Steve fell in love easily.

He supposed it originated from the years of pining after women who wouldn't take a second glance at the short, scrawny kid who was almost guaranteed to be coughing into his handkerchief. He would fill the pages of his sketchbooks with intimate drawings of mundane and casual actions: hands fixing hair, foreheads creased in concentration, teeth peeking through upturned lips.

Bucky hadn't appeared to fall in love at all, Steve was always secretly jealous of his friend's ability to move from girl to girl with just his charm and good looks. Bucky never moped over any girl, if he saw one he liked he would ask her out, going on a few dates until he saw a different one. There were many times that Steve found himself a tiny bit in love with one of Bucky's dames, but he never dared tell Bucky that – he would just give him that big smile and tell him good luck as he watched his friend walk out the door.

There was one girl, Freddy Walker, that Steve was head-over-heels in love with for several years ever since Bucky had gone steady with her sister for a month or two. In Steve's eyes she had been perfect – he daydreamed about her eyes and the way the crinkled when she smiled and his sketch book was full of her hair in the wind or her hands gently cradling a cup of coffee. He silently pined after her, revelling in her occasional kind conversations that he felt were probably only shared through sympathy on her part. Bucky had found his sketchbook shrine to her and teased him mercilessly until Steve had admitted his crush. He didn't tell Bucky how it was so much more than a crush – that he was in love – that way he protected that part of his heart that was just hers, just Freddy's. It didn't help to protect him when he found out she was engaged a month later, to her childhood sweetheart. He never even got an invitation to the wedding – his silent adoration never even noticed by her.

He fell in love with a few more girls in the years that followed, more sketchbooks were filled with illustrations of them, each of them slipping away from him in turn before he could ask them out for a dance. And then there was Peggy.

Peggy was different than the others. She was stronger, she was more independent, she was scarier, and she took a second glance at Steve. He could never quite understand what it was that made her look twice, perhaps she saw the same thing that Dr Erksine had seen – something inside of the gaunt kid from Brooklyn that gave away what he had the potential to become. Even then she saw him for who he was, not what he was; to her he was always Steve, not Captain America and he loved her for it. He had fallen within moments of seeing her and had prepared for the almost inevitable one-sided yearning he had become used to. But even before he had changed into the bigger, more looked at version of himself she had talked to him more than another woman before her. Then he had changed and everything was different - but she wasn't. It became less subtle as the war raged on around them, glances turning into smiles turning into quiet words until there is no denying their feelings. But then it's over and he is frozen in ice for almost a decade – the only thing left of him and his heart the sketchbooks. His love for Peggy only truly revealed in the drawings of her scarlet lips and her fingers pulling the trigger at him in anger and jealousy. There were pages and pages of her shooting at him, a girl had never been jealous because of him before.

Peggy treasured these sketchbooks for many years, even after she had married and had kids of her own. They never joined the other books at the Captain America exhibitions, they were different and didn't belong with the illustrations of the other women that anyone could looked at on a day out to the museum. She kept them in her desk drawer until he came to visit her, decades after she had last seen him yet he looked exactly the same. Froom her bed she instructed him where to find them, watching his face rise and fall at the sight of the sketchbooks that had been so precious for so long.

"You have them?"

After Peggy he thought that was it, his days of falling in love were over. He had his chance and now there was no point in allowing himself even the possibility of love again – he just threw himself into his job. And as a superhero there were plenty of distractions. He pushed himself harder and further than before, testing his body to its breaking point. He worked and then he went home to his Brooklyn apartment alone to eat, sleeping fitfully until the early hours of the morning when his workout schedule kicked in once again. It was monotonous, broken only by visits to see Peggy and evenings spent at Stark Tower being laughed at by Tony.

He didn't even notice that she started to appear in his sketchbook. It started with a simple subconscious rendering of a hand clutching at a file; he didn't realise it was her until he opened it on that page a few days later, instantly snapping it shut at the realisation. He told himself that it was just a one off thing, that it was just his artistic eye picking out a beautiful line for him to attempt to recreate later. But when it happened again a few weeks later he realised that it was something more. He found himself drawing the curve of her neck in his free time (which was being spent more and more at the tower as he found himself craving something more than solitude). It was something hidden and private, a secret obsession that he had long forgotten. She hadn't spoken more than a few formal sentences to him and yet he found himself falling once more. It was so easy to slip into loving her – she reminded him of Peggy in some ways and yet she was so different. She was almost cold in the way she acted but he knew there must be some warmth under there somewhere; it slipped out sometimes when she wasn't paying attention, a smile here and a kind word there.

But she only looked at him once.

Later she would reveal to him that this was one of her greatest flaws, that she would look at someone once and decide who they were and what they could be – she had to, it was her job. Often people didn't surprise her; there had only been a few exceptions, she told him: Natasha, Phil, an agent she had trained a few years back.

And Him.

Because eventually she did look at him again. It took her a few months and even then it was reluctantly, but she could not deny that there was something behind that heroic yet sensitive front that she saw on her first glance. Women still only gave him one glance, but it was long and uncomfortable; Maria was not just another woman that Steve fell in love with, there was something final about their devotion to each other. She didn't stare, she didn't worship him, she took him as he was.

His sketchbook was no longer filled with hidden glances and secret details, it was a catalogue of her body and heart. He didn't have to hide his work from her and subsequently in-between his delicate illustrations of her naked body and of her peaceful sleeping face were messages from her. Her scrawling handwriting whispered her love for particular drawings or revealed what she was thinking while he drew them (he particularly likes the one that admits her craving for ice cream in one that depicts her in deep thought). The words weaved through his drawings and heart, intertwining them in every way. Pages were gently pulled out and framed in his once lonely apartment that had become their apartment.

His favourite was the one that took centre place on the mantel piece; their hands are clasped together, hers, delicate and scared, above his, smooth and powerful, their wedding rings catching the light just so.