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She didn't wear lipstick any more. In the grand scheme of things, Steve wasn't sure why that was what stood out. He was living with a woman who, seven months ago, was ninety-five years old and dead. The fact that he could sit at this kitchen table on a Wednesday morning and watch her frown at a malfunctioning toaster was a miracle, some kind of grace that no catechism had ever taught Steve was possible.
It was just that Steve had grown used to catching a glimpse of a slash of red out of the corner of his eye, grown accustomed to knowing that that was Peggy standing four-square at his elbow, ready to take on all-comers. This Peggy—Peggy now—she moved with the same solid certainty as before, but she didn't seem to feel any need to fight her first war all over again.
After all, it wasn't like she could remember it.
"Is that... You liked that?" Steve asked. They were sitting at a rickety picnic table outside of a small roadside joint whose malfunctioning neon sign promised Fas Burrit Clea Restroo.
(A little voice at the back of Steve's mind that sounded an awful lot like Sam asked just why they had decided to stop here for lunch, exactly.)
What breeze there was was hot and dry, and the shade cast by the drunken picnic table umbrella didn't give much by way of relief. Steve could feel sweat beading at his hairline. The straight strands of Peggy's hair tangled around her face as she peeled back the foil from her food and squirted on the hot sauce with a liberal hand.
"I haven't had any yet," Peggy pointed out. Her accent was starting to blur a little, Steve had noticed, losing some of that English crispness she'd managed to keep throughout her first lifetime.
"I mean, before," Steve said. "You don't—"
"Not a blessed clue," Peggy said. She took a big bite of the burrito, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, and coughed. She added another dollop of hot sauce. "You know, I just might have. A sight more invigorating than shepherd's pie."
"I suppose," Steve said, opening his own bag of tacos al pastor. "It's just..."
"What?" Peggy said, between sips of her soda. She didn't meet his eyes.
"Nothing," Steve said. They ate.
"I realise," Nick said dryly, back at what had seemed like the beginning of this, "given the way things have gone lately that I could tell you that grass is green and you've had good cause not to believe me. But I didn't know this would happen, Cap."
"But you suspected," Steve said.
"Not even that," Nick said, folding his arms. On the bed in front of them, Peggy Carter slept, an IV line running into the back of her hand. She looked about the same age as she'd been when Steve had first known her. Her chest rose and fell easily; no hint of pneumonia now. The infirmary staff had put her in a clean hospital gown, but there was still graveyard dirt under her broken fingernails. "Though I guess you could say I lost my ability to be surprised about anything a couple of alien invasions ago."
"Nick."
"Choose your poison," Nick said. "Vita-Rays, contact with the serum, Dark Matter, Nitramene radiation... The amount of shit the Director was exposed to over the years just that we know about, it's probably weirder she didn't come back with a third eye in the middle of her forehead."
"She wouldn't have chosen this," Steve said, thinking of the talks he'd had with Peggy on the days when she was still lucid. No resuscitation, no extraordinary measures, no machines or tubes or injections. She'd been very, very clear.
Nick made a sound halfway between a huff of laughter and a snort. "We ever have choices when it comes to this shit?"
"Yeah," Steve said. "Yeah, we do."
They'd spent the past four months in one of Nick's safe houses west of Lubbock, living quietly while Steve kept one eye on the news headlines.
Neither of them worked, as such, but Steve occasionally took a couple of odd jobs, less for the cash in hand than for the chance to feel like he was helping someone. Peggy was there, after all, and with him, and breathing, but Steve felt less and less like he was doing anything—could do anything—to help her. Replacing miles of fencing or chopping up firewood let him feel like he was doing something with his day. It got him out of the house, too. It could be awfully quiet in rural Texas and Steve—always a city boy at heart—never felt like properly settled without the sounds of traffic or the rise and fall of voices outside, or low chatter on the radio.
Peggy read a lot, sitting in a chair next to a window with a view of the pasture stretching away to the horizon. For the first few weeks after they'd got to Texas she had still walked carefully, gingerly, like a person trying to get their sea legs, and Steve thought: sure, wanting to sit quietly made sense. Coming back from the dead took it out of a person, he knew that much, and for a while after they found her the docs at SHIELD had been making worried noises about kidney function and liver toxicity.
But even once she started to move more like herself, there was no sign of her memory coming back properly. Peggy knew her name, and his, and the rhyme she'd been taught in 1928 to help her recall the kings and queens of England, and why it was important to put on sunscreen in the heart of a Texas summer. But what had happened to her, or who they were to one another, well...
Steve had tried to explain it all to her—or as much as he could without making it seem like he was making any sort of a, a claim to her—but he worried that maybe he'd made a mess of it. She said she knew who he was, but sometimes Steve caught her studying his face like it was strange to her. Like she was worried.
The nearest public library was ninety minutes away, but Steve drove there and back once a week. He fetched Peggy pretty much anything set between the Thirties and now—fiction or not—hoping it would jog her memory. Trying to close the distance between then and now. Once he even brought back a battered omnibus edition of the terrible books that had been written in the late Sixties, The Howling Commandos and their Further Amazing Adventures. Colonel Rhodes had told Steve about them a while ago, how he'd read them as a kid.
"Made the mistake of trying to reread them a few years ago, when I was laid up at Landstuhl for a week," Rhodes had said wryly, shaking his head. "Probably always a mistake to reread the things you loved when you were too young to know better."
The books got just about everything wrong it was possible to get wrong, and weren't what you could call fair to Peggy, Gabe or Jim. Plus the covers were just plain awful. Steve thought if anything could spark a reaction in her, make her sit up straight and snap that this was nonsense, really Steven—
But Peggy didn't seem to get angry about anything anymore.
On the evening news, frowning anchors spoke in serious baritones about a new wave of prosecutions of government officials who were suspected of being Hydra operatives, and the suicides of those who were on the verge of being charged. The governor of Iowa had fled to a non-extradition country; currencies rose and fell against one another; in D.C., architects and demolition experts were still trying to figure out what to do with the remains of SHIELD headquarters.
Peggy watched it all with a kind of detached interest. She knew, because Steve had told her, that this had been her watch, once; knew she'd overseen the construction of the complex that was now so much rubble. But she watched it the same way you might watch a bad action movie, one with no real stakes and no one to root for.
Answers, the news anchor intoned, are still being sought in the case.
Steve looked at Peggy out of the corner of his eye. He still hadn't worked out what the right questions were.
They didn't share a bedroom. Steve didn't want to assume anything, and the house was big enough to sleep a half dozen. Peggy took the master suite; Steve slept in the smallest bedroom at the far end of the hallway. He could tell, though, that she slept about as much as he did, which was to say not a lot. Some mornings, he woke up at four to find Peggy already on the living room sofa, reading. Some nights he woke up at three because Peggy had nightmares, bad enough to make her scream and groan through clenched teeth. The house was big but the walls were thin and a supersoldier's hearing made it tough not to eavesdrop.
Peggy was never coherent enough that Steve could work out what her nightmares were about. All he could hear was the steady stream of no, no no, no, no.
Nick had given them both secure tablets, loaded up with everything they'd need. Peggy's contained lots of pictures: Peggy dancing with her late husband, with her daughters on their bat mitzvahs and graduation days and weddings, smiling grandkids in a backyard pool, Peggy steering a little motorboat with a captain's hat perched rakishly over one eye. She knew about them all, Steve had made sure of that, even if they couldn't ever know that she'd come back.
"To keep them safe," Peggy had said softly, looking down at a grey-haired version of herself holding an infant in a yellow knit cap.
It wasn't like with Bucky. Hydra'd taken Buck to pieces and then put him back together with deliberate wrongness. That had been obvious, in the grinding sound his arm made and the sour stink of his sweat and the trapped-animal fear in his eyes any time Steve got too close.
This Peggy wasn't wrong the way Bucky had been at first. She moved the same, held herself the same, even smelled the same. It was just that Steve couldn't help but think of her as this Peggy. Not that Peggy. Not her. (His.)
He loved her anyway, which was the hell of it.
It wasn't like Steve had been the only one to try.
Nick had known her too, and trusted her judgement about as much as he did anyone's, even his own. Steve knew he'd sat with her, talked to her. Once Steve had come back from an early morning run to see Nick leave Peggy's room, shaking his head. The door had been left ajar, just enough for Steve to look in as he'd gone past. He'd thought about going in, but then he'd seen how Peggy sat in a chair looking out the window at the facility's neatly kept grounds. Her hair was pulled back in a severe ponytail, and her lips were pressed together in such a hard line they seemed bloodless.
Steve had kept going. In his room, in the shower, he'd punched the wall hard enough to crack the tile.
Four months and one day after they got there, Steve woke up to find Peggy already in the kitchen, making breakfast for them. That was new. His breath caught a little when he stood in the doorway and watched her. She was in a t-shirt and jeans, her feet bare. A stack of toast sat on a plate on the kitchen island; eggs slowly scrambled in one pan and bacon fried in another while the kettle rumbled its way to a boil. It was such an ordinary, every day scene, except for how Peggy Carter had never been ordinary a day in her life.
Steve sat on one of the stools at the kitchen island and watched her work. Eventually, Peggy made up two plates of food and set one in front of Steve before retreating to a stool at the far end of the island. Steve tried not to let that sting too much.
Steve had just taken his first bite of eggs—rubbery, but he'd live—when Peggy spoke.
"They found you in the Arctic."
Steve looked up at her, startled. He swallowed, and set down his fork. "You remembered that?"
Peggy stretched out a hand and tapped a finger against the screen of a tablet sitting between them. "Wikipedia."
"Oh. Well, yeah. They did." Steve cleared his throat and tried to distract himself by buttering a piece of toast. It didn't work. How could it, when now he was the one who knew all the things that Peggy had lived through? "Phil hated Wikipedia. Phil Coulson. He's... You used to work with him. Helped train him. He used to write for it, but then he got into some sort of fight about their editorial policy on original research and made it so you couldn't access the site if you were using the SHIELD internet. Nat was pretty pissed."
"I see," Peggy said, perfectly polite. Too polite: the kind of polite you were with a stranger who was good friends with your boss but had just been rude to a waiter. There was a faint line between her eyebrows, though, like there was something she was trying to figure out.
Steve didn't mean to be rude about the eggs, but they definitely stuck in his craw on the way down.
"You'll want to get her out of here," Natasha had said. They were sitting outside at the upstate New York facility, drinking beers and watching Clint run target practice drills with some of the younger recruits. Because it was a spring evening, the breeze smelled of an odd mix of lilacs and cow shit. Not for the first time, Steve had wished that Brooklyn was empty enough of ghosts to let him live properly, in a city, as God intended people to do.
Natasha had sounded casual in the way she only did when she was being very serious.
Steve had shot her a sidelong look. "Heard something?"
Natasha had lifted one shoulder, let it fall again. "Hacked something. Nick asked me to. It seems like a couple of other agencies put two and two together and got five. They think you gave her the serum."
Steve had closed his eyes against the sudden rush of anger that sparked. "Why would I—how would I? They think I'm a scientist all of a sudden?"
"They think you did some sort of Hail Mary deathbed blood transfusion, but I don't know if you're enough of a romantic for that, Rogers," Nat had drawled. It was a good attempt at nonchalance, but Steve knew her too well for that now.
"How long?"
"Thirty-six hours, max. A little less, if they decide they don't want to get a warrant."
Steve had opened his eyes. "They're not going to get a warrant."
"Nope." Nat had taken another pull of her beer. "Want a distraction? I've been told I'm pretty good at distractions."
The next day, a thunderstorm rolled in. Around here, the land was flat enough you could see it approaching from a great distance. Maybe it wasn't the smartest idea Steve had ever had, but he went outside and watched it, the way the mass of dark clouds on the horizon seemed to have enough heft that you could reach out and pick them up. The first raindrops splashed large and fat against the parched earth.
When he saw the first crack of lightning, Steve turned back. Peggy was standing on the porch, arms folded, watching him approach. She didn't seem to notice the weather at all, although the rain was coming down hard now and each peal of thunder seemed longer and louder than the one that came before.
"Everything ok?" Steve asked when he stepped onto the porch.
"If I walked away right now, would your SHIELD let me go?" Peggy asked.
"I hope so," Steve said slowly. It wasn't that he distrusted Fury, exactly, so much as he was aware that the man played a very long game according to a very particular set of rules.
"And what about you?" Peggy continued. For maybe the first time since she'd woken up, she looked Steve in the eye directly and held his gaze. He felt rooted to the spot as surely as if he'd been struck by lightning. "If I started walking down that road and told you not to follow me, would you do as I said?"
Steve tried to picture that. He did. He tried to imagine standing here and not following her, when he'd walked into battle with her and walked to the grave with her, and loved her so much the whole time that he'd never felt like he had the words for it. "Peg—"
She turned and walked back into the house.
And the thing was, Steve was used to living with ghosts. He'd woken up in a world where his closest friends were museum exhibits, and most of the people who worked with him thought he was more statue than man. He just wasn't used to people looking at him like there was something about him that they feared.
He wasn't used to seeing anger masking fear on Peggy Carter's face.
They'd given him back his compass when Steve woke up, though it had looked much worse than he did after seventy years in the ice, the bronze turned green and the hinges rusted. When he'd finally got it open, the picture he'd had of Peg had crumbled to nothing. "We knew you'd want to have it," Steve had been told, though he didn't see much point in carrying it around next to his heart anymore.
They gave him a bunch of things after the reading of Peggy's will, too. Nothing valuable, the lawyer had said—after all, the medical care and funeral costs had eaten up most of Ms. Carter's estate, and the big house in the D.C. suburbs and the apartment in London had gone to the kids—but he'd handed Steve a large wooden box and the key to it, and said, "I know how much she wanted you to have this."
He'd left Steve alone in one of the law office's fancy meeting rooms, to sit at a table and open the box in private. Sitting on top of a stack of envelopes and some other, smaller boxes was a photo: a photo of him, one Steve had never seen before. Black and white and a little blurred, it showed him squinting and open-mouthed, hair falling into his eyes and shoulders showing bony through the thin cotton of his t-shirt.
Steve remembered that day, he thought. He'd been trying desperately to keep up with the others on the parade ground although his lungs were burning and his legs were trembling. He'd wanted to help, and this him—him then—no one thought he'd ever be able to.
No one except Dr Erskine, and Peggy. Peggy, who'd kept this picture of him for seventy years, and who'd wanted to make him a gift of that knowledge before she'd died.
Steve's eyes had been red-rimmed when he'd finally left the meeting room, but at least the lawyers had been paid well enough to pretend not to notice.
That evening, Steve rummaged in the bottom of his duffle bag until he found the burner phone that Natasha had pressed into his hand shortly before she'd sauntered off to plant a series of IEDs near the compound's perimeter. He dialled a number, waited until the phone had rung three times, and hung up. While he waited for Nat to call him back, he poured himself a glass of water and sat at the kitchen table. Rain was still spattering against the window panes. Peggy was in her bedroom, door closed, and hadn't come out in hours.
"Hey, sailor," Nat said when she called him. Underneath the drawl, she sounded faintly out of breath.
Steve sighed. "Shiver me timbers." Natasha had insisted that using code phrases like this were a way to make sure they were really talking to one another and that no one was under duress. Maybe. Steve was still pretty sure she was screwing with him.
"Everything okay with you two?" Steve could hear the sound of a door closing on the other end of the line, footsteps on metal grating. "You sound a little antsy."
"Can't think why," Steve said dryly. He cleared his throat. "I think I made a mistake."
"Left yourself wide open with that one, Rogers," Nat said. "But let's pretend I already made all the jokes."
"Thanks," Steve said. He didn't get tired the way most people did, not any more, but now he felt tired deep down to his bones. "I've... I've been trying to help her but I think I'm just hurting her instead. How do I know I'm not doing more harm than good?"
There was silence on the other end of the line for a long moment. In the background, Steve could hear the murmur of another voice: Sam, he thought.
"Well," Natasha said eventually, "if you want an opinion based on my own rich experience with employment-based amnesia—"
Steve huffed a laugh, squeezed his eyes shut.
"—you need to give her even more time than you might think. And I know this is going to sound rich coming from me, but you could just talk. Not tell her things. Let her talk. Ask questions."
Steve turned his water glass in a circle on the table top. "You know, it sounds like you've been saving that up for a while."
Natasha made a non-committal noise. "Maybe. Sometimes you've got to wait until you know you'll be heard."
Steve didn't even try to sleep that night, so when Peggy emerged from her room at two in the morning, he was still sitting at the kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee at his elbow and a paperback sitting unread in front of him. She stood and watched him from across the room and then she took a deep breath and said, "If I agree to whatever you wish, will you let them be?"
Whatever Steve had been expecting, it wasn't that. "Who? Peg—"
"You and Mr Fury have both made it very clear," Peggy said, voice shaking in a clear effort to keep a leash on her anger. "My cooperation in return for my—that family's—safety. But it's been months now and I still don't know what you want and I—"
"Peggy—Peg, no." Steve stood up so fast that his chair toppled over behind him, clattering noisily against the tile. Peggy's hands balled into fists as if—as if she expected. Bile rose, hot and cloying, up Steve's throat. He would never, ever—but then again, how would she know that? What did she know of him beyond the things he'd told her, the books he'd given her?
Steve remembered what it had been like to wake up after the ice, the subtle wrongness of the room and the too-familiar game on the radio. He'd been lucky then, in a manner of speaking: the fiction had been well-meant, and he'd been found by one of the few arms of SHIELD that hadn't been corrupted. But if things had been just a little different—and even then, who was to say that Peggy's response wasn't the right one? Look what a few decades of complacency had earned them all.
"I don't know anything," Peggy said, "I don't remember, and I don't know how much more of my blood your lot can possibly take but if that's what you need—"
Steve shook his head, slow, trying to think of a way to make her understand—but he'd never been good with words and he'd already given her all of them that he had. Everything except saying I love you to her face for the first time since she'd died, and as much as those words crowded into his mouth every time he saw her, Steve knew to say them now could only be a selfish thing.
"I woke up in a coffin, and the dates on the tombstone said, but I…" Peggy stretched out her trembling hands in front of her and looked at them with an expression that wavered between shock and revulsion. Her voice blurred now with tears. "You said this was to keep them safe, but every time I think I'm going to remember it all slips away again. And if I never remember, what use am I to you? But there are children in those photos and I could never forgive myself if, if—"
"Peggy." Steve shook his head again, hoping his face could make clear what his fumbling words couldn't. He had to fight to steady his breathing, just the way he'd had to his whole life before the serum. "I can go. It doesn't have to be me letting you go. You could—you could send me away. If that's what you want."
There were tears running down Peggy's face openly now.
"Or there's a handgun in that top drawer right there." Steve nodded in the direction of the kitchen cabinets nearest Peggy. "You want to take me out, you can do it."
It was a kind of torture, waiting for Peggy to decide. It was another kind of torture that Peggy needed time to decide. But Steve had always tried his best never to be a coward and he stood there, straight-backed, and he waited.
"Those books you got me," Peggy said eventually. "They said that we, that you… that you loved me."
"Yes. I do. Peggy—"
"I don't remember any of it. I don't remember loving you. I don't remember being her."
"I know." His throat felt so tight it was hard to get the words out.
"But you'd still let me—"
"Yes," Steve said, without hesitation. That, and more, if it was for Peggy—it didn't matter, he realised, if it was for this Peggy Carter or that Peggy Carter. There was no way for her to be that he couldn't, wouldn't, love.
Peggy didn't reach for the gun, and she didn't leave.
And Steve understood, that was the worst of it. He remembered why he'd gone into the ice in the first place and remembered what it had been like when he'd first come out of it. For Peggy it was all a blank, and she was smart, and it wasn't like it didn't pay to be a cynic in their line of work. She wouldn't have been her—really wouldn't have been her—if she had trusted him from the get-go.
That didn't make any of this less miserable, but all Steve could do was what he'd always done: pick himself back up, square his shoulders, and keep going.
"What if I never remember?" Peggy asked.
It was seven days later. Enough time for a whole world to be made, if Steve remembered his scripture right. Not enough time for Peggy to trust him, not really, but enough for her to be willing to sit next to him on the porch in the evening. They listened to music spilling softly from a little portable speaker and didn't say very much.
Earlier, when they were washing up after dinner, Peggy's fingers had brushed against his hand when she'd given him the dishcloth. Depending on how you counted, it was the first time she'd touched him either in months or in years.
Steve thought for a long moment. What if she never remembered? Memory was Steve's anchor in a world he hadn't been born into, but that wasn't the only reason he was himself, even after everything. And if this Peggy never remembered what any of it had been like, if she never again curled her hair or reached for a tube of red lipstick, that didn't change that she was Peggy. It didn't change the things that were important about her, or the reasons why Steve wanted to protect her. It didn't change the grief he'd felt when he'd watched them lower her coffin into the ground. It didn't mean that he couldn't love her now.
"If you don't remember," Steve said, "it doesn't matter. Because you're… you're Peggy. You matter to me either way."
Over the plains in front of them, the moon rose huge and round and orange. Next to him, and haltingly at first, Peggy started to ask him questions—about her past, and his, and what they had lived through together and apart. And if Steve didn't always know how to answer, well, there was a certain kind of grace in that, too. They were there together. There would be time enough.