title:
Waiting For This Moment To Arrivesummary:
In this exclusive longform piece for Vanity Fair, journalist and author Rebecca Stanhoff reports on the personal lives of the Avengers and their friends and family. Granted unprecedented access by the team, she discovers how relationships function within the team, how the significant others of the Avengers cope with their unusual situation and watches two starkly different people fall unexpectedly in love.characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Thor, Jane Foster, Bruce Banner, Clint Barton, Maria Hill, Natasha Romanov, Pepper Potts, Darcy Lewis, Peggy Carter, Nick Fury.
pairings: Maria Hill/Steve Rogers, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Jane Foster/Thor, Steve Rogers/Peggy Carter (past).
So, this story is labelled Maria/Steve, but that hasn't actually happened yet. As per my rant on Tumblr the other week, I find it somewhat annoying to find something in my reading queue that is not actually about the pairing I want to read, and where the references to it are, at best, glancing. However, this story mitigates it by being about the Avengers team (A1 team) as a whole, being by someone who actually
likes Maria/Steve, not monofocusing on one character - and particularly not on the character I least like - and, um, citing me as an influence. Flattery always helps. :D
It's technically post-AoU, but not everything in the movie has happened. eg. The fact that the journalist is writing about the original Avengers team obviously means that Banner hasn't run off.
So far, we're up to chapter 5 and it's enjoyable. I love the didactic tone of the fic; the way that the journalist is stating the facts and while some of it is clearly coloured by the journalist POV's personal view, it's simply put and shorn of the romanticism that frequently trips up most pairing fics for me.
The story is well-written, if there are SpaG errors they haven't thrown me out of the text, the characters are well-depicted, and the relationships are both true to canon and sensibly extrapolated.
If you enjoy the Avengers team, and you're looking for something Steve/Maria to read in the dearth that's rapidly becoming the Captain Hill fandom with the onset of Cap 3: Civil War, I have high hopes for this one. Especially the next chapter.
(I'm still waiting for the next chapter of I Came To Conquer to come out...)
