Chapter Text
The letter in her hands is the single most devastating object she has ever held in her life. It bears the agonising news that her brother--her best friend--is dead.
She thinks about their last conversation, of all the things he told her and believed about her.
Margaret Elizabeth Carter decides right then and there that she will never get married. She does not care one whit about what Fred will think when she breaks off the engagement because Fred doesn’t really love her, does he? If Fred really loved her, he wouldn’t be so adamantly against every attempt of Peggy’s to achieve her dreams. To prove herself.
Michael was right. He has— had —always been right. He knew that giving up her newfound desire to join the Special Operations Executive, a division of MI5, to marry Frederick Wells would be a mistake. He knew, he had told her, and she had told him to bugger off. That had been their very last conversation, and it was an argument. She hates that he was so right. Now he is gone, and all she has left are her increasingly distant, grieving parents and a fiancé who is hours away from becoming an ex-fiancé. She would have never even had to bother about an ex-fiancé if she had just bloody listened to what Michael had to say.
Peggy sits in her room and weeps in what would have been her bloody wedding dress, sobbing harder than she ever has, weak fingers clutching the letter that holds the news she always dreaded. Her brother is dead.
And she is never getting married. Now her plans have changed. She will not be persuaded otherwise, not even by her mother. And her father—well, ha! Her father will be so pleased to hear she’s changed her mind and will lord it over her head forever that he and Michael were right about Fred, while she was too blind and stubborn to see it.
Whatever her parents’ reaction, she is going to join the SOE and make that her life forever . Besides, no man in his society-approved right mind would marry a female in a field like that. It’s terribly unfair, but given the circumstances, Peggy knows she must force herself to face the truth.
Amanda Carter is disappointed. Peggy hadn’t expected anything else. However, she does not try to change her daughter’s mind because she knows Peggy is far too stubborn, and her efforts are useless, but she is saddened by the prospect of their family ending with her daughter. Harrison Carter chuckles and says matter-of-factly, ‘I knew that bastard wouldn’t be able to handle you, Pegs. You’re far too good for him.’
Fred has a much more aggressive response than Mr. and Mrs. Carter. He protests Peggy’s decision hotly when she tells him, but nothing will sway her now. She will not get married. She can’t. Certainly not to Fred.
And, to be honest, when most men hold the view of Fred Wells, that women could never be successful in the field she knows so strongly that she belongs in, does she even want to marry? To be tied down and forced to wait on the whim of her husband? To be barefoot and pregnant and everything you could not be when working as an agent for the SOE?
No. That is absolutely not what she wants.
What she wants is independence. She wants to prove herself. She wants to prove bloody Fred Wells and every hard-headed man wrong and show them that she can do what they can. She can even do it better.
Peggy scoffs at herself because she cannot believe she would convince herself she was in love with such a man as Wells . Fred was nice and all, and he would make a good husband to a girl who wasn’t as stubborn as she, but she looks back and shakes her head at how stupid she had been.
She knows quite well that after breaking off her engagement and joining a secret agency, she has so much to prove. Which she will because she absolutely has to. Her papers are submitted, and there is no turning back. She finds herself suddenly worrying about what she’ll do if it doesn’t work out.
There will be nowhere to turn if she fails.
When the war broke out, she was a student at Cambridge, one of the few girls looking to eventually earn a Ph.D. And then she was recruited to be a code breaker at Bletchley Park, and though she continued her studies, she knows they’ll be put to a complete stop when she begins work at the SOE, in that she will never be able to go back to a normal civilian lifestyle. She won’t be able to live at home because she will simply remind her mother of her failure to raise a good, dutiful housewife daughter every single day, and Peggy will be able to see that disappointment in her mother’s eyes for the rest of her life.
If the SOE and MI5 decide they do not want her, she will always have the option to go back to Cambridge, but the possibility of no friends or companions afterward haunts her.
Peggy pushes that all aside and moves forward. That is all she can do, for there is no way to go back. Besides, Michael thought she could do this. She will make sure she does.
She crafts for herself a perfect, pristine porcelain mask. No one will know what she feels or who she is underneath. She will be unstoppable, unflappable, and unyielding. It is the only way she can succeed. Porcelain can shatter, but she doubts her mettle can be tested enough for it to actually break. Her stubbornness will keep the front intact.
Her first day at the SOE is difficult, to say the least. Most of the other female recruits in her training group quit at noon. By the end of the day, she is the only one left.
The men take it easy on her, at first, because she’s a woman, but that only serves to frustrate her. She immediately demands to be treated like the rest.
What skills and basics taught to her by her older brother save her from complete and utter embarrassment, but she leaves the building that evening with bruises under her cream blouse and blood soaking portions of the uniform hidden at the bottom of her bag. Everything hurts like it never has before, and it quite literally takes a Herculean effort to get out of bed the next morning. She refuses to think about quitting, of course, because she is stubborn and determined and refuses to give anyone an excuse to say that she is weak and unfit for the job she wants.
Peggy learns fast, which is attributed to her own talents, as well as the fact that she must learn quickly or face disqualification. Stealth comes easy to her, on account of her being smaller and slighter than the rest of them. Her quick thinking has no parallel. But physically, she is still at a disadvantage that threatens to ruin her future as a spy.
She refuses to let this disadvantage hurt her chances and simply stiffens her upper lip and keeps going.
Despite the protestations of her constantly aching muscles, she practices combat skills at home. She learns to use men’s size and strength against them and quickly becomes SOE’s most promising recruit, yet it comes as no surprise when a man dumber and more ridiculous than she could ever be is called up for his first mission before she is because the men in charge are still unwilling to believe a female recruit could best all the men and do an even better job than them.
She uses this slight as fuel and works even harder, if such a thing were possible.
It pays off, of course, and she finally gets her first mission. After all the other recruits do. But that is not worth dwelling on, for it is an opportunity nonetheless, and she takes it with grace and enthusiasm.
In fact, she performs so well that her male partners are left with no choice but to tell their superiors that Carter is being wasted at so-called entry-level espionage and needs to be moved up because the Lord knows Britain needs more agents like her.
She isn’t promoted. So she just works even harder on her next mission, and this time, it is made completely and utterly obvious that she is far better than anyone had ever thought.
She is given higher clearance. Her third mission is ten times as hard as the first two, and for a moment, she wonders what she’s gotten herself into.
But then she meets the eyes of the Director, and she knows he believes in her. She knows Michael believed in her. So she believes in herself. It doesn’t matter what they all thought about her, anyway.
Except for Michael. His opinion had always mattered, and it continues to matter beyond his death.
She knows she could do it, and so she does.
Her third mission is a success, and Peggy thinks to herself that maybe she’s finally finding a place and carving out a niche in this spinning world of guns and camouflage and secrecy.
Peggy later learns that, based on her brother’s recommendation before he was killed in combat, she was trained differently than the other women in the SOE. She’s been trained to be effective enough to be assigned even the most top secret missions that require the highest clearance. There is great pride to be taken in knowing she proved her brother right, even in the face of many doubters.
Then she is loaned out to the SSR, a covert American intelligence agency, and sees the States for the first time. Bloody colonist rebels, she thinks with a grin. She has never been outside of Europe, and there is a little bit of a culture shock, but she has already established herself in Europe and finds herself relieved to discover that her status stays with her across the Atlantic. Agent Carter is known for her efficiency, ability to make the right decisions under great pressure, and knack for escaping even the tightest situations.
The SSR sends her head spinning in a way the SOE had not. Peggy learns about Hydra, the Nazi secret science division, and about a great many other wild things. She wonders at how utterly mind-boggling the world is and has been—while she had no idea.
She meets Howard Stark, who is perhaps the world’s foremost genius, and is amazed by some of the things he can dream up. She remembers the advertisements for the Stark Expo she had seen back home, and now she’s friends with the man behind it. It’s all so futuristic and out of place for her mind, but she takes it in stride without showing how much it shocks her.
Howard is also a flirt, and this serves as a tragic reminder that she would be stupid and naive to imagine that men have conveniently forgotten that she’s a woman. She still gets comments when she walks through the streets alone, but the men at work are too afraid of her to try anything. She’d like to keep it that way. Indeed, she has built up a name for herself in the world of agents—and also a reputation for demolishing the egos of men unworthy of her respect.
To Howard’s credit, he never tries anything again after she dismantles the genius’ ego with a few biting remarks and an elbow to his chin. He lies about how he got the bruises when questioned by her superiors, and it’s then that she knows she can count on Howard Stark to be an ally.
Then she finds herself shipped to the SSR base back in Britain and immediately sent off on a mission to Germany, where she is tasked with infiltrating Johann Schmidt’s headquarters and saving his ‘uncooperative scientist’. She doesn’t have the foggiest idea of what Dr. Abraham Erskine has that is so important, but she saves his life and supposes that was enough. Something about it feels rather weighty, though she has no idea what it is.
Dr. Erskine tells her what it is he possesses that was so incredibly valuable on the plane ride back to Britain’s SSR base. An enhancing serum with the potential to take a normal man and turn him into the peak of humanity, something that needed to be snatched from the clutches of Hydra before it was too late.
Erskine’s kind and soft-spoken nature immediately endears him to Peggy, and she wonders who he has left behind in Germany. Children? Grandchildren?
She wonders if she will have any grandchildren of her own before mentally slapping herself because having grandchildren will never be possible if she does not get married. And she’s not getting married. She hasn’t met a single man in her twenty-something years who made her feel like she was completely his equal, and she doubts that she ever will. Marriage would end the life she’s begun to make for herself.
Peggy supposes if she wants children all that much she can always adopt. That will save her the trouble of tying herself to some incorrigible man she could only half stand for the rest of her life.
Peggy is sent back to the States, along with Dr. Erskine, in order to assist a man by the name of Col. Chester Phillips in Project: Rebirth - an American/Allied effort to successfully use Erskine’s enhancing serum and hopefully create a division of so-called ‘super soldiers’.
Her SOE director had remembered the determination and resilience of Agent Carter and recommended ‘Agent Carter’ to aid in the training of Project: Rebirth recruits. Col. Phillips had agreed, and it was one of the great shocks of his life when ‘Agent Carter’ turned out to be a very obvious woman.
But Phillips had already spent a week convincing those under him, men who don’t have the clearance to search for information on Agent Carter, that Carter was the man for the job, even if he was British, and he could not take that back. So Peggy stays.
She does a darn good job, too.
On her first day at Camp Lehigh training Rebirth candidates—candidates to receive Erskine’s serum, she punches a man so hard he sits in the dirt, stunned and dazed. Pvt. Gilmore Hodge is big and burly, a good soldier, but not necessarily a good man. His pitiful attempt at attracting her (‘We gonna “wrassle”? ‘Cause I got a few moves I know you’ll like.’) makes her want to vomit and reminds her exactly why she will not give men the time of day in the romantic sphere. The satisfaction she feels when her fist connects with his face is intoxicating.
As she stares Hodge down as he sits in the dirt, a gobsmacked expression plastered on his dumb face, she thinks about winking at the short, slight man—Pvt. Steven Rogers, if she remembers correctly—toward the end of the line of men facing her, just to infuriate Hodge. Something about the (encouraging?) smile he gives her when she glances down the row makes her decide against it.
As she thinks about it a few days later, she finds that Rogers reminds Peggy of herself a little bit. He is not made out for war, not physically fit to be a soldier, just like she was seen as not made out for espionage, like so many thought her feminine physical weakness was a huge detriment to her ability. She wishes she could talk to the man because he might understand.
No one else does. They couldn’t.
No one else understands what it is like to have to constantly prove oneself to everyone one meets because once she’s proven herself to one person, there’s always another one that needs proof too. Every door is slammed in one’s face, every opportunity is given to someone else.
Perhaps the only person Steve (when had she begun to think of him by his first name alone?) has ever truly proven himself to was Peggy, because she understands. And Peggy has, from a young age, been taught herself to look beyond the physical. How else would she learn to beat up boys twice her size, if not for Michael telling her that the physical meant nothing if you didn’t have the brains to use it, if not for her mother telling her being pretty meant nothing if she was not also kind?
Peggy had initially wanted to laugh upon spotting the weak man among the line of America’s most fit men, but she soon was able to see past his size and strength (or lack thereof).
She begins to hope that Erskine picks him.
He had smiled when she punched Hodge, rather than look on in slight horror mixed with amusement, as the rest of the men did.
He uses his brain when his body fails him, pulling the pin out of the flagpole in order to do what no one had done in seventeen years in order to ‘get a ride back with Agent Carter’. It is admirable and inspiring, and the respectful way he inclines his head to her as he climbs into the jeep has something in it that makes her know that he knew she was stronger than she looked. She hopes her own expression conveys a return of the sentiment. It’s out of character for her and her ceramic facade, but she sympathises with Rogers anyway.
She can’t help but smirk at Sgt. Duffy and his gobsmacked face as he watches Steve leave in the jeep before turning back to her clipboard, and she only turns away because, for goodness’s sake, Rogers did not have to keep looking at her that way. He wasn’t ogling. He was almost awestruck , and really, she didn’t know what to say.
It would be naive of her to claim she had no idea she was attractive, but she had a hard time imagining she’d be attractive to a man like Steve Rogers. He seemed too, too - above it all.
Peggy says very little on that ride back, and Steve says nothing at all.
She knows he is stronger than he looks. He is certainly very smart. She’s seen him reading military books far more often than the rest of the men, and if Erskine doesn't pick him, it will be a shame simply because he is by far the brightest of the recruits.
Steve Rogers continues to surprise her and everyone else when he jumps on a dummy grenade and with the way he never complains when Hodge and others purposely sabotage him (that reminds her of her time in training with the SOE, and the way male trainees would mock her, among other things). Something about the dummy grenade incident makes her grin privately. She tells herself it is simply because Michael would have done the same thing. And because it further solidifies Rogers’ superior character. And because it was—she stops there.
As time goes on, it is more and more clear that Steve Rogers is indeed the perfect candidate for Erskine’s serum.
When the day comes, she knows she shouldn’t be so worried for the small, seemingly weak man, but she is.
He sits beside her in the car, hours before his life is to be changed forever, and stumbles over his words as he tries to talk to her. He is so honest about himself, and she wishes he was not so sickly because it was obvious that everyone has overlooked him because of his size, unable to see what Peggy now saw.
She tells him that he has no idea how to talk to a woman and almost immediately regrets the words when he replies with a smile and tells her that he thinks their current conversation was the longest he’d ever had with one.
It only takes that short, awkward conversation for her to decide he is the most honest, pure-hearted man she’d ever met. He knows what it’s like to have every door shut in his face. He knows what it’s like to be underestimated. He is honest, despite his falsified enlistment forms, because refusing to run away from a fight is a part of who he is, and he is true to that. Even if it takes breaking some rules. Michael was the same way.
Although she knows he has been overlooked, she is still surprised to find out that he has not danced before. Her surprise grows greater still when he admits that asking a woman to dance intimidates him, and he would rather wait for ‘the right partner’ to come around.
Even in her surprise, she smiles a real smile. He does not see the smile, though, as he stared ahead with uncertainty and determination flaming in his blue eyes.
There is something about his unbridled honesty and goodness that chips at the porcelain mask she wears.
Because when he looks at her again, all she wants is to take his hand in hers and assure him that it will all be alright, that the procedure will be successful. The feeling shocks her, and she desperately tries to seal the cracks beginning to form in her perfect front.
She is not blind to his anxiety. She can see the way he adjusts his sleeves and takes in breaths as deep as his asthma will let him. She wants him to know that someone cares, that someone else besides Dr. Erskine sees past his appearance.
They share another glance as they arrive at the antique shop façade, and she attempts to offer reassurance through her eyes alone, disappointed that she does not feel she has been successful in that particular endeavour.
When she enters the facility, she finds herself suddenly very nervous for him (for herself), because if this procedure, this serum, were to ruin this man who is nearly perfect despite his physical shortcomings, she will not know what to do. Steve was a good man, a very good one, and Peggy knew all too well how the world could use more men like him. Her eyes linger on his slight form as he looks at the equipment in awe and fear, and, despite her better judgement, thinks about what it might have been like if she’d met him outside of the SSR. Maybe they could have been good friends. Maybe he would have danced with her.
Her eyes never leave him after they enter the lab. She wants to stay by his side during the procedure (It’s an experiment really, though she hates to admit it), but she cannot fool herself into thinking she deserves such a privilege just because she could relate so much to the man or because she does indeed admire him a little. For this reason, she does not allow Erskine’s subtle words (‘Agent Carter, wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the booth?’) to sting at all. She only smiles at Steve and hopes Erskine is successful.
And when she hears his screams from the booth, she does not hesitate to fly from her seat and scream at everyone to turn the darn thing off, because she will not have anyone die for this experiment, especially not a man like Steve Rogers. Her heart beats in her chest, and she is horrendously afraid that something awful is going to happen while Howard Stark begins to turn it off.
But Steve’s voice cuts through the chaos, insisting that he can do it. She remembers his determination and does not doubt that he can.
The light bulbs shatter, there is a great burst of light, and she practically throws herself off the stairs and onto the platform to see the results of Dr. Erskine’s serum.
Peggy does not quite know what she had expected to come out, but it certainly isn’t what emerges.
Steve Rogers has grown at least a foot; he towers over her now and sports a physique likely envied by every man in the room (and the world, too, most likely).
Meeting his eyes, her breath catches— bloody Nora, he is gorgeous .
She grabs his shirt and hands it to him as he is helped out of the pod and asks him how he feels. He winces and tells her he felt taller.
And she suddenly feels as though she’s lost the ability to converse and only says, stupidly, that he did look taller. (She’ll later blush with embarrassment when she remembers that she couldn’t help herself and touched his chest because it was right there, and it really wasn’t fair at all, was it?).
A grenade goes off. She immediately pinpoints the man responsible as gunshots ring, and Dr. Erskine lies on the floor, fatally shot.
Capable agent that she is, she goes after the man, stopped only when Steve tackles her just as she finally gained a clear shot at the man responsible for the shooting, and though she’s upset he ruined her shot, she cannot forget the feeling of his arms around her, even if it was just for half a second.
She watches as he catches the man and looks almost terrified of his own hands after the man kills himself with cyanide.
She’s with Steve when he gets his blood taken, there under the pretence of…of nothing, really. Moral support. She reassures him that even if he was the only one to ever receive the serum, Erskine would be glad of it.
The doubtful and surprised look he gives her makes her want to hug him and brush away the blond hair that’s fallen in his face.
With every day that passes, her heart grows warmer and warmer toward the man.
( But she is never getting married, so she keeps some distance).
The fallout of Erskine’s assassination is not kind. Mostly because she is no longer around the brightest and best man she thinks she’s ever met. It seems dramatic, and perhaps it is, but there is no one like him around. Everyone who knows him at least a little knows this.
Peggy is transferred back to Europe, along with Col. Phillips. She doesn’t get to say goodbye to Steve.
Steve becomes the face of USO. He’s their main bond sales tactic. Captain America.
Peggy admits privately that he did have the face for the job, but she knows he is being wasted there. Colonel Phillips grows sick of her constant nagging, telling him that Steve—Pvt. Rogers—was meant for more than being paraded on stages across the United States to sell bonds. She does not let up.
‘Captain America’ may be wildly popular in the States, but Peggy hates him. Steve had joined the Army to make a difference, a real difference, and now that he really could, he is a sales tool.
Yes, Peggy thoroughly despises the scheme, even if she has to assent to the very obvious fact that the man made a silly spangled outfit appear quite dashing, although that is rather irrelevant, in light of the fact that she knows he is meant for so much more.
To think of Steve Rogers as any more than a good man with whom she shares much in common is silly. With great chagrin, she acknowledges that the word dishy comes to mind, and although she hates that word almost as much as she hates seeing him relegated to an advertisement, it fits.
Ah, but she is never getting married, so to become emotionally attached to the man who is the envy of all soldiers and coincidentally one of the best men she’s met since she began working for the SOE would be utterly ridiculous. He deserves better than a girl who’s determined not to marry. Nevertheless, when she hears ‘Captain America’ is coming to Europe to perform for the 107th, she finds a way to be there.
She hasn’t seen him in six months or so, and she figures that maybe seeing him again will help her stop thinking about him so much. It’s unlikely, but maybe she’ll even stop bothering Phillips about it, who coincidentally is with the 107th and will undoubtedly be upset with her if he finds out she’s there, but she’ll be careful. He’ll never know. She isn’t scared of him, anyway, because she isn’t scared of anyone .
She feels badly when Steve is booed off stage by the men, but she does not feel badly when she finds him sitting with a journal in hand, sketching. The rain is loud in her ears, her hair is drenched, and she still has half a mind to realise that her lipstick is beginning to fade from every time she wipes rainwater off her face, but she smiles.
He hears her approach and turns around, surprised to see her. His pleased greeting makes her heart jump. She beats it down mid-leap, like she would any green, uncooperative recruit.
She tells him what she has been thinking since the last time she saw him—he was made for more than this. More than the tights and the dancing and the silly music. He doesn’t believe her right away, she knows, but Peggy Carter will be damned before she sees Steve Rogers waste away on a stage when he could be truly changing the world.
Oh, if she doesn’t hate the dejected look in his eyes as he tells her that he’s gotten everything he’s wanted—to serve his country and be a hero—and he’s ‘wearing tights’. If she were a little more of the emotionally open type, she would share some of her own struggles, but she isn’t, even if Steve’s sad, puppy-like eyes beg her to crack the porcelain mask just a little more.
If she hated the look in his eyes while he confessed that he’d gotten all he wanted, only not in the way he wanted to get it, she abhors the panic that crosses his face when she says that today’s audience was made up of the remainder of the 107th.
He runs to Col. Phillips immediately, and, despite her better judgement, she follows him.
She hates the urgency in his voice as he asks for just a single name from the causality list from the incident at Azzano—Sgt. James Barnes. She hates that, for the most part, he keeps his composure despite the brewing grief in his eyes, and she hates that it takes digging her manicured nails into her palms to keep her from grabbing his hand in comfort in front of the colonel.
She could care less that Phillips promises that he and Peggy are going to have a conversation ‘she won’t enjoy’ because all she can see now is the growing pain behind Steve’s imploring eyes.
His frustration is palpable when he’s told that no rescue mission is being planned for the survivors.
Her blood begins to boil when Phillips calls him a chorus girl, but she cools down almost immediately upon seeing him take a good look at the map in front of him and declare that he does have somewhere to be in half an hour—only she can tell it isn’t where Phillips thinks it is.
The anger dissipates and gives way to worry because she cannot imagine that he is thinking of rescuing the POWs himself, and yet, that is the only thing he could be thinking of. What a silly man! What a preposterous idea! It takes half a moment for her to have a change of heart. Steve would not be himself if he made any other choice, she thinks.
Knowing that her effort will be useless, she attempts to talk him out of it.
It is useless. He asks if she meant it when she said he was meant for more than the Captain America act. She can lie easily, but she cannot lie to him when he looks at her that way, desperate for someone’s approval in this bloody notion of his that might get him killed. She tells him that she meant every word. Because she did.
Peggy finds herself asking Howard Stark to fly them to the Hydra base where the prisoners are. Stark acquiesces. Peggy is glad to have someone who agrees that Steve should not be shut up in a lab or paraded onstage.
About a week passes, and she thinks she might come to regret her decision. For one, Steve had interpreted Howard asking her to ‘fondue’ as something that it was not, and for another, she has not seen Steve since he leapt out of Howard Stark’s plane. After exclaiming with a rather cheeky smile that he could indeed give her orders because he was a captain, of course. Her heart had almost beat faster, but she did not let it.
Now her heart beats fast with anxiety at the thought that perhaps she has made a mistake. She’s never made such a blunder before. She hopes this isn’t her first.
Col. Phillips hounds her daily about her decision to allow Steve to run off to what will likely be his death, and her heart sinks a couple of centimetres with every day that surveillance reports seeing no sign of action in the area.
On the sixth night since Steve took on his suicide mission, she breaks, shedding a few tears before falling asleep. If the blood of Steve Rogers ends up on her hands, she won’t forgive herself. She clings on to shreds of faith that he will make it out somehow because he must. She doesn’t know what she will—do if he’s—this is another sentence she refuses to finish.
The transponder she gave him has not been activated. She supposes she should prepare for the worst.
Steve had wormed his way further into her heart than she had thought. The realisation punches her in the stomach, and she thinks she’ll be sick. Her sleep is rather fitful that night, and she wakes up far too early, waiting and waiting and waiting on the results of the last surveillance flight.
Phillips tells her in the morning that he will write a letter to Sen. Brandt, informing him that Steve has been killed. Privately, Peggy thinks Brandt, the blasted man responsible for the rubbish idea for Steve to be the face of USO, does not deserve to know what Steve’s status is.
She only nods and keeps an impassive face, ignoring the odd feeling of a gap growing in her chest and a lump beginning to form in her throat.
When the results of the last surveillance flight finally come in, she bites her lip so hard it bleeds. They report nothing. She numbly takes the papers back to Phillips, who pins the responsibility on her. Perhaps he is right to do so, but she does not think Steve would have regretted his decision in his last moments.
Peggy believes in Steve against the evidence and does not let Phillips’ statement that Steve and a lot of other men are now dead because she ‘had a crush’ bother her. She even defends herself against this accusation, telling Phillips that she had faith, and though that may indeed be a part of the truth, she knows, deep down, she is lying through her teeth.
She is not lying when she says she does not regret her decision because she becomes firmly convinced that Steve didn’t regret it. She remembers the determination and pleading in his eyes and no longer wonders if she regrets letting him go. She doesn’t.
A feeling that perhaps she may have lost something in all of these happenings begins to dawn on her as she follows the colonel to investigate the excitement beginning to build in the camp. She’s too tired for excitement, she thinks as she walks behind Phillips. That is, until her eyes land on Steve Rogers. With a veritable horde of freed POWs.
Relief washes over her. She lets out a sigh of satisfaction at the knowledge that she was indeed right about Steve. The men look terrible and beaten, but they are alive. Pride overwhelms her, on both her own behalf and Steve’s.
But mostly Steve’s.
She doesn’t think she could possibly feel any more lightheaded than she does now, even if her face betrays nothing, and then Steve bloody surrenders himself for disciplinary action.
Curse him and his upstanding character and perfect integrity, she thinks as she meets his eyes briefly.
It takes pressing her lips together firmly, clenching her fists tightly, and thinking about the potential disciplinary fallout of her actions to keep herself from throwing her arms around him.
Instead, she merely looks him up and down and says, ‘You’re late.’
His confident and cheeky response is to pull out his transponder, broken beyond use or repair and tell her he couldn't call his ride.
Peggy holds back a smile and a sudden desire to kiss the man senseless. To do so would prove Col. Phillips right and open a whole can of worms she would not like to deal with at this very moment. In fact, it would undoubtedly break etiquette and code on more than one level.
The men cheer for ‘Captain America’, and she watches as he takes in praise from the same people who booed him offstage just a week ago.
When he looks back at her for a long moment, she thinks maybe that the Captain America persona isn’t so bad after all. It’s given Steve confidence , and he wears it very well. Too well, maybe, because she hasn’t felt so unsettled by someone since she fancied Will Burrow in primary and punched him in the nose because she didn’t know what else to do.
Agent Carter is one of the best in her field, and she proves her own skills to herself in the best way: picking up on all the signs that Captain Steven Rogers must feel the same way about her that she does about him, while keeping her porcelain mask pristine. Perhaps, maybe not so perfectly pristine, but she conceals it far better than he. She isn’t dumb. She notices the way his eyes trail behind her when she leaves the room and the way he looks at her more often than he probably should.
The thought is absurd when it first comes to her, but, against the reasoning of her brain, she wonders if she couldn’t be his right partner after all.
Only so much time passes before she becomes weary of wondering and theorising based on little cues here and there and finally devises a plan. She almost feels badly about it, but she must know, or she will go insane. Peggy despises feeling like a little besotted schoolgirl playing ‘he loves me, he loves me not’. It needs to end.
Besides, who knows how much time they’ll have? She has faith that Steve is strong and smart enough to take out the entirety of Hydra if he puts his mind to it—he’d never run away from a fight, but if this war has taught her anything, it is to expect the tragically unexpected.
Her plan comes to fruition when Howard sends her to convey a message to Steve, and though she hates the knowing look in the genius’ eye, she agrees to fulfil the incorrigible man’s request anyway.
She puts on her favourite dress and heads to the bar where Steve and his future team members are meeting. The room goes silent when she enters, but she does not care. Her eyes are only for one man, the one who turns to look at her last. She looks at no one else except him, even when his friend tries to flirt with her. Men, she scoffs internally. Steve is surprised and happy to see her, but it is not enough.
Oh, but what is enough is the slight smile he gives her when she says she might go dancing when everything is over. What is enough is the look in his eyes when James Barnes asks ‘What are we waiting for?’, to which she responds with eyes trained firmly on Steve, ‘The right partner.’
He blushes, and she thinks she does too. Thank God for rouge.
Peggy leaves the bar that night very satisfied and, for the first time in a while, anticipates with just a bit of eagerness what the future could bring. What the end of the war might bring, if the good Lord wills that they make it there. Steve has, without saying those precise words, agreed to dance with her. It would be a lie to say she doesn’t feel like a giddy schoolgirl. She lies to herself anyway.
The terrifying question finally pops in her mind: could she marry him?
Well, it is far too early to answer that question, but Peggy thinks that Steve is just the sort of man she would marry, if she had a change of heart about the whole arrangement. She begins to fear that her resolve may be dwindling very, very slowly.
Her burgeoning hope for the future is shattered the very next morning, and she feels like an utter fool for her display the night before.
She walks in on Pvt. Lorraine and Steve kissing . There are few words to describe just how hot her blood boils at that moment. She really must be excused for her harsh reaction and sharp words, especially because she had been under the impression that they had some sort of understanding. Apparently not.
Steve’s attempt to explain himself is genuine, and she’s sure he has some wonderful explanation that she absolutely does not want to hear. She is too angry and feels too foolish to give him any benefit of the doubt, so she carries on with her frustration. Her pride will not allow her to do otherwise.
His rather stupid comment about her and Howard does nothing to dampen her fury. She leaves Steve with the man in question and stalks away to do something else, and when she comes back, Steve proudly models a new shield for her and asks what she thinks.
His very pleased smile is almost enough for her to relent. Almost.
Instead, she remembers that she is angry at him (and that the shield he’s holding is extremely bulletproof), picks up the nearest gun, and fires four quick shots at him. Steve looks at her like a puppy that’s just been stepped on, but she doesn’t care and stalks past his shoulder, her heels clicking satisfyingly with every angry step, glaring at him on the way out.
How silly she was to think he was different than all the rest!
He is different , her stupid heart whispers back at her, but she is done listening to that bloody thing.
This is exactly why she is never getting married. She has no patience for this.
Pvt. Lorraine has always been infuriating, throwing herself at any mildly attractive soldier she can, but it does not soothe Peggy’s anger to hate Lorraine. It is not satisfying to be angry with her.
Steve is easier to be angry with because she realises that is scared of one man: Steve Rogers. She fears that if she continues down her current vein of emotions, she will give him the power to break her heart, and the very thought of giving any man that power terrifies her. She already had given him far too much power, she thinks, after she showed up at the Whip & Fiddle more done up than she’d ever been in two years.
Fred never had any semblance of the power she’s stupidly given Steve, she thinks with a scoff, wondering, not for the first time in her life, exactly what she’s gotten herself into.
She returns to her room that night, her mind playing again and again the truly horrifying and sickening image of Steve kissing Lorraine, and wishes she had been more careful with her own heart.
Steve is an easy scapegoat, and for the next month or so, she does not speak to him if she can help it, even when it grows harder and harder to do so. Peggy is notoriously good at holding grudges.
The radio silence between the two appears to be the reason why Phillips sends her on a couple missions with Steve’s ‘Howling Commandos’. The colonel never says so outright, but Peggy isn’t stupid.
When it’s obvious that Peggy and the Commandos work very well together, Phillips decides to make it a more frequent arrangement.
Forced proximity does nothing for Peggy’s anger. In fact, she holds onto it as though it’s her child until she and Phillips are sitting in the SSR briefing room, watching film of the Commandos in action, and there’s a shot of Steve talking to a few of his men, compass innocuously sitting in front of him. The camera focuses on the compass and zooms in. She gasps softly.
In the upper flap of Steve’s compass is a newspaper cutout of no one but herself. She glances quickly at Phillips, who raises his eyebrows at her, and Peggy bites back a smile and a blush.
Well, she tries to, anyway, failing to keep them at bay for long.
Perhaps she had been too harsh on Steve. Col. Phillips is astonished at how quickly she makes amends after that.
She even apologises to Steve for her behaviour, and Peggy has never been one to apologise for behaviour she thinks was merited in that particular moment. Even though her apology all but broadcasts her feelings to the whole world (why on earth would she be upset at Steve for kissing Lorraine, if not because she was jealous?), she doesn’t care because the grin Steve gives her when he laughs softly, tells her that all is forgiven, and apologises for his own behaviour really is darling.
She again thinks about kissing him, but they’re sitting in the mess hall in front of soldiers and agents and Steve’s men, and she figures the display might be distasteful. And against the rules. She exercises self-control instead, picking at her food with a look she is sure is truly sickening and sappy.
When she looks up, Steve is watching her with a soft expression that makes her heart skip a beat. Peggy smiles and then starts laughing at the absurdity of the situation and just how childishly she handled it, and soon both her and Steve are laughing so hard that James Barnes walks over and asks if they’re feeling quite well.
She resents the twinkle in James’ eyes that suggests he knows far more than she’d like him to, but she nods and smiles at Steve’s friend despite that.
As they finish their meal, she wonders how she could ever doubt him. He is just as different as she first thought him to be and continues to prove it with every day that follows.
A few days later, Howard stops her in the hall outside his lab, grinning. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you won’t guess what I’ve heard from one of Captain Rogers’ men.’
Peggy shakes her head, hides a blush, and tells him that she couldn’t possibly imagine what he was talking about, despite the fact she knows that he is alluding to Falsworth catching her and Steve flirting something terrible outside of the colonel’s office two days ago. In her defence, no one else was around, and who was she to know that anyone would think anything of it?
Then she thinks about the way Steve’s eyes follow her and the crispness she’s known to operate under at all times and realises that Agent Peggy Carter really flirting truly is an occasion to note. She wants to be embarrassed and perhaps even annoyed, but she can’t be—not when she remembers how widely she smiled after or how pink Steve’s ears had turned.
Before she knows it, it’s November 1944, and a year has passed since Steve decided he knew better than Col. Phillips and saved the lives of more men than she’d like to count in one sitting. Her and Steve would be considered good friends now, she thinks. They’ve known each other for over two years.
If it were any other man in any other situation, Peggy would be frustrated with the fact that he has not yet asked her on a date, but they are in a war where every day is uncertain. Every moment could drastically change their entire lives, and she knows Steve isn’t the kind of man to do something just for the fun of it. He’s waiting for the right partner.
There is also the obvious fact that fraternisation between men and women is against the rules, would be horribly looked down upon, and certainly would cause more problems for her than she’s ever had to deal with. She forgets this important piece of knowledge more often than she’d care to admit. She really should remind herself of it more often.
On one particularly boring reconnaissance mission, she and Steve talk about their lives before the war, and he tells her that he would be an artist if he could do whatever he wanted. She thinks that’s somehow the most charming thing in the world. He is unsurprised when she tells him that she loves her job and would not change it for anything.
She also learns that he doesn’t know how to dance at all , unless dancing on his mother’s feet as a child counts, which she finds horribly endearing. She even offers to teach him on the spot, but he only pushes her hair behind her ear and asks softly if it’s all over yet.
It isn’t, of course, and she gives him a disappointed smile. Really, she does understand, though. He wants it to be special and perfect and the way it’s supposed to be. She thinks that it would be special anyway , but for a man who’s never had any of the normal experiences most people could claim, she cannot and will not blame him. It just gives her something to look forward to, for once.
Her brain tells her that these are dangerous and uncharted waters, that her heart is going to be broken, and it won’t work out the way she thinks it will. Her brain also tells her that Steve Rogers would never break her heart and that he is the best man in the world. And her silly heart can’t wait for the war to be over, so she can stop worrying about proper conduct with other soldiers. Well, just the one soldier, if she's honest.