A/N: Just FYI, Trolls annoy me, and their rude comments will be removed. Fortunately, I've only had to do this once. Still, it irks me. Trolls belong on political blogs. Now, if you would like to leave a negative comment about my writing AND you sign in, I will gladly engage you in conversation. I do not dislike detractors, just Trolls. :)

For my actual readers, thank you for your reviews, faves, and follows. And you can thank the troll for annoying the heck out of me the day before I leave for vacation coz it forced me to post another chapter. :D

OK, for the story. There are inferences to sex. (Was that frank enough? :D) Also to violence against children. T, for a reason.

Please, R&R. Just sign in if you wish to gripe. I don't want to be annoyed on the first vacation I've had in a decade. :D

The next day Steve did something he hadn't done in months, not since Maria had thrown in his face that she was sleeping with another man, he didn't avoid her. He had dreaded seeing her all night. He'd thought of all the day's possible scenarios, and showing up in her space every hour wasn't one of them. But when he arrived at the SHIELD base in the morning, he had caught a glimpse of her and something in her eyes convinced him that avoiding her was not a good idea today.

She looked pensive and nervous, and Maria was never either of those. He wondered if she had come to the same conclusion he and Tony had the night before. He didn't want to think what it could mean if it had something to do with Matt.

He'd had Tony fill the others in at breakfast on what Steve had overheard between Maria and the Council, and the information he'd been able to sift through so far. Of their past five ops with Maria, four had proved far more than what their intel had led them to believe and resulted in far more damage and casualties than any of them felt there should have been. It had been sobering to say the least and had resulted in more contemplation than conversation. Clint and Natasha said they'd do their own checking to see if they could get any names; otherwise, the group felt that, for the time being, it was best just to be on high alert.

Before Steve left for base, Tony handed him a thin file on Matt Tanner. Steve shook his head when he saw there was nothing out of the ordinary in it.

He grimaced and muttered that it didn't make any sense. Tony asked a pointed question and Steve was almost sorry he'd asked for his help.

"What exactly makes you suspect he's done something wrong?"

Steve stared at him for a moment, not wanting to betray Maria's secret. But he couldn't stand the thought of anyone making her less than what he knew she was and Tony had proven useful in the past, so he gave him the cursory version.

"When I heard them talking," Steve fought off an irrational fear come over him as he thought of that conversation.

"She was so," he paused to gather his courage and looked pointedly at Tony to gauge his immediate reaction. "Weak."

He saw the flash of surprise across Tony's face, then it was gone and a concerned one replaced it.

Tony pursed his lips as if he was considering the wisdom of the words he was about to say, then he looked back up at Steve.

"Do you think she's being abused?"

Steve felt a surge of anger rush through him and Tony tried to assuage it.

"I'm not saying she is," he said. "I'm only saying it's a possibility, considering the way she sounded to you. I've never known Maria Hill to be weak. It's just a, well, possibility. I'll look into it."

And Steve knew that meant he was going to keep an eye on Matt, which only brought him small comfort.

Before he could consider, he said aloud, "Why would she stay with someone who," the words strangled when his throat contracted at the thought of what Tony was inferring.

"I don't know," Tony said. "Was she abused as a child?"

Steve felt his blood run cold as he thought about the few things Maria had told him about her mother early on in their relationship.

"It's possible," he conceded.

Tony raised an eyebrow.

"She never told you?" he asked.

"She told me her mother drank a lot and took her anger out on her," he said, as he let out a breath. "But I never pressed her for more because it hurt her so much to think about it."

He wondered now if he should have. Maybe if he'd made her talk to him about it, they wouldn't be in this mess they were in now. Isn't that what people said these days, that you should talk about your problems? Maybe that was why she turned away from him. She might believe that because he didn't let her talk about it, it was a part of her that he didn't want to know.

"Steve, you have to stop this," Tony interrupted his thoughts. "That rabbit trail doesn't lead anywhere useful."

He looked back at Tony, surprised again at the man's insight. Then he shook the thoughts from his head, and left for the base.

And there, at least once an hour, he showed up in Maria's line of vision.

Her day was not going well, he could tell. She'd had a long meeting with Fury, an even longer one with Fury and the council, and then there were the whispers and stares as she walked through the SHIELD halls. Those, Steve could do something about. Any time he was in the proximity of someone saying something negative about her, he made sure to at least give them a pointed look until they realized he wasn't going to tolerate gossip about the deputy director.

One agent was bold enough to ask him why he was defending Maria after what she'd done to him.

Steve gave the man a confused look and said, "Why should that effect whether I think she's a good commander, or not?"

"Dude, she totally screwed you over," he retorted. "Pun intended."

When Steve realized exactly what the man was saying, the look on his face was apparently terrifying enough that the agent suddenly became nervous and found he had somewhere else he needed to be.

But as often as he could, Steve placed himself in Maria's line of vision. He didn't say anything, sometimes he didn't even look at her directly. He just felt he needed to remind her he was there for her and he wasn't going anywhere.

When he arrived back at the Avengers Tower that evening, JARVIS informed him that Mr. Stark would like to meet with him, and Steve was deposited in Stark's private apartment. Meeting there wasn't completely unheard of, but given the situations they were monitoring, it set Steve on edge.

"Sit," was all Tony said to him when he stepped out of the lift.

Steve swallowed down his growing dread and sat next to Tony on his sofa.

Stark pointed to a thick file on the coffee table and Steve took a deep breath before picking it up. On the tab he read "Maria Hill."

As Steve held the inch-thick file with trembling hands, Tony stood and walked over to the bar. He returned with two glasses of scotch, setting one down in front of Steve, who looked up and raised a questioning eyebrow.

"Trust me, you'll need it," Tony said grimly.

Before he could think twice about what he was doing and how he was invading Maria's privacy, Steve opened the file and plunged into the reading. He was only a few pages in when he slammed the file down on the table and stood to pace the living room.

Finally, he stopped and looked at Tony.

"I thought they took care of kids like that nowadays? I thought the state stepped in and," he paused and stared out the window as his confusion and anger warred with his natural common decency.

He turned back to look at Tony.

"Why did they keep giving her back to that woman?"

Tony shrugged and said, "Most child protective agencies operate with the belief that parents can be reformed, and that the child is always better off with his or her parents."

"But three times," Steve raised his voice in frustration. "Three times in just the few pages I've read."

Images of a small Maria broken and bruised were playing through his head. He recalled what he had done to rescue her from the hands of her torturers nearly two years ago, and he was glad Maria's mother was already dead, he wasn't sure he could restrain himself.

"You didn't even have to see the pictures," Tony said, and Steve looked sharply at him.

He noted the man's haggard face and bloodshot, red rimmed eyes, which he'd thought were only from the alcohol he'd been consuming.

"I didn't include them," he said, raising his glass to his lips again and staring at a point on the far wall.

Steve stared at Tony a few moments before returning to the sofa. They sat, both lost in their thoughts, for quite some time. Steve stared at the file on the table. He couldn't read it any more. He hadn't imagined how bad it was. Now that he thought about it, he had assumed that most of the problems had been when Maria was older, maybe 16 or 17, and somehow his mind could handle that, though it had still been difficult to accept. According to the information Tony had gathered, Maria had been taken from her mother the first time when she was barely two. A suspicious broken arm had been the cause. But she had been returned to the woman less than a week later.

Finally, Steve leaned forward, but grabbed the scotch instead of the file. He downed it in record time. Tony didn't even acknowledge when Steve went back to the bar to get a refill and downed that one as well.

He stood, hands pressed on top of the bar and stared at his empty glass. His mind was a chaotic mess as he attempted to process the information. He'd tried to get inside Maria's head so many times over the past six months. Now he understood why nothing he came up with made any sense. They were from two different worlds in more ways than one. He thought he'd heard Pepper explaining something like this once, that sometimes people are using the same words but the meanings each person has for them are completely different. To Steve, marriage was a logical step in a loving relationship. He wanted with Maria what he'd seen his parents have, he wanted to share a lifetime of love with her. To Maria, marriage and family were a terrifying prospect. The only family she'd ever known were her mother, who abused her, and her father, who had abandoned her.

He still couldn't quite grasp how Matt fit into the equation, and as soon as he thought of the man, his anger flared again.

Turning to Tony he said ominously, "If Matt is hurting her..."

Tony waved him off, "Way ahead of you, Cap."

Steve looked at him questioningly.

"I'm running a far more thorough background check than the first," Stark told him as he stood and walked over to pour himself another drink. "I've got people interviewing everyone who ever crossed paths with him. If there is anything dirty about this guy, we'll find out."

Though not completely reassuring to Steve, it was better than the nothing he'd had this morning.

"What do we do when we find out?" he asked the obvious question.

"Well, I'm all for taking him out," Tony said, then shrugged when Steve shook his head at him. "Hey, some people just use up more air than they're worth."

"We can't kill him," Steve informed his friend.

"Not directly, anyway," Tony said.

Steve furrowed his brow, trying to figure out what Tony meant.

"As a man accustomed to the finer things in life, I can assure you I can think of worse things than death," Tony told him.

"So, you plan to ruin him financially?"

"Depends on just how bad a person he is," Tony replied.

Steve was not entirely comfortable with the conversation, though he had to admit, ruining Matt financially was probably the lesser of the evils when one took into consideration what Steve wanted to do to the man if he found out he had so much as pushed one of Maria's hairs out of place.

"I still don't understand why she would go to him," Steve told Tony. "I get why the marriage proposal completely messed everything up. But why go to this guy? Why get involved with someone like him? Before she and I were dating, she hadn't dated regularly in years. Why not just go back to being alone?"

Tony sighed and shook his head.

"My best guess?" he looked up at the super soldier. "She wanted someone to remind her why she couldn't have it all with you."

Tony's explanation made no sense at all to Steve and it showed on his face.

"When people grow up with that kind of abuse, they go one way or the other," Tony went on. "Maria was on her way down the wrong path, straight toward what she grew up with, before Coulson pulled her out."

Steve nodded. He remembered Maria's story of how Coulson had given her a chance in SHIELD and now her success in the organization made more sense to Steve. She was driven to do well to overcome her past.

"It's probably why she was closest to Coulson, of all the people she knows at SHIELD," Tony said.

Steve nodded in agreement and mumbled, "That must be why, when she thought he was dead, it hit her so hard."

"Right. Then, enter you," Tony pointed at Steve.

Steve looked up at Tony in surprise.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, here is this very lonely, solitary woman, who loses one of the only people she has ever cared for, and in that time of loss, enter this ridiculously handsome, pathetically buff, super soldier."

Steve rolled his eyes. Tony had to get a jibe in somewhere.

"You were everything she never had with anyone," Tony explained. "Kind, attentive, generous, etc, ad nauseum. Naturally, she fell for you."

"So you're saying I'm some sort of rebound and she got over me?" Steve asked, still not understanding where Tony was leading with his explanation.

"No," Tony said. "I'm saying, you're the first good thing she ever had and it scared the hell out of her."

Steve made sure to still look confused so Tony would explain more.

Tony shook his head, as if it should be obvious to anyone what he was saying.

"While I personally can't understand why anyone would stay in as sexless a relationship as yours, it worked for her," he said.

"So she broke up with me because marrying me would mean," Steve started but Tony interrupted.

"Apparently I'm not doing a very good job explaining this," he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

After a few moments he opened them again and looked as if he felt he'd landed on the words he needed.

"You told her you loved her," Tony said, and Steve nodded.

"You infer by that, that you will always be there for her, and never leave her, no matter what," Tony continued, and Steve nodded again.

"Then you threaten her comfort level by proposing to her," Tony said, this time Steve grimaced in acknowledgement.

"So she runs because she realizes you weren't kidding."

Steve looked at him again in confusion.

"Oh, hell," Tony said. "She wanted you to run after her. Prove to her that you were serious."

"I was serious," Steve said. "I am serious."

Tony just shook his head.

"That's not what she saw," he told him. "She saw that she was very easily able to scare you off."

Steve opened his mouth to protest, but closed it as the truth of what Tony said sank in.

"Look, some women, when they say 'go away' really mean 'go away.' Trust me on that," Tony explained. "But I think Maria meant 'I'm scared and I need to know if you are serious about what you say you want.'"

"But why?" Steve asked.

"Sheltered child," Tony said, rolling his eyes. "When kids are abused, they often either become an abuser themselves, or they become a victim again. Even though she is a very strong woman, inside, at least as far as relationships go, she only knows how to be the victim. You gave her something different, but when you wanted to take things deeper, she didn't know how to handle it, and she ran."

"She thinks she's not worth more," Steve said, finally catching on to Tony's convoluted explanation.

"Yes! Finally!" Tony shouted and pounded his hand on the bar, then he shook his head. "I'll leave this sort of conversation to Pepper in the future."

"And when I turned away from her after she broke it off with me, I proved her right," Steve added.

"Twisted, I'm afraid," Tony said. "But very true."

"So all I have to do is prove myself to her," Steve said, brightening for the first time in months.

Tony chuckled sarcastically.

"Yep, that's all you have to do," he said, and raised his glass in mock cheer.