At least Kasey hadn't exploded like Ethan had when the bullets had gone into her.

I rose on shaking legs, seeing two red spots in her chest. Another was in the square of her forehead, weeping blood. Hope she doesn't detonate here.

Peering over the wall of the highway that separated it from the Pentagon, the fires seemed to lessen. The gunfire sounded less frequent. Things were ending on that front.

Focusing more on what was close, I saw Todd leaning against the barrier of the highway, eyes unfocused from the shock. My mouth parted.

He'd shot Kasey Clark.

I hunched over at feeling the burning in my chest grow. It didn't work. It only gave me an extra month or two. I'm still going to die. I bit down on my fist, eyes bugging at seeing it start to glow.

I could feel it taking over, my power. The heat spread through my veins, faintly burning me from the inside. It was only a matter of time before I would burst into flames.

"Kiara."

I tried to scurry away from Steve, as he was gingerly making his way to me, but the pain kept me rooted where I crouched. "Stay away from me!" I bellowed, hating to be shrill with him. "I don't want to hurt you."

"You won't, Kiara, I know it." He took a few steps closer to me. I shrunk away from him. "Don't make this difficult."

"If I explode, you'll die too. I can't let that happen." As Steve came closer, I retreated. The pain was barely tolerable, but tolerable enough to where I could stand on my own two feet and stumble away. I refused to take Steve with me. This was my condition, and nobody aside from me was to be taken by it.

Right now, he was the only one in danger. The people hiding in and behind their vehicles, all they would feel was the heat. All they would witness was a superhero dying at the hands of her own power.

"You can control it," Steve insisted gently.

"Have you not been paying attention?!" I screeched at him. I tried to pull my arms out of his grip once he got a hold of me. "Let me go, you idiot! You're making a mistake!"

"I know what I'm doing. You need to listen to me, Kiara."

"You've got it backwards; you need to listen to me." I tried to shove him away. "I'm going to die. I'm not letting you go with me!"

"Look at me."

My eyes flew up to Steve's face. I could see it on him, the determination to help me, the stubbornness to not leave my side. Gods, he was an idiot.

"You can control it." He flinched as he grabbed my face in his hands. "You need to relax, Kiara. Focus on my voice, look at me."

I screamed as the burning grew more intense. Relax, he says. I'd like to see him fight this. I wanted to cave in to the pain, but I stood my ground. If Steve wasn't willing to run off, I was going to stick it out with him and try to control the pain and the power before it overwhelmed me.

For his sake, and mine, I pulled away from Steve, shaking my head vehemently. He needed to get the message in his thick skull that he was being stupid and risking early death. It would be better if he was taking cover with the civilians, where he would be safe.

"Kiara!" I saw Todd leap onto the pavement.

"Not you too!" I snapped.

"No, listen! If you can subdue this long enough, we can get the answers out of Seth that we need!"

I blinked. "When did you get him into custody?"

"Yesterday."

"And you didn't think to say anything?" I screamed in pain again.

"Saving you was more important!"

"The fact that you—ah—captured Seth Joyce isn't something you just wait to tell me, Todd!"

"Saving the world comes first! Minor details come later."

"Minor detail?!"

"Todd, you need to go help the others," Steve insisted.

"You need to get your ass out too!" I scolded Steve.

"Todd, go. Now."

Todd didn't argue with Steve; he went to go help the fading warzone.

"Listen to me, Kiara." Gone was the Captain America mask, all I saw was Steve. His look of determination. His stubbornness. His idiocy. "Subdue it, like Todd said. Hang on just a little bit longer. Fight it, one last time."

I panted. "Steve, I don't think I can—"

"If your powers were becoming too much for you to handle, don't you think you would have noticed? The last time they almost overwhelmed you, your nose started bleeding. These freak-outs I've seen, no blood. This has to be connected to Seth somehow."

I wanted to believe what Steve was saying, but the fact that my veins were on fire and I felt I was ready to explode wasn't helping matters. It was very difficult to think straight.

"Come on, Kiara." Even as I buckled to my knees once again, Steve grabbed a hold of my arms despite looking as though he was in pain. "One last time."

I hunched over, shutting my eyes from the pain. Come on. The world will lose Cynder. Your friends will lose Kiara. You can't let them say goodbye to you. You can't. Make sure they don't have to. Loki, I really wish you'd found a spell or an elixir, something to help this. I...

The pain was fading. The sensation was dulling. I opened my eyes in astonishment as the pain was subsiding. I wasn't sure how I did it.

Eventually, the pain stopped. No fiery inferno was going to happen near the Pentagon. I wasn't going to destroy lives and a highway. Somehow, for some unknown reason, the pain had stopped. But how long will it last? What would be an awful moment would be that we'd all be tricked into thinking that things were fine, and then the next they weren't.

Thankfully, no such circumstance happened. There wasn't a sudden shot of burning pain through me, followed by a fiery explosion. For now. It still has the potential to happen at any time. It could be seconds from now, hours, days. As much as I wanted to worry about that right away, I was more enveloped in the moment of the fact that I wasn't dead.

"Kiara..."

I was at a total loss for words.

"You did it," Steve whispered.

"I-I don't know how." On wobbly legs, I got to my feet.

Steve's hands moved to my shoulders. "It's all right. It's over, Kiara. It's all over." He looked out towards the Pentagon, where now I heard silence instead of chaos.

"It's really over," I whispered. I tried to not think about the body count. How many experiments of Seth took out people within their blast radius.

Avoiding further grim thoughts, I pulled my eyes back to Steve's. In those blue eyes, all of the worry left me, as though he was sucking it from my soul.

Before I knew it, our lips met. I leaned back a bit, trying to collect my bearings. I wasn't sure if this was out of celebration or something different. Regardless of what it was, I wasn't complaining.

Steve was the one who kissed me first. I happily kissed him back. Something was writhing in my stomach. Butterflies was an understatement when it came to this feeling. Maybe a more accurate term was snakes. Or maybe dragons.

"I knew what I was getting into the moment I knew I felt something," he whispered against my mouth. "I'm glad we didn't lose you."

"Me too." I smiled abashedly. "Hey." I rubbed his swollen cheek tenderly with my thumb. "Don't look so embarrassed. You only just kissed the hottest woman on this earth."

"That was bad," he commented.

I chuckled. "I tried." For once, I seemed to be handling my fire crisis better than Steve. My brows creased over my eyes. "I thought that Peggy...?"

"She'll always be my first what-could-have-been," he admitted softly, avoiding my eyes briefly. "Things are different now. Believe me, this is shocking you just as much as it is me."

I quirked my mouth. "It's not so shocking. Some people could see it from miles away."

"Were you one of those said people?"

I felt heat rise in my face. "Do you want the truth or do you want me to say what you want to hear?"

"I'll take that as a no."

"Can you blame me? I trusted a freaking psychopath with my life. I'm not the best on picking up cues or gut feelings."

"Mm. Yeah, we'll need to work on that."

"So...now what?" I searched Steve's face.

"We're something more than friends and allies now."

"That's just the long way of saying we're together." My cheeks heated up. I could see the pink in Steve's cheeks too. "You're even cuter when you babble."

Who knew the aftermath of a battle could bring out people's strongest emotions? It took a freaking battle to get one of us to admit our feelings for the other.

"Hey, as much as we'd all love to see this tender moment, we're still not done." Steve and I turned our heads to see Tony in the Iron Man suit, helmet still over his face. I was sure he was smiling through that faceplate right now. "We've got to get you back in the right hands, firefly."

"Way to ruin a moment, Tony," I groaned.

"Just doing my job. Seriously, though. We got to get going, before you try and explode again."

I sighed. "All right. How's everything else?"

"The situation's under control. Both sides got dealt damage. Come on, you two." On that parting command, Tony shot up in the sky to circle back and finish up near the Pentagon building. "By the way, you know you're being watched and videoed, right?"

Oh. Right. The spectators who had become silent. The spectators who were now probably, as Tony said, videoing this. They had probably videoed the moment Steve and I had kissed. Great. More publicity. Just what we need. I wasn't sure I was going to like what was going to come out of the media.

"Think we'll take a lot of heat for this?" I asked Steve.

"For what? Saving the Pentagon?"

"No, for the...the kiss." I cleared my throat.

"If anything, we just gave people another thing to talk about for the next week or so."

"Oh, joy."

"But Stark's right, about our unfinished business," Steve admitted. "We need to figure your problem out, once and for all."

"Think you can help me stay cool until then?"

He smiled. "It'd be my pleasure, ma'am."

**[dies because of Stiara] I always knew those two would kiss in either the heat or aftermath of a battle.**