Hello.

I'm back.

FF decided to delete all of my previous one-shots. So about twenty days of work just went down the drain.

And so here I come, with a new version of my previous, 44-review 194-like 78-follow deleted fanfiction.

THANKS SO MUCH, WEBSITE.

Now you can expect a lot more angst and some repeated use of AU's. Sorry, it's just that I might really like that AU or I read a story slash saw a beautiful, heart-wrenching painting that I needed to slap on paper.

See you!

Prompt: Sorry I was never perfect like you are (Fem! Tony x Steve)

It was as simple as a matter of who was better.

Anyone who spent more than thirty seconds around them could figure it out. They were complete polar opposites.

Steve was perfect. With lush golden hair, bright blue eyes, kind actions and his gentlemanly way of crookedly smiling at someone that made her heart melt. His self-sacrificing nature, how much he cared for his friends. That adorable cherry-pink blush spreading all the way from his chin to the tip of his crimson-flared ears. With looks and a personality like that, it was no wonder Howard Stark favored him over his biological daughter.

He would make a much better CEO than that Toni Stark, the wind seemed to whisper. She's so ugly, and he's so beautiful. Why are they friends? the sea seemed to say.

Toni let out a choked laugh, throwing the StarkTab in her hand across the room unconciously. The sunrise outside mocked her, streaking the sky and the bay of Malibu in beautiful crisscrosses of red, orange, and pink. A few lingering traces of dawn fluttered in navy blue wispy bundles of clouds lazily floating across the splash of colour.

She had never felt so useless before.

She could remember what had happened last night. She'd worked herself half-dead, then drunk herself into a blissful oblivion. When she woke up in the hospital, she had been rewarded with Steve's captain-america-is-disappointed-in-you look. And so the moment she arrived home she shut herself in her lab, instructed JARVIS to cut off all access to the lab, delete all override codes except for her own, and proceeded to hack the absolute hell out of national security codes, nuclear codes, SHIELD's protocols, and every damn government-protected, world-saving program she could find because if she didn't she might go insane.

The tower had always been her home. It had supported her, provided her with a place to work herself dead, a place to vent out her troubles. The people staying with her in it had provided her multiple shoulders to cry on, endless arms to sink into. Especially Steve.

Hell, he would comfort the Hulk on a rampage if he could. He was so soft, so warm, so gentle. She was hard, brittle, unbreakable and unreachable. She could never be as wonderful and kind as he was.

She stood, watching the sun make its slow ascend over the valley. As she passed the prototype of Steve's shield, she froze.

If you need me...

"I'll be there."

.

Her chest seized around the arc reactor, sending her into a fit of pain. She gasped, throwing her hands to the blue glow. JARVIS was frantically screaming in the background, she could hear the faint wail of the sirens, the thunderous footsteps of the Avengers as they pounded on the glass, shattering it. But her senses were dulled and she couldn't realize anything but pain pain pain

As she looked into terrified ice blue eyes, she finally understood.

"Sorry I was never perfect like you." she whispered, and then everything was black.

I'm sorry, today wasn't my best day. I didn't feel like writing. I am typing this in the middle of French class, so words like feminine and Mademoiselle et Monsieur Stark are circling around in my empty vastness (in my head)

SORRY3