Work Text:
It's embarrassing, really, especially after all those accusations that women are just too weak for this line of work.
But honestly, let's see how you handle walking into your house after a long day of trying to force thick American military minds to think rationally only to find a dead man sitting on your sofa, giving you the same smile that had drawn you to him even back when he was a clueless, undersized kid you were afraid to breathe on lest he snap in two.
Of bloody course she faints.
He's lucky. Normally she would have pulled a gun.
Steve's story is absolutely impossible. She thinks that's why she believes it.
That, and he's always been a terrible liar.
He's emphatic that she can't use anything he tells her. She hates to tell him that what he's saying isn't very useful anyway. He wasn't thawed until well after the turn of the next century, and being Captain America in a vastly changed world with its vastly changed threats prevented him from getting more than a general historical overview of the last—next?—eighty years. Generalities don't help in her line of work.
She doesn't need him to tell her that Korea and Vietnam will turn into battlegrounds; anybody who's seen the intelligence could guess that much, even now. The Soviets will fall but make a massive mess first? Hardly a surprise. Assassinations? Leaders get assassinated all the time, and not just by the bad guys. That the Middle East will become so important is a little surprising, but it's not like Britain and France divvied the place up between them just for fun, and resources determine power. Terrorists? Terrorists have been with humanity as long as war, only their weapons change.
Aliens? Superheroes, plural? Men on the moon? Computers that fit in your pocket?
The man just traveled through time. Everything else sounds like a minor achievement.
Even his awkward revelation that she develops something he calls Alzheimer's—some kind of senility, she thinks, she's not familiar with the specific term—isn't terribly surprising. Her father was starting to have memory problems before the Blitz took him.
He's very nervous about telling her things that he thinks might change the future—even though he then turns around and says his scientist friend said the future can't be changed, it's all very confusing—so she lets it slide. It's not what she's most interested in, anyway.
No, she doesn't want to know about all the terrible things that happen to the world. She wants to know about his life, about his friends, wants to know that he has people he can trust when he goes back. She commits the names to memory like they're contacts for a mission: Tony and Natasha, Clint and Bruce, Thor and Sam and Wanda. She laughs at his tales of their downtime antics and holds him when he finally gives in to his grief over the ones he lost and silently wonders how even he handled so much without breaking.
That first night, he tells her this can only be for a few days.
Days turn into weeks, and he keeps finding reasons not to go back.
She thinks maybe he doesn't want to. He's assigned himself one last mission, to make sure they know where Natasha is buried, but that news hardly requires Captain America to deliver. And from the sound of it, life since he thawed has been a nonstop series of disasters.
Maybe he just needs a holiday. It doesn't sound like he's had one since 1943.
She buys him some art supplies and lets him have the shed in the back of the yard as a studio, mainly to keep him out of the kitchen. Men in the future apparently still don't cook. It's a good thing she can afford a housekeeper, or they'd starve.
When he accidentally sells a piece—a sketch of one of the alien worlds he's seen, mistaken by a publisher friend of hers as merely imaginative and perfect for a science fiction magazine he's starting—Peggy thinks it's time to look into a more permanent alias. Not all customers are going to be willing to pay in cash.
Maybe even more than an alias.
"No, it has to be Steven."
"That's not exactly hiding!"
"Steven is a rather common name, you know. I've got three in the front office."
"But—"
"Also, we're bound to slip up if we don't. And that will just draw more attention."
"Peggy—"
"Hanrahan went missing in the war. I know for a fact that he died and he won't be coming back, but somehow his records were never updated, so he's MIA. I've looked into it; he has no family left. It's perfect."
"Are you even listening to me? I've got to go back. And you— I mean—"
"Steve." She sets down the pen and looks up at him. "You talked to me, you say you knew my great-niece, you say I was important to a whole lot of people you knew, you say you were a pallbearer at my bloody funeral. What's my future husband's name?"
He gapes at her like a very adorable stranded fish.
Nobody at work believes it. And everybody wants to meet her husband. Half want to know if he's good enough for her, half want to know who thawed the Ice Queen.
Honestly, you'd think she grew a second head or something.
The problem with this outpouring of concern is that everybody here either met Captain America during the war or saw him in the newsreels, and nobody on this end of time has had eighty years to fuzz their memories. The beard and dye help, but these are trained agents, half of them former spies and/or assassins. He will be recognized.
She pretends to ignore the whispers of "bitch" and "shrew" when she lays down the law: There will be no meeting the new husband. He will not be coming to the office parties they periodically have to pretend that they are, in fact, a normal government office. There will be no unannounced visits to her house.
Oh, and one more thing: In the office, her name is still Carter.
Howard Stark doesn't just want to meet her new husband, he wants to pay for a grand honeymoon and possibly throw a wedding celebration bigger than Princess Elizabeth's and buy them a house. She hasn't seen him this excited since somebody found half a gram of vibranium overlooked in a storage cupboard.
She orders Jarvis to find Howard a wife. Quick.
They're good years. No, it's not the life she dreamed of when she was a little girl, back when the most any girl could hope for was a nice house and a decent husband.
It's better. So much better.
Not perfect. She hates the way he makes the bed; a home is no place for hospital corners. He can't stand the rebellious mess she leaves in the bathroom. Neither one of them can cook. Each swears the other snores.
She lets work take up entirely too much of her life, which is a point of contention until she becomes Director and finally has a mostly stable schedule.
Sometimes the weight of the years just catches up to him, like on the night he breaks and tells her what really happened to Sergeant Barnes. For days after, he retreats into the workshop and doesn't come out, working on portrait-sketches from memory or a painting of the planet where his friend died.
And even though he says the future can't be changed, even though he says he's okay with it, that he accepted all the limitations when he came here, she knows he spends entirely too much time torturing himself with thoughts of what could be fixed, if he only tried. That's why he didn't tell her about Barnes from the beginning, why he tried to keep that particular torment to himself.
He's terrified that he'll give in to the temptation to change things, that if he does, it will destroy everything, and he makes her promise, more than once, that she'll stop him if he ever tries. It may be the only real fear she's ever seen from him.
They're good years, but they're not always easy.
He's very insistent that he's left the superhero business behind. If he lets any of it in, he says, he'll be tempted to try to change things that he shouldn't.
She doesn't point out the obvious: the hero business is not necessarily about wearing fancy outfits, carrying a shield, and taking on world-destroying villains.
He really, truly, honestly doesn't understand the kind of impact he has just by living in their neighborhood, and she thinks she loves him that much more for it.
Within the first year, everyone knows, if there's a problem, you come to their house. It's not to see her—half their neighbors have no idea what she does and the ones that have an inkling are scandalized, but they overlook it for Steve's sake.
He gives art lessons and sympathy to the neighborhood kids. Before they get a real fire department, he's the one who charges in to make sure everybody's out. He gently talks the shell-shocked amputee at the corner back into the world and manages not to call the poor man "Bucky" once.
When the professor two doors down is caught up in the communist witch-hunt, it's Steve who defies the shunning and goes to their house and invites them over. It's Steve who catches the would-be vandals and gives them—and the rest of the neighborhood—a lesson in civics and civility at the top of his lungs. The scene repeats fifteen years later, only it's the first black couple to move into this area.
God only knows how many abusive husbands he's scared back onto the straight and narrow. Once she actually sees him rescue a kitten—though in his defense, that little girl's crying really is nerve-wracking.
She loses count of the times she comes home and finds two or three small children camped in the living room, because there's an emergency and their parents couldn't find babysitters, but everybody knows Steve will watch the kids if he's home.
He doesn't need a mask and shield to be a hero. He just is one.
The headache has settled in behind her eyes, but she doesn't even stop in the house for an aspirin, just goes straight back to Steve's workshop. She's later than usual, so all the kids have already headed home, though today's projects are all hung up on the empty wall to dry.
The light is best when his back's to the door, so there's a mirror mounted in the far corner; he glances up at it when he hears the door open behind him. "Hi, honey."
She takes a second look at the painting. That cliff looks familiar, though she doesn't remember a sea of bright tents at the bottom, and the eclipsed sun seems to have vanished. "Isn't that—"
"Vormir," he confirms, his voice flat. That canvas has come in and out of storage for the past twenty years, like the sheaf of sketches that lives in his nightstand. It's one of the few projects he can't just finish and leave alone. "One of the Debbies saw it, thought it was Mount Sinai, told her preacher, and he wanted it for their new building." He shrugs. "I can't get the light on the clouds right, anyway. Maybe we don't have the paints yet." She can see his eyes move, darting towards the collection on that far wall—pencil drawings of people she only knows as names, except for one, and that image of Bucky is so changed from the brash young man she knew it might as well be a stranger. "I'll start a new one for her."
She nobly refrains from telling him that he just said the painting was good enough for God but not the memory of Natasha.
"So," he says, briefly meeting her eyes via the mirror again. "Rough day?"
"Lockdown for possible infiltration. Two men, one impersonating a captain, the other hugging Howard Stark."
His hand jerks, leaving a smear of paint where he doesn't want it, and he swears and dives for a rag. "That's not right," he says, "it's not—"
She sighs inwardly, then goes over to the bank calendar on the wall that hasn't been changed in three months and fixes it.
"Oops," he says sheepishly. "I was going to try to be out of town today. Just to avoid—"
"They're gone. The Tesseract is already back in place—which I do appreciate. It's just—" She hesitates. "Steve, in your other life, did you ever meet Hank Pym?"
He puts down the brush, starts wiping off his hands. "Just once. Not for long. He came to the memorial for Tony—the family one, the one Pepper had for just us. I don't think he was very comfortable around us." He frowns. "You know, now that I think about it, Scott and Fury both said something about how his wife had to make him come to the service, but.... I had other things on my mind. Why?"
She rubs her temples. "I know you said you had to steal the particles because everybody who knew how to make them was gone, but when you had them back, while you were getting ready to return the stones, did it never occur to any of you to have him make some extra?"
To his credit, he realizes the mistake immediately. "Oh, shit."
"To put it mildly. He and Howard are at each other's throats all the time anyway—they both think they're God's gift to science—but now he's convinced Howard is trying to sabotage him, and you don't want to know what I had to promise to keep him from resigning on the spot."
"I am so sorry, Peggy— I should have—"
"Just tell me one thing, Steve."
"Absolutely."
"Was it you that made the prank call, or the other guy?"
"Me," he says, looking confused.
She laughs. "The best you could come up with was radioactive mailmen?"
Steve makes a decent career out of his art, though she's never absolutely certain that he wouldn't rather sign his work "Steve Rogers" than "Steve Hanrahan." He gets commissions, more than a few, and even does a few shows, though he's very careful that they're never on this side of the country where anyone they know or anyone from the main office might be tempted to visit. She never has any reason to suspect either their authenticity or the timing.
That is, until Howard and Maria's baby is born, and Steve abruptly decides he needs to go to Africa in search of some kind of special pigment. He let himself be beat up by half of New York when he was younger, spent a year chasing a crazy man through Nazi territory without once faltering, but the words "Anthony Stark" on a baby-blue birth announcement send him running.
"For God's sake, Steve, it's a baby, not a bomb." He panics much less about bombs.
He just stares at her. "The last time I saw that baby," he finally says, his voice quiet and rather dangerous, "he was grown, he was my friend, and he had just died."
"It's been twenty years!"
"It's been twice that since my mother died. You think that doesn't still hurt?"
She has no answer for that.
He's gone for a month.
He calls to tell her he landed safely, and that's all she hears from him. She spends three weeks wondering if it finally became too much for him, if the sudden trip is just an excuse to go back to his own time. She doesn't think he'd leave without saying goodbye, but this is the first time his future and present lives have collided like this.
But she wakes up one Saturday morning, and he's downstairs, murdering some perfectly innocent eggs and bacon.
And she has to admit, the new purple pigment makes a rather impressive paint.
Most people get to be happy if their nephew goes to college close by.
She doesn't, not for long. Never mind that Jason is years from even getting married, the idea of meeting Jason's offspring outright spooks Steve.
He wants to just vanish. For a man who's so damned good at tactics, he just doesn't get what kind of fallout that will have. A vanished wife would cause issues for a male Director, though mostly in the form of a brief police investigation; a vanished husband will bring up every possible accusation that she's too emotional for the job, too vulnerable to blackmail.
She almost has the plans in place. It'll have to be soon, Steve's getting antsy about spending any time with Jason and that's becoming hard to explain.
She already set up his apartment, on her last work trip. Except for holiday trips to see her family in England, he's not been back to Europe since the war. Nobody looks twice at an art lover in Paris. Maybe he can even find what he needs to finish the cliff at Vormir, be it inspiration or technique or paint.
It takes some doing to get the paperwork in place, especially doing it outside the normal channels, but she didn't spend all those years as a field agent for nothing. She leaves work early one afternoon to pick it up, then heads home to surprise Steve with it.
She's just gotten the car into the garage when she hears the gunfire.
She finds him lying at the open front door, blood soaking the floor. There's a hole in his leg and blood spreading in a crimson stain across his shirt.
She whips a belt around his leg, trying to cut off some of the blood, praying that bullet didn't actually hit the femoral, and then has to run back to the kitchen to get to the phone. One thing she cannot wait for is those portable phones he's talked about.
She grabs the first-aid kit on the way back. "Quit moving," she orders, landing on her knees in a puddle of entirely too much blood, and starts pressing layers of gauze against the holes in his shirt. Nothing hit the heart, clearly, but there's blood on his teeth and that's not a good sign. That means stomach or lungs—
"Bucky," he whispers.
"Hang on, the ambulance is coming— Hang on, Steve, you have to, remember, somebody has to tell them where Natasha is—"
He grabs her hand. "Bucky did this."
She realizes what he's saying. The Winter Soldier, the ghost assassin. Why would anybody send an assassin after Steve? In the future, perhaps, but now? He's an artist, but not a famous one; they're comfortable, since she lets Howard's people handle their money, but not the kind of wealthy that would make them a target. It would make so much more sense to send a killer after—
Oh.
Oh.
She's going to kill them. Whether he lives or dies, she is going to find these people and tear them apart.
It's sheer luck, nothing more. She's not panicked—Steve would say she's just too damn practical to panic—but she also doesn't have the immediate presence of mind to order the ambulance to take him to any specific hospital. Her husband is choking on his own blood. She's allowed to not be an agent for five fucking seconds.
But when they rush the gurney straight to the operating theater, she hears a vaguely familiar name being paged, and a few moments later, a more familiar face runs past her. She knows this surgeon. He's worked with SHIELD.
More importantly, he has high-level clearance and she can trust him. He's helped them fake several deaths.
Steve makes it out of the first surgery, albeit on a respirator—the blood was from the lungs, not the stomach—and she corners the surgeon and tells him what she needs. He doesn't argue.
He's very convincing—down to blood spatters on his scrubs—when he comes into the waiting room to give the bad news from the second "surgery" to her entourage of concerned neighbors and suspicious agents.
Steve goes to a much-larger hospital in the city under another assumed name while she has to play the toughest role of her working life: The sudden widow.
She suffers through funeral arrangements and an outpouring of sympathy and flowers wondering if she's going to be doing this again in secret in a week. Her family flies in from England, and the neighbors won't leave her on her own. She can hardly go to the bathroom by herself, let alone slip away at night to go see him. She has to rely on the reports from the baby agent she's put in charge, a kid so raw she's never even seen his file. He was a name she didn't recognize, a name who had no ties to her, and that had been the most important part.
She's spared the awkwardness of a fake burial, at least, telling everyone that he wanted cremation and he'll eventually be buried with her. They buy it, of course, although she still has to fend off some offers of cemetery plots.
Then, finally, she can escape. She takes a leave of absence, tells everybody at work she's going to England with her family, tells her family she's going someplace quiet out west, and goes straight to his side.
Five surgeries, leaving a trail of baffled anesthetists who can't figure out why it took such massive amounts of drugs to keep him under. One of the bullets broke his arm, another shattered part of his hip. Nobody tells her, but when she checks his chart, she finds that he had to be resuscitated twice. His survival has the doctors claiming divine intervention, and these are not particularly religious men.
The serum. It has to be. There were escapades during the war that should have crippled him that he was over in a couple of days. It's still working well enough to save him.
Still, when Steve finally looks up at her from his hospital bed and his eyes focus and he recognizes her, and he makes a groggy crack that he wanted to see his funeral, she seriously considers hitting him.
Whether it's a factor of how much damage there was, or of sheer age—if you count his years in the ice, he's more than 150—the serum can only do so much to heal him. He's going to be scarred this time. That leg may never work quite right again, and there was some damage to his vocal cords when they had him intubated.
It saved him, as it has so many times, but it's also turning this into a long, painful process. Just as they had trouble keeping him under for the surgeries, none of the painkillers they give him have much effect. It makes him something of a novelty, doctors bringing residents in to look at him, and she gets him out of the hospital and to a safehouse as soon as she dares. If she can't take away the pain, she can at least make sure he's more comfortable. And get him some real food—he's losing weight at an appalling rate on a hospital diet meant for normal invalids. The last time he was this thin, he was a foot shorter.
Doctors she trusts still come to check on him, and she's hired a couple of nurses to help with dressing changes and such, but at night, it's just the two of them. Even so, it's a couple of weeks before she can make herself say the words that come out like an accusation. "I don't understand how you didn't know this was coming."
He sighs, and looks away. "Because," he says finally; his voice cracks on the words, but she can't tell yet if it's emotion, or just another manifestation of his damaged throat. "I— When I found out you got married, I was happy to know you'd had a good life, but...it wasn't with me. I knew he was dead, but.... I didn't ask for details. I didn't want to know, Peggy. I'm sorry."
"Even when you decided to come back?"
He laughs, and that makes him cough—but as much as it might hurt his throat, he's not bringing up blood anymore. "That was a last-minute thing. Literally. The night before I left. Bucky convinced me. We decided on a year, and the only thing I really had time to look up was where you were living."
"Wait. Bucky convinced you? You weren't—"
"We were toasting people who were gone, and I threw it out there. It was some of Thor's stuff from Asgard, it can actually get me a little drunk."
For such a smart man, he can certainly be dense. "Steve. You're not listening. Bucky told you to come back."
"Yeah?"
"Steve, Bucky just tried to kill you."
"The Soldier," he corrects, "not Bucky."
"I understand the distinction, but you said you got Bucky free. Does he not remember anything of those years?"
"No. He remembers everything. He's said so, more than—" His eyes go wide, and he tries to sit up. "Holy shit." She pushes him back down. "This must be why," he mutters.
"Must be what?"
"Why he made me promise," Steve says softly.
"Who—"
"The information about where you were— I didn't have access to it. He did. And he wouldn't tell me until I swore not to try to change anything. He made me swear, on— Made me swear that I wouldn't try to change anything."
So it hadn't been just fear. He'd made a promise. Steve is a man of his word. If anyone knows that—and if anyone knows exactly what to make Steve swear on to make that oath carry even more weight—it's Bucky. "And if he'd told you why—"
"I wouldn't have come in the first place," he says. "He knows I would have stopped the whole thing right then. I would have told Bruce and found somebody else to bring back the stones. Made Thor take back Mjolnir. I wouldn't—"
"You would have never risked being tempted to stay." Bucky did know his friend.
"It was only supposed to be a couple of days," he admits ruefully. "Not a lifetime. God. He knew." There's a little hurt in his voice. Part of that may be just the physical pain—more than he's dealt with in a long time—but she thinks there's an element of betrayal there as well.
"Steve," she says, gently, "he thought you died." He had to; nobody hires the Winter Soldier to wound someone. "But at some point, he must have realized how long you'd lived here." He frowns, trying to follow. "He let you come back so you could have that life."
It's not the cozy domestic bliss of before, but in a way, the years after his "death" are easier. She and Steve never really went anywhere together, other than England for holidays with her family, so people are quick to write off her frequent trips to Europe as her trying to get away from uncomfortable reminders of her husband. They think she sells the house for the same reason.
Once there, time and anonymity work their magic. She can be somebody other than the Director of SHIELD.
"Etienne's" Parisian neighbors are as enamored with and protective of him as their old neighborhood, for many of the same reasons. Half those neighbors assume he's gotten married and greet her as such, the other half— Well, they are French. They're harder to scandalize than Brits and Americans.
And if sometimes she gets turned around on the way home from the store and has to ask for directions, well, Paris is a confusing city and French is fiendishly difficult to read, all those silent letters.
Once she retires, she spends hardly any time in the States. Certainly not enough to justify the apartment she still keeps in Washington, but SHIELD insists on it. She's still needed occasionally, of course—she knows too much about SHIELD, about where the bodies are, in ways that aren't always in the files. Some of their older connections won't deal with anyone but her. And sometimes she has to make unexpected visits to politicians to politely remind them why cutting SHIELD's funding would be a spectacularly bad idea. The new guy's good, but for some reason he balks at walking into a Senator's office without an invitation, and he is entirely too polite when dealing with the White House.
She comes back for other reasons, more unpleasant. When Howard and Maria die, she is obligated, as both their friend and Howard's longtime coworker, to attend their funeral.
Without Steve, naturally. It's bad form to crash a funeral with an uninvited corpse.
She studies their son, who she hasn't actually seen since he was a baby. Howard and Maria would have let her play Aunt Peggy to little Anthony as much as she wanted—and they both tried, God rest their souls—but that would have been entirely too rough on Steve, and by the time Steve "died," the child had been shipped off to a boarding school.
Tony's now a young man who's desperately trying to pretend his parents' deaths don't affect him, and doing so in a way that would make Howard simultaneously infuriated and proud as the proverbial peacock. She knows he's smart—Howard's a terrible braggart, and that's nothing compared to what Steve's told her—but she also knows from Maria that he's not exactly the responsible type, that Howard has made mistakes and their son has rebelled by, well, turning into another Howard.
Howard never was much for irony.
Most of the funeralgoers aren't even bothering to talk to Tony. The ones who do tend to not talk to him long. An already-sharp wit has become downright acidic today, and she estimates he's about two and a half sheets to the wind. Whoever forced him to come and play nice for the sake of society and the family business should be taken out into the street and shot.
She's never considered herself to have particularly strong maternal instincts, but she has to seriously fight the desire to physically drag the poor boy out of this madhouse, take him back to the Stark mansion, have the cook stuff him full of his favorite comfort foods, and let him just have some time to himself to mourn.
She manages to resist. Even when the temporary Stark Industries regent tries to bully the child into giving an impromptu eulogy and is righteously punched in the nose.
She can see it, she thinks. Beneath all that rage and grief and sarcastic bluster, she can see the shadow of the man Steve's told her so much about. He only needs the right forge.
He's not Steve—who is?—and probably couldn't be like Steve if he wanted, but she thinks there may be worse people to whom one could entrust the safety of the world.
She leaves her suitcase at the apartment when she heads for the airport. She doesn't realize this until somewhere over the Atlantic.
She doesn't think anything of it. It's been a rough week.
They travel a lot. It's been long enough that he's not as worried about running into old war buddies—or old enemies—anymore. She convinces him to go to the ceremonies for the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. They even take a trip through what was once Nazi territory, retracing his missions to destroy Schmidt's factories.
Obviously, travel is more fun when you're not in a war, but there's something about it being just them and the memories they both share and the freedom to take whatever road they want.
They see Europe, Australia, part of Africa, some of South America, most of Asia.
By unspoken agreement, Russia is never on the list.
A man comes out of the bathroom, limping a bit. "What are you doing in here?" she shrieks, reaching for the gun that should be under the pillow. It's not. Who took her gun?
He gives her a sad look, blue eyes shadowed. "Peggy," he says quietly, and the voice is familiar, soothing—
In an instant, he's no longer a threatening stranger, but Steve.
She's stunned by the betrayal of her own mind. She thought he meant she'd forget where she put the milk, or get lost trying to get to the grocery store, or leave the stove on. She never imagined that she wouldn't be able to recognize him.
"Oh, God," she says. "I'm sorry, Steve, I just—"
"It's okay." He sits down on the edge of the bed, pulls her close. "We knew it would happen."
"That doesn't mean I have to like it," she grumbles into his shoulder.
He squeezes her tighter, a soft hitch in his breath.
These preparations are slower. Not easier. They're a series of small, exquisitely painful goodbyes, complicated by her increasingly errant memory.
She has a complete breakdown in the middle of it, childish as it is. Selecting a nursing home is a special kind of torture, and she's doing it on her own because she knows better than to ask. He won't tell her if she does. They both know he won't risk changing anything.
He lets her yell, then holds her until she falls asleep.
The next morning, he hands her one of the brochures and says, "This is where you were when I found you after I thawed. It's nice."
"You know," he says one evening, "I can stay. I can just live through till it comes back around."
She knew this was coming. The worse she gets, the more it triggers his protective instincts. He can't help it. "And what are you going to do?" she asks instead, applying logic, the way she always does.
"I have a passport. I can apply for—"
"Jason is going to be helping with my affairs, and he will recognize you, Steve."
"Then I can—"
"What? Linger in the shadows for the next twenty years? Dodge yourself in the halls at the home? Duck your nieces and nephews? Are you going to help yourself carry my coffin at my funeral?"
"Peggy—"
"You don't know how long you have." There's no telling exactly how long the serum can keep him alive. As it is, he still looks younger than he should. Younger than she does, certainly, and she gets complimented all the time on that particular quirk of genetics. Nevertheless, he took a lot of damage from the attack—his voice and leg still aren't quite what they were—and it's another twenty years or more till the day he steps into that time machine. "You don't know that you'll survive the Snap on this side. You don't know that you'll survive until the Snap. Hell, you don't know that you'll survive to the day they thaw you!"
"That doesn't matter."
"It bloody well should!"
"Yes, I'm great at always doing what I should," he retorts. "Like putting back the stones and returning promptly."
That makes her laugh, which was probably his intention—but she's not going to let it distract her. "Steve. I know you've had a good life here—"
"I have a great life," he corrects quickly.
"—but you should spend the end of it in the time where you belong, with the people who can understand you."
"You understand me."
"I know, but.... I'm just me, Steve. And I'm fading." She touches his face gently. "Have you thought about what it must have done to Bucky to think he killed you? To let you step on that machine and go back in time without warning you, because he knew you wouldn't come see me if he did? Don't you think he'd want to know you survived? What would you have given to know he survived that fall?"
"Don't." It's barely a whisper.
She ignores him. Wife's prerogative. "You said you wanted to tell Clint and Bruce about Natasha's grave, not just arrange for a letter to maybe find them. No letter is going to explain the painting. And no letter is going to convince Sam that he deserves to be Captain America. That's going to take you, and it's going to take more than one telling. You're the Avengers' institutional memory, Steve, they need you. They can't lose Tony and Natasha and you."
"Peggy, I don't want to leave you alone."
"I'm not alone. I have Jason and Melissa to help me. And you'll visit, when you wake up."
"That's not—"
"Steve," she says, and waits for him to meet her eyes—and uses the words she's been saving for this day. "This is my choice."
She dreams a lot. Not always when she's asleep. It's just so much easier to drift than to fight to stay in the here and now. Some days are better than others. Today feels like it might be a good day, but it's early yet. Afternoons are harder.
"Aunt Peggy?" a voice asks softly from the door, surprising her. It takes her a minute, but she manages to connect it to Jason. "Are you feeling up to a visitor?"
It's early for visitors, not even lunch yet. And he normally doesn't ask. Then again, not many people beyond him and Sharon visit. The baby SHIELD agents who provide security don't often come in to talk to her.
"It's kind of a surprise," Jason goes on, "so if you're not up for it—"
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Jason, I'm not that fragile."
"I know, Aunt Peggy, but this is going to be a little bit of a shock—"
"Jason."
He comes in. There's a taller, wider shadow trailing behind him, and when the light hits it—
"Steve?" she whispers, levering herself to her feet. It's him, she knows it's him, it can't be anybody but him—but at the same time, it's all wrong. He's not limping, and he's young. He hasn't aged a bit since the day he crashed the Valkyrie into the ice.
Hallucinations can be a symptom. But Jason sounds real enough. And one of those many medications she chokes down daily is supposed to prevent hallucinations.
"It's me," he says, and even his voice is younger, without the damage. He sounds uncertain, as if she might not recognize him.
"You're here." She fainted on him once. She's not about to do it again. "I don't—"
"When I hit— It deactivated the bombs, they didn't go off. They think the cold combined with the serum and the impact and put me in some kind of suspended animation."
Suspended animation.
Frozen.
He's just been pulled out of the ice. This is...before. Before everything he told her, about the Avengers and Thanos. Before he came back to her the...other time.
She's not sure if her scrambled brain can handle this.
"Peggy?" he asks hesitantly. Jason must have warned him.
"Come here," she says, and he crosses the room without hesitation, slips his hands under her elbows like he thinks she might need the support. He might be right. She reaches up and touches his face.
He's warm and real. This isn't a dream.
"I'm a little late for our dance," he says softly.
"It's hardly your fault," she reminds him, and he gives her a careful hug.
Too careful.
"Steven Rogers," she says firmly, "I am not going to break. Hug me like you bloody mean it."
The sound he makes is halfway between a chuckle and a sob, and this time he holds on like he's afraid to let go.
And if her shoulder winds up suspiciously damp, well, his is too.
the end