Work Text:
By all rights, most of the people Steve knows have a better reason to be fucked up than he does.
——
Nat’s got the whole child soldier thing. Tony’s got the whole daddy issues, PTSD thing. Bruce’s brain chemistry is like, constantly warring against him. Clint has his own mysterious-but-tortured childhood, and Thor’s brother has tried to kill him (and everyone else) more than once. Bucky’s also got a fuckton of trauma, what with the brainwashing and the killing people.
Steve was disabled and poor, when he was a kid. But he’s strong now, and he—hell, he hasn’t even seen that much action. Maybe some of it was traumatic, but it’s nothing time and a clear head can’t help.
——
Steve has a problem with intimate relationships.
——
He got away with it when he was a kid because he was small and sick and a fighter; that kind of person really just attracts trouble. When he was big and strong but still a fighter, he got away with it by virtue of Peggy being his lady. Except where Peggy was concerned, and then he got away with it because there simply wasn’t time.
Now, he’s able to play the “stranger in a strange land” card—thank you, Heinlen—but he’s not sure how long it’ll hold up.
——
The truth is that he’s had lots of opportunity. Peggy wouldn’t have cared—they didn’t have some kind of agreement—but when choir girls made advances, he learned to pretend not to notice.
He did notice.
And he liked the idea.
But the idea of being in a dark corner with a choir girl is very different from the act of being in a dark corner with a choir girl. Turns out, the act sends him running off with his talk between his legs, chest tight, wanting very much to be entirely by himself.
——
It’s not limited to choir girls. He tried with Peggy, though she may not have seen it for what it was at the time. He kissed the corner of her mouth and he waited, hopeful, for desire to come. Instead, he got claustrophobic, thinking about expectations, hers and everyone else’s.
——
He thinks that maybe it’s a first-time thing, but that’s no good, because he can’t handle gritting his teeth through it even with that in mind. Back in Brooklyn—old Brooklyn, he guesses—he would imagine scraping up money somewhere, going down to the docks and paying someone to help him get the first time over with. He’d be paying, so it would be okay if he lay there like a limp fish, if he got scared, if he wanted it to all be very slow.
He never even tried to get money together for something like that, though. And now, well. He’s just too well-known.
——
(He wonders if his modern-day image is also an excuse. He could probably arrange something safe and confidential through J.A.R.V.I.S., and if not him, then surely S.H.I.E.L.D. They’ve alluded to stranger things when going over his benefits. Money isn’t the same issue it was. So maybe it’s an excuse. Or maybe he can’t handle the idea of how thoroughly things would go wrong if they did go wrong—if he tried paying for it and it ended up as front-page news. He doesn’t know.)
——
In quiet moments, he thinks about what he could be comfortable with, if he were allowed to have it. If whatever’s in him would let him have it. He thinks, maybe—if he could be there, while two other people enjoy themselves. Just to see that they end up all right. Maybe it would help.
Of course, he wouldn’t want to do that with strangers. And the people he knows? Tony wouldn’t take it the right way at all. Bucky’s his closest friend and his last connection to home, and he’s not risking him. Bruce is intensely private. Thor, maybe, but he has a difficult enough time in that department, and Steve’s not adding to it. Nat and Clint both seem like they might be okay with it, but he doesn’t want to force them into explaining if they’re something. He doesn’t think they are, actually, but that seems to be the popular understanding. And it’s—he doesn’t know them like that. He doesn’t know many people like that.
He’s from Old Brooklyn. He doesn’t know many people, period.
(And again, maybe these are all excuses.)
——
He’s tried researching. Nothing he’s turned up rings true, and no one can offer a solution.
——
The appeal of being there while two other people make love is past the pornographic. His research took him through all of that, and lots of it was fan-fucking-tastic, thank you very much, but it didn’t make him feel any braver. One night, he self-stimulated (jerked off, jerked it, jizzed—so much vocabulary these websites have) to a gal and two guys having a lovely and confusing time. The following night, he fled in the opposite direction of a woman at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters who offered to let him join her for a cigarette in an empty room.
He’s explored the world of the masturbatory, and thoroughly enjoyed himself there.
It’s the world of the living, breathing lovers that he can’t seem to enter into.
——
Steve feels like everyone walked into a room without him. And he’s heard about that room his whole life, but hearing about it and being in it are different things, and he can’t bring himself to do the latter.
——
It might be that he’s simply wrong, somehow. A member of the species that shouldn’t procreate and stops itself from doing so.
And that’s practically Nazi talk, he realizes, so it also might be an excuse.
He’s not sure what it is in him that’s wrong, but the common factor in all his mishaps and non-happenings is him. Perhaps people know somehow, deep inside themselves, that he shouldn’t be here. Perhaps they’ve always known, and perhaps it goes deeper than sickness or time. Perhaps it’s just something in him that tells them he’s not suitable for certain things.
Steve has never been asked on a date. Steve has only rarely felt interest in going on one, and if he does, it’s usually squashed by the notion of actually doing that instead of simply contemplating it.
Steve has maybe been propositioned dozens of times—thousands, easily, if you count Tweets from nineteen-year-old women, which he does not. Steve thinks he might be misreading what is and isn’t a proposition, too, because he’s started to err on the side of assuming the worst and not getting involved at all.
But he’s never been on a date.
And even outside of romance, he thinks he doesn’t have any strong relationships other than the ones forged by sheer proximity and necessity. His closest friends are people he fought in wars with. His very best friend is someone he used to share a bed with lest they both freeze in the night.
Maybe Steve really can’t make connections with people at all.
And maybe that’s an excuse.
——
What is any of this an excuse for, though? The fact that he’s older than anyone he knows and he’s still never gone past what the kids (i.e. Tony) call second base? The fact that he won’t pay for it to happen? The fact that he’s never seriously tried to tackle this? The fact that he’s lonely?
Are any of those things he needs excuses for?
He doesn’t think so.
What he needs an excuse for is the fact that he’s stuck between wanting and having, and that he can’t seem to make himself cross over.
——
Steve really, truly cannot understand why it’s him who never got to go through the door into that other room. He wants to know, even if he’s afraid of the answer. He’s afraid of a lot of things, and he knows that whenever possible, a person should work through that fear, try to come out the other side.
He also knows that it’s not always possible, though.
So when Clint offers to set him up, he makes a joke about being too old for everyone. And when Bucky, starry-eyed and fresh off of a coffee date with a pretty girl, asks if he really feels that way, Steve tells him, honestly, that he doesn’t.
“Just not ready yet,” he assures Bucky.
It doesn’t feel like an excuse.