Chapter Text
"Is it true?"
Daniel's voice over the radio mixed with static even as Peggy put the earphones on, still panting from her run back to the SSR van. She sat up straight in her seat, narrowing her eyes and giving full attention to what she had heard over the radio. Daniel sounded angry, upset. With Jack? She had no way to ask: her link to Daniel and Jack was one way. She could only hear their end of the conversation. They'd been separated for the mission, the two of them handling the exchange with the black market weapons dealer while Peggy stealthed in from the back and planted transmitters they could use to gather incriminating evidence. Her part of the plan had gone off without a hitch in half the time, so she made it back and tuned in to their conversation, which was progressing rapidly, and not in a direction Peggy liked.
"Fuck off." Even over the terrible radio connection, Jack sounded tired and stressed. Peggy's eyebrows rose of their own accord at the crude dismissal. When Daniel had wanted to come along for the active part of the mission Jack had backed him up, perhaps in the best position of them all to understand how relentless bureaucracy from behind the desk drained the soul, having experienced it recently himself, while he recovered. If anything, Peggy had expected their joined adventure to ease any remaining tension between the two men. What she was hearing over the radio however sounded like trouble.
"Tell me!" Daniel was saying, "Is it true? Did you lie to him or did you really..."
There was a long, torturous silence and Peggy bit her lip. Why hadn't Daniel finished the sentence?
"Yes, alright?" Jack's voice sounded harshly over the radio. "Is that what you want to hear? I killed them, and I hid the flag and they gave me a Navy Cross for it. Is that what you wanted me to say?"
Peggy dug her fingers into the edge of the table, but over the radio Daniel gave no response.
"I stood there while they pinned the medal on me," Jack continued, his voice harsh and angry, "and I thought: what a bunch of fools!"
"You bastard..." The side of the van shook. Peggy realized they were right outside, up against the side of the van, their argument turning physical. She threw the headphones on the table and yanked at the van's door, jumping out and finding them there, nose to nose and both furious as she'd ever seen them. Daniel had one hand on Jack's shoulder, pressing him into the colourful side of the van. "How could you..." Daniel was saying.
Before Peggy could intercede, Jack reversed the position, twisting until he could slam Daniel's shoulders against the van, shoving him back. "Fuck off! You bought into it same as them, but it was never real. None of it!" He took a step back, but she could see he was readying for another round.
"Jack!" Peggy called out, but he was on a roll now. He didn't seem to hear her at all.
"I've been waiting to say it for years," Jack said, "but I never thought if I did you'd be wearing the dumb look you're wearing now. I mean, you had to sense some of this?" When Daniel just numbly shook his head, Jack said, "Then I guess you really have no idea who I am."
"That's enough!" Peggy said, coming between them now and pushing them apart with her hands on each of their shoulders. Daniel looked mostly shocked at what he'd just heard, leaning against the van where he stood, but both he and Jack were breathing heavily. Jack was shaking minutely under her hand.
He didn't meet her eyes and turned away, striding silently towards the back door of the van and getting inside.
"Come on," Peggy said to Daniel who simply stared at her, looking shocked. "We'll sort this at the office. This is too public."
He seemed to realize she was right, they were having a fight right out in the open. When they got into the van Jack was already lying on one of the benches on the side, an arm over his eyes. He could have been asleep for the projected unconcern, but Peggy didn't buy it for a moment. His lips were a thin white line, his shoulders tense.
Daniel threw one last furious glance at Jack over the back of his passenger seat while Peggy got in behind the wheel.
Once when Peggy had been very little, three or so, Michael had broken his own favourite toy rather than give it to her. She'd been following him around as usual and wanting to do everything her brother was doing, immediately and as soon as she spotted him at it. Michael had resented the little person wanting all his toys, especially since their parents saw nothing wrong with him having to share what was rightfully his, so one day when she had bugged him enough he'd thrown a tantrum. He'd broken his toy so he wouldn't have to give in to her demands for it, and in the end their parents had found the two of them sobbing, both wailing inconsolably over the toy-soldier broken in half at their feet. Peggy had mostly been crying because Michael was crying. Both Peggy and Michael had learned to get along better after that incident, but Peggy had never forgotten how one person could make a seemingly irrational choice that hurt themselves most of all.
"What he did in the war might be terrible but at least I can accept it. I did some things I wasn't exactly proud of, myself. Who am I to judge?" Daniel was pacing the floor of his office, heated words spilling out, two splotches of color on his cheeks. Peggy watched all this, her chest tight. He was really taking it hard. Daniel went on, "But the way he'd lord it over us after! The Navy Cross, his status as SSR's favourite Golden Boy. And all this time it was based on a lie!"
"Are you upset because Jack lied or because you had wanted to be more like him?" Peggy said. Falls from grace hit harder the more invested you became in the idea of the other person, and Jack had certainly polished his image until today.
Daniel stopped his pacing and swirled around, words on his tongue. They never fell and he compressed his lips for a moment, thinking. "I did, didn't I?" he said eventually. The frantic energy seemed to run out of him with that statement and he leaned heavily against his desk, setting aside his crutch. "I resented and I envied him because he got through it all and he didn't get a scratch. There were nights I lay awake thinking what my life might have been like if I'd been whole after the war..." He chuckled, a sharp sound.
Peggy walked over to him, slowly, standing next to him and hooking a hand around his elbow, leaning in until he was pressed up against her. Daniel turned to Peggy and closed his eyes, breathing her in and with it the calm that she tried to instill.
"I promise you," she said quietly, "Jack didn't walk away from it all without a scratch."
Daniel opened his eyes, looking half-way curious and half-way already knowing what she was going to say. Some things were invisible to the eye; he knew it well.
"I understand why you're angry, and," she sighed, "Jack made a hash of telling you. But you're a good man, Daniel. I think you understand that it wasn't easy for him to admit any of it, especially to you."
"He told you." Daniel subtly changed the subject and she let him, because the last thing she wanted was to push him any more than he'd been pushed already. "A long time ago, from what I understand."
Peggy nodded. "He told me during our mission to Belarus last year." It hadn't been her secret to share, and she knew Daniel would not begrudge her that. But he was curious, and she'd answer what she could.
"I remember thinking something was different when you came back." Daniel shook his head, exasperated with the situation, and maybe with Peggy, a little. "How did you take it? Probably better than me, huh...?" His lips curved in a wry grin and her chest eased a little. If he could joke about it, he was half-way to accepting it.
"I had a lot of time to think on the plane back," Peggy said. "We'd come from a combat situation where people lost their lives; that always seems to put things in perspective. I'd seen the way Jack acted on that mission. He took care of his people, he let everyone go first and covered our escape where he could. Whatever happened afterward didn't diminish that."
"That's Jack, alright. You can't even hate the bastard," Daniel said, and chuckled weakly at his own words. Peggy smiled too.
"Jack is not an easy person to be friends with."
"You can say that again!" Daniel shook his head. "But I hate the way this sours everything now."
"Does it?"
"I wish I could just get over it, but I don't know if I can even look at him now without thinking about everything he told me. How he laughed at us, knowing he'd fooled everyone!"
Peggy looked away. She didn't know what had made Jack say those things, except maybe that same fear that seemed to rule him from time to time. The fear that if he didn't act to protect himself and push everyone away, the people around him would exploit every weakness he had. Daniel wasn't the person to do that, a blind man could see it, but then Jack wasn't coming from a place of rational thought. It had taken Peggy a long time to learn to read him, and it wasn't a process that she could just explain to Daniel now. He had to see it for himself.
What he needed was time and someone to listen to him work it out. Peggy could do that much.
She entwined her fingers through his and squeezed his hand. The next couple of days would be hard for everyone.
She found Jack hiding in her dark office.
"I fucked it up," Jack said from behind her desk, leaning so far back in her chair Peggy felt like he was trying to cover behind it.
"You didn't make it easier for yourself." She lifted an eyebrow and Jack grimaced. Peggy came closer and paused, sniffing the air. "Have you been drinking?"
"I'm not drunk," Jack avoided the question, but the answer was obvious. The smell of alcohol was in the room now that she came closer. Peggy looked around the office, but the blinds were drawn so the other SSR Agents wouldn't be seeing Jack in dereliction of duties. She sat across the desk from him and stared pointedly until he lowered his eyes and muttered, "Not nearly as drunk as I want to be right now." Now that the ruse was up, he lifted his hands from behind the desk. One held a half-empty bottle of scotch, the other a glass. They clanged when Jack set them against the table.
"That won't help anything, you know."
"What would help?" His hazel eyes met hers, and she was struck again by how much younger he looked when the masks slid away. It had been an honest question, a plea for help. "Because I've been wracking my brain for anything..." Jack put a hand to his forehead, staring at a far wall, clearly not seeing it, the very picture of misery. If he'd let Daniel see him like this, maybe it would have done half the work for him because Peggy's heart went out to him now.
"Start by not making it look like you reveled in lying to him," Peggy said firmly. "It isn't true, and it only serves to hurt you both."
Jack only reached again for the drink, ignoring Peggy's frown as he poured himself another finger of scotch.
After a moment of trying to project disapproval, she sighed. "Have you got another glass on you?"
Jack looked up in surprise, lips splitting into a smile when he made the connection. He shook his head no, he only had the one glass he'd been drinking from, so Peggy reached for the bottle and Jack pushed it towards her across the desk. He watched while Peggy took a sip, cringing a little at the taste, and set it back down on the table between them.
"I thought you'd be on his side," he said quietly. With their eyes meeting, she saw how he'd pictured it: the loyal girlfriend standing by her man and throwing away whatever rapport the two of them had built over the years because it didn't matter. But it did, all of it mattered, and Peggy wasn't that sort of a friend. Jack said in earnest, "But you are here, with me."
"I'm not taking sides," Peggy said. "As tempting as it is to knock your foreheads together and stop this nonsense I can't actually do that either."
"If I thought letting him hit me would make him feel better..."
"Oh, now you're just self-flagellating." Exasperation crept into her voice: it was like he purposefully found the least useful solution for everything. "You missed the chance to tell him calmly, so he'd listen, and introducing more emotion on top of everything could only make it worse."
"Because everything is logical in Peggy's world," Jack said bitterly. "Don't you think I looked for a better way to tell him?" He looked away, distant in the memory. "But he was saying things and it was like my brain switched off. I laid into him when he least deserved it and doesn't that just put a bow on things."
"You can fix it," Peggy said, certain he was clever enough, even if he made it difficult to keep in mind, at times. She stood up and walked over to the other side of the desk, pulling at his arm above the elbow to make him rise. "C'mon, I don't think sitting here in the dark drinking is doing you any good."
Jack rose, and wavered on his feet. He was a lot more drunk that she'd assumed, which startled her because his speech didn't slur one bit and until that moment she'd never have thought it. She was going to ask him if he'd make it, wondering if she needed to lend a hand after all, but Jack straightened and got his balance, and the signs disappeared again. He just looked so normal.
"Let's go, I'll drive you to your place," Peggy said.
Jack reached out and took her hand by the fingers, surprising her and making her look down at where he held it with his own, larger hand. He squeezed her fingers in gratitude, and took a shaky breath before nodding and following her outside.