Work Text:
For prompt #4: Forehead kiss
Not for the first time in her twenty-five years, Lydia Martin cursed her height. It had been hard enough to surrender her love for heels in favor of more sensible flats on this mission. And it certainly hadn’t helped that her partner was none other than Captain “call me Steve, ma'am” Rogers, who, at six feet tall , had such a long stride she had to scramble to keep up with him.
Lydia hated feeling like she couldn’t keep up, even though she had graduated Magna Cum Laude from Stanford.
But the reason she currently hated her short legs right this very moment was because all the extra effort she’d had to take to keep up with Rogers in the mad dash for their burner car so they could hide themselves away from the AIM guards giving chase after spending the entire day on her feet meant that said legs were sore and aching. Running away with Steve when the extraction had nearly gone south hadn’t helped, but it was better than getting riddled with bullets courtesy of the ex-military security AIM’d had in their lab.
(Lydia is perfectly aware that she can put up a good fight and, if all else fails, unleash the scream of the banshee and shatter their skulls. But she’s keeping the supernatural on the down low from her employers at SI and brain matter would probably be overkill in this instance.)
And to think she’d done such a great job of staying away from dangerous situations and playing hero since leaving Beacon Hills. If Scott could see her right now, he would be wriggling his eyebrows and grinning like a Cheshire cat. Lydia huffed at the thought and wriggled her body in an attempt to get more comfortable.
“Miss- I mean Dr. Martin,” Steve groaned against the hair at her temple. “I know this isn’t the most comfortable position, but could you please try not to move too much?” They’d taken cover on the floor in between the front seats and the middle seats of the SUV, facing each other, which was a tight fit given how enormous Steve was.
She certainly wasn’t going to complain about having no place else to rest her hands but on those broad shoulders. Steve, the gentleman, was keeping his hand braced against the seat behind her.
Lydia arched one eyebrow at him, taking advantage of their closeness to take note of the clench of his jaw and the twitch of muscles in his cheek. There was also the telltale reaction to her body, hardening against her hip. He looked so adorably embarrassed she couldn’t help teasing him. “It’s alright, Captain,” she purred. “I’m not actually your superior officer. There’s no need to salute me.” Her audacity got her an incredulous huff of laughter from Steve. He schooled his expression into a neutral one.
“That’s not actually how it works. You don’t just salute your superior officers- it’s an exchange of respect, especially when you’re saluted to first.” Steve kept his eyes above sea level, and so did Lydia, but she strongly suspected if she looked down now, she’d see what the rain and the chill in the air had done to the state of her shirt and much-too-thin bra.
He kept a straight face, the bastard.
Inside, Lydia squirmed. They’d had such an exchange the first time they’d met: her seeking to shock him, him trolling her. The witty repartee had surprised her by getting past her defenses, exciting her with how well their wills could dance together. She’d known she was doomed, then.
He’s exactly the sort of man she’d have a meaningless flirtation with; he’s also exactly the sort of man who she’d be powerless to fall in love with if she let herself. And she was having a hard time denying herself the latter. It’s pathetic, she thinks, to have a crush on someone as famous as Captain America- but that was precisely Lydia’s dilemma. Over the past few months, she had come to know Steve, not Captain America, as more than a passing acquaintance.
“What’s Barton saying?” She murmured drowsily as they continued to lay there. Rain pounded on the roof of the car, making it hard to see anything outside the windows. They weren’t safe now, but Lydia couldn’t help the sense of security that being with Steve provided her, and closed her eyes for just a second.
She felt the rumble of his voice against her chest as he relayed what he was hearing over his comm. “They’ve increased their patrols, all roads out are currently blocked so we’re going to have to wait. Another twenty minutes and Morse is gonna create a diversion to get them chasing after her-”
Lydia hummed as she tuned him out.
When she floated back up to consciousness an indeterminate time later, her limbs were heavy- sore but relaxed- and she was toasty even if her clothes and hair were still damp. The heat of another body against hers made her groan and furrow her brows. Her head was resting on something hard that smelled faintly of sweat and rain.
With a flash, she remembered the mission, hiding, Steve.
“Steve?” She gasped, jerking against his body. Now that her eyes were open, she could see just how much closer they had somehow managed to get. Earlier, they’d been holding themselves tense, ever so slightly apart, out of polite acknowledgment of the distance their professional roles demanded of them. But in her sleep, she had relaxed completely into him and Steve had adjusted his legs so the small space wasn’t so cramped for him. This meant one of his very muscular thighs was inserted between her knees and the pool of arousal at the scant contact against her pubis had Lydia wanting to rub herself against him.
She restrained herself from doing something stupid like moving her hand from where it was currently clutching his bicep up to his jaw, to grip it and angle it up and away so she could nip at the skin of his neck and show him just who was really in charge here.
“Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty,” he teased. “Morse is almost ready to go. You’re fine.”
That was when she realized Steve had moved his other arm under her head so she could use it as a pillow. And the arm that she was currently clutching? The hand attached to that one was pressed against the dip in her waist, right over her scars. Beneath her blouse, her skin burned and Lydia couldn’t control the way her world narrowed in on that single point of contact. The memories of terror, of powerlessness, of violation. Her heart began to pound and her skin grew clammy.
“No, don’t-” she burst out, grabbing Steve’s hand and shoving it down to her hip. She didn’t let go of his hand as she lay there, willing herself to regain control over her body. Ten years. A goddamn decade and she still couldn’t escape what Peter had done to her.
Steve was right there with her, trying to tilt her face up so he could see her. The concern in his blue eyes made her so ashamed, Lydia just wanted to cry. She despised being vulnerable like this. “Lydia? What’s wrong? Damn it, I’m so sorry, I just needed to change the position of my arm before it went numb and I should’ve waited to ask you first-” His fingers tugged against hers, he clearly meant to remove his hand entirely. She clutched them harder against the back of her hip, shaking her head.
“No, it’s okay. Just-” Shit, an IQ of 170 and she could barely express her thoughts. “It wasn’t that you were touching me, it was just that it was a bad spot for me. And I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to move on from this moment, okay?” She stared at Steve, imploring him to believe her. This really wasn’t the time or place.
He still looked worried, but he nodded and entwined their fingers over her hip. “Alright.” And then he leaned closer and pressed a tender kiss against her forehead. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Lydia breathed in sharply, blinking back tears at the kindness, the understanding. Her traitorous chin wobbled. Steve saw it all when he pulled back.
“Hey, those…those eyes of yours are too pretty to have tears in them.” He murmured, his voice lower and rougher. “What color are they anyways? I thought they were brown, but they aren’t are they?”
Hypnotized, the words seemed to just spill out of her lips. “Technically they’re hazel- more green than brown. They just look brown at a distance because of a phenomenon called Rayleigh Scattering. It’s all about how light scatters over the iris.” She paused to take a breath after imparting that gobbet of knowledge to Steve, who just stroked his thumb over her knuckles and hummed.
Her mini-lecture had done the trick, it had distracted her from her earlier panic attack and calmed her. “Thank you,” she said, feeling the slight heat in her cheeks. She might not hide behind her intellect any more, but that didn’t mean she didn’t cringe at her moments of nerdery.
Luckily for her, Steve didn’t seem to be turned off by that.
He grinned, the lines at the corner of his eyes crinkling. Whatever he was about to say was cut off as he cocked his head to the side, listening. Lydia tensed up even though she was loathe to pop the nice little bubble they had going here in the SUV.
Steve nodded. “Roger that. We’re on our way to the rendezvous site, ETA twenty minutes.” To her, he said: “Time to break out. You ready?”
“I’m ready for a venti caramel macchiato when all this is over.” She quipped, sitting up and climbing over Steve and the divider to get into the passenger seat of the car. No men with guns in sight. Steve followed closely behind, making the seat rock back and forth from his weight as he finally settled his considerable size into the driver’s side seat.
Lydia watched him with pursed lips as he patted his pockets down. “You lost the keys, didn’t you?”
Steve closed his eyes and groaned before reaching down to yank the plastic covering off from around the steering column, exposing the colored wires. He raised an eyebrow when he saw that she had also reached over to do the same, their eyes meeting.
“The red ones are the battery wires, you need to strip the insulation off those before you twist the together,” she told him nonchalantly. Steve’s lips quirked.
“I actually picked this up in Nazi Germany, you know.”
“Did you now?” Lydia asked serenely as she watched him strip and twist the battery wires together then connect that to the yellow ignition wire. He hissed when the live starter wire shocked him lightly before he touched it to the end of the connected battery wires. The car roared to life.
“Yep,” he said succinctly.
She didn’t know what it said about her that she had been around werewolves and all manner of supernatural creatures, but she was turned on by how strong Steve was that he could simply break off the metal keyhole so he could unlock the steering wheel.
“Maybe over coffee, you could tell me how a PhD in mathematics learned to hot wire a car.”
Lydia flipped her hair over her shoulder, buckled herself in, and drawled, “Sweetheart, buy me a chocolate croissant with that coffee and I’ll tell you how I learned to make a self-igniting Molotov cocktail when I was fifteen.”
Steve looked suitably impressed, and then he shifted the car into Drive and hit the gas.