and you're doing oh so well these days | Agent Carter | Peggy Carter/Howard Stark
t: and you’re doing oh so well these days
f: Agent Carter (MCU)
p: Peggy/Howard (past Steve/Peggy)
ch: towerparty - lightning round
r/wc: R/2505
s: “You ever think we missed our chance?” Howard asks.
“We’d only have squandered it,” Peggy responds.
n: [Title from Liquid Diamonds by Tori Amos.] My prompt was there's something 'bout a midnight rain, and, as ever, whenever I’m meant to be writing smut, I went for pretentious and vaguely sad instead. This probably won’t make much sense if you haven’t watched Agent Carter.
Howard’s record player smile is a little dented at the corners, and Peggy recalls Angie, face screw-crumpling, as she pushed away a magazine with his glossy grin on it and said no, not him, not even for a Hollywood contract. Peggy thought about adding he has his good points, you know, but didn’t, caught between a truth and a lie, and anyway, that would involve admitting more than she’s willing to. Howard Stark, always someone’s guilty secret, whatever the circumstances.
With hindsight, she perhaps should not have taken Howard up on his offer of a new home; she can keep her own hours, not worry about clambering back in through the window should she wish, but past experience has taught her that being easily findable rarely ends well.
Case in point.
“Are you drunk?” Peggy asks, as Howard drips inexorably onto her rug.
“Stone cold sober,” he says, his bow tie dangling in tragic soggy loops from his right hand. It’s pathetic in a way that Howard rarely is; Peggy is enjoying it somewhat, and adult enough to admit it to herself.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever met you stone cold sober,” she remarks. If she were feeling kinder, she’d put the kettle on, make him tea or a hot toddy or something to stop the shivers she can see kindling in his shoulders. Peggy is a lot of things, but she isn’t kind. Not anymore, anyway.
“I think there was a point in the September of ‘forty-one,” he says.
Ah, Nineteen Forty-One. Howard in a lab with Erskine, who knew to cuff him around the head when he was being unbearable, and Peggy tentatively professionally attached to the project and more emotionally attached to Erskine.
“He’s a brat, but he’s almost as good as he thinks he is,” was how Erskine introduced Howard to her, and Howard’s eyes gleamed as their hands touched. His smirk was a razor blade, designed to slice through a woman’s garters with swift efficiency, and she squeezed his hand hard enough to crush the bones while they shook.
They had fun back then, friends who weren’t friends, who shared schnapps and foxtrots and classified stories. Peggy dug herself into the blood and dirt of Europe, and then returned to America, where the lights were bright and the people still smiled and Howard’s eyes glittered when one polished brogue slid between her heels.
They left things comfortable. That isn’t to say they couldn’t have tried to define something, but they didn’t. It mattered less then, and anyway, maybe they thought there would always be the next time their paths crossed, perhaps by then things would be in alignment.
And then Peggy met Steven Rogers, and he answered all the questions that Howard didn’t even make her ask.
So many of Peggy’s good memories, so many of the people who mattered to her, are tied so intimately to the war. She is trying her best to build a new and different life now; she cannot be nostalgic for something that tore so many lives apart, ruined so much of the world. Peggy is so many things nowadays, but she refuses to allow maudlin to be one of them.
“You ever think we missed our chance?” Howard asks, as though he’s been watching the memories flick behind her eyes; embarrassing, since they played hours of poker, learning each other’s tells, laying down royal flushes like right hooks. She should be better around him than this.
“We’d only have squandered it,” Peggy responds, brutally crisp, and doesn’t add like we did with everything else. “What do you want, Howard? It’s late.”
“I want you to forgive me,” Howard responds, simple, and she pictures locking fingers in his wringing wet collar and squeezing.
“So you walked over here in the pissing rain at midnight,” Peggy says, flat, and refuses to look at him, at the drowned puppy expression he’s trying that’s worked on a dozen broken girlfriends in the time she’s known him, but never on her. “Did Jarvis refuse to drive you?”
“I can drive myself,” Howard scoffs, but his hair is leaking rivulets of New York rain down his face, and part of her wants to mother him and the rest of her wants to slap him.
He’s supposed to be very good at what he does, Peggy said, while Angie refilled her cup and Howard smirked up from the magazine, another film starlet leaving lipstick on his collar. He’s a volatile one, always has been. And the girls get diamonds afterwards.
Angie’s mouth twisted, nose wrinkling in distaste. His smile never reaches his eyes, she said, was called away before she could say more.
Peggy spent the days after that watching her own smile in a mirror, trying to work out if it still had the same light it did before, if it still bore any real sincerity. She and Howard are fundamentally different in so many ways, but they bear more matching scars than they’re ever comfortable admitting. Neither of them have moved on in the way they perhaps should have done.
“You never change, do you, Howard?” she sighs, and steps back a little, away from the glitter of his eyes.
“It’s what you like about me,” he responds, shrugging, and Peggy hates that it’s true. He’s altering, or at least his ego is growing more ugly by the month, but scrape the surface and he is who he is, and she needs something like that.
“You’re assuming that I like you at all,” she responds, tired, work in the morning. Daniel’s eyes wary and perhaps a little guilty, Thompson’s stonier, as though he can take back everything he told her if he doesn’t blink too often.
Howard sighs. “So you’re still pretty mad, then.”
“I’m not angry,” Peggy tells him, the sceptical curl of his lip. “I’m disappointed, and I’m angry about being disappointed.”
“I always disappoint you,” Howard says, and the veneer is gone, too late or perhaps too early for it to stick. She thinks of him, louche over cigars, smirk cutting a clean line she wanted to press her fingers into for posterity, the war a game anyone could play if they had the money and the nerve. A boy, an insufferable bastard, but easier than this amalgamation of his endless mistakes, the distance between where he reached and where he fell short. “We all do.”
Steve didn’t have the chance to disappoint either of them; it’s part of what keeps him holy, painful to the touch.
“You could try to be a little less obvious about doing it,” Peggy says, and something cracks in her shoulders, her spine, makes her tip her head forward into her hands to laugh into the palms.
“You wouldn’t know what to do with me if I behaved myself,” Howard tells her, and he’s smiling now when he looks up. “I was looking forward to us having to go on the run, though; I thought we could be this decade’s Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Well,” Peggy says, “there’s always next time.”
Howard grins, bright and crooked, sweet in a way he isn’t for most people. But Peggy isn’t most people, and their relationship is ragged and splintered but it holds, just about.
“I look ridiculous, right?” he says, sheepish, ruffling at his wet hair.
“I wouldn’t try this with any woman you want to take you seriously,” Peggy agrees.
“It’s too late for you,” he says, something wry, something mournful.
“It is,” she agrees, stepping in to tug at his ruined shirt. “And no one finds a man with pneumonia attractive.”
“Women are far more sympathetic to me than you realise,” Howard says, and Peggy thinks, oh, I know, but doesn’t say it.
“You’re a disgrace,” Peggy tells him, her voice dropping, and something drags in her brain, the sound of a choice snapping closed.
Howard’s mouth is cold when she kisses him, the tickle of his moustache startling and familiar at once; it’s been years since they last did this, and the world is different now; they’re new people now. When she slides her fingers into his hair, it sends a river of cold water sluicing over them, down Howard’s back; he shudders, and she laughs into his mouth. He swallows the sound, eyes closed where Peggy’s are open, and that’s the thing about Howard: every time, he means it. Later on, he doesn’t. Later on, he’ll slough it off as another night, have Jarvis send flowers and chocolates with a name on the cards that he’s already forgotten, but in the warmth of the moment, there’s nothing and no one else, only this.
Maybe what Peggy needs is more moments and fewer years.
She bites into Howard’s lower lip, and when he pulls her against him, rainwater soaks into her nightdress. She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of shivering, but this will not do. She has lived a life where she spent months in uncomfortable ditches and crawled through mud and thawed out snow to try and find food, but there seems little point in this, in Howard’s sodden shirt bunching under her hands and the crease of his wet slacks spilling icy drops onto her bare feet. She pulls back enough to drag the shirt over his head, buttons snagging and breaking as she does so. And there he is, hair ruffled ridiculously, the freckles that skim his shoulders that the camera never captures, that no one ever talks about when they’re selling their stories to the tabloids.
Hello, Peggy thinks softly, in the voice of herself several years ago, when this was fun and meant very little.
Howard grins at her, pulls her back into him. He’s cold all over, skin goosebumped, and his nipple is hard under her fingers when she slides a hand down his chest, his heart shuddering. His mouth finds her ear, the skin behind it, the pulse in her neck; she digs nails into his back as he breathes Peggy, Peggy, Peggy into her throat. Oh, to be that girl again, scotch and easy kisses and Erskine rolling his eyes in the lab the next morning, fond and frustrated in equal measure. The days when a super soldier was a hypothetical, and Howard spent half his time electrocuted and the other half flirting with the secretaries.
Sometimes, there is a simple thrill in knowing better but in going ahead anyway.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” Peggy warns him, his palm spread against the back of her thigh, his hands warmer than they should be, though pleasingly unsteady. Howard knows what she means immediately; he stills for a moment, and she thinks that perhaps he’ll just step back and let her tumble undignified to the rug, but instead he kisses the space where her neck becomes her shoulder, and says: “wouldn’t be the first time.”
Her nightdress pools on the floor, Howard burying his face in her breasts like someone being reunited with old friends; the thought makes her smile before he sucks her right nipple, startlingly hot in the chill of the room, the clamminess where their damp skin has been pressed together, and she has to tilt her head back to blink unseeingly at the ceiling. This was one of Howard’s homes once, and for a moment she wonders how many girls have crumpled here under Howard’s favourite routine. Perhaps it should make Peggy jealous, or angry, or determined to end this before it really begins, but she likes it, likes that things stay in perspective. She knots her fingers in Howard’s hair, shudder-gasps under his mouth, and curls a leg around him, clinging to him with the ease of muscle memory. It’s been years and a war, but she recalls this nonetheless: they didn’t stop sleeping together because they weren’t any good at it, after all.
They stagger-stumble to her bed, teeth and skin and nails, breathing quick and harsh, and Peggy knows what this is like with Howard crooning endearments and praise and knows that she would kick him through the wall if he tried to do that to her now. She wants none of that; but she’s starving for the connection, and she thinks Howard might be too, lacking in some of the finesse he prides himself on. Peggy likes him better like that: less gloss, more humanity. The showman in him is merely exhausting.
Peggy lets him slide between her legs, her thighs falling easily open as Howard dots a kiss to her navel and another to her hipbone and a third to the crease where her leg meets her body.
“Howard,” she says quietly, kicking at his shoulder with a bare foot.
“I could tease you more,” he remarks.
“I could put you through the wall,” she responds, and his mouth curls before he dips his head down to her cunt, the first long slide of his tongue hard enough to make her toes clench tight enough to hurt. There are benefits to taking a man like Howard Stark to bed: the main one is that he is painfully good at this, all tongue and lips and the slightest hints of teeth, enough to make her hips rock and skid against the sheets. She stays quiet, digging her nails into a nipple, the rain still hitting the windowpanes outside. The air in here is thick, warm despite the cold, and Peggy’s back arches when Howard slides his tongue inside her, slick and fast, his palms pressing her legs further apart.
Part of her wants to keep her orgasm to herself, not to allow Howard to have it, but she can’t help herself, twisting under his mouth, clinging to the bedsheets and his hair and her own body, finally collapsing into the mattress in a rush of sharp breath and tangled curls. Howard presses his smirk into the side of her knee, thumbs drawing aimless yet perfect circles on the insides of her thighs, and Peggy thinks about his wet trousers and the hot slide of him into her mouth, another memory she isn’t averse to sparking.
“You’ll have to call Jarvis to come and get you in the morning,” she says.
“He’ll be disappointed,” Howard replies, shifting to lie beside her in the knotted sheets, cheeks flushed, eyes bright and dark.
Peggy lifts an eyebrow. “In me or you?”
Howard waves a hand in the air. “He thinks you hung the moon, Peg. I’ll be the one getting his frosty silences.”
“As long as you don’t get him to send me jewellery in the morning,” Peggy warns.
Howard laughs, leans over her to wrap one of her curls around his finger, intimate and easy in a way they’ll probably never be ever again. She could be sad about it, but she isn’t.
“I’ll put together something shiny and explosive for you instead,” Howard tells her, soft, and maybe he’s trying to say something else, and maybe he isn’t.
“That’s my boy,” Peggy says, and drags him into kissing her before he can dispute that, or, worse, agree.
f: Agent Carter (MCU)
p: Peggy/Howard (past Steve/Peggy)
ch: towerparty - lightning round
r/wc: R/2505
s: “You ever think we missed our chance?” Howard asks.
“We’d only have squandered it,” Peggy responds.
n: [Title from Liquid Diamonds by Tori Amos.] My prompt was there's something 'bout a midnight rain, and, as ever, whenever I’m meant to be writing smut, I went for pretentious and vaguely sad instead. This probably won’t make much sense if you haven’t watched Agent Carter.
Howard’s record player smile is a little dented at the corners, and Peggy recalls Angie, face screw-crumpling, as she pushed away a magazine with his glossy grin on it and said no, not him, not even for a Hollywood contract. Peggy thought about adding he has his good points, you know, but didn’t, caught between a truth and a lie, and anyway, that would involve admitting more than she’s willing to. Howard Stark, always someone’s guilty secret, whatever the circumstances.
With hindsight, she perhaps should not have taken Howard up on his offer of a new home; she can keep her own hours, not worry about clambering back in through the window should she wish, but past experience has taught her that being easily findable rarely ends well.
Case in point.
“Are you drunk?” Peggy asks, as Howard drips inexorably onto her rug.
“Stone cold sober,” he says, his bow tie dangling in tragic soggy loops from his right hand. It’s pathetic in a way that Howard rarely is; Peggy is enjoying it somewhat, and adult enough to admit it to herself.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever met you stone cold sober,” she remarks. If she were feeling kinder, she’d put the kettle on, make him tea or a hot toddy or something to stop the shivers she can see kindling in his shoulders. Peggy is a lot of things, but she isn’t kind. Not anymore, anyway.
“I think there was a point in the September of ‘forty-one,” he says.
Ah, Nineteen Forty-One. Howard in a lab with Erskine, who knew to cuff him around the head when he was being unbearable, and Peggy tentatively professionally attached to the project and more emotionally attached to Erskine.
“He’s a brat, but he’s almost as good as he thinks he is,” was how Erskine introduced Howard to her, and Howard’s eyes gleamed as their hands touched. His smirk was a razor blade, designed to slice through a woman’s garters with swift efficiency, and she squeezed his hand hard enough to crush the bones while they shook.
They had fun back then, friends who weren’t friends, who shared schnapps and foxtrots and classified stories. Peggy dug herself into the blood and dirt of Europe, and then returned to America, where the lights were bright and the people still smiled and Howard’s eyes glittered when one polished brogue slid between her heels.
They left things comfortable. That isn’t to say they couldn’t have tried to define something, but they didn’t. It mattered less then, and anyway, maybe they thought there would always be the next time their paths crossed, perhaps by then things would be in alignment.
And then Peggy met Steven Rogers, and he answered all the questions that Howard didn’t even make her ask.
So many of Peggy’s good memories, so many of the people who mattered to her, are tied so intimately to the war. She is trying her best to build a new and different life now; she cannot be nostalgic for something that tore so many lives apart, ruined so much of the world. Peggy is so many things nowadays, but she refuses to allow maudlin to be one of them.
“You ever think we missed our chance?” Howard asks, as though he’s been watching the memories flick behind her eyes; embarrassing, since they played hours of poker, learning each other’s tells, laying down royal flushes like right hooks. She should be better around him than this.
“We’d only have squandered it,” Peggy responds, brutally crisp, and doesn’t add like we did with everything else. “What do you want, Howard? It’s late.”
“I want you to forgive me,” Howard responds, simple, and she pictures locking fingers in his wringing wet collar and squeezing.
“So you walked over here in the pissing rain at midnight,” Peggy says, flat, and refuses to look at him, at the drowned puppy expression he’s trying that’s worked on a dozen broken girlfriends in the time she’s known him, but never on her. “Did Jarvis refuse to drive you?”
“I can drive myself,” Howard scoffs, but his hair is leaking rivulets of New York rain down his face, and part of her wants to mother him and the rest of her wants to slap him.
He’s supposed to be very good at what he does, Peggy said, while Angie refilled her cup and Howard smirked up from the magazine, another film starlet leaving lipstick on his collar. He’s a volatile one, always has been. And the girls get diamonds afterwards.
Angie’s mouth twisted, nose wrinkling in distaste. His smile never reaches his eyes, she said, was called away before she could say more.
Peggy spent the days after that watching her own smile in a mirror, trying to work out if it still had the same light it did before, if it still bore any real sincerity. She and Howard are fundamentally different in so many ways, but they bear more matching scars than they’re ever comfortable admitting. Neither of them have moved on in the way they perhaps should have done.
“You never change, do you, Howard?” she sighs, and steps back a little, away from the glitter of his eyes.
“It’s what you like about me,” he responds, shrugging, and Peggy hates that it’s true. He’s altering, or at least his ego is growing more ugly by the month, but scrape the surface and he is who he is, and she needs something like that.
“You’re assuming that I like you at all,” she responds, tired, work in the morning. Daniel’s eyes wary and perhaps a little guilty, Thompson’s stonier, as though he can take back everything he told her if he doesn’t blink too often.
Howard sighs. “So you’re still pretty mad, then.”
“I’m not angry,” Peggy tells him, the sceptical curl of his lip. “I’m disappointed, and I’m angry about being disappointed.”
“I always disappoint you,” Howard says, and the veneer is gone, too late or perhaps too early for it to stick. She thinks of him, louche over cigars, smirk cutting a clean line she wanted to press her fingers into for posterity, the war a game anyone could play if they had the money and the nerve. A boy, an insufferable bastard, but easier than this amalgamation of his endless mistakes, the distance between where he reached and where he fell short. “We all do.”
Steve didn’t have the chance to disappoint either of them; it’s part of what keeps him holy, painful to the touch.
“You could try to be a little less obvious about doing it,” Peggy says, and something cracks in her shoulders, her spine, makes her tip her head forward into her hands to laugh into the palms.
“You wouldn’t know what to do with me if I behaved myself,” Howard tells her, and he’s smiling now when he looks up. “I was looking forward to us having to go on the run, though; I thought we could be this decade’s Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Well,” Peggy says, “there’s always next time.”
Howard grins, bright and crooked, sweet in a way he isn’t for most people. But Peggy isn’t most people, and their relationship is ragged and splintered but it holds, just about.
“I look ridiculous, right?” he says, sheepish, ruffling at his wet hair.
“I wouldn’t try this with any woman you want to take you seriously,” Peggy agrees.
“It’s too late for you,” he says, something wry, something mournful.
“It is,” she agrees, stepping in to tug at his ruined shirt. “And no one finds a man with pneumonia attractive.”
“Women are far more sympathetic to me than you realise,” Howard says, and Peggy thinks, oh, I know, but doesn’t say it.
“You’re a disgrace,” Peggy tells him, her voice dropping, and something drags in her brain, the sound of a choice snapping closed.
Howard’s mouth is cold when she kisses him, the tickle of his moustache startling and familiar at once; it’s been years since they last did this, and the world is different now; they’re new people now. When she slides her fingers into his hair, it sends a river of cold water sluicing over them, down Howard’s back; he shudders, and she laughs into his mouth. He swallows the sound, eyes closed where Peggy’s are open, and that’s the thing about Howard: every time, he means it. Later on, he doesn’t. Later on, he’ll slough it off as another night, have Jarvis send flowers and chocolates with a name on the cards that he’s already forgotten, but in the warmth of the moment, there’s nothing and no one else, only this.
Maybe what Peggy needs is more moments and fewer years.
She bites into Howard’s lower lip, and when he pulls her against him, rainwater soaks into her nightdress. She doesn’t give him the satisfaction of shivering, but this will not do. She has lived a life where she spent months in uncomfortable ditches and crawled through mud and thawed out snow to try and find food, but there seems little point in this, in Howard’s sodden shirt bunching under her hands and the crease of his wet slacks spilling icy drops onto her bare feet. She pulls back enough to drag the shirt over his head, buttons snagging and breaking as she does so. And there he is, hair ruffled ridiculously, the freckles that skim his shoulders that the camera never captures, that no one ever talks about when they’re selling their stories to the tabloids.
Hello, Peggy thinks softly, in the voice of herself several years ago, when this was fun and meant very little.
Howard grins at her, pulls her back into him. He’s cold all over, skin goosebumped, and his nipple is hard under her fingers when she slides a hand down his chest, his heart shuddering. His mouth finds her ear, the skin behind it, the pulse in her neck; she digs nails into his back as he breathes Peggy, Peggy, Peggy into her throat. Oh, to be that girl again, scotch and easy kisses and Erskine rolling his eyes in the lab the next morning, fond and frustrated in equal measure. The days when a super soldier was a hypothetical, and Howard spent half his time electrocuted and the other half flirting with the secretaries.
Sometimes, there is a simple thrill in knowing better but in going ahead anyway.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” Peggy warns him, his palm spread against the back of her thigh, his hands warmer than they should be, though pleasingly unsteady. Howard knows what she means immediately; he stills for a moment, and she thinks that perhaps he’ll just step back and let her tumble undignified to the rug, but instead he kisses the space where her neck becomes her shoulder, and says: “wouldn’t be the first time.”
Her nightdress pools on the floor, Howard burying his face in her breasts like someone being reunited with old friends; the thought makes her smile before he sucks her right nipple, startlingly hot in the chill of the room, the clamminess where their damp skin has been pressed together, and she has to tilt her head back to blink unseeingly at the ceiling. This was one of Howard’s homes once, and for a moment she wonders how many girls have crumpled here under Howard’s favourite routine. Perhaps it should make Peggy jealous, or angry, or determined to end this before it really begins, but she likes it, likes that things stay in perspective. She knots her fingers in Howard’s hair, shudder-gasps under his mouth, and curls a leg around him, clinging to him with the ease of muscle memory. It’s been years and a war, but she recalls this nonetheless: they didn’t stop sleeping together because they weren’t any good at it, after all.
They stagger-stumble to her bed, teeth and skin and nails, breathing quick and harsh, and Peggy knows what this is like with Howard crooning endearments and praise and knows that she would kick him through the wall if he tried to do that to her now. She wants none of that; but she’s starving for the connection, and she thinks Howard might be too, lacking in some of the finesse he prides himself on. Peggy likes him better like that: less gloss, more humanity. The showman in him is merely exhausting.
Peggy lets him slide between her legs, her thighs falling easily open as Howard dots a kiss to her navel and another to her hipbone and a third to the crease where her leg meets her body.
“Howard,” she says quietly, kicking at his shoulder with a bare foot.
“I could tease you more,” he remarks.
“I could put you through the wall,” she responds, and his mouth curls before he dips his head down to her cunt, the first long slide of his tongue hard enough to make her toes clench tight enough to hurt. There are benefits to taking a man like Howard Stark to bed: the main one is that he is painfully good at this, all tongue and lips and the slightest hints of teeth, enough to make her hips rock and skid against the sheets. She stays quiet, digging her nails into a nipple, the rain still hitting the windowpanes outside. The air in here is thick, warm despite the cold, and Peggy’s back arches when Howard slides his tongue inside her, slick and fast, his palms pressing her legs further apart.
Part of her wants to keep her orgasm to herself, not to allow Howard to have it, but she can’t help herself, twisting under his mouth, clinging to the bedsheets and his hair and her own body, finally collapsing into the mattress in a rush of sharp breath and tangled curls. Howard presses his smirk into the side of her knee, thumbs drawing aimless yet perfect circles on the insides of her thighs, and Peggy thinks about his wet trousers and the hot slide of him into her mouth, another memory she isn’t averse to sparking.
“You’ll have to call Jarvis to come and get you in the morning,” she says.
“He’ll be disappointed,” Howard replies, shifting to lie beside her in the knotted sheets, cheeks flushed, eyes bright and dark.
Peggy lifts an eyebrow. “In me or you?”
Howard waves a hand in the air. “He thinks you hung the moon, Peg. I’ll be the one getting his frosty silences.”
“As long as you don’t get him to send me jewellery in the morning,” Peggy warns.
Howard laughs, leans over her to wrap one of her curls around his finger, intimate and easy in a way they’ll probably never be ever again. She could be sad about it, but she isn’t.
“I’ll put together something shiny and explosive for you instead,” Howard tells her, soft, and maybe he’s trying to say something else, and maybe he isn’t.
“That’s my boy,” Peggy says, and drags him into kissing her before he can dispute that, or, worse, agree.