Summer 1944

Same Old Love—S.G.

You and Steven have been at odds since the day the serum stopped your lungs from collapsing.

Two miracles, born weeks apart in different labs, made of the same science and the same impossible expectations. The papers love him—the Sentinel of Liberty, the good soldier, the moral center of the world. They don’t write about you. The SSR knows what to do with girls like you. Tuck them into the shadows, sharpen them until they can cut.

He’s hope. You’re strategy. That’s what they tell you, anyway.

You meet again that June, deep in occupied territory. The air tastes like dust and gunpowder, and you’ve spent forty-eight hours behind enemy lines gathering intel you aren’t supposed to have. Your thigh is bleeding, your knife hand is shaking, and your last transmission was a whisper through static.

He finds you in a ruined church, sunlight spilling through shattered stained glass as if the heavens are trying to apologize for everything.

“Couldn’t stay out of trouble for five minutes?” he mutters, breathless with relief and irritation.

You roll your eyes. “I did. This is minute six.”

He tries to hide a smile. He fails.

You’re too tired to argue, and he’s too worried to pretend he’s not. When he helps you to your feet, his hand meets yours with familiar warmth—steady, grounding, infuriating. He’s still too gentle with you, as if the serum didn’t rebuild every bone you ever broke.

“Stop babying me,” you snap.

“Stop nearly dying,” he fires back.

It’s the closest you two get to affection.

The mission becomes a tag-team effort, whether you like it or not. He takes the front corridors—loud, bright, righteous. You slip between the cracks—silent, quick, merciless. Every time you drag an enemy officer into the dark, you can practically hear Steve somewhere behind you muttering in protest.

Every time he charges a room shield-first like he’s immortal, you hiss under your breath, Idiot.

He offers to carry you each time you sprain your ankle because somewhere under all that loathing is empathy for the woman that wears heels on every single mission.

And then, one blistering July night, the two of you end up pressed against the same wall, waiting for the same patrol to pass. His shoulder brushes yours. Your breath catches. His doesn’t.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he whispers.

“I’m never alone,” you say, nodding toward him. “Unfortunately.”

He gives you that look again—the one that says you drive him crazy and also that he’d die for you without hesitation.

“Try not to get shot this time,” he murmurs.

“Try not to get captured,” you reply.

“Try trusting me.”

“Try earning it.”

The patrol passes. The moon shifts. The war rages on.

And the two of you keep circling each other like twin storms, equal and opposite, both convinced you’re right, both too stubborn to admit how deeply intertwined you’ve become.

You don’t love him. You don’t even like him. Not really.

But when the bullets start flying, you move together—two halves of the same impossible experiment, two weapons forged for the same war, two hearts beating in sync against your better judgment.

He tries not to notice the way your undershirt sticks to your skin after a long mission, and you’ll try to ignore the way something flares to life in your chest on the days when his brown Army uniform fits just right. He once watched you disassemble and clean your gun; slender fingers moving meticulously over metal and brass. Steven tried to look away. He failed. There are hard days. More often than not, recently. Days where your breaths mix and your gazes darken and the walls feel like they’re closing in.

You patch him up after missions, dragging alcohol across skin that’s too warm, too perfect, and he clenches the table so hard it cracks—because your fingers are shaking. He still occasionally calls you ‘ma’am’—in the fragile moments when it feels as if he tries to say your name it’ll burn his throat. And sometimes, it does. You pretend not to notice, to care. But you do.

You both do.

God help you both, it feels inevitable.