Archive of Our Own

When Peggy saved that lost Russian czarina from assassination, she never thought it would mean having to spend the next two years in witness protection. But sure enough, right after four years of a World War, a month in the frozen wasteland of Moscow searching for leads, and a very quick phone call from Chief Dooley, she was confined to the new suburban lifestyle cropping up in cities all over the bloody country after the War. An awful movement, really. Families began to all look the same – a husband, a wife, two children, and of course, Fido the pooch. There were two of them, actually, that lived on either side of her. Very nice, very polite. Absolutely unbearable, but nice. So, she tried not to be too judgmental, but as her opinion was always right, this was a very difficult undertaking for the great Peggy Carter.

However, she couldn’t complain as much as she would like. The neighbourhood, “Levittown,” as they were calling it, was a new and upcoming community chalk-full of homecoming soldiers and their lovely wives. Well, and their newborn children. A plethora of newborns. It was as if Peggy had gone to bed one day, only to discover the next morning, that there were thousands of American babies that had popped up practically overnight. Alright. So, she could complain. It was rather disgusting. Her cookie-cutter one-story house, on the blandly named “Lilac Row,” that bore no such promised lilac bushes, was the same as the next five adjacent homes. And if you flew up in a plane, (which thankfully for Howard she still got to do from time-to-time), you would discover that it was not only the next five houses down from hers that were identical, but the entire neighbourhood. Atrocious. Truly American atrocity.

At least you’re alive, Peg...or uh, Sandy? Howard had told her this on one of their many late-night meetings, where he would indulge her with the sexual exploits he had embarked on since she had gone into witness protection. And yes, you heard right – Sandy. That was her name in this sterilized existence. Practically descended from British royalty of the Carter name. Only to become Sandy – wait for it – Jenkins. Sandy Jenkins. How incredibly drab. But Howard had had the audacity to say to her: ‘at least you’re alive.’ Of course, to Howard, alive was better than actually living. Peggy attributed this to the fact that Howard had never actually attempted to live, rather than just exist with his contraptions and his women. He had never attempted to feel, to love, or to embrace anything that actually required an emotional complexity.

Ordinarily, Peggy was not so severe of Howard. She knew exactly who he was, she acknowledged his massive travesty of personhood. But these past few years… After the War, after losing Steve, after realizing the fundamental, profound changes of her new life, she became quite and properly jealous of him. Howard, who in the last year alone, had been wanted by the SSR, escaped to Hollywood, had a surreptitious affair with a starlet, only to clear his name and stumble back scot-free to New York. Ugh. Of all the nerve. While Peggy, who had saved a princess from a sleeper cell of HYDRA infiltrates, had to go into witness protection.

And she was the one who had lost everything, not Howard Stark.

Anyway, she tried not to think about it. At least…not too much.

After all, what was the point of missing Steve? He was gone. Aching and weeping over him would do her no such good. And that was the mentality she had that morning as she took out her hair rollers, staring at herself in her pale-rose vanity mirror. Sandy Jenkins had never loved Steve Rogers, and if that’s who she was now, then she supposed Peggy Carter shouldn’t either. She would move on from Steve, she knew this…but…

I gotta put her in the water.

Please…don’t do this. We have time. We can work it out.  

Peggy…this is my choice.

I’m gonna need a raincheck on that dance.

He had owed her a dance.

Tears welled in her eyes as she gathered them back into herself, feeling rather pathetic. Here she was, a young woman, after a brilliant combat stint in her presumably to-be, long successful career of service, and she was crying over a boy. And not some lord or heir to a British dynasty, but a stupid American sod. A soldier, of all the bloody idiots. American soldiers – loud, grabby, bombastic, reckless, assumptive. But that wasn’t Steve, a tiny voice whispered into her ear.

No, you’re quite right. That wasn’t Steve. Soft, sweet, caring. Baby blue eyes that dwelled deeply in his own thoughts. A bit distracted, true, but that was the case with all great people. They had a great many thoughts rolling around in their heads, considering the price and the cost of their decisions. An artist. He had shown her his sketchbook – filled with pictures of Bucky, Rebecca (Bucky Barnes’ little sister), his mother as she was ironing a shirt, and then, once you flipped past the graphite portraits, you found the worlds and fantasies that Steve Rogers dreamed of. Castles. Knights. King Arthur. The Lady of the Lake. Roman gladiators. Shepherds with sheep. A knight who saved herself from the dragon. In fact, a knight who tamed the dragon, only to climb on its back and ride it off into the sunset of the unexplored world. That’s you. He had told her with pink cheeks, embarrassed by his own talent as so many extraordinary people were, unaware of their own potential and brilliance. No, Steve was not an American soldier. Not in the sense that Peggy had known.

Oh, yes. And a fabulous arse. Especially in tights.

So, yes, pathetic was the word. She had pretended to slay dragons when she was a child, now she wasn’t even capable of chasing down a few ghosts ricketing around in her head? She was hardly the knight that Steve had envisioned her. Instead, she was reduced to the ingratiating Sandy Jenkins.

With a steady sigh, she gathered herself, running a hand through her undone hair. She needed to get ready for the day. She glanced at the framed picture of that small, asthmatic golden-haired boy who looked back at her with a raw resolved expression on his face from her vanity. I’m going to do what’s right, he seemed to say. That was the expression, that was the radiance that emanated from him in that frame. And it was that same sentiment that had made him crash a plane into the arctic ice, sacrificing himself for the greater good. She knew it. She smiled at him, running a thumb over his face, before she finally stood up and turned to her wardrobe.

Enough dallying, Sandy. Crikey O’Riley. You would have thought she’d never dealt with grief in her life. She dropped her robe and quickly got dressed into the red dress. She knew she was really tempting her emotional well-being with the idea of even wearing anything of the sort – as she had promised Steve she would wear this very thing to their date. But she loved how it made her feel – its crisscrossed stitching that covered her bosom, the way it hugged her curves, and accentuated her figure – well, it made her feel downright lovely. Even if that silly American boy wasn’t here, she could still appreciate what she had. Despite being Sandy “American milk-toast” Jenkins.

Once she was dressed, Peggy started in on her daily chores around the house – the dishes, laundry, watering her flowers. All very mundane, but comfortingly routine. She was just in the middle of brewing a cup of tea, when she heard a knock on the door. Probably from her drab and drolling neighbour, Linda. Hiya, Sandy, I made this cornbread casserole – thought ya’ might want some since I don’t notice ya’ cookin’ all that much. Figures since ya’ don’t have a steady. Not ta’ worry, doll. You’ll get yourself one. Well, for your information, Linda, just because she didn’t cook “all that much,” didn’t mean she couldn’t. Plus, she wouldn’t cook for a quote-on-quote “steady.” If anything, her “steady” would be bloody cooking for her.

She walked from the kitchen to front of the house and without much thought, opened the front door. It was a rather sunny day, but with the big tree that shaded the front porch of Peggy’s house, a great amount of cool and pleasant shade fell over her steps. That’s where the golden-haired stranger on her front steps was standing. With his back to her, she noticed he was dressed in a light brown leather jacket with a navy-blue dress collar peeking out at his neckline. He was well-dressed and seemed to fit the clothing well, but there was something about his clothes that seemed to make him tense. She noticed it in his shoulders. Striking, really. His shoulders seemed almost familiar… That’s how he always holds those shoulders when he’s up in arms about something. It was the first thought that came to Peggy, before she asked in her nasally, but cutesy all-American accent: “Can I help you?”

The man turned slowly, the sunlight which had been cradling his back, fell upon his face as he came to face her. Baby blues. It was the first thing she saw. Those terribly beautiful robin-egg blue eyes. And then the rest of his face filled in – a strong jaw, those round, kissable cheeks that didn’t seem to fit his face exactly but still managed to look so right, and that small, unimposing smile. The same one that she had dreamed of for two years. “Steve.” His name left her like a breath of air as she felt all the oxygen escape from her lungs. She must have been dreaming. Her knees buckled, but Steve caught her as she fell forward, crashing down into his arms. Their collision of bodies was perfect: perfectly timed, her head coming to rest on the chest in the perfect position, his lips perfectly burying themselves into her rich chestnut waves. It was perfect. Surreal, cutting, dreamy perfection.

“I’m here, doll, I’m here.” She didn’t even realize he had been whispering to her, a mantra over-and-over again as he brought her tightly against himself. She pulled him into her house as they sunk to the floor of her living room on their knees, each of them unable to keep standing with the weight of their reunion pressing down on them. He was thumbing her tears off her cheeks, looking deeply and painfully into her eyes, shaking a little as if he couldn’t bear the enormity of her presence. They were both crying. That’s what she remembered most vividly. His tears on his own face. They rolled down his cheeks in slow and solemn splashes like he was partaking in a sacred event, one that induced both awe and agony. “Peg.” Somewhere in the mess of their colliding and embracing, he had scooped up her face, wanting nothing more than to look at her forever. “Peggy.”

This had to be a dream, right? Steve could not have shown up, on her front porch, unmarked and uninjured, when two years ago he had supposedly died in a tragic plane crash. And as much as she loved a good reunion dream (she had had too many), she really didn’t want to wake up only to remember that Steve was gone. His comfort, his embrace, his warmth. No. She didn’t much want to recall that he had died, and she was alone in American suburbia.

“I need you to tell me this is a dream.” She whispered to him through his warm and steady chest, which she was currently pressed up against. Her tears had wetted his shirt, but since it was a dream, she didn’t feel all that bad. “I need you to tell me you’re not really here.” She begged him, clutching his lovely shirt in between her fists.

Steve pulled back just enough to look at her once more, but his arms stayed steadily wrapped around her back, keeping their chests pressed up against one another. “Peggy,” he searched her teary gaze with his own, “I’m here.” He pressed his forehead against hers as they kneeled before her open door, sunlight streaming around them. Their shadows cast a long, but strangely lovely silhouette across her living room floor that appeared to look like praying hands pressed together. “I came back for you.” He shook his head with a soft sob as he trailed his nose down along the side of her face until he finally came to bury it in the crook her neck.

It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be… But how she wanted it to be real. How desperately she wanted this moment to exist. She hadn’t even realized how tightly her fingers clutched him, white-knuckled and buried deep down into the fabric of his shirt. Well, that was just it then, she had to see if it was really real. Ever practical, she knew just how to get to the bottom of things: “Prove it.” She asked of him. A heartbroken grin coming to rest on her face as she looked over his golden-haired crown.

He shifted himself to look up at her with eyes that were strained and…ancient. They were different. Sad, worn lines etched themselves along the ends of his eyes. Steve, in fact, looking at her then, was different. His golden hair was pushed back, a crest over his crown, rather than his sweetly innocuous comb-overs. He was bulkier, bigger than she remembered. Then there were the wrinkles on his forehead – concerned, worried, exhausted. Raw and fresh-cut heartbreak sat on his face like an opened, bleeding wound. Unprocessed. Unfiltered. Unconfronted. This Steve, who had her wrapped up in his arms, was someone else. Someone who had lost so much so recently. And that’s when she knew it was real, because he wasn’t her Steve.

“You’ve been gone a long time, haven’t you, my love?” Her voice was tender, but soft. A lacy whisper. Steve’s eyes diverted from hers as they filled with fresh tears. So, somehow, someway, this Steve had come to her from a different time, an altogether different place.

“I got a lot to fill ya’ in on, Peg.” His eyes finally shifted back up to hers with a tremendous amount of guilt, regret, and something else she couldn’t quite identify. “It’s been a long time. Longer than ya’ know.” She believed him.

Taking his face in her hands, as it was her turn to tenderly cup those cheeks she loved so much, she held him steady. “Well, you can tell it all to me.” A sweet, undemanding smile possessed her richly adorned red lips as she watched him. Her voice, known for its demanding “Britishness,” was rather soft as if it meant to wrap Steve up in a comforting embrace just as her very arms that were wrapped around him.

The tea kettle began to whistle loudly from the kitchen, causing Steve to jump three inches off the ground, his eyes wide with surprise. Peggy chuckled as she patted him on the cheek, reluctantly releasing him from her grasp. “It’s only the kettle, Steven, come on – I’ll pour you a cup.”

After Peggy had poured them both a cup of tea, and they were seated beside each other at the kitchen table, they fell silent and an unexplorable awkwardness loomed over them. Not so much that they were uneasy with one another, it was as if the joy of their reunion had been pinned back up into place. Neither of them entirely sure how to proceed. It had only been about the reunion – the “seeing” of one another again, and now that that had happened, it wasn’t entirely clear what was to happen next. And that undeniable story seemed impossibly dense as it settled between them, tense and unaddressed.

With a tentative movement, Peggy reached over and placed a gentle hand over Steve’s that was in place on the surface of the smooth, plywood tabletop. Her small, delicate fingers came to rest in between his, burying themselves in between the spaces of his fingers. “I’m glad you’re here, darling.” She said softly, bravely shifting her eyes to meet his. “I really am.” 

Steve’s blue eyes, muddied with sea-green strokes of color, moved like marbles stuck in sand, as they finally came to rest in her own bright brown gaze. He trusted her eyes. They steadied him in this new, but past world he now inhabited. They drew him back to the present. When he first arrived, he had been afraid to meet those eyes, afraid she would have looked at him differently, afraid she would have seen him as someone else.

“Well, I was in the neighborhood.” He offered her an attempt at a teasing smile – did he still know how to make that expression?

Peggy chuckled at his jest, involuntarily shifting closer to him. “You were just…in the neighbourhood? Casually?”

“Yeah, just ‘poof’ here I am – Steve Rogers, at your service.” He tried to tease her once more, but the desired effect had seemingly worn off. “No uh… To be honest, I spent a little while lookin’ for ya. You’re a hard lady to find, believe it or not.” He sniffed through a short, saddened laugh, shifting his eyes away from hers. He blinked, fresh tears seemingly reappearing in his eyes. “But I had to… I had to find you.” The quaver that carried through the natural timbre of his voice was thick. The emotion that came with it seemed to expand, flesh out into its own being, and take up space inside of Peggy’s tiny kitchen. Steve suddenly seemed all too large to be seated in this daintily furnished home of hers.

With a strained, sympathetic gaze, Peggy stood. Her chair sighed in protest as it was pushed across the linoleum-glazed tile. It was the only sound that seemed to last longer than Steve’s emotional confession. She walked behind his massive frame and with a deliberate, but gentle touch, she tucked her arms around his waist. She rested her chin on his shoulder, folding herself practically over him as if her own weight could replace the emotional burden he seemed to carry on his massive shoulders. “Steven, there’s no need for that. You succeeded.” She smiled, half on the edge of laughter, half on the ledge of a great and heavy sadness. Her cheek came to rest against his, lips pushing tenderly up against the bottom-half of his ear. “I have been found. Unfortunately, safe and sound in suburban America. But I am… I am here, my love.” She whispered to him in assurance just as he had to her, her fingers running over the silky fabric of his shirt. 

Turning his head to look at her, his eyes shined with unshed tears of doubt, wonder, and love. The tension between them, the unease, the unsureness, the denial…all suddenly…slipped away. It was gone. For that one, unsettling moment of surreality and dreamy sunshine, they were back to being two halves of a collected whole, something that had been taken from them was once more replaced. Intact. Together.

He took in a shaky breath, lips parting as a single tear escaped over the rim of his bottom lashes. “Peggy…”

She offered him a small, sweet nod. I know. She took a hand and cupped his cheek, before she closed the space between them. Her lips met his. They kissed. It was slow and impossibly lovely – lips meeting one another in brilliant, tangible harmony. Peggy could feel her heart soar all the way up into the very banks of her lungs. Breathing felt difficult between the ebbs and flows of their kiss, her heart had seemingly swallowed all her desire to breathe. But why would she want to breathe, when Steve’s touch against her skin seemed to fulfill her more than the very act of breathing itself? You would consume me whole, Steve Rogers, if I gave you the opportunity.

Breaking their kiss with a quivering laugh, bound with nerves and unspoken intention, Steve leaned his forehead against hers. “Can I…uh… Can we…?”

Peggy grinned at his question, shifting her ferociously bright brown eyes from his lips to his own. “I thought you’d never ask, darling.”

Before she could even process the elated, indescribable excitement that split across his face, he was scooping her up in his arms, carting her up bridal style as if she weighed mere ounces. With a surprised squeal somewhere between shock and laughter, Peggy leaned her head against his shoulder with untouchable mirth. Her eyes kept their place neatly on his face. “Steve Rogers, what is this?”

Steve glanced down at her with a hint of his former cheeky, yet smug humor. “Uh…room service, I guess?” 

Peggy’s jaw dropped in shock as a surprised laugh escaped from deep in her throat. Her head tipped back over the edge of his arm in laughter, before she brought herself back to rest rightly under his chin. “You have, indeed, become something else, Steve.” For a moment, the mirth and shock at his sudden movement was overtaken by something far more pensive. But whatever it was, it lasted for mere seconds, before she was back to smiling with that busty, cheeky grin of hers. “Alright, take me away, off to it—” She gestured to the nook of a bedroom off to the side of the kitchen with an elegant thrust of her hand.

With a brimming grin, Steve walked her into the bedroom. He laid her down onto the duvet with a somewhat nervous, but all the same, intimate smile. “You sure about this, Peg?” Her bed was much too small for what they intended to do – if it was going to be enjoyable for the both of them.

Peggy’s smile, however, said something different. She grinned up at him with an almost carnal, magnanimous joy. “Oh, yes. I’m absolutely certain.” A hand came to rest around the back of Steve’s neck, as she pulled herself up from the torso to kiss him once more. This time, it was not the tender, fleeting softness of two long-lost lovers reuniting. No. Peggy was done and over the all-too gentle circumstance of reunion – this was what she wanted. She ferociously locked lips with his, demanding and perhaps selfish of her own desire, but she didn’t much care.

They’d been separated for years; it was time they had their fill.

It was near dawn, and neither of them had still found it in them to sleep, the two of them had been talking long and well into the night. While the two lay in each other’s arms, relishing in their reunion, kissing – and well, doing other things in-between – the starry sky above them had become lighter, navy-blue into indigo, indigo to pale lavender and pink, orange and gold. A sunrise, dawning on the horizon. Outside Peggy’s window, birds began awaken in chirps and song, while one of Peggy’s neighbours was out with their chosen Fido.

The world was beginning to wake up, while Steve and Peggy were only just coming to an end of a long story that had been Steve’s life. Frozen in the arctic. Joining a superhuman team in the future. Finding Bucky brainwashed and lost. Killer robots. Gods with lightning and thunder. Losing everything…all over again, only to have it back for mere moments. Time travel across thousands of different worlds. Until finally, Howard Stark’s son died for the sake of the world. A friend lost. His story had been broken by intervals of finding people to love, heartbreak over losing them, only to find them once again. It made Peggy want to weep.

Not because Steve had gone off, without her, and lived another life, but because so much of the story he told…could have been prevented. By her. The SSR corrupted by HYDRA, Bucky’s lost time as the Winter Soldier, and what seemed to be the greatest tragedy: her handling of finding Steve. He had been alive. Forgotten. At the bottom of an ocean. And they had all but given up on him… He had had no choice but to move on.

“I found a family with the Avengers…but I just… After Tony died, I… I didn’t know what I wanted anymore.” His voice was gravelly, aged. Peggy, her head resting on his bare chest, could hear the deep rumbling of his voice from within as he talked. His blue-green eyes had become altogether dark, notched and gnarled like an old tree trunk. “I just knew I needed to see you again.” He looked down at her with thick, resolved devotion as Peggy raised her gaze to meet his. A meager smile came to her face.

Sweet words, but she was much too pragmatic to let those be the only thing she heard. Steve didn’t know what he wanted. He still didn’t. He hadn’t come to her as an endpoint, he had come to her as refuge in catastrophic confusion.

Pulling herself up to a sitting position, she turned to him with a knowing smile on her face. “Mmm haven’t you’ve become a charmer with those words of yours?”

Steve snorted in a modest chuckle, his eyes leaving hers as he looked down at his hands. The way the early morning sunlight spilled in around his face, caught itself on his eyelashes that rested on his cheeks, and made him look altogether far too close to some kind of angel. “Yeah, you know me… A real charmer.” He teased, turning his head to look at her.

“Well, would the real charmer like some breakfast?” She raised a teasing eyebrow, while she wrapped the sheet up around her to find her robe buried somewhere beneath all the clothing they had shed throughout the previous evening. “Now, you can’t eat everything in my fridge,” she snickered as she remembered the super soldier’s capacity to eat, “but I can scramble something up for you.”

Steve grinned through his melodious laugh that followed her jest. “I don’t know, doll, I’ll probably wither away – I mean look at me, I’m practically starving as it is.”

Peggy, finally tying her robe into place, smirked at him from across the room. “That arse of yours would say differently, Steven.” With that, and Steve’s bright and blushed cheeks, she walked out of the room to go and make them some breakfast.

With her legs thrown over Steve’s thighs, Peggy lounged back in her chair, snacking on a piece of toast and jam, she was in mid-chuckle at something he had said. Her eyes were bright with humor and ease. The scene looked good on them – easy to come to, easy to breathe in. “No, that was the time Dugan thought it would be clever to sneak into a German cabaret and parade around with fake German accents. You boys were all terrible at German accents, let alone German.”

Steve gasped out in laughter, his fingers – which had been massaging Peggy’s knee – paused as he doubled over from her recollection of the story. “Well, don’t pin it on me. It was Dugan’s idea – we thought we could get intel.”

“Yes, without speaking German, you thought you could waltz into enemy territory and just “German” it out of them.” She rolled her eyes, but the loving smile on her face was kept in place, as she watched him struggle to contain his laughter at the memory.

“Oh, my God. Wasn’t that the time that Buck tried shaving his mustache…” he was already laughing amidst the telling of the story, “to look like Hitler’s?”

“Yes! Because appearing like the grand Chancellor of Germany was James’ fix for the situation. Bloody moron.” She ran a hand through her hair as she shook her head in disbelief. How had any of them survived the War at all? She had truly been the only one with any common sense. In fact, how they managed to survive the few combat missions she hadn’t accompanied them on, was beyond her.

Chuckling and bubbly with mirth, Steve finally came to rest his eyes on hers once again. For the first time, he didn’t look so bloody pensive. His expression looked clear and free, as if he was coming back into himself. “Alright, I gotta ask – and not to pass any judgment, Peg – but uh,” he glanced around her kitchen, with a hesitant expression, “this isn’t exactly Agent Carter’s scene.”

Releasing an exasperated sigh, Peggy groaned and dramatically threw a hand over her forehead. “Oh, I know.” Her eyes were cast to heaven, vengefully digging into her ceiling as if the Almighty could feel the heat of her anger. “Well, you know, it was all very routine: I saved this Russian princess from execution, stopped the end of a brutal cycle of violence within a Bolshevik regime, and came home as a great and honoured servant of this hallowed country.” She threw up her hand in Shakespearean dramatism, smirking with mischief at her description. “Well, apparently that wasn’t the end of it. This assassin from this up and coming Russian terrorist organization, gets ahold of my identity and throws it out into the intelligence community. Suddenly, everyone who hates me knows where I live in Manhattan. I was having a cup of tea the one evening, and a bullet cuts straight through my nan’s china. I was so upset.”

“Over the assassin?” Steve’s eyebrow peaked in horror.

“No, you dolt, over my grandmother’s porcelain.” Peggy shook her head in distaste as if Steve’s question was outrageously stupid. “Anyway, a phone call later, and I’m living in American suburbia within the confines of a witness protection program. What a glorious expanse it is.” Sarcastically dramatic, she rolled her eyes, and took a sip of tea as she swung her legs off of Steve, settling herself into her chair.

Much to her surprise, Steve began to guffaw in big-belly laughs. His entire body looked as if it was moving in his fit of disbelieving laughter, unable to control his hand from slapping down on his knee. “Jeez, Peg.” His Brooklyn accent that still remained, even after all this time, slipped in over the ‘eez’ of his interjection. “I’m sorry, it’s just – you in witness protection?”

“Yes, yes, laugh it up, Steven.” She gathered up her dishes and took them to the kitchen sink, tsk’ing at his enjoyment in her misery of living in this pasteurized community. She clattered the dishes into the hot, sudsy water over Steve’s laughter.

“Well, that seems like a load of overkill, if I ever saw one. You can take care of yourself.” Steve nodded in approval of the woman before him. Not just in approval, however, but in complete endorsement. There had never been a truer statement, in his opinion. If there was one woman who could run the show, all by herself, no strings attached, it would be Peggy Carter.

Peggy turned around sharply to nod in agreement. Finally, someone on her side. “Yes, thank you. I can.” She huffed and crossed her arms below her chest, before she walked back over to sit beside him.

“I mean, the Peggy Carter I knew would’ve left this place a long time ago. Gone off and raised hell somewhere else.” His blue eyes came to rest in hers, a small, endearing smile coming to face. He was kidding, a joke.

But he didn’t know how true it was.

The matter of truth was, quite simply, Peggy had changed and…so had he. “Well… That’s just it, darling. The Peggy Carter you knew… She’s…different now.” She swallowed, shifting her gaze away from his, afraid of seeing his expression. “I had to become a fundamentally different person after you died, Steve. Someone, unfortunately, much more unsure than I once was…” Finding her courage, muddled and somewhere inside of her, she raised those defiant brown eyes to meet his.  

There was a lull in the conversation between them. A silence that cast over the two of them like the sunlight slowly rising outside of Peggy’s kitchen window. It was warm, stirring, telling – all at once. It was as if it was the fruition of all the things that both of them had known since the moment Steve knocked on her door. There was an untouchable, unspeakable gap between them. Years, age, and agony – all twisted and sheltered in unexpected ways that neither of them could voice. So, this is what it had meant – all that unexplored conflict that raged behind Steve’s sapphire-blue eyes – he had been torn between her and the future he once knew.

It was simple once she realized it: They were different. Peggy had only begun to manage her life after him, while Steve had gone and lived an entire life without her.

And here it was – this massive, poignant difference between them, manifest in pained, doomed silence. Peggy watched Steve as he looked down at his empty plate, pushing the last morsels of eggs around with his fork. A heartbroken smile began to tug at the corners of her lips – bright and bursting at the seams with exuberance, despite the sinking dread in her chest; perhaps that’s what made it so heartbreaking. A triumph in and of itself, but that was Peggy: triumphant even while her world was burning.

A tear ran down Steve’s cheek as he finally looked up to her, revealing the glossy unmined diamonds sitting within the banks of his lashes. Peggy reached over, nearly instinctively, and rested her hand over his. His blue eyes settled up against hers as if her own gaze was a lean-to of support, resting, and comfortable at last. “I’m sorry.” He whispered to her. There was a finality in his words. Oh. So, they both knew then.

“My darling,” Peggy shook her head with that extraordinary smile pinned up on her lips, “don’t you dare apologize. This was a gift.”

“I don’t wanna go...” The pain that crossed the super soldier’s face was severe, sharp, and breathtakingly felt. It settled over his expression like a well-worn jacket. This was not a pain that was new to him, nor was it one he seemed unaccustomed to wearing. On the contrary, that heavy brow and those shaky blue eyes, appeared to be the more “proper” expression for this new and solemn face he wore. “I remember who I am when I’m with you.” His expression squelched up – wrinkles and lines and shifts of movement that communicated a grand cacophony of ancient and lingering confusion within him. The diamond-like tears that flared up in the banks of his eyelashes, shimmering and shining as they fell, were not out of sadness, but out of frustration. Steve, after a century on this planet, still struggled to know who he was.

But Peggy knew his words weren’t true. They weren’t true at all. She cocked her head as her smile faded from her lips, studying Steve for a long moment and debating the proper course of action. Whatever the proper course of action was, however, she didn’t take long to settle on it as she got up from her chair and squeezed herself onto Steve’s lap with a snarky smile crossing her face. Even in such an emotionally taut moment such as this, the Brit always managed to find the humor in a terrible situation. Cupping Steve’s chin with her palm, she brought his bowed and heavy head to rest against her forehead. “You remember who you used to be, Steve, not who you are now.”

“I don’t know what I want.” He sniffed as tears escaped those sacred banks that had held them back. A floodgate breaking down as they escaped. She could feel the bunching of the muscles within his face as he pressed himself closer to her, wrapping his arms around her back as they pressed the limits of the chair they were seated in.

“My love, I think…” She swallowed as she smiled through her own tears as they began to zig-zag down her cheeks. “I think you used to want this life. And I think…” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think you even used to want me.” At this particular observation, Steve broke down against her as he softly cried, his head sinking from her forehead to her shoulder as if he couldn’t stand to keep his head up.

“But the world’s changed for you and me both.” She whispered sweetly like a lover saying ‘I love you’ to a sleeping partner. “This grief… This grief that you have, Steve, it’s shaken you.” Her lips trailed down the side of his face to rest on the exterior of his cheek, upturned and smiling, vibrant and heartbroken. “And maybe being here with me is a comfort…a promise of something from long ago… But, my love, how long will it be before you begin to resent me?” Her voice was aching, a gentle and pained song of truth. She knew what she asked was hard to answer, but she was always the one to ask the hard questions.

It was her job. No one else would.

“I would never resent you…” He quaked and quivered, tightening his arms around her as if the denial to her question would prove its truth.

“No, maybe not me, darling, but you would resent the decision you made in living in a time that doesn’t make sense to you anymore.” The truth was sharp and jagged as it came across her tongue. She gasped out a sob as it left her, a revelation that she could not afford to swallow.

“But I love you.” He buried his face in her hair, shaking with discomfort, as if her words cut into him. Steve knew she was right. She could feel her words sinking deep and quick into his skin. Her words weren’t a poison, they were an antidote to something he had forced himself to swallow.

“But don’t you see, Steve… That’s why you know.” Her lips smiled against his sweet, warm cheek. She could taste the salt of his tears, feel the heat of his body against hers. Such a comfort, such an embrace, such a tragedy. “You can’t stay here…” Because you love who I used to be…  

They held each other for a long while after that. Crying softly and deeply into one another as they had the day before when they were first reunited. Now, it was out of something altogether overwhelmingly different. There was much to cry about, if you really thought about it. What could have been, what was, and what would be. Three things that forever haunted human grief and fine tunings of the heart. The two of them, together, could have lived an extraordinary, revolutionary life full of adventure, promise, and spectacular beauty.

But that was when they were young, when they had been different, when they had had a choice. That had changed. The world had changed, and neither of them could go back. Perhaps the best they could do was start over.

“Steve, my love, you know…you still owe me a dance.” Peggy gasped through shaky sobs. Her words, caught in emotion and tears, were garbled, restrained, and sticky. But despite her deep sadness, despite her penetrating heartbreak that reigned across her face like an ever-cruel monarch, she still managed to offer him a small smile. Her nose reddened and lips swollen from crying, looked practically bolded across her face, as she met his own shaky gaze.

Her super soldier chuckled through more tears as they skimmed onto her fingers that were pressed up against his cheeks, but Peggy didn’t mind. No, she didn’t mind at all. “Ya’ know, Peg, even after all this time, I still don’t know a thing about dancin’.” His eyes managed to stay on hers as if he was afraid to look away, while he offered her a sad, but modest tease of a smile.

“That’s not an excuse, Steven – put your dancing shoes on, up yeh’ go.” Rising to her feet, Peggy pulled him up with her, keeping her hands intertwined with his. They stood in the sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window, looking at each other, marveling at one another’s appearance. Robed and tousled from bed, the two of them looked like they had been through something together. An indescribable journey that expanded across the known universe, time, and all of reality. Steve had come back, all this way, after a lifetime, just to see her…one last time.

Perhaps that’s what this had all been for this Steve Rogers, not a reunion, but a goodbye to someone he used to know. A part of himself he had held onto, through everything, that didn’t seem to fit with who he had become. Out there, across the waves of time and space, there was something else that fit there now. Something more true, real, and waiting at the end of the line.

Ten minutes later, with Glen Miller’s “I Know Why (And So Do You)” warbling on the record player, the two of them were clinging to one another in the center of Peggy’s living room. Peggy was shivering up against Steve, but not from the cold. The day outside was shaping up to be quite beautiful with the sky coming to settle on a picturesque blue, without a cloud in sight. How perfectly egregious for a moment like this.

Slowly spinning in concentric, drowsy circles, the two of them held onto each other, not saying much of anything. The strident, but melancholy chords of Miller’s trombone were woven within the brassy, sleepy tone of Pat Friday on the vocals. She mercilessly bounced back and forth between agony and acceptance of some great, striding tragedy within the notes of the song.

Why do robins sing in December

Long before the Springtime is due?

And even though it's snowing, violets are growing

Peggy, with her ear pressed up against Steve’s chest, watched the sun shift through the rose-tinted panes of the single stained-glass panel in her front window. Unshed tears kept themselves close and intimate within her eyes. She held onto him, grasping the fabric of his shirt from behind, clutching it as if she never planned on letting him go.

I know why and so do you

Tears were trailing down Steve’s cheeks in solemn streaks as he took in a shaky unsettled breath. One hand came to rest on the top of Peggy’s shoulder blades, forming to her skin as if he was made to hold her as he did, while the other hand clutched tightly around her own up against his chest. He meant to keep it warm. Because despite the day’s spring warmth, her skin felt clammy and chilled. It felt like there was so much of him – extra space, extra flesh, extra muscle – and so very little of her. He forgot… He forgot, amongst all the things he loved about Peggy, how right it felt to feel her this close.

When you dance with me, I'm in heaven when the music begins

I can see the sun when it's raining, hiding every cloud from my view

And why do I see rainbows when you're in my arms?

“Perhaps it doesn’t bear repeating…but I do love you, Steve.” Peggy whispered softly to him, her eyes finally shifting to meet his. The thick, uncuttable meaning in her eyes was heavy and unmoving. She looked at him with every known emotion – all of them, both namable and those that weren’t, were powerful, brilliant, and glossy – clashing and colliding within her gaze like rough, rocky waves beating against the side of a cliff face.

I know why and so do you

Steve reached down to brush the tears that were beginning to escape from her eyes with the back of his fingers. “I have always loved you.” His expression quivered as he fought back more tears. “There’s a reason I had to come back…because I had to see you…” He shook his head, unable to voice much else. While Peggy’s emotion was vast and ever-expanding like the universe miniaturized within herself, Steve’s was heavy, steel, and stagnant. The weight of it pressed down on his expression, making every curve and cut of his face look like it was worked within an iron forge. But despite the heaviness of his feeling, his words were true. He meant what he said. Steve Rogers had gone to the future, found another family, another world, but he always did love Peggy Carter. Always.

I know why and so do you

Pat Friday’s voice extended out into the room, gliding and dancing in a hanging note, until finally the music began to fade. The end of the song leaving a sudden silence, as the sound of the end of the record began to flip over into the dreaded quiet of the room.

Peggy buried her face in Steve’s shirt, desperately trying to memorize his scent, trying to hold everything about him in place for an eternity. She would never see him again, after all. Or maybe she would.

In a dream.

“I guess you best be on your way then.” She whispered to him, before shifting away to take him all in one last time. And that particular “one last time,” when she looked at him…she wasn’t so sad anymore. Because while she knew this Steve was someone else, she realized just who he had become. Her Steve – the one who dreamed of dragons and knights and warriors – was someone who needed protecting, someone who she defended in the flame of battle, someone who still believed in a better world.

This man, he was someone else now. He had grown into himself, become a man who had seen and lost too much to believe in the myths and heroes he once had. But perhaps that just made him stronger, braver, and much more ready to take on a world so very different than hers. The way he smiled, the way he breathed, the way he laughed – that hadn’t changed, but the very composition of his soul had shifted. There was a far greater mettle engrained within him that she could no longer reach nor understand.

He was no longer half of her, but a half of someone else.

There was someone else.

She smiled a little as she realized how beautiful that was for him. Not that he had someone else, but that he had someone else who understood the epic tragedy that bled through his veins.

Steve’s face fell as her own expression lightened. She may have known who he had become, but he didn’t. Taking a step forward, coming up on her tiptoes, she took hold of his face and grasped it in-between her hands. She smiled at him, brightly and brilliantly, raising an eyebrow in quiet resilience. Shifting her gaze between each of his sad blue eyes, giving both of them her proper attention, she fixed him with a fiery expression of both belief and condemnation. “Vain man, you go, and you live.” Another tear escaped her great, blazing eye, but her words caused Steve to chuckle – sadly, but lighter than he had been.

“You think too much of me.”

“And you don’t think enough of yourself.”

Steve’s expression threatened to crumble, before he pulled her into another tight embrace, compulsive and strong-armed. With a shaky gasp, Peggy allowed herself to be crushed and collared up against him. It was close, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Besides, she would have done the same thing if she shared his crippling strength. “Thank you.” He whispered into her ear, kissing her temple. “Thank you, Peg.”

The two of them stood on Peggy’s front steps, holding hands and brushing away one another’s parting tears. “You don’t need me to pack you any biscuits, do you? This is a short trip, yes?”

Steve laughed – a full-bodied and amused sound – and gave her a shake of his head. “It’s really short. Ya’ blink and it’s over.”

“Well, if it’s that easy, don’t feel like you have to stay away forever. You can always come back for – as your lot calls it – a slumber party.” She teased him as she always did, pushing him to blush and chuckle at her brazenness.

With another one of those full-body laughs, Steve held onto her gaze with a grin that was spun from summery sunshine. Bright and natural. “I know where t’find ya’.”

There was a pause between the two of them, both of them smiling at one another as they had over the course of seventy years. Or maybe a matter of months. Or minutes. Or even seconds. Who knows? Time was weird and eternal and timeless, all at once. Peggy remembered how he had smiled in the back of that car, on the way to receive the procedure that would change his life forever. She knew then, as she knew now, that boy would do a great and mighty thing: He would change the world. Thick-arsed or not. He would. Her faith in that scrawny, stubborn boy, with a mountain of ambition and charcoal pencils full of dreams, was undeterred.

Leaning down from the step above him, Peggy rested her hands on his shoulders, finding herself to be much taller than him (for once). Steve squeezed her hips affectionately as he drew himself closer. There was once again an unexplainable silence between them. Neither of them knowing just what to say.

“Thanks for breakfast.” Steve murmured, chuckling at its inappropriateness for the moment.

“Oh, shut up, you nitwit.” Peggy smiled as she closed the distance between them, pulling his lips into spellbinding kiss. A kiss that would have been remembered for another seventy years or so, at best.

When she pulled away, Steve blinked in shock as if all vital information had drained out of his head. Oh, yes. That’s the Steve she remembered. With a pinch of his cheek, she kissed the reddening spot there. “Alright. There you are – off yeh’ go.” She sniffed, composing herself and shooing him off of her porch.

A broken, but hopeful smile laced itself across Steve’s lips as he nodded, squeezed her hands once more. “Bye, doll.” Peggy felt her breath escape her lungs like a draft of cold air slicing through an open window. What was she doing? Why was she letting him leave? No. He had to go. He had to.

There he was, going down the front path of her house, towards the street. He wouldn’t be able to hear her in a few moments. He would be gone. Forever. Impulsively, she called to him: “Steve!” He stopped walking and turned to look at her, concern written into every groove of his face. He felt the same way. “Do I ever see you again?” Peggy asked, biting her lip to keep another bout of annoying self-manifest tears from making yet another appearance.

At that question, the deep and heartbroken worry that was on Steve’s face seeped away. The sun shined down around his golden hair, crafting itself around himself once more like another dumb halo. He smiled up at her, a mischievous, wry expression. Oh, she liked that. “I guess that all depends on you, hon. But… If I know anything about Peggy Carter, I wouldn’t think she’s a quitter.”

Long after Steve had gone, Peggy found herself in the tiny closet she had called her “study.” It was really just all the books she had refused to leave behind in her Manhattan flat, which she had shoved into crates within this cramped storage space. But on the walls of her claustrophobic study, was a mad case of an investigation from a woman who had refused to give up on finding that special someone.

Maps of the arctic charted across every spare space of wallpaper, while strings of clues and black-and-white newspaper clippings hung across the yellowed maps. There were coordinates written in hectic, hazardous order among the icy waters surrounding the northern pole of the world. Schmidt’s cube – a particularly large newspaper clipping – was highlighted as being found in one area of the icy waters. There was blue ink that circled and zipped around its found location, markings and outlines of Howard’s trips to find any trace of Steve.

Cocking her head to look at the maps once more, she smiled. “Maybe I can’t find you…” Peggy’s eyes brightened as they shifted from the charted icy waters, to an icy land, hundreds of miles away from where Steve was. A place called Russia. “But I bet I know someone who can.” A smile, a twist of her lips. A promise to herself. A new purpose.

“Alright, on my count,” Peggy turned to the other Howlies, her face a mask of cold and calculating leadership, “one, two –” she turned sharply to the barred door and dropped her hand, giving the signal for Dernier to bust down the base’s doorway. It had taken them weeks to get this right. One wrong move and it all went down in flames.

Jacq, as they all affectionately called him, flipped the trigger device’s switch. What followed could only have been designed by the explosion’s expert himself – a soft, but powerful explosion that perfectly cut down the door and left all of them intact. As the steel door crashed down, revealing a group of some of the best-known fighters of the War, Peggy readied herself for the worst. An army, an ambush, maybe the Red Skull had survived. After all, Steve had. Nothing could have prepared her for what to expect.

But instead of powerful strong-armed guards, there were only a measly number of hungry-looking ex-Nazi scientists. Like rats revealed in a shaft of light, HYDRA’s remaining members all looked up with alarming and terrified expressions. They were all hovering over the body of a weak and limp man, laid over a bed of ice, his metal arm limply hanging over the edge of the metal slab.

With a vicious welt of anger at the sight, Peggy gritted her lips. Because in the middle of it all, a rat-faced and shrimpy little man, stood over her former friend and partner, with a sharp and jagged knife. Arnim Zola. She had once felt a shred of pity for this man, having to serve under Schmidt was worse than any prison sentence. Now all she felt was red, coursing rage. A rage that would have burned down the world for the sake of those she loved.  

“Put the knife down, darling.” She propped her rifle up, aiming it directly for Zola’s head, as the rest of the Howlies dashed in on either side of her. They began to take down the scientists, gathering them up, and prepping them for military arrest. There was no way any of them would be hired by the likes of the SSR. Not on her watch.

“Whatever you’ve done to him, you conniving little mole, I’ll make sure you pay for it with a fate worse than death.” She smiled sweetly as Dugan kicked Zola’s knee in, forcing him to the ground. “And I mean that, from the bottom of my heart.”

“If I were you, bud, I’d be shittin’ my pants.” Dugan smirked as he jerked Arnim to his feet. Dugan dragged him past Peggy, giving her the chance to wink at the evil little man and blow him a kiss. Sliding the rifle around to her back, she slowly, uneasily walked over to the slab of metal where her friend was.

At the sight of him, her heart dropped down, down, down into her chest. “Oh, James…my darling…” Tears filled her eyes. “What have they done to you?” She cocked her head, soft and probing brown eyes traced the outlines of scars and bullet wounds that riddled his naked chest.

The shiny, metal arm – marked by a bright, taunting red star – was haphazardly sown to his flesh. The skin was raw and painfully blotched there, as if it had only begun to heal. They had mutilated him for the sake of their own use. His breathing was ragged, and his blue eyes, that had once looked more like gemstones than irises, stared listlessly and glazed up at the high-arched ceiling of the room. He was drugged, no doubt because he would have killed had he been fully conscious.

Outside, flickering and visible, through the tall, gothic windows that were framed by iron bars, a snowstorm had begun to settle in over the Siberian countryside. It was frigid both within and without in this arctic world, but they had made the choice to freeze him anyway. His lips were tinged blue. His fingernails on his flesh hand were pinched indigo with the effects of rotten, numbing cold. She wanted to swaddle him up in a thick, feather blanket.

Reaching out to gently trace the gaunt bone of his cheek, Bucky turned sluggishly to look up at her. His blue eyes struggled to stay on hers, they struggled to stay open. “I know you…” He slurred. His lips hung open as if the words were heavy to form and the price of saying them was too heavy to close. “I know… I know you…” He tried to move, tried to sit up, but he slumped back down into the ice chips.

“Yes, my darling, you do know me.” Sick of seeing him slumped and frozen, Peggy grabbed hold of a tarp that was hung over chair and grabbed Bucky’s arm, dragging him into a sitting position. His head hung down against his chest, while his long hair hid his features, revealing only his soft, pale-rose lips. When she first met Bucky, she had noticed those lips first. She was instinctively positive she was not the only person who had noted the design and loveliness of them. Wrapping the tarp around his shoulders, she pulled him over the ice and into her arms. “And I’m going to take you home…and I promise, I’m never, ever going to let you hurt again.” A tear slipped out of her eye as she felt Bucky exhale and settle against her.

On the way home, Bucky was out of it for most of the trip, but he whimpered in protest if Peggy so much as shifted from his side. His head stayed resting on her shoulder as he slept, breathing deeply and serenely, for the first time in years. He didn’t remember her, not completely anyways, but he trusted her. HYDRA had scraped his brain, but they hadn’t taken his soul. No. Not yet.

Peggy hadn’t given them the chance.

The two of them, Bucky and Peggy, stood in a grand, elegant study. Unlike the cramped closet of Peggy’s old suburban home front, this was an expansive, gold-leaf trimmed space, with cherry-wood bookcases that went all the way up to the ceiling. On the walls were maps of every country in the world, some were framed, yellowed and hand-drawn from times before printing presses and type text. The oldest one, a half-drawn land sludge of the West Indies, was marked 1617. While on the eastern side of the room, were astrological equipment that seemed to date back to the time of Galileo. Tools meant to chart stars, universes, and galaxies across all of space. The place seemed to breathe in a vast knowledge. Great people with great minds had worked in this study.

By a silver tray of two steaming cups of hot chocolate, a grand fireplace crackled and popped with warm, pleasant flames. While a fresh, pine-scented Christmas tree, that towered all the way to the grand ceiling, stood guard by the frosty-framed window of the room. Beneath its massive branches, rested a wealth of shiny-wrapped presents. Most of which were for Bucky, as Peggy had both been unsure as to what to get him and wanting desperately to ensure he had a good Christmas. I grew up in the Depression, Pegs, you don’t have to worry about getting me something nice. But despite his protests, Peggy, as she always did, acted as she liked and gotten him probably more than he would’ve wanted.

The only present Bucky had gotten Peggy was a modest, silver band that she wore proudly on her right middle finger. Inscribed lovingly on the inside was the message: To the original British Spitfire, thanks for kicking Nazi ass – JBB – December 1948. Of course, Peggy had loved it and prized it among her most precious possessions.

“O.K., so this is where Howard was, and this is where the Cube was found, right?” Bucky asked Peggy as they stood over a map of the world. Probably comparable to the very the width of that massive room, the map was stretched out across the long mahogany desk that had once been Peggy’s great grandfather’s.

Studying him with pleased, but somewhat suggestive smile, Peggy nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

Dressed in a red fair isle sweater, with black slacks, Bucky looked rather cozy as he stood beside Peggy. He was bent over the map, tracing the northern passageways to the Artic Circle. His eyes, while always half-shaken from the trauma he had endured with HYDRA, had grown quick and alert, sharp and ready for action. The easiness that had once rested on his face was long gone in the electric shock treatments that had attempted to fry the love of Steve out of him, it had been drown in the icy waters they had frozen him into.

But even so, with Bucky, all bets were off. He was cut from a rather resilient thread, right down to the very ventricles and veins of his heart. With Peggy by his side, he had slowly grown back into some version of who he used to be. And yet – You don’t have to try to be who you were, James, only who you want to be now. Peggy had told him one night, when he found himself shaking and sweaty from his nightmares. As far as I’m concerned, you get to be whoever you want to be.

Hearing that, Bucky had offered her a hint of a smile, before he placed his head in her lap. An arm coming to wrap itself around her legs, while he looked out into the English countryside that lay outside the window of his bedroom. Beside comforting Bucky in midnight hour philosophical conversations, Peggy had thought it best for Bucky to recover someplace isolated and away from the messiness of back home. With that in mind, she figured the best place for him was the world of her own childhood, the Carter Estate. Her grandparents’ ancestry home.

And the great English house and its surrounding lands, did Bucky good. Much of his recovery was marked by walks and treks through wet, wintery English countryside. Sometimes, she would wake up in the middle of the night, only to find he was out walking the old horse trails of the estate, or sitting amongst the wooly, unshaven sheep as they grazed on the damp grass amongst the fresh-fallen snow. She didn’t worry that much, however. Bucky was simply the type who needed to wander, be alone with his thoughts, separated from her even. She knew he thought about Steve, worried about him, festered over what to say when they did finally find him.

I’ve loved him since I was 13… I didn’t know how to define it then – some kind of blind loyalty, I guess. It wasn’t until I was older, watching him grow up into this stupid, snot-faced kid…that always had bloody knuckles and dirt under his fingernails…that I realized what it was. That I was in love with him…and I would’ve done anything, anything in the world, to keep him safe. Bucky had told Peggy this confession, while they were bundled under a thick, wool blanket on the floor of her bedroom, staring into her fireplace. The flames flickered across his face like the change of the emotion he spoke of: busty, Brooklyn loyalty dashed into affection, affection into an unnamable expression of something more, and something more into an undefinable love that he would have sold the world for. He had his arm wrapped around her, with his head resting on top of hers, tears swelling in his eyes as he remembered how much Steve Rogers meant to him.

Why didn’t you ever tell him? Peggy asked softly, not wanting to prod him into admitting something he didn’t want to. The last thing she wanted was to force him with the rare show of emotion he offered her.

He never wanted me like that. The profession was quiet, soft, and strained against a grace of his devotion. His eyes shifted from the fireplace to the floor, a tear escaping down his sharp cheekbones. Unlike Steve’s round cheeks, Bucky’s were chiseled and appeared haughty in some framings of his expressions.

How could you ever know that, my love, if you never told him?

The question had caused Bucky to rethink a vast amount of the things rumbling around inside his head. Things he had thought about the same forever…suddenly seemed, altogether different, flipped, and upturned. He wanted to believe her, but to internalize the idea of Steve reciprocating his own feelings…that was a large, impossible idea to swallow.

How could Steve have ever felt the same way he did? Steve had never known what it was like to watch himself struggle to breathe, while he slept as Bucky had when they were kids. He had never understood the sheer, existential terror that jolted through Bucky every time Steve had declared he wanted to go be a “soldier” in a World War. The idea of his tiny body shot down by colossal German batteries, sludging down into the muddy, murky earth of the battlefield, alone, limp, and cold, brought an inconsolable chill to Bucky’s blood.

And then, even when he became Captain America, when he was giant, capable of lifting three times the weight of Bucky himself, there was a new terror that erupted within him: how could he possibly protect him now? He couldn’t shield him from the fists of bullies in back alleyways, he couldn’t soothe him during an asthma attack by rubbing hot vapor oil on his chest, he couldn’t wrap up his entire frame in a one-armed hug… He felt more useless than he had ever felt before. In fact, as he fell from that train into the wintery Austrian landscape below, his last conscious thought had been: Who’s going to protect you now?

But Peggy… Peggy had protected him; she had kept him safe. After Bucky supposedly died, she had dried Steve’s tears, protected the shattered remains of his heart, and held them in place while he figured out where they went.

Just like she had managed to do with Bucky. Clever little dame, that one.

Piece-by-piece, stitch-by-stich, she had somehow woven all these strange and new pieces of himself back together again. While Steve was the one he had always felt the need to protect, Peggy was the one who guarded Bucky’s own heart. And God, she was ruthlessly protective of him, never really leaving his side. An attack dog, no, that was too mild. A dragon was more appropriate. Her belly was full of fire and her skin was tougher than the sharpest blade. She was determined to protect whatever potential he had.

So, when she asked him to rethink Steve’s own feelings for him differently, as someone who had kept Steve safe and had watched him mourn over the tragic loss of his “best friend,” Bucky kept her words close. The lady obviously knew what she was doin’, he probably should have trusted that more.

“Alright, then if the Cube was found here, that means that he could have crashed only about twenty-thirty miles further in.” Bucky lifted his head from the map to face Peggy. She was frowning at his observation, not in a disappointed way, but in a way that gave Bucky the impression she had never thought about it like that before.

“You think he might farther south, then?” Her darkly distinct eyebrows knitted together as she came to lean over the desk beside him, tracing the penciling he had done over the map. That would make sense. They had assumed Steve’s crash had been north of the Cube’s coordinates. Howard’s equations would have suggested that, but Bucky had been a soldier, he had seen planes come down, crash and burn to the ground. He knew how strange the clash of War could be.

“I mean, it would be worth a look, yeah?”

Peggy turned to look at him, eyes impossibly bright and filled with a radiant sense of budding hope. “You brilliant bastard.” She whispered, before she reached up to kiss his cheek. Incarnated, ineffable emotion filled her gaze as she pulled him into a tight embrace, causing Bucky to tense, before he relaxed against her, folding his own arms around her. “Let’s go get him, darling. Let’s bring him home.”

Bucky stood on the helm of a massive steam engine tanker, every square inch of land that surrounded them was frozen, ice-blue ocean. In the distance, he could see mountains rising from the border of Greenland’s frigid shoreline. The sky was grey, overcast, and unforgivingly cold. He knew the cold should have affected him more, but for whatever reason, it only left him feeling slightly chilled. He probably wouldn’t have worn a jacket, had it not been for Peggy, who insisted on bundling him up. Coats, hats, gloves, scarfs – all richly-made, all prepared to take on the frozen tundra they were sailing into.

If there was one thing to take from all this nonsense of the past year and a half, it was that Steve was no longer the only one who had made him feel special or loved. Peggy did too. He wasn’t sure if he would ever feel like he deserved her. Steve probably did, but not him. If Peggy heard him say that out loud, however, she would have slapped him. She hated when he, quote-on-quote, “undermined his state of value.” Whatever the fuck that meant. He had to smile at the thought of her then. All her elegant turns of words and phrases, brimming with intelligence, sharp as a sword. She was somethin’, alright.

It was hard not to love her. But the truth was, he didn’t think he could love anyone after HYDRA. While Steve was the only person he had ever really loved, Peggy… With Peggy, he had simply grown to love her. She was there, always, and if he had to face the world without that now, he wasn’t so sure he could.

“Seeing any icebergs we should be afraid of?” His steel-cut blue eyes, that were practically the same freezing shade of blue as the waters below, shifted to the left to see Peggy exiting from the living quarters.

“Yeah,” he chuckled as his metal arm, buried beneath the downy fabric of his coat, came to rest around her shoulders. “Good thing this sucker’s not made of steel. Jesus Christ. What were they thinkin’ on the Titanic?”  

Shivering a little in the sub-zero temperature, Peggy rolled her eyes and tucked herself closer into Bucky. He was warm even then, an obvious effect of his super soldier serum. “On the Titanic? Probably, something to the like of, ‘Oh, shit.’” She teased him, licking her chapped lips against the blistering wind.

Chuckling at her flip of his words, he found himself looking ahead into the dark waters in the distance. His smile faded, his thoughts obviously shifting. “What are you gonna say to him, if we find him?”

“Hmmm… ‘You self-sacrificing arsehole, you stood me up for a date.’ Just like that.” She grinned into the puffy material of his jacket, burying her chin and lips down into her wool scarf.

Bucky laughed – a wonderful sound to Peggy’s ears amongst the snowy, frozen silence of the arctic wasteland around them. “You’re gonna give that kid a run for his money, you know that?”

“Better than most.” She patted his chest, right where his heart was. It was both a reassurance and a nod to his own unprofessed feelings for Steve. “Promise me something, Buckaroo. Promise me, that when we find him, you will let yourself be happy.” It was a demand, he realized. A voice of the divine, more like. Let there be light, and there was light. In the same fashion as Genesis, Peggy was charging him with a goal: to know that he was loved.

Jesus. She expected a lot, didn’t she? Tears blurred his vision and he was sure, if they had fallen from his eyes, they would have frozen to his face. “I’ll try, Pegs. I’ll try.”

“Heya  – Barnes, Peg – we found somethin’!” Howard cried as he dashed out of the captain’s chambers. “We found a ship!” He was jumping up and down, waving a device in his hand with the greatest grin on his face. This discovery, of course, would lead Howard down a lighter path, as it was the lack of discovery of Steve Rogers that kept Howard from ever truly forgiving himself. And in twenty some odd years, when his son was born, he would not waste time, he would show that kid how much he loved him. And even into adulthood, Tony and his father would talk about all matter of things. The world, for Howard Stark, as well as the world at large, was about to change.

Looking to one another, Peggy and Bucky, smiled. Tears glittered in both of sets of their eyes. An impossible sense of hope mirrored between their gazes. Neither of them had ever really believed they would find Steve, but suddenly…it became all too real. The person they loved most…they found him.

Turning back to face the incoming ice and water, Peggy smiled out into the frozen landscape. No, it was just as Steve had said, she wasn’t a quitter. Especially not when it came to the people she loved. Taking Bucky’s gloved hand in hers, she squeezed it, smiling through a single tear that trailed down her face. They found him and they were going to take him home.

“Get him back!” Sam snapped, looking absolutely rigidly terrified at Bruce’s exasperation as he fiddled with his tablet. Where was Steve?

“I’m trying; it’s not working.” Bruce grunted as his massive green fingers flashed across the screen, trying to rig the quantum tunnel to open back up again.

Bucky, smiling sadly at his friend’s absence, sniffed and stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets. He already knew what Bruce and Sam didn’t, Steve wasn’t coming back. He turned from Sam and Bruce as they argued over how to get Steve back. No, he wasn’t coming back. He had known that look on Steve’s face as he had hugged him – an all-too brief embrace for something that seemed much more larger – and he knew immediately what Steve intended to do. Bucky registered it with a quick and brutal acceptance of what was coming. Steve had never wanted to really stay here, not with him, anyway.

In one swoop, he came to acknowledge three truths as Steve disappeared into the golden flash of the quantum tunnel’s technological magic:

Steve had wanted to save him from HYDRA, but that was out of obligation.

Steve had been with him until the end of the line, but that had come and gone.

Steve hadn’t been happy in the present, Bucky had been the one thing holding him back.

Unsure as to why he wasn’t as upset as he thought he would be, Bucky walked the short distance over to the lakeside. If anything changed, which he knew it wouldn’t, he could still hear Sam and Bruce.

Maybe the reason why he wasn’t so upset was because it hadn’t really set in yet. You know, the fact that the love of his life, whom he had loved since he was 13, had left him…and he had never told him how he felt. He guessed he should have felt angrier about it, vengeful even, but that just wasn’t Bucky. How could Steve have known? It wasn’t like Bucky had made a giant neon sign with a flashing arrow that said, “I’m with you til’ the end of the line, pal, as a friend, but also if you wanted to get dinner sometime, you know, in a romantic sense, buddy, I’d also be with you til’ the end of line for that, too” or anything like that.

Steve was kind of oblivious to that sort of thing though. He’d always been. The world just sort of happened to Steve, he didn’t really ask questions as to why it did. That’s probably why he fell so in love with Peggy Carter, she made it as clear as could be how she felt about him.

But hadn’t Bucky? Hadn’t he shown how much he loved Steve? Jesus Christ. He woke up out of 70 years of brainwashing, just to realize he was about to punch Steve’s face in… He woke up, but not only that, he also made an effort to remember. Or, at least, made an effort to try and piece together everything about himself, so when Steve finally found him, his old friend wouldn’t have to waste any time on him. They could just…pick up where they had left off, right?

The truth was, he didn’t want Steve to have to deal with that. No, it was never Steve’s job to pick up Bucky’s mess. Thanks to Bucky, that was always the case. Bucky protected Steve, not the other way around. He knew that much, even when he was on the brink. And he was happy to do that, it was the greatest honor of his life to be what Steve needed, whenever he needed it. A friend, a protector, the guardian of his dreams, the admirer who saw him as beautiful, lovely, and stupidly perfect… Plus, he was a natural artist. The kid could have drawn better than Leonardo DaVinci, in his opinion.

O.K., to be frank, Leonardo DaVinci was about the only artist Bucky knew, but Steve knew em’ all. That was the point – Steve knew what he didn’t, and Bucky was happy to just to be the guy that knew something. Something worth knowing to Steve, that is.

With the toe of his boot, Bucky kicked some pebbles into the clear, reflective water before him. They floated up to the surface with a few miscellaneous bubbles, before they sunk to bottom, gracefully landing amongst the other multicolored rocks and stones. A few blue gills that had been swimming by, noticed the newly placed stones, and scattered into the reedy seaweed out a little ways. The surface of the lake was serene, even with the mountain of carnage from where the old Avengers Compound had been, the lake still glistened with clear, sky-blue water.

Looking down into uninterrupted surface, Bucky remembered how he had dragged Steve out of the Potomac nearly ten years ago, at this point. He remembered his confusion, horror, and sinking suspicion that the man, choking up water, resting below his feet, had been someone of vital, life-giving importance. No, more than that, he knew it. This man blotted out the sun and caused his whole world to eclipse. More simply, he was the sun, the sky, and everything else that was far too immense to name. Poetic stuff, huh?

Yeah, well, Bucky didn’t consider himself much of a poet, but it was all he could think to describe the meaning of Steve to himself. Because even when he was mush and clay from HYDRA’s undoing, he knew deep within himself, that his world rotated around the axis of this man.

A man named Steve.

Hearing footsteps behind him, Bucky turned sharply to his right. He had expected a disappointed Sam, as those footsteps were much too light to be Bruce’s. But the person who stood before him, as he discovered in a time-stopping, breath-halting, eye-opening moment of clarity, was none other than Steve Rogers. A shaky, uncontrollable little breath escaped in-between his lips. “S-Stevie…?”

Steve’s eyes were filled with tears, raw and unashamed revelation. “Buck.” In three strides, he was there, taking him up in his arms, wrapping him tight against him, ensuring there was absolutely no space between them. Bucky’s shock was still frozen on his face as his chin rested on one of Steve’s broad shoulders. He… He was here…? Slowly, but surely, the shock drained off of his face as tears of unconditional relief welled in his eyes. He turned his face to bury itself in the crook of Steve’s neck. His own arms wrapped around Steve, with no intent on giving him the opportunity to disappear again.

“Y-You came back.” He whispered into his warm, sweet-smelling skin. He couldn’t believe it. He came back. Why would he come back? There was nothing for him here, right? Nothing he wanted, anyway.

Pulling away, only enough to meet Bucky’s eyes. Steve’s blue-green irises had seemingly faded to a clear-of-conscience blue. Sky-blue, as a matter of fact, really. He looked as if he had been emancipated from something both abrasive and colossal, freed of some sort of primordial curse. Maybe not a curse, but more of a heavy, unabsolvable sin. Bucky’s breath was stuck in his throat.

That was it.

The weight. The weight of the world was no longer on Steve’s shoulders. His eyes were clear, the smile that was dawning on his face… Oh, fucking Jesus. Bucky’s heart could have sung praises written by Greek muses. Does the heart grow in size when you love someone as much as I love you, you beautiful, fucking dumbass? Steve Rogers was free. The guy who blamed himself for everything, who never let himself slip out of another’s fault, had undone Atlas. He was no longer the arbiter of the world’s weight. That was someone else’s job now.

“Buck,” Steve took Bucky’s hands in his. “There’s… There’s something I gotta tell ya’.” His eyes were subdued, but celestially bright like stars spun out of the knapsacks of gods.

Dread and wide-eyed tension seeped into Bucky’s stomach. What the fuck did that mean? What did he have to tell him? Christ. Suspiciously, he eyed Steve’s hands that were wrapped in his. What…? What did this mean? His heart was skipping pulses, practically jumping to its own circadian rhythm. Did he come all this way just to—

“I love you, Bucky.”  

The world went deathly silent. Bucky’s blood drained from his face as he felt his mouth run dry. What did Steve just say? What…? What did he just say? He blinked once, twice – nope, all this blinking wasn’t gonna cut it. He needed some goddamn eyedrops. That was the last thing Bucky expected Steve to say. He loved him? In what way? Was he just admitting a platonic sense of love? Okay, sure. Yeah. Right. That had to be it.

“No, let me explain, O.K.? I owe you an explanation. I woke up in this world, Buck, in this world that I didn’t understand…” He shook his head, frowning in a pained sense of inevitability. “And I tried to become someone I wasn’t. I went from being some bright-eyed kid in the 40’s, to someone I didn’t even know. My whole life became just a matter of stumblin’ around, in this new world, tryin’ to make sense of it all. And then you show back up…and you throw my whole game, Bucky.” Steve voice was all strangled and straggled, as if his words were coming faster than his thoughts were. His eyes darted back and forth between Bucky’s to someplace behind him. This was obviously upsetting to him, which was the last thing Bucky wanted.

Cocking his head with a sympathetic gaze filling the center of his expression, Bucky placed a hand on Steve’s cheek. He was trying to stop him in his pursuit of whatever this was. He didn’t have to say anything, in Bucky’s opinion. He was back and he loved him, that was enough for him.

Steve shook his head, cleared his throat, and gathered himself. No. He had to continue. “Because once you showed up, Buck, once you came back into my life. Nothing else mattered to me. Not the shield, not being Cap, none of it.” He reached up and rested his hand over Bucky’s that had been on his cheek. “All my wanderin’, all my searching for something in this world,” tears welled in his Azul-blue eyes, quivering somewhere between green and blue, “it all just stopped when I found you again.”

Bucky’s eyes swam with tears as he listened to Steve’s confession. He grabbed hold of Steve’s jacket and pulled him closer so he could rest his forehead against him. A sob broke from his chest as he furrowed his brow, trying to accept this massive revelation that Steve had settled upon the space between them. There was a delicate sanity of which Bucky possessed and Steve was testing. “Stop…” Bucky growled, trying to not collapse against him, trying to keep himself steady. “Stop, Stevie. Please.”

“No.” Steve cried, grabbing him by the shoulders, squeezing them tightly. “You are… Buck,” he gasped, shaking him, attempting to get him to look at him. “Bucky, I’ve loved you my whole life. That’s real, that’s permanent, and I can’t shake that.”

So, that was it. The words Bucky had been waiting for since they were both poor, good-for-nothin’ kids in Brooklyn. Words he had held close to himself, afraid to share out of an agonizing, gut-eating fear that Steve would never feel the same. And yet, here he was…feeling the same way.

Feeling the exact same way…

How long had he imagined this happening? How many times, during his imprisonment at HYDRA, had he dreamed of this blonde-haired kid confessing his love to him? How many times had he wished Steve could understand a fraction of the coursing, thunderous love inside of him? At times, it felt like it could’ve broken out of him, exploded upwards into the sky, expanded across the stars, and become its own omnipotent universe. Maybe, it had in a way. A universe in and of himself. All for Steve. All waiting for Steve. Fuck. Fuck. With a frozen, slick fear of what awaited him, Bucky shifted his eyes to meet those of Steve Rogers.

Well, what had he been so afraid of?

Because what waited for him, was the same kid he had loved since he could remember loving anyone.

Biting down on his lip to keep from breaking into sobs, he took Steve’s face in-between his hands. He hesitated, waiting for a moment longer, savoring this before-the-world-explodes moment, before he crashed his lips into his. It was desperate, heated, and chalk-full of explosive, imminent meaning. That kiss was poetry, soaked and age-old with a newly discovered reading. The entire world was dwarfed between them and made small.

They had both been waiting a full lifetime to do that.

They were both vastly different people from the high-spirited kids who had once ran the Brooklyn streets, but they had grown into one another. They were the only ones who knew each other from the before and the after. The promise of til the end of the line, became the bridge between two halves of their lives. They were two halves manifest now into one whole. Opened and closed. Woven and threaded.

As they pulled away, smiling at one another in a knowing, radiant moment of realization and epiphany, the world was silent because nothing else needed to be said. Steve loved Bucky, and somewhere, across time and space, that was all Bucky needed to know.