EXCHANGE INTERFACE

Seeing as it's the week that Captain America: The Winter Soldier comes out in cinemas through Australia and the US, I thought I'd pimp a couple of my favourite Maria/Steve fics.

There aren't very many of them. 118 works on AO3 under the Steve/Maria pairing tag.

And that's including all the stories in which it's a secondary pairing, or the ones which could be subtitled 'Everyone's Paired With Someone, Oh Look, There's Nobody For Steve, Let's Put In A Reference To Maria Hill' or 'I'm Writing This Slash Pairing With Steve But We Need Him To Fail The Heterosexuality Test'. And, of course, the 'Let's Infect Maria With Pollen And Have Her Throw Herself At Guys Who Aren't Interested For Laughs' story. (There's only one. Thank God.)

Of those 118 works, I've written 36. That's over 25% of the Steve/Maria fics on AO3. At one point, I'd written nearly 50%. That was a truly terrifying point in time - the realisation that I was fuelling this ship all on my lonesome.

It's gotten better since then.

Chiseled Out Of Brick – brandywine421

He was a grown man, hell, he was a superhero. Asking a girl out for a drink wasn't that hard. It wasn't rocket science or espionage or math or divine intervention - it was just asking a girl a question. Out loud.

If I had any complaint about this story, it's that the ending didn't quite finish on the strong note I was hoping for. However, the rest of the story is A-plus on the characterisation, story development, and relationship dynamic.

Basically, how Steve and Maria start off being fuck buddies and kind of fall in love along the way to managing the Avengers, rescuing Bucky, and keeping Maria from getting killed.

I have a thing for the stories where the Avengers come around to being on Maria's team; the ones where they don't trust her any more than she trusts them, but they get to it in the end. And this one is a doozy from start to finish, while showing exactly how awesome and BAMFy Maria is.

The introduction of Bucky is beautifully tense – die-hard Clintashas will have to read it through one eye squinting: it's Natasha/Bucky with a side-serving of past Clint/Coulson, but it's still pretty damn good.

She's written a sequel where Steve and Maria have a baby; which is self-confessed fluff all the way.


can't carve a whistle by irnan

Maria Hill's never found it easy to explain why she became a SHIELD agent, but she knows why she stays one.

This is the story that started it all off for me – and, I suppose, therefore started it off for a lot of other people, since I seem to have converted a bunch of people to Maria/Steve over the last two years.

I went looking for fic about Maria Hill, and this was one of the few that had her listed immediately after the pairings list. Most of the time, she appeared after all the Avengers, Nick, Phil, Darcy Lewis, and assorted other characters.

It's fairly safe to say that 'A Woman Of Edges' and 'Give A Girl A Moment' both had significant roots in this story.

I liked the idea of Maria having a family: people to ground her, to give her that anchor to why she's doing this – something personal. (And I'm tired of heroes/heroines who have no family attachments. At all. There's a rant in here about liminal heroes, but I'll leave that for another post.) The scene in 'A Woman Of Edges' where Steve meets Maria's family took a few cues from the scene in here where Maria's family meets Tony Stark. And Maria's conversation with Steve about the nature of their work is echoed in her thoughts on personal responsibility in 'Give A Girl A Moment And She'll Take You For All You've Got'.

Sadly, irnan only ever wrote two Steve/Maria fics, and the Steve/Maria was more of an incidental side thing than an actual focus on their relationship.


there is nothing like a dame by Anonymous

Very loosely based on an avengerkink prompt that wished for Steve going down on all the USO girls. Somehow it ended up being more about the road to Steve going down on all the USO girls, how he learned to pleasure a woman, and how these skills do not go unused in the twenty-first century.

First note: Not everyone will be able to read this fic, the author has restricted it – presumably only to AO3 users (there's a little padlock next to the anon'd author).

It's Steve/Maria and Steve/OFC – lots of Steve/OFC, in fact, and basically about how Steve gets his sexual education before he becomes Captain America and how he and Maria end up in a relationship. It's hot, it's pretty cute, and even if the author hasn't labelled it Steve/Maria, there's definitely an element whereby they're developing an actual relationship – even if that relationship is only 'fuckbuddies'. An excellent smutfic.