The rabbit along with the encrypted laptop where it stored its digitally-captured voice with limited infrared-camera capabilities had been gifts from Xavier's School for Gifted Children, delivered soon after Berry in a baby pink box with an elegant white ribbon, the sophisticated signature on the note Jean Grey. Moira had asked Darcy, sudden hacker extraordinaire and fellow dissident, to take a look at it, suspicious because Moira had met the current headmistress of Xavier's only the once when Jean was touring the Avengers facility. While she'd liked the cool, collected mutant with the incredibly kind eyes, the Sokovia Accords that had ripped apart Moira's life had also neatly folded the X-Men into the Avengers Initiative. She wasn't inclined, then, to trust the rabbit didn't actually belong to Fury.

"Nah," Darcy declared, dropping her feet from Moira's coffee table with a grunt when James bopped her on the top of the head, Natasha too busy rocking a cooing Berry to pay anyone else any notice. "It's a nice gift, not broadcasting anywhere. Now it is also extra special sparkly encrypted by Aunty Darcy." She winked at an exhausted Moira when James leaned forward to kiss the baby's forehead, both he and Tasha murmuring in Russian to the kicking, squirming Berry. "Let's just see someone try to mess with sweetness."

But they had, they had, and the bunny had been sent accidentally through the wash wrapped in Berry's beloved blankey almost a month ago and while Moira was rated above average with computers, she'd been unable to finesse the laptop into giving up its secrets. Darcy, loud, no-filter, protective Darcy, would be with James and Natasha, though, and Moira had to hold onto that as she leaned her cheek against the cold brick of the building where she'd made her life without Steve, closing her eyes and shivering as the chilly wind gusted past, her thick sweater, jeans, and boots no match for its autumn bluster. Autumn was usually her favorite time of the year, cooler weather and fuzzy socks and a real log fire in the grate that made a huge mess but soothed both she and Berry, curled up in blankets and reading a story.

Down that path, though, lay despair for beneath her panic and anxiety over Berry's kidnapping lurked the memories of the crackle and snap of another fire in another fireplace, Steve's hands on her bare skin after months of dancing around each other in the hall, on the stairs, in front of the mailboxes, pretending not to see each other only to culminate in his gasping, arching "Please," after that last, fateful meeting in the laundry room, his halting confession that he wasn't sure he could love someone else, her naïve belief it didn't matter.

Waking up with him in the throes of a nightmare, wrapping herself around his shivering, chilled body like a living blanket.

Laughing with him over another of the movies on his list as they ate popcorn and drank beer.

Staring at him across the breakfast table as he grinned at her, lopsided and teddy-bear adorable, his hair mussed by her fingers, his bare feet nudging hers and the terrible, sinking sensation that she'd already handed him her heart.

Crying as he lay so still in the hospital bed and him trying to comfort her, his hand on her face as she smacked his shoulder and admitted she loved him, dammit, and his smile so big and foolish as he called her 'Moira-mine' for the first time.

Holding his hand, his grip almost too tight, as he talked to the best friend he remembered and not to the asset that had almost killed him, Fury and a weary, worn Charles Xavier hovering in the background, watchful and worried and expectant.

The first time he told her he loved her, blood on his knuckles and at his temple, his suit torn, her gun still hot in her hand and her ankle likely broken as he bowed her back and kissed her to within an inch of her life, killer robots be damned, Falcon and the Soldier smirking in the background. "A part of me will always love Peggy," he whispered later, their foreheads pressed together as she curled in his lap. "But I deserve to be happy, and you make me happy."

Watching the stick turn pink, positive pink, pretty pink, and his face as bright and shiny as a new penny as he picked her up until she could almost touch the ceiling, his cheek on her belly.

Banned from meeting after inquiry after committee in Congress, at the United Nations, at the facility, with Fury and Xavier and the President and the NSA and the Premier and the King of some country no one had ever heard of, Steve Rogers losing ground to Captain America as the protestors in the streets blamed the mutants for the destruction and called for genetic testing and cleansing and incarceration. Is it your child, your neighbor, your wife? They are among us.

His face, hard and set and oh so fucking calm as he burned all her dreams, all her hopes, all they'd built together, to the ground, for the promise and the threat that if he just signed the Accords, Fury's hold on his reins would ensure politics would include, rather than exclude and vilify, mutants. That the X-Men would join the Avengers in protecting the world and register themselves based on Xavier's promise.

Giving birth alone, James and Natasha and Darcy coming too late, no one to hold her hand or remind her to breathe, no name to give their baby but his mother's and her own. No one to share in the joy or the work or the utter, unconditional love for the bright little light they'd made together.

Avoiding the news because no one, no one outside the charmed circle of the Avengers, had known she and Steve were together, were a couple, had a child, complete blackout on former SHIELD agent Moira Mackney, and so it was with great pride and an incredible amount of fanfare that the internet could declare Steve Rogers falling in love with Peggy Carter's great-niece "endearing", the two a "handsome, striking, successful power couple for the ages", hands clasped tightly at Peggy's funeral, Steve's eyes red and wet, grief written in the tremble of his lips, Moira's heart breaking for him, Sharon's smile somehow both sad and smug.

There had always been a strange sort of rivalry between the two women bred by their similar trajectories and fostered by their differences. Moira had been two years ahead of Sharon in the academy, Moira third in her class, Sharon first. Moira was good with languages, could speak five and read four more; Sharon was good at hand to hand, a practitioner of three different martial arts. They scored about even in weapons training, were equally skilled with electronics, could both lead a team and follow directions. Moira was better at triage, medical and operational, in the field; Sharon liked to blow things up and had an eye for detail. Moira didn't hate the lab and could decipher documents in a pinch; Sharon would rather gouge her eyes out with a spoon than be anywhere but in the thick of the action. Sharon had a famous family she denied; Moira was a foster kid spit out of the system at eighteen. When it came time to assign one of them to Steve, it was Moira only because Sharon had already been promised to the CIA on a joint op.

It had never occurred to Moira that perhaps Sharon had designs on the good Captain. Or that Steve, who loved so completely and selflessly and destructively, also loved based on proximity.

"Moira."

"Hello, Sharon."