Brock was several clouds above the ninth. He was practically giggling as we weaved back through the trees, still with our arms wrapped around each other, moving slightly sideways to avoid having to loosen our grip. He was supporting me just as much as I was supporting him. Not until we got back to the little house did we break apart slightly, though I kept hold of Brock's hand as I leapt up the steps and opening the door, throwing a wide smile back over my shoulder. I was five steps inside before I spotted the difference, and came to an abrupt halt, my outstretched hand behind me slamming into Brock's chest and forcing him to stop too. On the sleek blackness of the kitchen counter top, right in the middle of the island, was a small black object, with a sickeningly pink bow on top. It took my fear-numbed brain a few seconds to recognise it as a camera, but even then I didn't relax. I craned my neck, sweeping as much of the room as I could without moving my feet. Eventually I had to release Brock to check in the bathroom, looking behind the door for intruders, but not reassured by the empty rooms. Brock, meanwhile, had crossed to the kitchen, and picked up the camera before I could open my mouth in warning. My spine was tingling as he tossed aside the bow, looking up at me and smiling.

"It's okay," he chuckled, gesturing me over as he flicked the camera on. I approached warily, even step measured before I took it. Brock tilted the screen to show me an image of a sheet of paper with thick red pen scrawled across it.

Have a good week. N.

I looked up at Brock, thoroughly confused and still worried. He read my expression only too easily, taking my hand and pulling me over to the sofa, setting the camera down on the table.

"I didn't want to just disappear," he explained, "so I told Romanoff that I wanted to do this, and she helped me set all this up." I glanced at the camera. Romanoff. Natasha Romanoff.

"She... helped you?" I said, my voice only barely above a whisper. Brock nodded, looking a little sheepish now. "Where are we?"

"North Michigan," he replied at once. "Friend of a friend of a something owns this place I think..."

"Is she here? Did she fly the plane?" I asked, my intuition leaping up.

"Yes," Brock said slowly, "and no. She is here, has been for a few days. As far as Rogers knows, she's investigating a lead just over the border, in Canada, but she's really being getting stuff ready here, the car and things like that."

I frowned lightly. "And the plane?"

"That... ah, that was an autopilot system," he admitted.

My eyes bulged. "A what? Are you saying a program was flying that thing?!"

Brock grimaced. "I said you didn't want to know. But it does a very good job." I scowled, but let it go, reaching forwards to pick up the camera a little gingerly, still not convinced it wasn't hiding a bomb, and flicked through the rest of the pictures. My jaw dropped. They were of us, on the beach, image after image of us walking, sitting together, Brock talking, him down on one knee before me, and the pair of us embraced afterwards.

"I hadn't realised she was going to do that," Brock admitted, with a wry laugh.

I snorted, looking through them more slowly. "These are actually pretty good," I said grudgingly, pausing on one where only our silhouettes were showing, leaning on each other with the lake in the background.

"Who would have guessed?" Brock chuckled, and I smiled with him. "You hungry?" I nodded against his shoulder, flicking the camera off and putting it back on the table before rolling up and padding over to the kitchen. The hardwood floors felt odd beneath my socks, so different from carpet. Brock didn't seem to notice as he followed me to the fridge, which turned out to be fully stocked with everything from steak to an avocado. I raised an eyebrow at the fruit, then went still as I looked down at the door. Milk, a couple of bottles of wine, and several beers looked up at me and I swallowed, suddenly feeling sick. Brock, with stunning intuition, pushing the door closed and moved around me to take my hands.

"I'm sorry, Grace. I really, really am."

I nodded. "I know," I whispered, without looking up. "It's just... God, I was so scared, coming back and you weren't there..." Brock wrapped his arms around me, and I held onto him. "Don't ever do that to me again," I muttered into his shoulder. "We get through things together."

"I promise," Brock said, and I knew he meant it. "I wasn't thinking straight. Just knowing it had been a whole year... Everything changed so much." I pulled back so I could press my forehead against his.

"Not everything," I reminded him. "I love you. Just as much today as I did yesterday, as I did fourteen months ago. Just as much as I will tomorrow, and every day afterwards." I felt Brock smile as I kissed him.

"What would I have done without you?" he breathed, and I kissed him again.

"Good thing you don't have to find out," I said, and opened the fridge again, and we began cooking together.

I tried to relax that evening, sipping my glass of pink wine while Brock nursed a single beer, but for all the smiles and jokes and laughter between us, I struggled to keep my mind from returning to the image of him, hunched in a dark corner of a bar, with twelve empty bottles in front of him. It had taken me an hour and a half to find him, and I'd nearly had to carry him out to the car. After the slurred, incoherent babbling had subsided, he'd spent the next hour keening softly as he cried, before crawling to the bathroom to throw up repeatedly. I'd seen Brock drunk before, but never to that level, and I hadn't needed to ask why he'd suddenly felt the need to get so smashed. It was lucky that the next day had been a Sunday, because neither of us had slept in the night. 7am found Brock, vomiting finally over, curled up in the very middle of our bed like a child. Unable to bear moving him, I'd just gone and sat on the end of the couch, where I'd slept through the day, oblivious to all the things I should have been doing, until I was woken as he sat down next to me. We'd both cried then, and cuddled for thirty minutes without saying a word.

Eventually, I gave up trying to shut out the memory. Pushing up from the couch, I smiled at Brock's inquisitive glance, unlacing my fingers from his as I left him to flick through the TV channels. I wandered over to the bathroom, slipping out of my clothes and throwing them onto the bed as I went, and closing the door gently behind me. As Brock had promised, there were towels hanging up on the heated rail, and I rubbed my fingers over their softness as I cast my eyes over the shower controls, and spun the dial to let water start gushing out, holding my other hand under the spray as I waited for it to warm up. I didn't have the patience to let it become comfortable, but plunged under the water when it was merely bearable, gritting my teeth in a silent growl at the sudden tingling of my skin under the water that was tepid at best. With a sigh, I crossed my arms against the tiled wall and leant forwards, resting my forehead on them and letting the gradually heated water run down my back. What I thought about in those moments, I'm not sure. Cocooned behind the safety of my eyelids, I let it all go, blinking in surprise when the door opened behind me.

"Room for one more?" Brock asked as I looked round. For a moment, I just stared at him. My fiancé. I smiled, and nodded. He was in the door in a second, snapping it shut behind him, and I turned the spray down as I reached out a hand to pull him in, grinning at his confidence in my answer that had apparently let him undress before asking. The mostly unblemished skin of his chest and legs made the rippled burns on his face and arms stand out even more, rippling as he moved towards me.

"Hi," I whispered, moving aside so there was room for both of us, deliberately kissing his scared cheek.

"Hey," he replied, barely loud enough for me to hear over the water as he eased his arms slowly under the water, barely wincing. "You okay?"

"Better than," I grinned, and I meant it.

I learned one very important thing very quickly that week. I should never play card games with Brock. Not ones where I had to bluff anyway. I held my own at Rummy, couldn't stop giggling when he tried to teach me poker, and was thoroughly thrashed at Bullshit. I'd thought it wouldn't work because there was only two of us, but Brock seemed to know exactly what I'd put down without even glancing at his cards. We played three games, and I vowed never to try again.

We watched endless movies, sprawled out or curled together, only half watching the screen. My favourites were the action ones, where Brock would keep up a running commentary about how they used the wrong sort of explosive, or how that punch should have broken Jason Statham's hand.

Another surprise, though apparently Brock had known about it, was that when I turned on the stereo, it was all my songs that blared out, courtesy of Natasha apparently remotely accessing my iTunes library somehow. Neither of us could sing worth a damn, but neither of us cared either.

It was a week of paradise, and as I stood by the car, gazing back at the little house, I didn't want to leave. It was a physical reluctance, a twisting in my stomach, and a prickling in my eyes. If we left, we'd have to go back to the world. Back to work, people, worry, threats and animosity from Rogers. Here, it was just me and Brock. Turning around, I nearly opened my mouth to beg Brock to let the fantasy become real, to stay. But as I met his eyes, I knew that he wanted the exact same thing, but wouldn't let it happen. He wasn't going to run away from something he'd decided he deserved a long time ago.

We got married a week after we came back, just the two of us in a nearly empty room with the minister and some witnesses at the back. Neither of us had any family to invite, Brock's only relatives being some cousins in Australia that he didn't talk to, not that it mattered to us anyway. This wasn't a big event, it was just a formalisation of something we'd known for a long time. I was his and he was mine. We signed the licence, took it back to the dmv and drove home with stupidly big grins, fell tangled together into bed for a couple of hours, then watched half a city explode out of the sky on the news in the afternoon.