AN: This is just a filler chapter really, hope you like it.
Nattie didn't leave the Manor for the first six years of her life, she had never played in the dirt and the mud, run through the rain or be exposed to all the germs that people carried around.
So it was unavoidable that she would become sick after being exposed to school and a number of children. For a genius, Tony should have considered this but as Nattie had never been sick, he didn't think about it.
He was regretting that when Nattie caught a horrible case of the flu and he didn't know what to do.
Nattie was either sleeping, throwing up any heavy food, crying hoarsely because she was ill, coughing up her lungs or sneezing violently. She was also very clingy.
Tony had never been around a sick person before, his nannies had always looked after him when he was ill and Nattie had never been sick before, so of course he panicked.
He tried to give her all the treats she liked like chocolate cake, but she just brought it back up and Nanny would scold him. One good thing came out of it though, ice-cream soothed her throat and she was able to keep it down.
He carried her around for hours like he used to when she was a toddler, one of the few times she was quiet, and bought her loads of teddies. He constantly carried around chilled juice for her as well as tissues just for her and did all his work from home.
He was up at all hours of the night with her, dotted on her endlessly, and in the end when she was better, Tony had made himself sick.
Nanny chided him as she tucked him into his bed, telling him she could have easily taken care of 'Miss Nattie' by herself.
That's the memories that come back into his mind when he sees Nattie's head wrapped in bandages, her lovely dark hair cut choppily short, after his little battle with Obie.
Large dark eyes staring out of a pale and drawn face brought back the memories of six-year-old Nattie sick for the first time and wanting her big brother all the time.
Those memories and feelings become stronger when he handed her a soft brown teddy he had picked up on his way home.
Nattie smiled as she cradled it and shifted so Tony could sit next to her, his arm slipping around her shoulders and pulling her close, letting her head rest on his shoulder.
She'll always have a scar, stretching from her right temple and pass her ear, and it would mostly be hidden by her hair. But Tony would know it was there, a reminder of the fact he could have lost her and to someone he had trusted for years.
It would be that scar that reminded Tony that he couldn't really trust anyone with his little sister, his most precious person. And because of that scar, a few years in the future, Tony would have a hard time letting his sister go, especially into the arms of Captain America.
Steve first saw the scar when he was drawing her.
Nate had been busy on the computer, numbers and text filling her screens and confusing him, but he had still drawn her because she looked so focused.
She had popped two of her painkillers—something he noted with a small amount of alarm that she did quite regularly—and run an absent hand through her hair and pushing it back, that was when he caught the silver of the pale scar on her temple and disappearing into her hairline.
He was barely aware he moved until Nate jumped under his touch when he gently touched the scar, and looked up at him with startled dark eyes.
Steve had fought in a war and had seen many wounds in the past, and almost as many scars. Nate's scar reminded him of some of the scars that the Howling Commandos had from when Hydra hit them harshly with the butt of their guns when they were under their care.
Steve, himself, had no scars as the serum healed him quickly and left no scars behind.
Someone had hit Nate in the head with something, hard enough to leave a scar and obviously with intent to harm her. And it hadn't been an accident, Steve could tell.
"I was twenty-four." Nate spoke suddenly breaking him from his thoughts, though when he glanced down at her, she was looking at her computer screens. "My brother had been hurt, dying, and I was so shocked that I didn't see the blow coming. Nanny stitched me up after cutting my hair and cleaning the blood away, she moved me to the couch before going to clean up the blood off the floor.
I woke up as she was cleaning. There was so much blood, it was like something straight out of a horror movie, and head wounds bleed a lot after all. The floor had to be replaced, it was too stained with my blood."
"My friend, Bucky, had a few scars like this." Steve told her, thumb absently stroking along the scar. "He got them when he was captured by Hydra, they had beat him a lot."
Steve's face tightened both because of the memory and because of the fact that Hydra was still alive, alive in the division that Peggy, Phillips and Howard had built, a division that Nate worked for and a division he was working for.
He startled as her slim petite hand grabbed his hand, pulling it away from her head but she kept hold of it, and she looked up at him with stubborn and determined dark eyes.
"We'll stop them." She told him. "You've helped do it before, and I'll be there for you the whole way. We'll destroy the whole Hydra."
Her complete confidences made a grim smile curl his lips, the coolness to her dark eyes when she spoke of destroying told a promise.
It was a dark promise, a promise that spoke of the death of many men and women who hailed from Hydra, and it was a promise that was going to be stained with blood.
And he should have been horrified, he was Captain America and he was meant to stand for goodness, justice, honour and all that. But he was also Steve Rodgers, a boy from Brooklyn that had hated bullies, a man that had wanted to fight for his country despite being rejected a number of times, a man that didn't want to kill anyone but having to anyway because he was soldier, a man that lost his dearest and oldest friend to Hydra soldiers, a soldier thrust straight out of both his war and his time, a man drowning in this strange and new world, a man who had gone to sleep and woke up with everyone he knew gone or old, a man who was only holding on to his sanity because of the woman in front of him, a man that was darkly pleased with the promise she had given and a soldier that would destroy Hydra once and for all.
He may be Captain America, but he had been Steve Rodgers for far longer and would always be Steve Rodgers first. And he knew he had faults like everyone, he knew he could be as cruel and violent as the bullies he hated, he knew he could be judgemental like everyone else and as hot-tempered as any man.
Just because he was all those things didn't mean he was evil or bad, it didn't mean that he wouldn't save the world again or help civilians in need of aid, it didn't mean he couldn't still be kind and it didn't really make him any less of a hero in some people's eyes. It just made him human.