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“I’m going to have to take a rain check on that dance, Peggy,” comes Steve’s voice over the radio, and. She realizes she should hold her tongue, let him say whatever he needs to say. But she needs to say something herself.
“My real name’s not Peggy.”
“Well, what is it?” Steve laughs like he did on the USO tours; affected, too bright. “Margaret? I could call you Margaret.”
“My real name is Susan,” she says. “Susan Pevensie. But call me Peggy, please. I...I just wanted you to know. No one else does, anymore, and I thought you should.”
“Always full of surprises, Peggy,” he says, his amusement genuine now, but too brief, too, too brief; and all too soon he plunges into the water, and the silence is all too familiar.
--*--
In Narnia, she is Susan the Gentle, and mosaics, statues, music and festivals are done in her honor. Ballads are written to her bright smile, to the way her horn calls. There are poems, epics, about the way her arrow flies true, but not in war; under her and Peter’s rule there is only peace, and Susan the Gentle is seen as a womanly vision, an ideal of compassion, with a sharp eye and a soft hand.
Peggy remembers this, abruptly, in Paris in 1941. She looks down at the body she is burying, its necked snapped and the eyes staring, and wonders how anyone ever got her so wrong.
--*--
Aslan makes a mistake when he sends the Pevensies back, the first time; or perhaps he does not. Either way they have been returned to Professor Kirke’s estate, dropped on their backsides before the wardrobe like old coats thrown away, except it’s 1930, and Professor Kirke has only just moved in.
Professor Kirke shakes their hands and welcomes them as a Narnian would, with an “of course” and a “well, it can’t be helped” and “how are the Jackdaws doing, by any chance?” Professor Kirke takes them under his wing as “distant cousins up from London, parents can’t afford to keep them in this climate, poor things” and they become the Carter children, four more faces in the village crowd.
Susan Margaret Pevensie, now Carter, is called Peggy by all the girls in school, and she wears nice dresses, and bright lipstick, and the others never forgive her for it.
--*--
When they return to Narnia, one thousand years after their golden reign, Lucy sobs into Susan’s chest and says, “Mr. Tumnus is gone,” over and over. Peggy, who almost feels like Susan again, realizes she can never forgive Aslan for all he has taken from her family. One day he will punish her for her lack of faith, for her nylons and her dark heart, but for now the anger burns bright, and her Horn calls.
--*--
The train crash is, Peggy thinks, a bit overdramatic. She knows it is her punishment, and their reward, but did he need to take all of them so? They could have all died in their beds. It could have been a tragically funny oddity, three letters of condolence all coming at once, instead of a sad policeman with his hat in his hand.
“I’m so sorry, Susan,” Professor Kirke says at the graves, and he means it, but she knows he does not understand. He does not see what she does, that once he has played his part in 1943, he will get his own reward, and she will be alone, as Aslan intended.
“My name is Peggy,” she says, and walks away, knowing she will never see him again. For her is not gentleness and mercy.
--*--
The minotaurs who fight with them, for Caspian, call Lucy Valiant and Edmund Just like everyone else, but they call Peter something entirely impolitic, and Susan is dubbed the Terror.
Susan, who even standing on Aslan’s How still feels like a Peggy, likes it very much.
--*--
Peggy goes to France because she does not remember the invasion of Poland, or the rise of Nazi Germany, well enough to do anything helpful, but she remembers the Resistance, she remembers stories of women travelling behind enemy lines, women leading strike forces. She arrives in Paris in 1938, and spends the next two years teaching herself French, German, secret codes, how to shoot pistols. On June 14th, 1940, Peggy watches the tanks roll by on the Parisian streets below, and she pulls newly-invented nylon stockings on.
--*--
Susan the Terror stands before Aslan, and listens to him explain that she and Peter will never be able to come back. There is blood under her fingernails, still, and when she goes back to England, it is still there.
She wears red nail polish, and in her dreams she is awash in blood and darkness. She sees her arrows find eyes, throats, hearts, sees Peter’s sword arc high.
In her nightmares, she is married.
--*--
They call her the English Terror, and she really isn’t sure why or how it comes to pass. It’s ridiculous, and when anyone tries to call her that, she sighs and thinks that Josephine Baker doesn’t have to put up with this shit.
(Josephine Baker calls her the Terror too, but with a twinkle in her eye and the suggestion that it is some sort of endearment. Josephine is not a queen, but you can’t tell, looking at her.)
Peggy snaps necks and breaks codes and finds herself leading whatever’s at hand more often than not. She directs hands, helps the inexperienced or scared find sure footing. She becomes known as a resource for complex analyses, for training the inexperienced, for being able to find the best person for the job and for never backing down.
She has a boy named Marc, a silly, brash young artist, and he proposes marriage the same week that she gets a letter from the Americans, asking if she can come consult with the SSR, help train agents and perform data analysis.
America is not a hard choice to make, and she is only occasionally bothered by memories of Marc’s anger, his betrayed face. She considers that she should be regretful, but it is hard to regret Brooklyn.
--*--
Susan the Gentle shoots an arrow from horseback into the dead center of a target, and the festival audience applauds. She splits the arrow with another, standing on the horse’s back, and the audience cries as one. The queen is a beauty, and accomplished like no other, they say, and they throw roses at her mare. Susan fixes her smile on her face.
Later, when the Kings and Queens have retreated to their private quarters, Susan sighs and pulls her tiara from her head. “Sometimes I feel as if the Gentle part is a commandment, rather than a description.”
Peter and Lucy are confused, but Edmund nods to her, slightly, and it is almost enough to settle the matter in her heart.
--*--
Steve Rogers is small and asthmatic and is earnest in the sort of way Peggy deeply despises in everyone except Lucy. But Lucy is dead, and Steve Rogers laughs when she decks a cadet, pulls the pin on the flag pole.
He tells her, “My neighbor Mrs. Feynman would do these courses better than me. You should go get her instead.” Then he lays down in the backseat and goes to sleep.
She doesn’t want to like him, but she sort of does.
--*--
Susan was, before she was a Queen, or anything else, a terrified teenage girl in the London Blitz. And huddled in the shed with her mother and brothers and Lucy, she had wished there was anything at all she could do.
In the newspaper she’d dropped to the floor, on page 10, there was an article about Captain America, who had just broken two hundred men out from behind enemy lines and brought them home safe. Peggy Carter was not mentioned, but Susan shivered in the shed and wondered if there was not another person she could yet be, not knowing that she already is.
--*--
By herself, in her tiny Brooklyn apartment, Peggy hums and claps and dances. Out of everything that has gone fuzzy with time, this remains clear, the steps to the spring dances, the bright songs about growing things and happy dryads.
Peggy does not wish for suitors or subjects or friends, but she does wish she could have someone to dance with.
--*--
Susan the Gentle, Susan the Terror, Peggy, stares at her hands and wonders how these names are all for the same person, for they do not feel the same at all. And she knows, in the end, which one she is supposed to be, and which one she wants to be.
No one ever accused her of being a good listener.
--*--
Peggy finds Steve Rogers looking nonplussed at Doctor Erskine as he laughs and drinks whiskey in the barracks. Peggy steals Erskine’s glass and downs it in one.
“That is fine whiskey!” Erskine complains. “You cannot simply take it like a shot!”
Peggy shakes her head. “I prefer wine anyway. Don’t stay up too late, gentlemen.”
She hears Erskine say as she leaves, “Don’t get your hopes up. She is made of finer things than you and I.”
“You mean scarier,” Steve says, and Erskine laughs.
--*--
Of Susan the Gentle’s suitors, the ones she allows to dance with her are considered the most favored. Those who are invited into her private garden break out into a sweat, and hope their holdings will survive.
Susan the Gentle is kind and beautiful and gentle, like all the songs said. But she is a Queen all the same.
--*--
Peggy does not fall in love with Steve Rogers until the last USO show, when he leaves the stage to escape the jeering, jaded soldiers, and looks at her, so restless and caged and earnest all at once, and she recognizes the look, from a mirror in a castle long ago and far away.
So she gets him Howard Stark’s plane and a radio and a chance. And he comes back with two hundred men and a smile, and blood on his costume boots.
Later, when the raucous celebrations quiet down and Steve has a chance to strip off his ridiculous getup, to strip off Captain America and all the weight the words carry, he instead sits next to her, watching the trees.
“Does it get easier? Killing people?”
Peggy looks at him. He looks genuinely upset.
“I don’t know. I’ve never found it hard,” Peggy says, and is surprised at herself. Not for the answer, but for the fact that she answered honestly.
Steve looks at her. “No, I don’t imagine you regret much.”
“I regret a great many things. But I will not regret choosing to kill someone else to live. I will not regret…” She clenches her fists. Thinks of the Blitz of her first childhood and the White Witch and the Nazi guard in Paris who surprised her, got her down on the ground and ripped open her blouse. “But I will not regret fighting.”
Steve hesitates, then nods, and she reaches out and holds his hand.
--*--
Bizarrely, what actually keeps Susan from sleeping with her suitors is the thought that Aslan might be watching.
--*--
Peggy has sex with Steve on leave in France. He is exhausting and confusing and too stupid and righteous and she may love him a little bit, she cannot be the girl he needs, the sort of girl that could fall into his arms at the end of one of his propaganda films, or at the very least be with him at the end of the war. But she has sex with him anyway, and he laughs and can lift her against a wall and still take her orders the next day.
Peggy is not sure she will ever know the sort of love that leads to marriage and houses and little children with braids that play hide and seek in wardrobes, but she starts to think it is not the only way to love a person.
--*--
Peggy dreams of Reepicheep, the stupid idiot suicidal Mouse, and he has Steve’s voice, and she cannot remember if it was ever any different.
--*--
Steve is even more pleased at the bright, patriotic paint job on his new shield than he is with the shield itself.
“It’s swell,” he says, and then the next mission out he throws it into the face of a Hydra soldier with a flamethrower, as if the shield and stars and stripes weigh nothing at all. Peggy wants to laugh and cry.
--*--
If Steve were Narnian, he would be a King, or perhaps a Lion. Maybe a Badger.
They would call him Valiant, just like they did Lucy, and their songs about him would be very beautiful.
--*--
Bucky Barnes falls, and Peggy holds Steve’s hand after he gets tired of trying to drink the bar dry. Peggy’s fingernails are red and it is all she can think about, that her fingernails are red, so red, and Steve's knuckles are white as he holds onto what goodness he can find.
She knows Steve would grieve for her just the same as Bucky, but she wishes he wouldn’t. At the same time, she knows he won’t. She knows the one left lonely, the one who ought to always be left lonely, will be her.
--*--
Susan the Gentle lies beside Aslan’s body on the Stone Table with Lucy, weeping, holding the lion’s broken body. Lucy weeps for the creature, for the great being, that they have lost; this is not what Susan weeps for. She cries because Lucy saw this, because Lucy never deserved it.
When Aslan rises again with the dawn, Susan wants to ask him what took him so long, why he would do this to her sister. But she is still young, and holds her tongue in check.
--*--
“I couldn’t leave my best girl. Not when she owes me a dance,” Steve says, smiling and heartbroken.
“I used to dance with my brothers and sister,” Peggy says. “And suitors and satyrs and Badgers and Donkeys even, sometimes.”
Steve bites his lip. “Peggy…”
“Oh, shush, I’m not that mad, not yet.” Peggy smiles at him. “Just reminiscing. They used to call me Susan the Gentle, if you can believe it.”
Steve snorts, and she pinches him, and for one shining moment, he really is smiling, like the boy she knew so many years ago, the boy she wanted to have a future. Now he does; she does not know how Aslan has managed it, but he has given someone else a second chance at life, and she does not think Steve will disappoint Him.
“I don’t miss my family,” Peggy admits. “I don’t miss the people I knew. Well, I do, of course, but it all seems like fiddly bits now. I miss red lipstick, and nylons, and dancing. I cannot remember the last time I saw nylons, real, proper stockings.”
Steve pulls a tube out of his pocket and it’s Elizabeth Arden in pure, bright red, in an old and battered tube. “I forgot to give this to you, before...I got Dum Dum to get some from his girl in Paris. Cost me a pretty penny.”
Peggy’s hand shakes, but she has done this many, many times, and the lipstick goes on just as smoothly as she remembers. It will smear and rub and go away soon, she knows; long-lasting lipstick was new when Steve crashed the plane. She starts crying, and smiling, and wonders if he has given this to her on previous visits, if she has gotten to live this simple joy over and over and over. She thinks it would be wonderful if she has.
Steve helps her to her feet and they stand there, swaying slightly. Peggy hums a spring dance, a slow, gentle melody about sleeping among the whispering trees, and closes her eyes.
Peggy is finally, actually dying, after living far longer and seeing far more than a silly girl like her was ever meant to. Peggy thinks it is not so bad, if she missed out on Narnian Heaven and Peter’s respect and any number of other things for this, in order to wear red lipstick, and dance with a boy.
Peggy closes her eyes, and smiles, and the smile is gentle.