Captain America: Professional Best Friend

The Breaking Point

When the team gets back to New York after dropping off the Sokovian citizens, Emma makes her way off of the helicarrier quickly, wanting to get home right away and change out of her clothes that are stained with the blood of the injured. As she makes her way off of the craft, Maria catches her arm and says, "Good work today. Keep what I said in mind, okay?"

Emma nods and forces a smile on her face, replying, "Will do." As much as she knows she needs to talk with Steve about the past few days' events, she's afraid of what might happen. Emma tries to think through what she wants to say to him as she makes her way home and into the shower to clean up.

After listening to some music and clearing her head, Emma decides that it would be best if she just faced the situation head-on. "You're a grown-up, Emma, you have to do grown-up things sometimes like taxes and admitting to your dodgy past..." she mumbles to herself as she heads to Avengers Tower once again.

Emma makes her way into the training area where she sees Steve beating up on a punching bag. Her heart is racing and her limbs feel slightly numb as she approaches him. "I thought I'd find you here," she says quietly.

Steve looks up from the punching bag and wipes his brow, mumbling, "Yeah, it's been a day."

Emma nods, "Ain't that the truth?" She sits on one of the boxes near him and asks tentatively, "Can we...can we talk?"

"As your captain or?" Steve asks while taking the wraps off his hands.

"No, I mean...maybe? I dunno. It's just..." Emma stammers. She begins to fiddle with the ring on her thumb and she looks at it as she fumbles through the rest of her words, "With what Ultron said about me, about my past... ever since then I can't help but notice a bit of a rift between us. And I mean I get that there has been mission after mission, but we usually talk during and after those and I just can't escape the feeling that something's wrong.

I know it probably came as a bit of a shock to hear that I used to do some...not so legal things, but you have to believe me, I had a reason and I have not once thought about going back to that life again. I put the past behind me when SHIELD took me in. At that time there was just a lot of-"

"Emma," Steve interrupts her, putting his hand up to stop her.

"There's so much more to the story than the surface, just trust me," Emma tries but he holds up his hand again.

"See, that's the thing, Emma. Trust. Trust is something we should have as teammates and as friends," Steve's voice raises a bit in frustration. "What makes me upset is that you've hidden this from me for all these years! I don't care that you broke the law, I have too, but how can I trust you if I don't know who you really are? If I know nothing about your past?"

Emma opens her mouth to say something back to explain herself, to explain how there's more than meets the eye to what happened, but her heart had just shattered into a million little pieces at Steve's words. She can't find anything to say other than, "I'll just see myself out then..."

As Steve watches Emma jump up off the box she was sitting on and head for the door, he fully realizes what he had said. "Shit..." he whispers to himself, closing his eyes. Before she reaches the door, Steve tries calling out for Emma, but the door closes right as he finally calls her name.

He didn't mean to be so harsh on her, he was just so frustrated from the events of the week that everything just exploded. In his frustration, Steve turns to the punching bag he was hitting a few minutes prior and punches it off of its stand in one go.

Steve debates going after Emma and smoothing things over to repair their friendship and whatever could have come out of it but decides against it. He was still angry at the fact that she used to go behind the law and didn't tell him about it. Why didn't she tell him? He thought she trusted him...