Setting up Sunday
Watching the winter grow so, oh, no
We're making excuses
For insecurities
It's not about me
Oh, it's never about me
Steve would never forget the first time he saw her. It had been snowing all morning when she came bursting into Stark Tower all red cheeked and bright eyes, snowflakes still clinging to the tips of her eyelashes left over from her walk from the train. There was an immediate attraction before he even knew who she was and how she was connected to their group. But it was the moment that she began to speak, playfully berating Tony for having JARVIS hack into her school's network and cancelling the afternoon history class that she actually liked instead of her morning analytic geometry class, so that she would be available to him for the rest of the day, that he knew was done for. That the visceral want deep in his belly would be a constant companion whenever they were in the same room.
She was young, and bright, and free and the very embodiment of everything a young woman could become at the dawn of the twenty first century. But he would never tell her that, not how much he admired her light and vitality. No, he would only watch from afar as they skirted the edges of each others social circle. He had nothing to offer her, he was old fashioned, cynical about what the world had become, he was a relic from another time. She was better off without him regardless of how lost and alone he felt, and how a single smile from her could brighten his whole day. She was better off if he kept his distance, he could only bring her down. It wasn't about him.