's rectify some past mistakes," Tonia said, and bit Eve's lower lip.

"We can't right now," Eve said, wanting to, wanting desperately, but unable to go farther in good conscience. "You've been drinking—you might—might regret it."

Tonia screwed up her face, taking a moment to self-evaluate. "Little bit drunk, fair," she agreed. Then she snapped her fingers.

A subaudible hum rose in the night air. Tonia's skin twitched all over, and she coughed twice before grinning hugely up at Eve. "And...sober. Bloodbourne nanobots! They're fantastic. Now that's out of the way, how about I treat you to some superb lesbian sex? I've heard I'm great at it."

"Yeah," Eve said hoarsely. "Okay."

This time, they fell backwards into Tonia's bed still kissing.

"You're not going to die," Eve whispered, giddy, into Tonia's shoulder. "You're right here."

"I might die if I don't get to touch your tits," Tonia replied. "Out of that bra, gimme."

Eve wriggled out of her sports bra—she'd thought about trying to put on something sexier for the party, and then to her embarrassment, discovered she didn't have anything that wasn't elastic and compressing—and was rewarded immediately by Tonia's hands on her.

Tonia thumbed over her nipples, both at the same time. Eve sucked in a breath, her ribs rising into Tonia's fingers. She liked being touched here. It was easier than finding her clit, a sure-fire way to find pleasure. She experimented with sending the tight, building feeling in her chest downward, curling it around the base of her pelvis, and thought I bet I could learn to come from just this.

Tonia would love that challenge, Eve suspected. It was her kind of thing, a trick of focus and precision.

"How rough do you like it?" Tonia asked, adding a little twist and pull.

"Not sure," Eve said honestly.

Tonia made a low, happy sound. "I get to test everything for the first time with you, you're a treat. Hold still and tell me when it hurts."

Eve tangled her fingers in Tonia's hair and tugged slightly, suggesting silently that maybe Tonia could try with her mouth. She'd imagined it enough times to be bold enough to ask for it now she had access to the real thing.

Tonia got the hint instantly and shifted so she could lick over Eve's hard nipple. She increased the pressure slowly, adding a light scrape of teeth when Eve's hands tightened involuntarily in her hair.

Eventually Eve winced. "Too much, sorry."

"Don't be sorry," Tonia said, looking up through her lashes. "We're collecting data, sweetheart."

"Alright," Eve said, shuddering as Tonia refined her touch, teasing Eve just on the edge of overstimulation.

Tonia repeated the process several times, switching from place to place on Eve's body, until Eve felt like she was a finely adjusted machine. She squirmed, naked and tingling all over.

Finally, Tonia walked her fingers along the line from Eve's sternum to her pubic bone. Eve gasped in anticipation, the muscles down there clenching in involuntary jerks. Tonia stroked up between her legs, spreading Eve's wetness until she felt like she was glistening with it.

Fuck, Eve wanted Tonia inside her this time.

Tonia found her clit and circled it with a skillful fingertip, which was nice, but also distracting. Eve had a goal! Time to take initiative: she reached down to take Tonia's wrist and guide it a few inches lower.

"Oh-ho," Tonia said, smirking at her. "It's like that, huh?"

"I kept thinking about it," Eve admitted, then was overcome by embarrassment and grabbed one of Tonia's pillows to cover her face. "Even when you were wearing the armor, your hands—"

Tonia pulled the pillow away and kissed her. "You got it, hot cross buns."

Then her fingers slid in, easy as anything. Eve's legs fell loose and open, half-shocked and welcoming it. She didn't feel filled so much as opened, like she had been standing backstage waiting for the lights to come up and Tonia had pulled the curtains aside, insinuating herself into Eve's quiet, private space. She wasn't alone in her body—now Tonia was there too.

Tonia stroked Eve's lax thigh, then raised her eyebrows in an obvious you ready? expression. Eve nodded, not sure what she was agreeing to, but knowing that she trusted Tonia with this.

Inside her, Eve felt Tonia's fingers move with new purpose, and then they were hooked gently up against Eve's pelvis, almost like she was going to lift Eve's butt off the sheets by the vagina. Eve almost giggled at the thought, but then Tonia started to move.

She thrust slowly at first, rubbing along Eve's insides in a steady rhythm. Eve sighed, enjoying the gentle, building glow. This was nice. She imagined Tonia touching her like this for a while, then finding her clit again and taking orgasm for a whirl again.

Then Tonia's pace quickened. Her forearm flexed as her strong fingers ground against the inside of Eve's pubic bone. Eve had time to think I've never felt anything quite like this before and then all the sense leaked out of her head and the only thing she wanted was more. She panted as Tonia fucked her, her hips lifting mindlessly off the bed. Tonia was implacable, ruthless in chasing Eve's pleasure.

Eve was aware she was making a lot of noise. Tonia was quiet except for heavy breaths and occasional unvoiced whispers of yeah, yes, Eve, let go, good, give it up, baby.

Eve's body informed her she'd hit its limit, but Tonia kept giving it to her, the thumb of her free hand rubbing Eve's clit now, and Eve was almost afraid because she didn't know what happened next, just that Tonia was about to break through her control and fuck her straight into the unknown.

"Almost there," Tonia whispered. "Just like that, there, I got you." Tears sprung in Eve's eyes as Tonia pushed her past the border of what she thought her body could feel, and then everything broke free.

Eve Rogers left the building, and was replaced by a shaking mess.

Tonia touched her soothingly all over while she groaned her way through the tail end of orgasm.

"What was that?" Eve asked, when she was done being jelly.

"G-spot orgasm," Tonia said happily, draping herself over Eve. "Science says they don't exist."

"Huh. How ‘bout it."

Eve ran her hands across the narrow planes of Tonia's back, palms gliding over the metal ports in Tonia's skin. They were just barely colder than the rest of Tonia. Tonia kissed her neck and reached up to ruffle Eve's hair, then rolled off her and wiped her hand on the sheets.

Tension seeped into the room, pooling chilly in the places between Eve and Tonia. Last time this had been the part where Eve left in a hurry. She definitely wasn't pulling that stunt again, but the alternative—staying, touching Tonia—left her feeling awkward and shy.

"Do you want me to, uh—?" Eve asked, making a feeble gesture that came out much cruder than she meant it to.

"I wouldn't be opposed," Tonia said, voice half sex-rough, half dryly amused.

"I'm not gonna be good at it," Eve cautioned. "As established."

"C'mere, you useless virgin," Tonia said, cracking into a smile.

Eve sat up and slung herself into Tonia's lap, careful to hold most of her weight up with her thighs so she didn't crush her, and kissed Tonia as best she could. Tonia kissed back, one part eager, one part desperate, two parts kneading Eve's ass with both hands.

"Honest, if I can't get myself off, I won't be any good at you," Eve said.

Tonia kissed her some more before answering. "Practice later. You kiss me, touch my boobs, and I'll take care of the rest, nice and simple."

True to her word, Tonia worked one clever hand between them. Eve caught Tonia's pleased gasps with her mouth, then decided to be brave and bent lower until she could kiss Tonia's breasts. She sucked on Tonia's nipple, loving how that made Tonia arch and shudder and wrap her free hand around the back of Eve's skull, pulling her close. It wasn't a lot, but Tonia seemed to enjoy it plenty.

Tonia came quick and hard, her head thudding back against the headboard as her hips jerked up against Eve's. Eve liked watching that—liked it a lot—and thought she might understand why Tonia hadn't felt too put upon helping Eve out with the orgasm thing.

"Stay," Tonia demanded afterwards. "I'll make you breakfast. Well, no, not-Jarvis will make you breakfast, but I'll tell him to do it and I'll drink coffee nearby while you eat it."

"Alright Stark, calm down," Eve said, snugging one arm around Tonia to demonstrate her point. "I'll be right here."

The next morning Tonia surprised Eve by waking up at five. Eve held herself still, pretending to be asleep, and watched Tonia roll out of bed, tie her hair up, and come back with a sleek laptop and an Irish coffee. Then she spent an hour rattling away at the keyboard.

Eve didn't go on her morning run until six. She'd always assumed that Tonia would sleep later than she did. Tonia certainly made a habit of sashaying into early meetings obnoxiously late, the previous night's makeup blurring around her eyes.

That was an act, apparently. It made a kind of sense. Nobody liked a woman who was too powerful. Eve'd had her fair share of teammates go sour the first time she beat them in the sparring ring.

Plus, it was useful when the opposition underestimated their competition. It made men go sloppy. Nobody expected Captain America to put a bowie knife through a Kraut's spine. Eve didn't advertise that she could do that, but she had, when duty called for it.

"I can tell you're awake, stud," Tonia said eventually. "Sorry for the clatter. I'm working on a silent keyboard but it's on the back burner—I might let Steve Jobs beat me to that one as a cute little gift."

"Mmmm," Eve said, stretching her legs. Her heels didn't reach the edge of the mattress, which was a new and pleasant experience. Tonia's bed was enormous. Probably to accommodate all the gay orgies they talked about in the tabloids. Eve wondered if all of Tonia's partners woke up at the crack of down to Tonia already working. She wondered if Tonia's partners stayed the night.

"You promised me breakfast," Eve said.

"No dawn delight?" Tonia pouted. "I didn't get to show you any of my sex toy collection last night."

"No," Eve said. "It's too early for sex."

Tonia waved that off, already distracted by some other thought. Her eyes widened at some silent realization. "Oh my god—you are completely lacking in dildos, aren't you? Honestly, that's good, I can't imagine what jelly glitter monstrosity you would buy in your desperation to get out of the unmentionables shop as fast as possible."

Eve flopped over onto her back, scrubbing one hand through her hair. Tonia was almost as excited about Eve's lack of sex toys as she was about designing her a new combat uniform.

"I'm going to make you a gift basket."

Eve did not want a gift basket full of sex things. "Your hand worked just fine," she grumbled. "Dunno why you want to get all fancy about it."

Tonia went pink and crossed her legs. "You can't say things like that," she said hoarsely.

"I can say what I want," Eve said stubbornly. "Free country."

"You're getting at least a basic starter kit," Tonia insisted. "Variety is the spice of life."

Eve rolled her eyes.

"And I'll watch you use them."

"Oh," Eve said. That was—well that changed the equation, didn't it? Her face heated, and it was her turn to cross her legs.

"I win," Tonia said, with a shimmy of triumph.

"No more talking about sex until after breakfast," Eve said, which made Tonia laugh, a good big happy sound, incongruous in the thin morning light.

Eve enjoyed the absence of insecurity for an entire thirty-six hours.

Then she saw Tonia and Carol talking on the steps outside the Trisk as she left work to go home. She hadn't even thought—she was so stupid. She'd forgotten, in the thrill of having Tonia, that there wasn't any guarantee of keeping her.

She tried to look casual, leaning against a nearby concrete planter and staring at her sturdy cellular phone. Tonia hadn't mentioned sleeping together again. She hadn't said much to Eve at all, except for a series of cryptic texts asking Eve to choose between colors: silver or purple? Black or tan? Oxblood or navy?

Feeling juvenile and unable to stop herself, Eve texted Tonia to test if she'd reply. What are these colors for anyway? The uniform to stays red white and blue. No purple.

Tonia's hand went to her breast pocket and pulled out her phone in the middle of Carol's sentence. She grinned as she typed.

Gift basket.

Then Tonia looked straight at her and winked.

"Earth to Stark," Carol said, raising her voice enough that it carried up the steps to where Eve was standing. "We're discussing Middle East strategy, not indulging your hopeless crush on Rogers."

Tonia shrugged, still looking at her phone, thumbs darting over the keyboard.

Eve's phone beeped.

Want to get something to eat? Expensive. Steak maybe. I know a place where they show you a certificate stamped with the cow's nose print to verify the quality of the beef.

Sure.

Tonia slipped her phone back into her jacket and hooked her thumbs into her belt loops, leaning back and giving Carol a lazy once over. "I can do so much better," she said, pitching her voice so Eve could hear it.

Carol raised her eyebrows. "And you think I couldn't? You're lucky I'm here to indulge your thing for blondes."

"Whatever, Danvers," Tonia said. "Go bother the NSC about Iran, they care more. I have a hot date with Captain America, and yes, you can stick that up your gash and smoke it."

Carol scoffed. "Is Captain America the name you gave the bottom of your current vodka bottle?"

Tonia didn't grace that with a response, just twinkled her fingers in Carol's direction and jogged up the steps to where Eve was loitering.

"A date, huh?" Eve asked.

Tonia spread her hands, innocent. "You didn't say no. Although if you do change your mind please do it after we've made it to my car so I don't look like an idiot in front of Danvers."

"Nah," Eve said, offering Tonia her arm. "Just tell me who's supposed to pay on one of these lesbian dates, ‘cause if it's me we're getting hamburgers."

"Wow, absolutely not, no hamburgers. Steak, Rogers. Perfect, sous vide steak finished with a flash-sear in a dry pan."

"Sounds awful expensive."

"Very. Don't worry, they don't bother to put prices on the menu—you won't even have to complain about inflation."

"They have good steak sauce?"

"Wagyu beef does not need steak sauce."

Tonia tucked one hand into Eve's elbow and steered her towards the street. Eve was selfishly pleased about the effect that had on Carol. "Danvers looks about fit to pop," Eve whispered in Tonia's ear.

Tonia smiled, soft and a touch wicked. "Would you look at that."