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Tonight it’s another night as nights back home always are, whisky in a glass and Europe burning and Howard to her left counting showgirls with his smile pressing thin, Steve to her right a warm solid weight who’ll get her home if she slips-up, overindulges, forgets herself. Except that Peggy doesn’t ever forget herself, not for long, kissing the smudged lipstick off the mouths of Captain America’s backing dancers as their tour breezed through, blue silky skirts under her palms, then back out into the war again, part woman, part man, all bruised knuckles and Steve’s knowing, protective, smirk.
Her boys: in this, in everything.
The girl singing sways at the microphone, lights glitter-splintering off her carefully pinned hair, and she’s good, good enough for a room full of teary-eyed patriotic civilians, who maybe still think of this war as something glorious, not something grinding their soldiers down into pieces, pieces, pieces. Peggy sips her drink and presses at her lipstick stain on the glass with a ragged thumbnail.
“You should go talk to her,” Steve says, when the girl’s finished singing and a man’s taken her place, stamping shiny leather shoes to a hotter new beat.
Peggy demurs a little, eyes on the ashtray she and Howard have been filling.
“Do it, Peg,” Howard adds, “or I will.”
The girl’s eyes are bright, and she shines even out of the spotlights.
She says her name is Angie and she holds Peggy’s hand a moment too long when they shake.