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Carol listens dutifully to the mission debrief, attention particularly piqued by the well-deserved shout-out to Spider-Woman for her role in rescuing a bus full of civilians. She catches Jess’ eye across the table, smiling warmly. Jess winks with her healing black eye, still visibly scuffed from her encounter with Moonstone the morning before.
She bites distractedly at the worn medical tape around her knuckle as the topic changes to a list of heads-up warnings, which includes organized crime updates, supervillain sightings, and recent battles. Carol kicks her lightly under the table, giving her an amused but critical look for putting the clearly-unclean material in her mouth.
“We’ll continue to monitor the increased Doombot activity,” Steve summarizes, concluding his recap and glancing towards Tony, who is to close out this week’s Avengers meeting.
Tony saunters up to the screen at the front of the room, a tickled sort of look in his eye Carol knows well. After enough years working with him, and enough games of Poker, she recognizes his tells- this one means he’s got a Full House.
“Thanks for coming everyone, I hope you’ve all got your assignments down for this week. Keep fighting the good fight.”
Carol watches him curiously, absentmindedly reaching across the table to lay her hand over Jess’ to stop her from picking at the bandages around her fingers. Carol can see her smirking from her peripherals, and tightens her grip as she half-heartedly tries to pull her hand away.
“In conclusion,” Tony says, and gestures into the air to trigger a slide change.
A new photo appears, replacing the mission report.
Carol snaps her hand back, expression shifting more neutral as she takes in the sight in front of her. Her Poker face is good. She’s just not sure that it’s going to help.
It’s a picture of the alley she and Jess were in very late the night before, littered with pieces of the Doombot they tracked and gutted. Centered in the photo, unmistakably, is Jess, on her tiptoes, arms around Carol’s neck... kissing her.
Jess shoots Carol a put-on smile, with just a hint of grimace in it, clearly trying to gauge her reaction. Carol looks straight ahead, attempting to tunnel her vision straight to Tony and not pay mind to how much of the room is staring at her.
“Sharing fan-edits in our meetings now, are we?” Carol says cooly, “I’ll get Ms Marvel to send me some of you and Banner for the next one.”
“Oh, no,” Tony laughs, “it’s not a picture, it’s a whole video.”
Clint laughs behind her. Jess shoots him daggers.
Carol’s heart drops into her stomach. The existence of a video isn’t going to show more than the brief kiss they shared before heading back to Jess’ apartment, contrary to what assumption Hawkeye clearly made, but it is going to make this harder to pass off as a forgery.
“It’s gotten all over the internet in the last half-hour,” Tony says, clearly still thinking this is funny, “Word’s out, Care-Bear, I just wanted to settle these bets in person.”
Sure enough, Tony gestures again, and a video appears, of Carol punting the Doombot into the wall of the alley, shooting it with a photon blast. Jess slides into frame, dodging a laser and leaping onto the robot’s neck, sticking her feet to the bricks behind her and pulling his cape back. The attack gives Carol the needed opportunity to stick her hand into its chest, pulling out its glowing core. For added safety, she rips the core to pieces as Jess digs around in its open chest cavity to wrench out additional wires. She pats her hands together, grimacing at the oil staining her gloves.
Her mouth is moving, but this shaky, zoomed-in phone-video doesn’t pick up on her words, just the way she slips around Carol’s side, sliding her gloves off slowly. She shoves the cloth in-between her belt and her trousers, playfully grabbing Carol’s sash and turning her around.
Carol- the one in the room- feels her vision actually tunneling now, going strangely dark at the edges like one of the lovely harbingers of an impending migraine.
The Carol on video looks around, clearly not spotting the fan filming them from a fire-escape, and smiles playfully, standing to her full height as she looks down at her girlfriend. Jess pushes onto her tippy-toes, looping her arms over Carol’s shoulders and around the back of her neck for balance, kissing her for all of two seconds before slipping away. Two seconds was plenty. The video ends.
Tony laughs, making jokes she can’t quite process over the buzzing in her ears. Jess looks at her, concerned.
Carol stands, sweeping her notebook into her hand, and turns, walking straight out of the room without another word or look.
Heading up to the roof to leave, she passes Kamala and the Champions’ Spider-Man, sitting on some couches, waiting for the meeting to end.
Kamala’s got her phone in her hand, face-down on her leg, and when she catches Carol’s eye she freezes, smiling hesitantly, opening her mouth as if to speak, but closing it as her mentor breezes past.
Carol forgoes the elevator for the stairs. She flies straight up the middle, unlocks the enforced door, and takes off straight up. She’s intending to go home, but she needs a bit of cover first, not to be an overt streak of gold barrelling it out of Avengers tower. She drifts slowly over the clouds in the direction of her apartment, trying to calm down.
It’s ridiculous, she thinks, not for the first time. She’s over 50 fucking years old and she’s been famous for years. She needs to be less startled by invasions into her private life, particularly on the subject of dating.
In theory, she likes to be open about most topics. She’ll certainly share her opinion on anything.
It’s always been important to her that people know what she really thinks; she refuses to be one of those apolitical public figures who answer questions vaguely to keep as many fans on their side as possible. She’s gotten in plenty of trouble over the years for speaking her mind on the benefits of pro-choice legislacion, for letting the press know when she thinks elected officials are making stupid decions, even for supporting same-sex benefits, even though the general American public likes to pretend that wasn’t an issue they were so recently divided on.
She remembers, though.
Carol has worked hard in life to succeed, contrary to what her father had set up for her.
He believed that women had no place in the world except for taking care of a man’s children and home. She never took much stock in his opinion; he pretty much lost all credibility with his tendency to get drunk and beat them.
Still, his views weren’t uncommon, especially in the military. It was hard enough being a woman in the Air Force. If they found out she liked girls, she’d have been arrested, dishonorably discharged, and forced to pay back all the money she didn’t have to begin with to pay for college.
She relaxed a bit, the past few years. She’s not big on public relationships with anyone, regardless of gender, but she quietly dated her neighbor Marina for a while, allowed herself to really consider women as an option again, and got back together with Jess.
Her long-time friend has always been a little hard to pin down, and their attempts at a romantic relationship have been put on hold by nothing less than total amnesia and superhero civil-war, but lately, it’s been good.
Really good.
Waking-up-in-the-morning-watching-Jess-sleep-and-counting-her-blessings good.
Still, she had recently been shaken almost to the point of drinking by the harsh public reaction to her Kree heritage. She’d been immediately slandered, had her rank stripped from her, all in the span of just a few days. It was eerily reminiscent of what she’d thought would happen if people found out she dated women, and although that’s less likely to be the cause these days, her worry about it is a hard habit to break. And she’s never trusted the government not to flip-flop on their policies from one administration to the next.
Carol breathes, dropping below the cloudline to actually find her apartment. It’s not too far, and she quickly zips over, floating to her window and pressing her finger to the print-scanner Tony installed, sliding it open and slipping inside.
Chewie greets her warmly as she slides along the wall to sit onto the floor. Her space-cat has always been extra-cuddly when Carol’s having an episode.
Carol embraces Chewie gratefully, pulling her against her chest and kissing the top of her head. She pulls out her phone in the opposite hand, hesitant to see just how many suggested-if-you-like-Captain-Marvel news articles are waiting for her in her chrome app, but unable to stop herself from checking.
She swipes past the smiling selfie of her and Jess that is her lockscreen, ignoring all the notifications clogging her screen, and opens her internet browser, navigating away from the dinner recipe she had planned for tonight into a new tab. Sure enough, all along the bottom: “Captain Marvel and Spider-Woman’s Affair, Caught On Camera”, “Carol Danvers and Jessica Drew Kiss After Late-Night Doombot Battle”, “Star Wars: 5 Characters From the Books We Want to See on Screen”, “Carol Danvers’ Closeted Lesbian Affair”.
Carol holds down the last one, marking, “not interested in ‘Daily Bugle’”. Then, out of frustration, holds another, marking, “not interested in ‘Captain Marvel’”, another, “not interested in ‘Carol Danvers’”.
Her phone buzzes in her hand again as a knock sounds at the door.
Carol sighs, dropping her cell and Chewie onto the couch. In her hallway, leaning coolly against the other side of the doorframe, is Jessica Jones, draped in her heavy leather jacket. Carol steps aside wordlessly to let her in. She’s her close friend, and one of the few people who already knew, anyway.
“You kinda left Jess there,” Jones admonishes, making a beeline for the kitchen. She turns on Carol’s coffee maker, heating the plate underneath the 3 hour old brew.
“She’s already out ,” Carol points out, tiredly, pinching the bridge of her nose, “like, out.”
“Closet. Yeah,” Jones says, scrunching up one side of her face, “but you still left her there with all those annoying motherfuckers.”
Carol huffs, almost a laugh. She’s glad Jessica came by.
“They are so annoying.”
“Well, whatever, Luke says she left,” Jessica tells her, hopping to get from her short little legs up onto the counter, “He texted me that you’d booked it. You doing okay?”
Carol shrugs.
“Yeah. I should be.”
Jessica raises her eyebrows, glancing away from her in an exaggerated gesture clearly meant to accuse her of being full of shit. With anyone else, even Jess Drew, it would be annoying, but something about Jones makes Carol take her dickish behavior with more humor.
“I am a goddamned middle aged woman,” Carol complains, opening her fridge for something to drink; she stares blearly into it, not seeing any of what she actually wants. “I should not care.”
“Yeah,” Jessica agrees, “everyone totally knew anyway.”
She gestures with her hands at Carol’s general shape, miming a triangle to emphasize the width of her shoulders, then a little fake hair ruffle, referencing Carol’s freshly-short-again cut.
“Thanks for the support.”
“ That’s what she said .”
Carol furrows her brow, trying to formulate what sexual reference she’s trying to convey, when Jessica elaborates, “That’s what Jess is gonna say when she gets here.”
Carol groans.
“She’s been texting me, asking if I know where you are, ‘cause you’re totally not answering your phone,” Jessica tells her.
“Ah, goddamn it.” Carol darts out of the kitchen, snatching her phone out from under a pile of yowling orange fur.
She pointedly ignores that she’s got texts from Tony, Luke, Jessica Jones, maybe others, and opens the thread between her and her girlfriend.
JESSICA DREW: "Hah. Whoops.........”
JESSICA DREW: " You okay?”
JESSICA DREW: "?????”
JESSICA DREW: " It’s fine”
JESSICA DREW: " Tony was being a Dick”
JESSICA DREW: " Luke already knew. Consider anything you told Jess to be something he knows too. Joint marriage brain”
JESSICA DREW: "Couple ppl asked why u bolted but Luke Monica and Wolverine r pretty much telling people to mind their biz lol”
JESSICA DREW: "I mean but it’s not like I wouldn’t think it was funny if it was someone else”
JESSICA DREW: "The dating, not the bolting.....”
JESSICA DREW: "I left too. Not as much fun without you staring them down. Where r u?”
JESSICA DREW: "...You good???”
JESSICA DREW: "R u mad ??”
JESSICA DREW: "Window”
Carol looks sharply sideways, expecting Jess to have already scaled the side of her building to glare at her through the glass. She supposes she’s pretty high up. Carol walks over, prying the window open and staring down. Sure enough, Jess is making her way up storey after storey.
“We have an elevator,” she calls, leaning against the sill.
Jess mimes webshooting up at her, but of course has none. Carol leans fully over as she gets close, snagging her outstretched hand and pulling her up the last little bit.
“Thanks.”
“Sorry.” Carol mumbles, “Didn’t mean to bail.”
“I think you did,” Jess says, “I’m very portable. Could’a just scooped me on up when you flew out of there.”
“Spontaneous migraine.”
“Eensy panic attack?” she whispers, non-judgmentally.
Normally Carol has them over more serious issues, but Jess knows what triggers them isn’t always immediately obvious.
Carol holds two fingers up, confirming ‘eensy’.
Jess pulls Carol away from the window, holding onto fistfuls of her jacket to press a slow kiss to her lips. Carol bows into it, bringing a hand up to her waist gently.
“I was just surprised you left. Didn’t think you cared what other people-” Jess jumps, “Agh. Hey Jess.”
“Wassup,” Jones greets, taking a sip from her mug of lukewarm coffee. She grimaces.
“Well, cat’s out of the bag,” Jess says, patting Carol’s ass and moving to sit onto the couch, opposite from the side Chewie is on, “we’ve been dating long enough anyway, right? How long until you and Rhodey told people?”
“Uh,” Carol shrugs, staring blankly, “I guess he told them while I was in space. We kinda took a break then though, I’m not sure if he was seeing anyone else.”
“Yeah, so this is more serious than that was right?” Jess says, frowning.
She’s staring, hard, at Carol, and more than anything, is not looking anywhere near Jones. She’s feeling a little self conscious; Carol can tell by the look glittering in her green eyes, with her yellow glasses pushed up into her thick black hair.
At the start of this iteration of their relationship, Carol had specified that she intended this to be something they both cared about. She wanted to be friends still, if it didn’t work out, but she wasn’t looking for a casual fling. Jess had looked almost relieved at the assurance, and Carol sees that same concern now, looking for confirmation that Carol hadn’t forgotten she was aiming for something real.
“Of course,” Carol says, sincerely, but quietly; she and Rhodey got somewhat serious for real eventually, for a brief period after he’d come back to life, but in the earliest days of them dating, they hardly even saw each other. That’s not what she wants with Jess.
She likes her privacy no matter who she’s with, but the problem isn’t really in the seriousness of one relationship over the other. It’s the added weight that comes along with telling people she is dating a woman. She thinks of Sally Ride, the first female American astronaut, who was revealed to be gay only after she had died. She had been a hero of Carol's for obvious reasons forever, and having worked in the military, and at NASA specifically, Carol easily understood how she could go a lifetime in the closet. Carol has always had enough close friends- like Tracy and her wife, Jessicas Drew and Jones, even Logan- who she could be herself around, that she didn't feel the need to share more broadly.
The somewhat tense silence is broken by the beeping of the microwave. Jones returns with her mug, taking a more satisfied sip.
Carol’s phone buzzes, again, and she glances worryingly to it in her hand.
“Everything okay?”
She shrugs, tense.
“What’s the issue?” Jess asks.
“I-” Carol flips her phone around and around in her palm. How does she explain this terror? Does she even have a good reason? “It’s not dating you that’s... well, you’re a woman, you know?”
“You’ve dated women.”
“Not publicly. Until now.”
“Yeah, so?” Jess asks, not unkindly, “I’ve never known you to care what other people think.”
Carol feels the pain creeping into her temples again, blurring the lines between whether she is just anxious or in full pre-migraine prodrome.
“The Avengers don’t care if you like chicks,” Jess assures her; her tone is comforting, but her expression betrays some confusion, “They probably suspected anyway-”
“Will everyone stop saying that?” Carol snaps.
Jess widens her eyes, leaning back into the couch. The movement jostles her glasses, which drop back onto her nose. She doesn’t remove them.
“It’s... clearly it’s news. It’s in the news.” Carol holds her phone in the air, shaking it.
“I- yeah, I guess...”
Carol shrugs. Feeling flustered, she pushes past Jessica to access her medicine cabinet, hoping to catch this migraine before she’s on the floor with a scarf tied tightly over her eyes, trying not to puke.
They don’t follow her into the bathroom, so she takes a moment to breathe, fixing her hair and looking at her cellphone.
TONY STARK: “Hey Carol! / All good? / It’s not like I posted the vid. / Text back, alright? / No-one was really surprised, don’t worry. / You know you could have told us anything, right? / You want your cut of the betting pool? Seems only fair. / I’m joking. There’s no pool. / I’ll give you a cut anyway. We’ll make up a number. / Text back.”
LUKE CAGE: “ Sending Jess to your place, you want her? / My Jess.”
JESSICA JONES: “ omw up”
MONICA RAMBEAU: “Nosey bastards! / You can always tell me anything tho dw / ♥”
Carol drops her phone onto the counter, pressing her palms into her eyes, leaning backwards into the wall. She feels anxious and angry, but no-one else seems to think she should. They’re all thinking that it was obvious, that she could have just told them already, that she has no reason to be upset.
It’s embarrassing; she’s over 50 goddamn years old and she couldn’t drop this little detail about herself to more than a couple people after all this time? They’re probably all talking about how she hid it for so long, how she ran out of the room.
Bzz.
MS MARVEL: “Hey Carol! I’m really sorry about that video online!”
MS MARVEL: “My friend got outed to the whole school once. I imagine it was pretty scary.”
Carol slowly picks her phone off the counter, vision blurring with tears as she reads Kamala’s thoughtful messages, the first that actually indicate she has some right to be upset.
MS MARVEL: “IDK if it helps bc it still should have been your choice, but a lot of people online are leaving comments about how important this is to them. Representation matters in your heroes!”
MS MARVEL: “I’m still your number 1 fan tho, no-ones taking that spot! ;) Love you!”
Carol leans against the counter, wiping her eyes, not sure what to write back. She bites her lip, trying to reel it in before her shaky breaths can turn into full-on crying. One woman in her living room has super hearing, and she couldn’t even hide it from the other if she’s in here much longer.
Too soon, there’s barely a knock before her girlfriend opens the unlocked door, slipping into the room and closing it behind her.
“Jess went to get us pho for lunch,” she says, reaching to gently take Carol’s cheek in one hand as she turns away. A tear escapes her eye, running over Jess’ bandaged fingers.
Jess takes her wrist in her opposite hand, bringing her knuckles up to kiss, pressing her thumb into Carol’s palm.
“I’m sorry,” Jess says, “I don’t really understand... but I want to.”
Carol meets her eyes. The glasses are off. Off her face, off her head entirely.
“What do you tell people you’ve known for over a decade,” Carol asks softly, “when they ask why you were hiding something like this?”
“You weren’t just hiding this,” Jess points out, “you still won’t admit you dated Simon.”
Carol smiles unwittingly, amused. She unfortunately did date Simon Williams for a little while. Tony has asked a number of times for her to confirm it, but she won’t.
“That’s because that was embarrassing and bad for both of us,” Carol says, smiling, “but I’m really proud to be dating you...”
“So,” Jess sounds almost relieved, “it’s not that?”
Carol shakes her head.
“Really just is about coming out, huh?”
“I guess,” Carol mumbles, “it’s more about not coming out.”
There’s a lot of problems where the solution is to take the hit early. The longer you wait, the harder and harder it is to do something. She feels a bit like that now. If she’d just told them a few years ago, even, it wouldn’t have felt so embarrassing to have been outed. Or maybe if she’d gotten to tell them herself. As it is, they’ve known her for too long now for it not to be a big deal that she didn’t say anything all this time.
“Well, why didn’t you tell people when you were a teenager?” Jess asks, pulling herself onto the counter and wrapping her legs behind Carol’s butt, bringing her close.
“Uh,” Carol says, brow furrowed, as she places her hand on either side of Jess, “my dad would have killed me.”
“Okay, what about in your 20s?”
“Would have been arrested...”
“That’s fuckin’ crazy,” Jess says, “I mean, I was raised in a Hydra camp, so I get it, but I pretty much got to embrace all the shit they hated once I left... Okay, what about your 30s?”
“Still in the military,” Carol says, thinking, “I dated a little, quietly, after they instituted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but it felt like a stupid risk anyway.”
“40s?”
“Ran a magazine, joined the Avengers... life fell apart. Joined the X-Men, quit drinking, rejoined the Avengers...”
“Bad time,” Jess agrees, “Early 50’s, forgot you liked women altogether for a while there.”
Carol laughs, shaking her head, “No I realized that immediately,” she says, “there was a beautiful woman sitting by my bed when I woke up.”
Jess smiles, clearly a bit tickled by the compliment. Carol takes her face in both hands, kissing her mouth, her cheek, behind her ear, on her neck. Jess pulls her closer, running her hands up Carol’s back underneath her shirt, tilting her head up to encourage Carol to continue.
“Yeah, so,” she mumbles, into Carol’s cropped hair, “you couldn’t have done it sooner than now.”
Carol scoops her off the counter, carrying Jess into her room and dropping her onto the bed, passing the time until their food arrives. They kiss for a little while longer, Carol’s larger, heavier frame pleasantly pressing Jess into the mattress, until Jones’ knocking becomes more insistent and annoyed.
She takes in the both of them when they answer the door- Jess sans coat, Carol with her ruffled hair- and sighs.
“I see you’re feeling better, Carol.”
After their soup and some conversation, both of which are warm and pleasant, Jess suggests Carol pull together one of her usual game nights. Carol recognizes it for what it is- what it was a few months ago when she was discharged and Jess brought friends to catch her brooding by the water with a bottle of Jack Daniels. She’d thought it was an intervention at the time, but now she knows it’s really just a good reminder that she’s got real friends at this point in her life.
Carol lets them sort it out, bidding them goodbye so they can return their respective children, promising she’ll swing by Jess’ in a bit.
She sits, texting Kamala back at last.
: "Hey kiddo. Thanks for the note."
: "What did your friend do after the school found out?"
MS MARVEL: "Hi Carol!"
MS MARVEL: "I gave her a heads up that someone had some loveletters she wrote, so she told her crush first. Took some control of it all."
: "Smart kid. Give her my best."
: "Game night tomorrow. See you there?"
Carol cleans her tidy apartment- making the bed, wiping down the counters, and changing Chewie’s litter box- before setting out fresh cat food and hopping in the shower.
Feeling refreshed, Carol drops Chewie beside her most lively-looking houseplant, pulls up a fullscreen pic of a simple pink, purple, and blue flag onto her phone, and sets the device at her cat’s feet, snapping a photo with the digital camera Tracy had left to her.
She posts it to her scarcely-used instagram with no caption, closes the app, and leaves for her girlfriend’s apartment, feeling a little more in control than before.