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The fantasy, of course, was always exactly this: a second chance, a reprieve. Calling it a miracle would not be an exaggeration. On the surface, it is exactly the fantasy. It is Steve, standing here in front of her. Steve with an apology for keeping her waiting at the Stork Club, a hint of mischief in his voice and hope in his eyes. With open arms and a very long story to unravel, but – here. Whole. Present.
This has always been Peggy’s private daydream, tucked into some back corner of her heart. In the last few years, though, it has only ached when it was poked at, and if her heart can be a soft thing, she’s too pragmatic to poke very often.
Now it’s a fantasy that made itself into her reality.
Which is exactly the root of the problem. A fantasy is by definition a singular moment; reality has to encompass more than one initial burst and outpouring of joy. The film reel never played out past the knock at the door and the open arms, the apology and the mischief, the kissing and the crying.
It didn’t include the exhaustion in Steve’s eyes, ever-present alongside the hope in him, the love, the want. The slump of his shoulders or the mess of his hair; it didn’t encompass the length of his story, the weight of it, and the toll the years have taken on him. It didn’t include figuring out how, exactly, they were meant to keep the return of the most iconic and recognizable political and pop-cultural figure in American history a secret.
It didn’t include ending her engagement to Daniel, the cruelty of a conversation where she could provide no real answers to his heartbroken questions. Their wedding was only four months away, and he knows Peggy too well to believe cold feet are something she’d let stand in her way. It might not lessen the pain if she could say Steve, it’s Steve, Daniel, he’s come back to me, please understand, she knows, but it would give Daniel reasons, at least, it would give him the grace and consideration he deserves.
And it did not include Natasha.
* * *
Steve’s described Natasha to Peggy in a multitude of ways: as his partner, his best friend, his right hand, his favorite person from the future where he had to make a home. She takes his word for it: Natasha doesn’t back it up, because Natasha refuses to speak to him.
Well – that’s not exactly accurate. She speaks to him when she must; she’s the one out of her element now, the time-traveler stranded in a world that doesn’t belong to her with no choice but to make the best of it. Necessity means that she can’t freeze Steve out entirely.
As Peggy sees it, that’s something making her even more resentful. Natasha doesn’t strike her as a person to whom need would come easily.
So: she speaks to him, when she has to, and when she does, she is curt. Never uses a whole sentence if three words will do; Peggy actually finds herself admiring Natasha’s gift for turning a deliberately open-ended question into something that can be answered with a yes-or-no.
She’s not curt with Peggy, though.
Natasha is respectful and polite – perhaps overly respectful, sometimes, and she’s quiet. It’s a little like living with a cat, the way she can make herself seem as though she’s not there at all, even at the times Peggy knows she’s only one room over. And Natasha herself is so vivid – she’s the kind of beautiful that makes a person do a double-take and linger. She is such a natural focal point: her brilliant green eyes, the shape of her body, the strange shade of her hair (Ombre, she called it when Peggy asked, and her mouth twisted up into something painful. Not intentional. Haircuts had started to feel pointless, and Peggy nodded, let the subject drop.)
Natasha is eye-catching even in her misery and her rage; it’s a gift, to be so naturally noticeable and still be able to make herself disappear.
And she can devastate Steve with a single look. Natasha won’t let him plead to her, so in the quiet of their bedroom at night, he pleads to Peggy because it needs to spill out somewhere: what was I supposed to do, Peg, was I supposed to leave her on Vormir like some broken piece of space trash? Was I supposed to live knowing I’d let her die? Was I supposed to leave her to wake up stranded on some other planet with no way to get home? What else should I have done but bring her with me?
Peggy has no answers for him. She wishes she did.
* * *
When Peggy wakes up in the middle of the night, yanked abruptly out of sleep, it’s because they’re screaming at each other.
Actually screaming, and for a moment, she thinks about striding into the living room, pinching them both sharply by the ear, and reminding them that she has – that they have – that there are neighbors, and as they’re still trying to sort out cover stories, where they will live, Peggy’s future with the SSR, Steve and Natasha’s futures in 1949 at all, this is not an optimal time to draw attention to themselves.
When her feet hit the ground, though, she hesitates. This is her world, and her time, but there are things that don’t belong to her. This is one of those things, and perhaps it’ll at least clear the air.
Steve’s voice booms through the house, Captain America at his most righteous; Peggy always hated this voice. She remembers the look she would give him, their private signal that he needed to reign it in that still only worked about half the time. “You want me to apologize? That’s what you’re looking for, you want me to tell you I’m sorry you’re alive, because it’s gonna be a cold day in hell before – ”
“I’d like you to respect the fact that it was my decision, that would have been nice – ”
“I had the option to bring you back when I returned the goddamn stone!” Steve thunders. “Are you really telling me you would have done any different?”
“And then you dragged me here to sit around and watch you play house with saintly Peggy Carter?” Natasha says. She sounds vicious, as though she means every word to cut. “That’s what you saved my life for? I’d rather be dead than consigned to infinite decades of Sunday night meatloaf and pretending we don’t notice all the casual era-specific racism.”
“What do you want me to say, Nat, what do you want me to do?” Steve says, furious but also near begging. Peggy can hear it through the walls, she can picture the look on his face as easily as if she was in the room with them.
“I want you to say that your plan isn’t actually to be this pathetic,” Natasha snarls. “I want you to tell me you didn’t come here to live happily ever after in Carter’s arms and not think about the fact that somewhere out there, the Red Room is operating at full steam and your best friend is being tortured and Hydra’s creeping itself into – the Steve Rogers that I know couldn’t sit around and let any of that just happen.”
“You know what Tony said about the timeline!” Steve yells, furious and desperate and Peggy’s hands curl in the blankets, forcing herself to stay rooted.
Is she the Peggy Carter she knows right now, she wonders, because since when would she ever stay rooted in the middle of a storm, even one that didn’t entirely concern her?
“Fuck the timeline,” Natasha says, but it spills out of her like a keen, as though she is close to tears, and absurdly, she’s the one Peggy wants to comfort right now. She’s the one displaced and rootless, lost and unmoored – no money, no agency, no friends but the one who’s brought her into this position. “And fuck you thinking I’d value my own life over all the rest of it.”
“Fuck you back,” Steve says, choked up and agonized. “Fuck you back for thinking I could ever leave you behind no matter what it cost.”
* * *
Mr. Jarvis arranges considerable lines of credit to Howard’s accounts at Gimbels and B. Altman; Natasha needs an entire wardrobe, shapewear, cosmetics, shoes – they’re beginning from the ground up. He’s intrigued when Peggy calls with the request, and happy to oblige, though he does ask for a promise she’ll give him the details the next time they see each other.
It causes Peggy a certain amount of regret to know that she can never tell Mr. Jarvis the actual story. A line’s been drawn between the beginning of their partnership and today. From now on, she will never again not be lying to him. It’s easier to focus on her regret about that particular deception than it is to think of what it is she’s keeping from Howard.
He would never forgive her for this, and she knows it because if the tables were turned and she found out, she would never forgive him. She remembers his voice under the influence of Dr. Fenhoff; the way it broke and trembled with joy from the cockpit of his plane when he thought he was finally on his way to bring Steve home.
This is a necessary deception, yes; it doesn’t mean that it’s not dishonorable, and it’s not sitting well with her. It’s not sitting well with Steve, either, but he’s adamant about his bloody timeline, and Peggy doesn’t see the efficiency in fighting a war on two fronts. Not right now.
Though if he’d asked her, she would say he’s already changed it enough by bringing a woman born in 1984 backwards. Surely cutting himself off from the others who mourned him isn’t doing much good.
Natasha is observant and assessing in the department store – a spy, Steve’s told her, a spy for most of her life and if he hadn’t, Peggy would think it was just that she’s an extremely shy person. But she’s been told, and now she knows what she’s looking for: Natasha is figuring out the rhythms of life in this decade. She’s listening to speech patterns, she’s mentally listing the things she’ll need to fit in, the way she needs to walk and dress and speak and stand, and she’s doing it all in as a cover.
It doesn’t look like much, but Peggy understands the work that’s being done here, the scope of it, the enormous undertaking. What she’s watching is impressive.
Natasha is trying on a pair of sensible brown heels when the idea comes to Peggy, and she decides a moment later that it’s a good enough offer that it doesn’t merit further consideration.
“Come work for me,” she says.
Natasha’s head turns, sharp and abrupt. Her hair is swept into an updo and arranged under a hat to conceal its dual coloring; she hasn’t dyed it or cut it off, not yet. “What?”
“Come work for me,” Peggy repeats. “I’m no slouch at forged documents, you know. We can find a way to bring you in. You can’t just putter around the house and the Gimbel’s shoe department forever. If we need to work up an identity and a cover, it may as well be a useful one.”
“Steve won’t like it,” Natasha says after a moment.
“Sod what Steve will like,” Peggy tells her, crisply. “I’m thrilled to have him here. I am. But he’s boxed us all into very awkward positions and I don’t think that entitles him to a say in how we choose to make it palatable.”
You are dying, she thinks. You are dying right in front of me, and if we don’t know each other that well, I will not just sit around and watch you wither on the vine.
“You have to make a life here,” she adds. “I don’t know what he thought that life would be. To be honest, I don’t think he gave it any thought at all beyond the fact that he loves you and he needed you to be present, and I don’t fault him for that. But you can’t make yourself smaller or dimmer to avoid upsetting the metaphysical apple cart, can you? From my perspective, it looks like the cart’s already been reduced to applesauce.”
“That’s a terrible metaphor.”
“Well, give me time. I’ll think of a better one. What do you say?”
“You aren’t anything like I thought you would be,” Natasha says.
“Is that a good thing?”
“Very,” she says, and nods her head once, as though it’s the same as a handshake. “All right, Agent Carter. I’m in.”
“Agent Romanoff,” Peggy returns. “The pleasure’s mine.”
* * *
At dinner that night, Natasha passes Steve the salt before he’s asked for it, anticipating his request. She knows him so well; it’s stopped surprising Peggy. She’s even started to enjoy it.
Steve looks absurdly thrilled with the gesture. “Thanks,” he says. “Thanks, Nat.”
“You’re welcome,” she returns – two words, Peggy thinks, she used two words when she could have gotten away with a silent nod of acknowledgement, and she sees Steve understands that for the gesture it is, too.
He’s still deeply unthrilled when Peggy tells him that Natasha will be joining the SSR and that he is not allowed to involve himself in it, but it’s a shorter fight than she was prepared to have, and all over a salt shaker, for the first signs of thaw.
* * *
“She’s fast,” Natasha observes.
“Indeed,” Peggy says, lowering her Walther as she watches Dottie scramble from the fire escape to the rooftop above them, leaping to the next one over. Very quickly, too quickly for Peggy to be able to pull off a shot. Her voice is cool, but it feels as though something large and angry is stomping around in her chest at being outplayed yet again. Dottie is slippery and evasive and endlessly malleable; even when Peggy boxes her into a corner, she finds a way to wriggle free.
But when she turns her head, Natasha is smiling in a way that Peggy doesn’t believe anyone but herself would feel comfortable calling a smile. There’s something anticipatory in her eyes. Something that’s the closest thing to joy Peggy has ever seen in her.
“I’m faster,” she says, and becomes a blur of motion shimmying up the drainpipe before Peggy can react.
Natasha returns exactly twelve minutes later, long enough for Thompson and a car’s worth of backup to arrive, and when she reappears, she’s dragging an unconscious Dottie into the alley behind her. There’s a gash over Natasha’s eye, leaking blood all over her lovely face in a way that makes her look nightmarish. Thompson winces when he sees it, offers her a handkerchief with a vague air of it’s less that I’m concerned about your injury and more that this is interfering with my ability to stare at you, which is a thing I very much enjoy doing.
Still: somehow Dottie’s the one who’s gotten the worst of it, and later, Peggy will be mildly ashamed, in a Thompsonlike way, that her first thought – her first thought before anything else – was that she wondered how a fight between the two of them had unfolded. What it must have been like to see it happen.
* * *
Dugan’s words pop into her head in the bathroom at HQ, as she’s watching Natasha clean out the wound on her forehead in small, precise movements. She’d let Peggy help with her ribs earlier, arms gracefully extended from her sides as Peggy had fastened the compression wrap. She knows from experience how painful a cracked rib can be; it’s unsurprising, still, that Natasha bears it all without so much as a wince.
It’s not until she’s watching Natasha swab hydrogen peroxide over the still-bloody cut and looking at her reflection in the mirror with that perfect calm that the words come to Peggy’s head, unbidden.
I’d hate to tangle with one that’s all grown up.
Natasha catches her eyes in the mirror and smiles – a real smile, this time, one that anyone could identify as such. “If the offer for that ice is still on the table, I think I’ll take you up on it,” she says.
Heat rises to Peggy’s cheeks. She’s been caught staring. “Of course. Won’t be a moment,” she says. The back of her throat tastes sour on the walk to the kitchen.
She understands now where Natasha’s come from. She hates the thought so much that her always steady hands shake with it as she cranks the metal lever to release the ice tray, as she wraps the shards up in a tea towel.
* * *
Steve’s started talking about moving further out of the city, just from a practicality standpoint. Somewhere it’ll be easier for him to find work and live under an assumed name, where there’s not quite so many people around at all times. Westchester County, maybe, tree-lined streets, wraparound porches.
Places people move once they’re married and nowhere Peggy had ever thought to picture herself; she’s been floating back and forth between the Los Angeles office and the Manhattan branch for so long that she’s grown used to feeling rootless. It’s somewhere she might have moved if she’d become Mrs. Sousa.
She finds the idea of moving to the suburbs with Steve and Natasha less claustrophobic than she would have with Daniel, which – is maybe another indication that ending her engagement was ultimately the right move. It’s easier to make compromises with the two of them, easier to picture herself in other kinds of lives. She’s even thinking a bit about the sort of house they might find.
So it comes as an unpleasant surprise when Natasha admits she’s been looking at apartments in Manhattan.
“You are?” Peggy says, trying to sound more curious than displeased, but she’s not sure if that’s coming through.
“I can’t third wheel the two of you forever,” Natasha says with a laugh. She’s been doing that more lately, letting herself relax inch by inch. “I’ll have saved up a little more by then, anyway. If you’re buying a house, it’s as good a time as any to cut the cord.”
Steve is restless that night. He tosses and turns in bed without falling asleep, gets up to shuffle through the room and straighten out clothes in the closet, do pushups, reorganize the bookshelf, coming back to try and give sleep another shot at intervals in between. It’s not keeping Peggy awake; she’s been trying to read a case file to tire herself out and can’t seem to focus on anything past the first page.
Finally, she closes the file. There’s no progress being made this way.
“You don’t want her to live apart from you,” she tells him.
Steve looks up from the armchair in the corner of the room, where he’s refolding their socks. “No,” he admits, his face guilty, but he doesn’t lie about it, he doesn’t even try. Peggy loves that about him, so much; it’s a little burst of warmth in her chest, the reminder of how these are things about him she never quite forgot, that have never changed. “No, I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” Peggy admits. She’s nervous, watching Steve, gauging all of this – what they are talking about, what they are talking around. “Why have you never told her that you love her?”
He’s crumpling the socks in his hands, winding them around his fingers and stretching them out. In the morning, the fibers will be loose and frayed. “Because it was always enough for me to be her friend,” he says, with that same honesty. “Because the world was such a mess and we had failed so badly that it felt like there was no point to anything, anyway, not even relationships. Because I loved you – I always loved you, Peggy, and I didn’t know that I could do both at once and be fair about it to anybody.”
Peggy slips out of bed and crosses the room to go to his side, sits herself on his lap and pushes her fingers into his hair. “Oh, my darling,” she tells him, and brings his mouth to hers. He kisses her with such gratitude, such desperation; she never thought she would kiss Steve again, and she wonders if it will ever stop feeling like a miracle. “From the moment we met, you and I were always going to have to invent our own version of fair, weren’t we?”
* * *
It’s the first Saturday that Peggy hasn’t been on duty in what feels like weeks, so when she opens the front door after some relentless knocking, the last face she wants to see in the entire world is Jack bloody Thompson.
“What do you want?” she says, not bothering to conceal her annoyance. It’s early, still; she was thinking of seeing if Natasha would be up for a walk to the Automat. Difficult conversations, in Peggy’s experience, tend to go better over pie and coffee, and there are so many things she wants to figure out how to say.
Thompson grins at her, an infinitely irritating grin, and waggles his eyebrows. “Relax, Carter. I’m not here for you.”
“Then who - ” Peggy starts to say, when Natasha coughs delicately behind her, and any words she was about to say next die in her throat, forever.
Natasha’s hair is arranged in a waterfall of dark red waves, rippling down one side of her face and secured in place with a comb. She’s wearing a silk evening dress the color of tangerines, and it should clash horribly with her hair, but it doesn’t. She is a sunburst, she is a comet.
Her eyes are outlined in kohl, her lips are a deep brick red, and it’s another hit low in the stomach when Peggy recognizes that it’s her own lipstick coating Natasha’s mouth.
She is speechless and her only saving grace in this moment is that Thompson is too dumbstruck to realize that Peggy is just as far gone.
He sweeps his hat from his head and half-bows. “Agent Barton. M’am. Wow.”
(She’d chosen the name when they were building her cover, she’d assured Peggy it was about to be a rough time in history to advance in any US organization with a Russian surname and that she didn’t mind giving it up; that she had another family name she’d be just as happy to use, and Peggy did not miss how deeply sorrowful Steve’s eyes had turned when Natasha had shown him her new identity. Natasha Barton, whose husband fought and died in the European theater, who was one of the unsung Howlies. It was a good story. It did make everything easier.
Were you married? Peggy had asked, and Natasha shook her head, but she had looked almost as sad as Steve did, and she had decided not to pry further.)
“Thank you,” Natasha says, and it’s only then that Peggy notices Thompson’s thoroughly close clean shave, the shine on his shoes, the sharp cut of his suit that’s a few levels nicer than the slouchy ones he wears to the office.
“You’re going out tonight?” Peggy asks, when she can find her voice. With THOMPSON?
“Jack invited me to the theater,” she says.
“Would you believe I was lucky enough to end up with two tickets to the Carousel revival,” Jack says, and the smile he shoots Peggy is probably supposed to be charming but is so thoroughly thick with smugness that she wants to punch him. Again. “Natasha mentioned a couple weeks ago she hadn’t gotten a chance to see it and hell, everybody oughta see Carousel.”
Peggy narrows her eyes. Like fun he just happened to end up with two tickets.
“Do you mind if I borrow your wrap?” Natasha asks, and when Peggy shakes her head no, she almost changes her mind when she watches Jack slip it on over Natasha’s bare shoulders.
He winks at Peggy on their way out the door. “Don’t wait up, Carter.”
“Do wait up, Carter,” Natasha says over her shoulder, which is the only reason Peggy is able to prevent herself from forcibly tackling Jack to the ground and scratching his eyes out right there in the hallway.
* * *
“He’s a toad,” she fumes at Steve. “He’s an entitled, patronizing, domineering toad who still believes on some level that I ought to be bringing him his sandwiches, and none of this is anything I haven’t warned Natasha about. In fact, I’ve warned her several times over, and I know she’s seen his behavior in the field, so the fact that she would agree to a date with him is so utterly – ”
Steve has the nerve to smile at her, and it interrupts her midrant. “How dare you look at me with that sort of impertinence, Captain Rogers.”
“Bet you a cannoli that she’s only using him for the free ticket,” he says.
Something wings inside Peggy’s chest that she quashes in favor of glowering at Steve. “She could have bought her own ticket.”
“She’s Natashaing,” Steve says. “It’s been a really long time since she’s had any fun at all, between the Snap and ending up here. Maybe it’s just easier to relax and take a practice run around somebody with no expectations.”
“I have no expectations!” Peggy exclaims. “And frankly, I would have loved to have seen Carousel myself. Rose loaned me the record and some of the songs on it are magical. I’m certain they’re even better live.”
Steve sets a hand over hers. He’s still smiling, and something about it is unfamiliar. This is New Steve, as she’s come to think of it. Steve who’s spent a decade living nearly a hundred years in the future, who’s come back to the past and sees things a little differently because of it.
“Let’s talk about this a little more productively,” he says, and squeezes her hand.
* * *
Natasha keeps to her word and isn’t home very late at all. Thompson doesn’t even walk her up to the porch. Peggy has the lamps on in the living room, and when Natasha lets herself in through the front door, the dim light makes her glow like coal after the fire has gone out; still hot to the touch even after the flames are gone.
“How was the show?” Peggy asks.
“Patriarchal,” Natasha says, her mouth twitching. Peggy finds herself smiling back, even though she didn’t mean to do it. “Pretty songs, though.”
“And do you think by this time next year, I’ll be a bridesmaid as you become Mrs. Jack Thompson?”
“Even if I was the marrying type, I’d never make you be a bridesmaid, it’s an awful job,” Natasha tells her. “Please remember that this is my stance when you and Steve get married.”
“Steve explained bisexuality to me tonight,” Peggy says.
Natasha blinks. “Huh.”
“I appreciated learning the word for it,” she adds. “It suits me, I think. It always has. And he loves you, you know.”
“I haven’t even taken off my shoes yet,” Natasha says. “And I wouldn’t let Jack take me out for a drink when the curtain came down, so I’m not nearly drunk enough for this. Peggy…”
She raises a hand to cut Natasha off; now that she’s figured out how to begin, she means to go on, and she rises from the couch, walking closer to Natasha. Natasha who has been so sad for so long, who has ached under burdens Peggy can’t even imagine. Who has lost so much, who is still fighting, who is struggling to carve out a life for herself, and when she sets her hands on Natasha’s hips, feeling the boning and corsetry beneath the silk, Natasha does not shy away.
“There is nothing I can do to make you feel as though you belong here,” she tells Natasha. “You couldn’t fix it for Steve when he crash landed in 2012 and I can’t fix it for you here. It’s time, isn’t it? That’s the only thing that can be applied, to something like this.”
After a moment, Natasha nods. Slowly, slowly, she lifts one of her own hands in return, the tips of two fingers tracing along Peggy’s cheek, her jaw, the spot just below her chin.
“But we can be your home,” she says. “We can be that, the three of us. There’s no choosing, not anymore.”
Natasha presses her lips into a line. It smudges the edges of her lipstick just a little, the outline of it no longer a perfect Cupid’s bow, and Peggy might prefer her this way. Less pulled together, less perfectly lined. Here. Human. Not so remote and untouchable.
“He understands if you haven’t entirely forgiven him just yet,” Peggy promises. “Not enough to be with him right now, but you know he can be patient. It’s just that I’m not sure that I can.”
When Natasha laughs, it’s brief and brilliant and beautiful. “I’ve tried, Carter. I’ve tried not to want you, this isn’t a road I’ve wanted to run down.”
“Then stop trying,” Peggy says, and knots a hand in Natasha’s hair, pulls her into a kiss that she did not realize she has been waiting most of her life to feel and oh, oh, when Natasha cups the back of her neck, when she caves, when she can feel the way she melts against Peggy…
This is the woman she’s chosen to spend this first kiss on.
Natasha is beyond worth the wait.