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She’s got eight vacation days left - he counts each day down - when Violet leaves him.
She’s been in California far longer than she was meant to be, than she should be, frankly, but she pushes the door to his office open every morning and he’s hard pressed to find a reason not to be glad for it.
It’s hardly any time left at all, and he pulls deeper at the bottle of whiskey, lets it burn just a bit more viciously when he adds up eight days and three hours time and whatever the magnitudes, the latitudes of distance are between them.
She doesn’t need anymore vacation days to ruin him; he’d been pretending all along - false limb, false life. Perfectly adequate and hollow.
---
He tries not to grimace at the curl of her fingers at her side - seven days left and a stain of blood at her side.
“You need him?” he asks because he knows (the scientist who is less corporeal but somehow more whole than he is). She’s fearsome as ever, and he’s waiting for her direction - holding to some false hope that makes him unable to love bearclaws in the morning and thin, soft lips after night shifts.
“We need him,” her mouth bows in a way that has him thinking about her in an alley, her running from him, her fighting to defend Stark’s name - he’s too straight-lined, falsely noble.
It’s all self-loathing and so much like those days following his injury - he hates her, he hates himself more - and she’s determined as if she doesn’t know she’s his whole world.
“All right,” he shrugs, he aches, “it’s a plan.”
---
It’s about six and a half days, he figures, as he adjusts the dials in the surveillance van.
What he’ll do once she’s back in the New York offices, he hasn’t quite figured. He has about two more bottles of quality booze in the cabinet above his refrigerator, and an infinite number of hours to work that out.
He imagines it’s like recovering from shellshock. Once the reverberations echo out, and the headaches become more bearable, it all fades into what living means post-war, post- Peggy.
“We can still call it off,” he tells her, “if you’re having second thoughts.”
As if all of this is okay, as if he can’t see the lines at her eyes tighten when she moves her arm to turn on Jarvis’s mic.
But later, when he watches the red devour its way across his handkerchief pressed tight against her stomach, he realizes what it will mean not to run from her. To turn away and be without her.
There was a field in France, with lilacs all around. He remembers the way they turned down to look at him and the sound of artillery and he thought, for a moment, about how it would be to walk towards the flowers. He knew what it would mean not to run from death.
But he’s looked straight at that, too, and lived beyond that battle.
“How is it?” He says instead.
---
It was probably those weeks on the front when the rain wouldn’t let up, when he could feel the rain at the deepest edges of his bones, that he became adept at counting. Day one - clothes heavy and soaked. Day two - feet hurting and cold. Day Three, Day Four, Day Five - rain, rain, horrible, painful rain.
But it doesn’t rain in L.A., and he hasn’t had to count until Peggy walked through the door.
Six days left - the pads of her fingers wrapped around his thumb. Six days left - the palm of her hand on his, horribly, wonderfully warm.
He hasn’t pulled down that handle of scotch tonight, but he wants to when he runs his hand on his face and thinks about the heart of her face so close to his; the tilt of her head and the way her lips parted gorgeous and red. How she’d leaned.
The ceiling of his room is nothing like the lilacs, either. It is dark and quiet.
He’s still counting because he is fooling himself, and it’s only a matter of time until the end.
---
Four days and they should talk, but they haven’t.
And they won’t, he thinks as he nurses the tender bruise swelling above his eye.
He’s out a job, he’s out a hell of a lot of things, come to think of it, not the least of which is his sanity, whatever semblance of control he had on his life.
Wilkes has rejoined the land of the able-bodied and he’s still an outlier in that world. He pulls his the prosthetic off and is suddenly less, not a ghost - but not much more.
She’d looked at him, he’d been certain, like he had mattered, hands clasped over where his leg should have been.
It’s a goddamn pattern with him - leave to break. A leg, a heart.
And when Peggy leaves he knows something in him will, too. He just hasn’t figured out what is left in him to shatter.
---
A day. That’s it.
Days have contained far more and far less in his lifetime. Stretches and stretches of bloodshed and shouts and rounds of ammunition and devastation. Hazy afternoons stuck against the seats at Ebbets Field with blazing heat and green grass that start and end in the same moment.
She’s promised to stop by, to bid her farewells. And when he answers the door and she’s silhouetted against the late day, he wishes she hadn’t come at all.
“It’s looking a bit better,” her hands move hover reluctantly above the jaundiced edges of the gash at his eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he moves back on his crutch and aside for her to step through the door. “I’ll pull through.”
It’s the first time she’s been here, and now he knows what she looks like, standing with soft eyes and sad smile. He’s a jackass, and he thinks that if he doesn’t die next week at the hand of Hydra, he will remember this forever. Peggy Carter in a green blouse and blue slacks in his living room.
“I don’t want to leave,” she finally says, and maybe he’s dreaming. A battlefield hallucination, where he’s safe and loved and home.
But his leg aches and Peggy’s fingers are fidgeting nervously against one another, and the California heat is oppressive as ever, so he walks toward it, her.
“Don’t.”
---
There is half a day - well, a night - remaining when he sits at the edge of his bed and unbuttons her blouse from the bottom up.
He hasn’t seen the wound on her stomach since that night on the couch, and the relief and fear is as suffocating now as it was then, but now he presses his lips to the hip bone just below it, breathes out when she tangles her hand at the back of his head.
“Daniel,” he looks up, and her eyes are shining and bright and he’s only ever seen her cry once, so he moves his thumb across her stomach, waits. “I’m sorry. Truly, I am.”
He can’t stand because he’s not sure his leg - real or otherwise - will cooperate with the easing weight of her words. Instead, he gently pulls her to his lap. And this is what he imagined when he picked up the phone and didn’t call her. When he would picture her in a moment and wait three hours for that moment to travel the distance to meet him. Her laugh around the curve of a coffee cup crossing the Rockies and reaching him, alone on the edge of his bed in Los Angeles.
“Peggy Carter,” his nose and hers, his forehead and hers, rest at their inhales and exhales, “You have absolutely nothing to apologize for.”
---
He wakes to the touch of her fingertips at his cheek.
Her face is plain and broad and so achingly beautiful and he never wants to shut his eyes again.
“You have these delightful freckles,” she smiles, “I’ve been counting them.”
Her leg is thrown across his hip and she hasn’t stopped tracing the bridge of his nose. “How many you got?”
“Oh,” she hums, presses her mouth to the tip of his nose, “at least a dozen.”
“That right?” He laughs with his forehead at hers and his arms at her waist, wound loose.
She shrugs and digs her chin into his chest, places another kiss at his collarbone. “It’s very difficult to take a proper tally,” her voice is husky, more English than when she’s awake and commanding, “When you’re constantly snoring and moving about in your sleep.”
“I don’t snore,” he shakes with a laugh, and her hair and body move with it, and it is stupid, but it feels like it is consuming them both.
“Well,” she smooths her palm along his jaw, nails scratching lightly along his temple, “it might require a more thorough survey.”
He lets his hand trail the swell of her hip, far more impressive than her dresses had led him to believe, “While this subject wouldn’t object to further evaluation,” he makes note of the dip in her back, “How many vacation days does the agent have remaining?”
There are no vacation days left when she gingerly leverages her leg and eases him onto his back, the messy waves of her hair catching in the waking light, his finger going to the dark stitching on her stomach. “You see, my boyfriend happens to be quite well connected,” she looks down at him, “and I am an excellent prospect.”
“Yes,” he agrees, and it is not hours between them, “yes you are.”