Trying to Bridge Dark Water (pre-slash Steve/Tony--PG-13)
Title: Trying to Bridge Dark Water
Author: sororexitium
Pairing/Characters: pre-Tony/Steve, Margaret "Peggy" Carter
Fandom: Avengers (movieverse)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Child Abuse
Summary: Peggy is ninety-one years old, and trying to bridge the then and the now.
Notes: This is part of my Mostly Family, but Sometimes Strangers series. I'm sure everyone can see by now that I'm kinda skipping and jumping with this one.
Peggy was sitting in her chair by the bay windows in her living room. The radio was playing in the background, an oldies station she had found several years ago. Mostly now it played tunes from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, but it was better than some of the other music she had heard in her life time. She sat with The Princess Bride settled in her lap, her glasses perched on her nose.
Around her were several pictures. Her living room was where she spent most of her time, and so most of her precious possessions were kept in here. Pictures littered her walls and most flat surfaces. Books were scattered about, mostly her favorite action/adventures, but some of the science fiction books that her youngest granddaughter, Lisa, had given to her. A few letters were on her coffee table, along with some promotional adverts.
Her bills didn’t arrive at this place though. If there was anything monetary, it was sent to Stark Tower, where her nephew made sure everything was in order. More specifically, one of his assistants made sure everything was in order, but she didn’t hold it against her nephew. He was quite the busy man after all.
Beside her, the telephone rang and the number on the display read the gatekeeper to her community. She reached out a slightly shaking hand to pick it up, pressing it to her ear.
“Yes, Martin?” she spoke into the speaker, a slight smile on her face.
Martin only ever called her condo when there was a visitor there for her, and she didn’t have very many visitors. Her granddaughters were scattered about the states but the youngest lived closer to Albany than she did to New York City and only came every month or so. Her nephew came around on Wednesdays and Saturdays when he had the chance, which was considerably more than when he had live out of state of course. Other than that, she had the odd visitor now and again. A neighbor coming to play cards with her, but they wouldn’t be coming through the gate. The lovely living assistant who came in the mornings and evenings to do small things for her, but she didn’t need much.
She may be ninety-one but she was still a very mobile woman.
“Hello, Mrs. Carter-Holt,” Martin said in his deep, baritone voice. “There’s a Steven Rogers at the gate to see you. Should I let him in?”
Her heart sped up marginally and she had to take a deep breath. She had known this would likely happen soon. Her nephew had been by to tell her of the news that Captain America had been found in the Arctic, frozen but not dead. Later, he had told her that he was in SHIELD facilities, being looked at by doctors, psychologists, scientists, and government officials, so it would probably be some time before he was able to see her.
Last Saturday, he had told her that Steve Rogers wasn’t really anything like she said he was.
It had broken her heart to hear that, but she still looked forward to seeing him herself.
“Let him in, please, Martin,” she said, waiting to hear the affirmation from the gatekeeper before setting her phone back in its holder.
Taking another deep breath, she levered herself to her feet, taking a moment to set her book down and shake out any wrinkles from her pants.
Steve would be quick in arriving. Her condo was relatively close to the gates while still within walking distance of the little lake out back, and the park where some of the nurses took the elderly in her community.
She wasn’t necessarily fast in getting to the door, but she made good time after the first ring of the bell sounded. She still took a certain pride in the fact that she didn’t need any help getting around on her own. She knew not many her age were fortunate in that respect.
Peggy smoothed her hair unnecessarily before she opened the door, feeling the still thick, short white hair perfectly combed as it had been that morning.
She was nervous. Anyone would be in her position. She hadn’t seen Steve in sixty-seven years, years in which she had aged and, according to the news, he had not. She wandered what he would see in her; what she would see in him. She wondered if he really had changed so much in the ice, the way her nephew made him sound.
When the door was open, it was like pulling open a door to the past. Steve looked just as she remembered him. Tall, blond, and looking completely out of his element despite how stiffly he held himself. He was in civvies this time around, more modern though they held a bit of the ‘40’s air around them.
And he still stared at her with those strikingly blue eyes.
“Peggy,” he breathed with a disbelieving smile. “I wasn’t sure…I mean…He said I could find you here, but…”
She gives him a smile back, feels her skin wrinkle around her eyes and mouth. “Tony knows better than to lie to my friends,” she responded fondly. She took a step out of the way, holding her arm towards the living room in invitation. “Please, Steve. Come inside have a seat. I’ll get us something to drink.”
Steve stepped inside, looking around the well-sized domain with curiosity, sparing a few of her photographs.
The hallway was mostly filled with snapshots she had taken of country sides and landmarks in her travels with her late husband, Walter. It wasn’t really that exciting. Good reminders and memories, but nothing like her living room pictures.
When he stood uncertainly in her hallway for a moment too long, she sighed amusedly. “Go on. I’ll be behind you shortly. Just take a seat on the couch.”
This time he listened, thankfully. Her kitchen wasn’t small, but it would be easier to get drinks without him hovering dumbly in the corner. Her nephew was more than capable of doing that, and sometimes impeded with her work by trying to help.
By the time she made it out of the kitchen, he was holding a picture. By the frame it was one of her family, the last one the four of them had taken before her son had died in Viet Nam.
It was one of her favorites, but the entire room was filled with her favorites, so that wasn't really saying much.
She smiled at him as she set the tray down on the coffee table, shaking as she always did. Steve guiltily replaced the photograph to its original placement,pressing his hands onto his knees as she took her seat beside him. Reaching over him, and firmly ignoring the creak in her old bones, she picked it up again, angling it towards him as she pointed out the members of her family.
“That’s Walter, my husband,” she said, pointing to the man thick glasses and black hair. “I met him in 1950, shortly after I became an American citizen. He worked for the CIA as an analyst. Fascinating work according to him, though it sounded dreadfully boring and much more tedious than anything I ever did in the military or SHIELD. He loved it though. He died in ’92. Emphysema. The man smoked two packs a day the entire time we were married.”
She shook her head, remembering how many arguments they had about his bad habit.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Steve said, meaning it which was nice and very true to his character.
Peggy patted his hand. “Don’t be. He was seventy-seven, and made himself a nuisance to the very end.” She smiled, trying to comfort him with her jesting words, before she pointed to her two children, starting with her daughter. “That’s Terri. She was my older one and the mother of these three.” She reached for a picture of her three grandchildren all three girls, pointing them out as Lisa, Victoria, and Hanna, before setting it back down. Then she pointed to the last one in the original photograph, a young man with dark hair and her eyes. “This one is Gregory, my son. He was a lot like you. Wouldn’t back down from a fight if he thought it was for the right cause. You would have liked him.”
Steve nodded, looking a little shell shocked. Peggy supposed that he was. It probably wasn’t good to go into her entire family line within the first ten minutes he had been at her house, especially since the time that had passed for her, hadn’t passed for him. It would be no wonder if he woke some morning and still didn’t know this strange land.
The nightmares he must have…
It had been nearly seventy years since her war had ended, and the nightmares still seemed too close for her comfort. For him the war must still snap at his heels, all the trauma and loss warring with a world he knew nothing of and very few new anything of him.
She patted his hand again and set the picture down again. “That was probably quite a bit for me to unload on you,” she admitted. “I haven’t even asked how you are, or how you’re handling everything.”
His hands stayed pressed against his knees and he looked very tense sitting on her couch. “I’m not really sure right now,” he said, his eyes gazing at his hands momentarily, taking in her old, wrinkled hand covering his young, perfect one before his eyes shot around her living room. “Everything keeps shifting before I can get a real grip on anything helpful.” He sighed, and his eyes found her hand again before following her arm up to her face. “I wanted to come see your earlier, but the psychologists said that I wasn’t ready for anything like that. That it would put too much stress on me.”
Peggy nodded. “I would think that they were right. I would think it would be quite stressful to see your gal sixty-seven years older, wrinkled and gray just after you’re basically defrosted.”
A frown worked between his eyebrows and pulled lightly at the corner of his mouth. “I still wanted to see you. You’re the only one…” He took a deep calming breath and exhaled it evenly through his mouth. “Sorry.”
Peggy folded her small hand around Steve’s. “Don’t be. I can’t imagine any of this is easy for you.”
“Some of it is,” Steve admitted. “Putting on the suit is easy. Fighting for the safety of America is like breathing.”
“For Captain America.” Steve gave her a confused look. “Those are easy for Captain America; what about for Steven Rogers?”
“We’re not really two different people,” he said with a small amount of irritation.
She nodded slightly. “Not wholly, no. Steven Rogers makes up Captain America, through and through, but some things…some things you grew to leave behind when you picked up the shield. Being a man trapped in a new world with few friends might be easy to forget when there is a battle to be fought.”
Steve didn’t say anything to that. Instead he pulled his hand from hers and reached for another picture. “Tell me more about your family?”
He didn’t seem so different to her.
+++
In Spring 1968, Peggy introduced her closest friend Maria Hartridge to her oldest friend, Howard. She and Howard had grown apart over the years, but they still worked relatively close together for SHIELD, making it easy for them to pass idle conversation to each other as well as introducing close friends.
Peggy had taken Maria with her to a fundraiser Howard was holding, as Walter had been busy doing work for the CIA. Her who children were with Walter’s sister for the evening. It was essentially a girl’s night out for her and Maria.
When she had seen Howard, they had exchanged a polite hug and kisses to the cheek before she had pulled Maria forward.
It was a catastrophe in the making.
Howard was with his own friend, Obadiah Stane, a seemingly charitable man but with a shine in his eyes that Peggy had never been comfortable around. Mr. Stane always had goals in mind, and as his eyes landed on Maria, younger, blond, smart Maria, Peggy could see wheels turning in his head. Maria would be the perfect distraction for Howard, and Mr. Stane would be free to do as he wished.
It worked for a little while. Howard and Maria hadn’t even been in a relationship for a full year before their wedding in December, and even by that time, Peggy could see the changes being made to both of them. At first it was easy to put aside. Maria had an extra drink at lunch, while Howard was away on a business venture. She became a bit more distant and as refined as the designer suits she wore, perfect and high maintenance.
Howard came around SHEILD less and less, always with Obadiah, helping to ensure the safety of Allied soldiers with bombs that, though she would never say it aloud, reminded her of the Red Skull.
In early ’71, Maria gave birth to their first and only child, Anthony.
Peggy was in the waiting room.
Howard was in West Berlin.
She had been willing to give Howard some amount of credit at that point in time. Tony had been born three week premature, and the business meeting couldn’t be postponed. When he returned he stopped by his factory only for an hour, before he came to the hospital, but that had only been because that was where the private chopper was scheduled to land. The fact remained though, that Howard didn’t see his son until four days after his birth.
Peggy wasn’t there when Howard arrived, but she did know from Edwin Jarvis, a man who became a dear friend and ally to her over the years, that he only stayed for two hours before heading back to the factory. He did hold Tony though, for an entire ten minutes before he was settled back in his bassinette.
Ten minutes…
Walter hadn’t been able to put Terri down for an hour when she had first been born.
She thought perhaps that could have been when her dislike of Howard had begun, but to be honest it had probably happened long before that. Tony had just marked the tangible difference between her friend in the war and the man she couldn’t stand.
Still, she remained somewhat close to Maria, and as her daughter was eighteen when Tony had been born and her son seventeen, she delighted in holding Tony, even if he was a fussy baby and the nanny could hardly get him to take a bottle. Maria was glad for the company, Peggy used to think, as every time Tony began screaming she would hand her child over.
It wasn’t until Tony’s fifth birthday that their friendship shifted forever. When Peggy arrived at the mansion, she found it decorated and there was entertainment everywhere. Children ran freely with a nanny or two following, trying to keep them under control. Maria was at the couch with a martini glass in her hand, talking to another well off wife, her eyes already glassy.
Howard was speaking with a business associate. Little Tony stood beside him, tugging at his pant leg, a contraption his young, genius mind had invented held awkwardly under his arm as he tried to gather his father’s attention.
“Anthony, stop it. I’m busy,” Howard said, shoving Tony away a little.
Tony came back up to him, patting at his hip insistently. “Daddy, it’ll just take a second. I promise. Daddy? Dad!”
Howard growled a little, grabbing onto Tony’s wrist tightly as he said to his associate. “I’ll be back in a second.” The associate looked relieved and irritated, like it had taken Howard far too long to deal with Tony, but gave a short nod as Howard hauled Tony out of the room.
Howard came out just a few moments later, red in the face and rubbing his palm. Tony followed just a moment after, surprising Peggy by making a beeline, not towards the activities, but away from them, running towards his room, with his project held to his chest.
Peggy graciously broke away from her conversation with a scientist who worked for both SHIELD and Stark Industries, to follow him. Her heels clicking mutedly on the marble flooring made the only noise in the hall up until she closed in on the hall Tony resided in, and then it was easy to hear his hiccupping sobs as well as his ineffective attempts to muffle and control them.
His door wasn’t closed all the way, so Peggy easily stepped in without making a noise, not that she thought he would have noticed. His back was faced towards the door and he made loud moaning sounds as he tried to hold back the loud sobs and tears.
“Tony?” she called softly, stepping onto the carpet and shutting the door gently behind her. He didn’t respond, only sat on his bed with his knees pulled up to his chest making him seem like a small ball. He had always been such a small child. “Tony?” she called again louder.
He tried harder to get control of his breathing, but all it helped do was make him breathe faster and more erratic. Peggy swept in quickly, putting a hand to his small back. “Tony, darling, you must breathe. Take a deep breath,” she ordered, an instinct from her own two children and Gregory especially.
She had to repeat the command a few times before the young boy took a shuddering breath, listening as she instructed him on how to breathe. When he was finally hiccupping softly in the aftermath of his bawling, she sat on the bed next to him, coaxing his face away from his knees with a gentle hand. She turned his face towards her, gasping not at the red rimmed eyes, or splotchy face, but at the angry handprint that was obvious under the flush of tears and sadness.
The resulting argument between she and Howard and Maria had not been pleasant, to say the least. She had told them that he was cruel to the boy for only wanting to show him a creation he had made and Howard had said that he was busy, and that Tony should have learned proper etiquette by then. Maria agreed. It had spiraled out of control and to this day, Peggy didn’t remember all of what was said. She knew Steve had never been mentioned in the argument, but maybe he should have been. What she did remember was that she said the word ‘abuse’ and Howard had become red faced and screamed, “If you don’t like the way I raise my son, you can see yourself out, Margaret!”
She had, but she hadn’t stopped seeing Tony.
+++
Steve’s visits became many over the month and the more they saw each other the easier it was. There was still a level of strangeness surrounding them, to be sure. After all when she and Steve had first met, he had been less than a year older than her, and now she was roughly sixty-six years older than him. Despite that, Peggy still had her mind and her memories and Steve adjusted well to the oddity of it all.
They spoke about their mutual friends, all of whom were sadly deceased now. They spoke about the oddities of the 21st century and how sometimes even Peggy had troubles keeping up and she had lived through all the changes. They talked about Steve’s team, and some of the friends he was tentatively gaining.
They hardly spoke about her nephew, and they didn’t mention Howard, which Peggy thought was a feat. She was always able to sidestep the questions leading up to Howard with a funny story about Dum Dum Dugan, who had worked with her in SHIELD, or a retelling about Colonel Phillips.
She knew Steve had caught on to her tricks. He had probably done so only a week into visiting her, but she couldn’t help herself. It was easy to evade Howard’s name, his stories, and his achievements, because she had been doing it with Tony for years. When she had told him stories of Captain America, the Howling Commandos, and herself in the war, it had become second nature to just omit his father. Even when he was small, and he still thought that maybe there was something he was doing to make his father so angry or worse, distant, the look on his face before Peggy started deleting Howard out of stories had been heart-wrenching.
Not to mention, stories of Howard when they both knew him would lead to stories of Howard after Steve had crashed. She didn’t want to go through all of that bad water, and she didn’t want to betray Tony’s trust like that. As far as she knew, the only ones who knew the full extent of Howard’s abuse and Maria negligence, who were still alive anyway, were herself, Tony, and perhaps his two friends, Pepper and Rhodey, but she wasn’t sure about them.
Eventually though she had to wade those waters of dark, cold memories.
Steve said one Tuesday afternoon, “You don’t have any pictures of Howard up.”
She didn’t have many pictures of Maria up either, but he hadn’t known her. And she had several of Tony around that Steve hadn’t commentated on.
She shrugged. “He’s in my picture of the Howling Commandos,” she said easily, pointing in towards the black and white photograph in the bay window. It was a washed out photograph, more sienna now, but it was still pristine every time she looked at it.
It was also one of the last times she could actually remember loving Howard Stark as a friend.
Steve took a deep breath and looked at his hands resting between his thighs. “Peggy?” he asked.
She turned her eyes toward him, her lips pressing thin in anticipation of whatever-whoever-Steve was about to ask after.
“Why doesn’t anyone talk about Howard anymore?” She opened her mouth to answer, but he shook his head. “No, no, not the inventor or the creator of Stark Industries…just Howard. I’ve…I’ve tried finding out more about him, but…it’s like he’s gone. And sometimes I try to talk to Tony about him…”
Peggy stiffened marginally, turning her head to him. “You do what?”
Tony hadn’t mentioned that in their several conversations. She made a mental note to herself to ask him about that when she saw him tomorrow.
“Tony, his son,” Steve tried to explain.
“I’m aware of who he is, Steve. You ask him about his father?”
Steve gave her a confused look, which was only logical for him to do, because she hadn’t told him anything about Howard. He didn’t know not to ask. She heaved a sad sigh and shook her head. It suddenly made sense why Steve wasn’t what Tony thought he was…if Steve had been…
“What else do you say about Howard?” she asked.
Steve didn’t answer her question. He stared at her, his brilliant blue eyes trying to sleuth out everything she had never said about Howard, and probably all Tony had hidden about his father beneath angry words, sarcastic comments, and well timed retreats.
“What happened to Howard?” and his words said that he didn’t mean how he died. Any news article could tell you that. His words said that he was finally figuring it out.
Peggy met his gaze evenly. “I don’t know, Steve, but who Tony and I remember isn’t the man you do.”
+++
Her son, Gregory had died by the time Tony was three. Her daughter had moved off to a college in North Carolina. She and Walter had struggled through the time for a while, but they had finally overcome it. Tony had helped them heal a little more, and after her explosive argument with Howard, when Peggy had called Edwin Jarvis and started scheduling outings with Tony, they had healed as much as they could.
Many of the pictures she had in her living room were the only ones anyone had of Tony’s young life. Howard and Maria had never been picture takers. Edwin had taken as many as he could, but they were few and far between with the many things the Stark family entrusted to him. Peggy and Walter had both delighted in having a young child around the house again, even if it was only once or twice a week and only for about three hours.
They were both getting older. So Tony could have been like a grandchild to them, but he always called them Aunt Peggy and Uncle Walt. Even when he went to boarding school, MIT, and all the colleges he decided to attend, he would call them once every two weeks at the very least and wrote whenever he felt bored enough, which, granted wasn’t often, but he wrote to them, chicken scrawl making up the letter with equations and computer codes scribbled hastily in the margins.
She still had each and every one of them.
She was sitting on her back porch, rocking on the little swinging bench and staring at a photograph of Tony and herself, when the front door opened and Tony called out, “Aunt Peggy!”
He sounded raw, open.
Peggy was honestly surprised it had taken him this long to show up, or Steve that long to bring up Howard…and what Peggy had admitted to him.
It had been a week since Steve had demanded to know who Howard had become. Quite honestly, she had expected Tony to come to her condo that very night, but Steve apparently tried to bring it up naturally.
She sighed, and stroked the glass over the picture, her finger smoothing down a seven year old Tony’s wild hair, as she called out loudly, “I’m here, Tony.” She set the picture of them beside her, turning to the open sliding glass door just as Tony came out.
It was easy to see that he had escaped his lab to come see her, as he was dressed in an undershirt and ruddy jeans. When he was younger, she used to tease him about being underdressed, and he would look down at himself with a confused expression. Walter used to say it was a joke from their time, and Tony would nod, still curious as to how he was underdressed.
He leaned his weight against the sliding glass door, deflating marginally under the strain of his emotions. Tony was never good with his emotions when they came more than one at a time. He had been ten when he’d stopped processing all of them, preferring to shut them down, focus on his work, or drink, or, for a heart stopping few years when he was in his early twenties, take drugs.
She sighed, patting the empty space next to her. Watching with a heavy heart, she took Tony’s hand as he fell into the seat next to her, squeezing with all her strength. This was probably the first time since Tony had come back from Afghanistan since she had felt so old, like no matter how hard she held his hand, Tony would never be able to feel it.
He did though, and he gave her hand a gentle squeeze in return as he stared over the lake with unseeing eyes. Finally, Tony asked, “Did you tell him everything?”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I told him the bare minimum. He was…He’s always been very intuitive, dear. He’s always been able to see bits and pieces and make a full picture out of them.” She looked into Tony’s eyes, dark and hurting. “Everything I said took place before you were born.” Tony remained quiet, a very unusual habit for him. “Why? What did he say?”
“He apologized. For insinuating that dad was a better man than me, for calling me spoiled and selfish. That part didn’t make sense, because I am. I’m very spoiled and very selfish.” He sighed, shaking his head disbelievingly before admitting quietly. “I didn’t want to tell him about dad. Or I did, but I realized that that would probably be a dick move even for me. Guy just woke up like six months ago. He doesn’t know anybody, doesn’t know this time, or what’s changed. I didn’t think telling him that…telling him dad wasn’t the white hat he remembered was a good idea.”
Peggy gave a proud smile, touching her hand to his face, so much older than he had the right to be. “He would have found out one day, Tony. Better to rinse the wound now than to let it fester.”
Tony made a face. “That is disgusting. Really. I know you were in the war, but can you just…not do triage jokes? They make me my skin crawl.”
She patted his cheek lovingly before pulling him down by the neck to press a kiss to his forehead. “You’re a good man, Tony. And he is too. I think you just need to learn each other as humans, not aliens from different times.”
Tony sighed, but put his arm around her shoulders. “Yeah. Maybe we’ll come to you for therapy. Peggy Carter-Holt, bridge between the futurist and the man out of time.”
“I expect hazard pay.”
+++
Two weeks later they did actually come to visit her together.
Author: sororexitium
Pairing/Characters: pre-Tony/Steve, Margaret "Peggy" Carter
Fandom: Avengers (movieverse)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Child Abuse
Summary: Peggy is ninety-one years old, and trying to bridge the then and the now.
Notes: This is part of my Mostly Family, but Sometimes Strangers series. I'm sure everyone can see by now that I'm kinda skipping and jumping with this one.
Peggy was sitting in her chair by the bay windows in her living room. The radio was playing in the background, an oldies station she had found several years ago. Mostly now it played tunes from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, but it was better than some of the other music she had heard in her life time. She sat with The Princess Bride settled in her lap, her glasses perched on her nose.
Around her were several pictures. Her living room was where she spent most of her time, and so most of her precious possessions were kept in here. Pictures littered her walls and most flat surfaces. Books were scattered about, mostly her favorite action/adventures, but some of the science fiction books that her youngest granddaughter, Lisa, had given to her. A few letters were on her coffee table, along with some promotional adverts.
Her bills didn’t arrive at this place though. If there was anything monetary, it was sent to Stark Tower, where her nephew made sure everything was in order. More specifically, one of his assistants made sure everything was in order, but she didn’t hold it against her nephew. He was quite the busy man after all.
Beside her, the telephone rang and the number on the display read the gatekeeper to her community. She reached out a slightly shaking hand to pick it up, pressing it to her ear.
“Yes, Martin?” she spoke into the speaker, a slight smile on her face.
Martin only ever called her condo when there was a visitor there for her, and she didn’t have very many visitors. Her granddaughters were scattered about the states but the youngest lived closer to Albany than she did to New York City and only came every month or so. Her nephew came around on Wednesdays and Saturdays when he had the chance, which was considerably more than when he had live out of state of course. Other than that, she had the odd visitor now and again. A neighbor coming to play cards with her, but they wouldn’t be coming through the gate. The lovely living assistant who came in the mornings and evenings to do small things for her, but she didn’t need much.
She may be ninety-one but she was still a very mobile woman.
“Hello, Mrs. Carter-Holt,” Martin said in his deep, baritone voice. “There’s a Steven Rogers at the gate to see you. Should I let him in?”
Her heart sped up marginally and she had to take a deep breath. She had known this would likely happen soon. Her nephew had been by to tell her of the news that Captain America had been found in the Arctic, frozen but not dead. Later, he had told her that he was in SHIELD facilities, being looked at by doctors, psychologists, scientists, and government officials, so it would probably be some time before he was able to see her.
Last Saturday, he had told her that Steve Rogers wasn’t really anything like she said he was.
It had broken her heart to hear that, but she still looked forward to seeing him herself.
“Let him in, please, Martin,” she said, waiting to hear the affirmation from the gatekeeper before setting her phone back in its holder.
Taking another deep breath, she levered herself to her feet, taking a moment to set her book down and shake out any wrinkles from her pants.
Steve would be quick in arriving. Her condo was relatively close to the gates while still within walking distance of the little lake out back, and the park where some of the nurses took the elderly in her community.
She wasn’t necessarily fast in getting to the door, but she made good time after the first ring of the bell sounded. She still took a certain pride in the fact that she didn’t need any help getting around on her own. She knew not many her age were fortunate in that respect.
Peggy smoothed her hair unnecessarily before she opened the door, feeling the still thick, short white hair perfectly combed as it had been that morning.
She was nervous. Anyone would be in her position. She hadn’t seen Steve in sixty-seven years, years in which she had aged and, according to the news, he had not. She wandered what he would see in her; what she would see in him. She wondered if he really had changed so much in the ice, the way her nephew made him sound.
When the door was open, it was like pulling open a door to the past. Steve looked just as she remembered him. Tall, blond, and looking completely out of his element despite how stiffly he held himself. He was in civvies this time around, more modern though they held a bit of the ‘40’s air around them.
And he still stared at her with those strikingly blue eyes.
“Peggy,” he breathed with a disbelieving smile. “I wasn’t sure…I mean…He said I could find you here, but…”
She gives him a smile back, feels her skin wrinkle around her eyes and mouth. “Tony knows better than to lie to my friends,” she responded fondly. She took a step out of the way, holding her arm towards the living room in invitation. “Please, Steve. Come inside have a seat. I’ll get us something to drink.”
Steve stepped inside, looking around the well-sized domain with curiosity, sparing a few of her photographs.
The hallway was mostly filled with snapshots she had taken of country sides and landmarks in her travels with her late husband, Walter. It wasn’t really that exciting. Good reminders and memories, but nothing like her living room pictures.
When he stood uncertainly in her hallway for a moment too long, she sighed amusedly. “Go on. I’ll be behind you shortly. Just take a seat on the couch.”
This time he listened, thankfully. Her kitchen wasn’t small, but it would be easier to get drinks without him hovering dumbly in the corner. Her nephew was more than capable of doing that, and sometimes impeded with her work by trying to help.
By the time she made it out of the kitchen, he was holding a picture. By the frame it was one of her family, the last one the four of them had taken before her son had died in Viet Nam.
It was one of her favorites, but the entire room was filled with her favorites, so that wasn't really saying much.
She smiled at him as she set the tray down on the coffee table, shaking as she always did. Steve guiltily replaced the photograph to its original placement,pressing his hands onto his knees as she took her seat beside him. Reaching over him, and firmly ignoring the creak in her old bones, she picked it up again, angling it towards him as she pointed out the members of her family.
“That’s Walter, my husband,” she said, pointing to the man thick glasses and black hair. “I met him in 1950, shortly after I became an American citizen. He worked for the CIA as an analyst. Fascinating work according to him, though it sounded dreadfully boring and much more tedious than anything I ever did in the military or SHIELD. He loved it though. He died in ’92. Emphysema. The man smoked two packs a day the entire time we were married.”
She shook her head, remembering how many arguments they had about his bad habit.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Steve said, meaning it which was nice and very true to his character.
Peggy patted his hand. “Don’t be. He was seventy-seven, and made himself a nuisance to the very end.” She smiled, trying to comfort him with her jesting words, before she pointed to her two children, starting with her daughter. “That’s Terri. She was my older one and the mother of these three.” She reached for a picture of her three grandchildren all three girls, pointing them out as Lisa, Victoria, and Hanna, before setting it back down. Then she pointed to the last one in the original photograph, a young man with dark hair and her eyes. “This one is Gregory, my son. He was a lot like you. Wouldn’t back down from a fight if he thought it was for the right cause. You would have liked him.”
Steve nodded, looking a little shell shocked. Peggy supposed that he was. It probably wasn’t good to go into her entire family line within the first ten minutes he had been at her house, especially since the time that had passed for her, hadn’t passed for him. It would be no wonder if he woke some morning and still didn’t know this strange land.
The nightmares he must have…
It had been nearly seventy years since her war had ended, and the nightmares still seemed too close for her comfort. For him the war must still snap at his heels, all the trauma and loss warring with a world he knew nothing of and very few new anything of him.
She patted his hand again and set the picture down again. “That was probably quite a bit for me to unload on you,” she admitted. “I haven’t even asked how you are, or how you’re handling everything.”
His hands stayed pressed against his knees and he looked very tense sitting on her couch. “I’m not really sure right now,” he said, his eyes gazing at his hands momentarily, taking in her old, wrinkled hand covering his young, perfect one before his eyes shot around her living room. “Everything keeps shifting before I can get a real grip on anything helpful.” He sighed, and his eyes found her hand again before following her arm up to her face. “I wanted to come see your earlier, but the psychologists said that I wasn’t ready for anything like that. That it would put too much stress on me.”
Peggy nodded. “I would think that they were right. I would think it would be quite stressful to see your gal sixty-seven years older, wrinkled and gray just after you’re basically defrosted.”
A frown worked between his eyebrows and pulled lightly at the corner of his mouth. “I still wanted to see you. You’re the only one…” He took a deep calming breath and exhaled it evenly through his mouth. “Sorry.”
Peggy folded her small hand around Steve’s. “Don’t be. I can’t imagine any of this is easy for you.”
“Some of it is,” Steve admitted. “Putting on the suit is easy. Fighting for the safety of America is like breathing.”
“For Captain America.” Steve gave her a confused look. “Those are easy for Captain America; what about for Steven Rogers?”
“We’re not really two different people,” he said with a small amount of irritation.
She nodded slightly. “Not wholly, no. Steven Rogers makes up Captain America, through and through, but some things…some things you grew to leave behind when you picked up the shield. Being a man trapped in a new world with few friends might be easy to forget when there is a battle to be fought.”
Steve didn’t say anything to that. Instead he pulled his hand from hers and reached for another picture. “Tell me more about your family?”
He didn’t seem so different to her.
+++
In Spring 1968, Peggy introduced her closest friend Maria Hartridge to her oldest friend, Howard. She and Howard had grown apart over the years, but they still worked relatively close together for SHIELD, making it easy for them to pass idle conversation to each other as well as introducing close friends.
Peggy had taken Maria with her to a fundraiser Howard was holding, as Walter had been busy doing work for the CIA. Her who children were with Walter’s sister for the evening. It was essentially a girl’s night out for her and Maria.
When she had seen Howard, they had exchanged a polite hug and kisses to the cheek before she had pulled Maria forward.
It was a catastrophe in the making.
Howard was with his own friend, Obadiah Stane, a seemingly charitable man but with a shine in his eyes that Peggy had never been comfortable around. Mr. Stane always had goals in mind, and as his eyes landed on Maria, younger, blond, smart Maria, Peggy could see wheels turning in his head. Maria would be the perfect distraction for Howard, and Mr. Stane would be free to do as he wished.
It worked for a little while. Howard and Maria hadn’t even been in a relationship for a full year before their wedding in December, and even by that time, Peggy could see the changes being made to both of them. At first it was easy to put aside. Maria had an extra drink at lunch, while Howard was away on a business venture. She became a bit more distant and as refined as the designer suits she wore, perfect and high maintenance.
Howard came around SHEILD less and less, always with Obadiah, helping to ensure the safety of Allied soldiers with bombs that, though she would never say it aloud, reminded her of the Red Skull.
In early ’71, Maria gave birth to their first and only child, Anthony.
Peggy was in the waiting room.
Howard was in West Berlin.
She had been willing to give Howard some amount of credit at that point in time. Tony had been born three week premature, and the business meeting couldn’t be postponed. When he returned he stopped by his factory only for an hour, before he came to the hospital, but that had only been because that was where the private chopper was scheduled to land. The fact remained though, that Howard didn’t see his son until four days after his birth.
Peggy wasn’t there when Howard arrived, but she did know from Edwin Jarvis, a man who became a dear friend and ally to her over the years, that he only stayed for two hours before heading back to the factory. He did hold Tony though, for an entire ten minutes before he was settled back in his bassinette.
Ten minutes…
Walter hadn’t been able to put Terri down for an hour when she had first been born.
She thought perhaps that could have been when her dislike of Howard had begun, but to be honest it had probably happened long before that. Tony had just marked the tangible difference between her friend in the war and the man she couldn’t stand.
Still, she remained somewhat close to Maria, and as her daughter was eighteen when Tony had been born and her son seventeen, she delighted in holding Tony, even if he was a fussy baby and the nanny could hardly get him to take a bottle. Maria was glad for the company, Peggy used to think, as every time Tony began screaming she would hand her child over.
It wasn’t until Tony’s fifth birthday that their friendship shifted forever. When Peggy arrived at the mansion, she found it decorated and there was entertainment everywhere. Children ran freely with a nanny or two following, trying to keep them under control. Maria was at the couch with a martini glass in her hand, talking to another well off wife, her eyes already glassy.
Howard was speaking with a business associate. Little Tony stood beside him, tugging at his pant leg, a contraption his young, genius mind had invented held awkwardly under his arm as he tried to gather his father’s attention.
“Anthony, stop it. I’m busy,” Howard said, shoving Tony away a little.
Tony came back up to him, patting at his hip insistently. “Daddy, it’ll just take a second. I promise. Daddy? Dad!”
Howard growled a little, grabbing onto Tony’s wrist tightly as he said to his associate. “I’ll be back in a second.” The associate looked relieved and irritated, like it had taken Howard far too long to deal with Tony, but gave a short nod as Howard hauled Tony out of the room.
Howard came out just a few moments later, red in the face and rubbing his palm. Tony followed just a moment after, surprising Peggy by making a beeline, not towards the activities, but away from them, running towards his room, with his project held to his chest.
Peggy graciously broke away from her conversation with a scientist who worked for both SHIELD and Stark Industries, to follow him. Her heels clicking mutedly on the marble flooring made the only noise in the hall up until she closed in on the hall Tony resided in, and then it was easy to hear his hiccupping sobs as well as his ineffective attempts to muffle and control them.
His door wasn’t closed all the way, so Peggy easily stepped in without making a noise, not that she thought he would have noticed. His back was faced towards the door and he made loud moaning sounds as he tried to hold back the loud sobs and tears.
“Tony?” she called softly, stepping onto the carpet and shutting the door gently behind her. He didn’t respond, only sat on his bed with his knees pulled up to his chest making him seem like a small ball. He had always been such a small child. “Tony?” she called again louder.
He tried harder to get control of his breathing, but all it helped do was make him breathe faster and more erratic. Peggy swept in quickly, putting a hand to his small back. “Tony, darling, you must breathe. Take a deep breath,” she ordered, an instinct from her own two children and Gregory especially.
She had to repeat the command a few times before the young boy took a shuddering breath, listening as she instructed him on how to breathe. When he was finally hiccupping softly in the aftermath of his bawling, she sat on the bed next to him, coaxing his face away from his knees with a gentle hand. She turned his face towards her, gasping not at the red rimmed eyes, or splotchy face, but at the angry handprint that was obvious under the flush of tears and sadness.
The resulting argument between she and Howard and Maria had not been pleasant, to say the least. She had told them that he was cruel to the boy for only wanting to show him a creation he had made and Howard had said that he was busy, and that Tony should have learned proper etiquette by then. Maria agreed. It had spiraled out of control and to this day, Peggy didn’t remember all of what was said. She knew Steve had never been mentioned in the argument, but maybe he should have been. What she did remember was that she said the word ‘abuse’ and Howard had become red faced and screamed, “If you don’t like the way I raise my son, you can see yourself out, Margaret!”
She had, but she hadn’t stopped seeing Tony.
+++
Steve’s visits became many over the month and the more they saw each other the easier it was. There was still a level of strangeness surrounding them, to be sure. After all when she and Steve had first met, he had been less than a year older than her, and now she was roughly sixty-six years older than him. Despite that, Peggy still had her mind and her memories and Steve adjusted well to the oddity of it all.
They spoke about their mutual friends, all of whom were sadly deceased now. They spoke about the oddities of the 21st century and how sometimes even Peggy had troubles keeping up and she had lived through all the changes. They talked about Steve’s team, and some of the friends he was tentatively gaining.
They hardly spoke about her nephew, and they didn’t mention Howard, which Peggy thought was a feat. She was always able to sidestep the questions leading up to Howard with a funny story about Dum Dum Dugan, who had worked with her in SHIELD, or a retelling about Colonel Phillips.
She knew Steve had caught on to her tricks. He had probably done so only a week into visiting her, but she couldn’t help herself. It was easy to evade Howard’s name, his stories, and his achievements, because she had been doing it with Tony for years. When she had told him stories of Captain America, the Howling Commandos, and herself in the war, it had become second nature to just omit his father. Even when he was small, and he still thought that maybe there was something he was doing to make his father so angry or worse, distant, the look on his face before Peggy started deleting Howard out of stories had been heart-wrenching.
Not to mention, stories of Howard when they both knew him would lead to stories of Howard after Steve had crashed. She didn’t want to go through all of that bad water, and she didn’t want to betray Tony’s trust like that. As far as she knew, the only ones who knew the full extent of Howard’s abuse and Maria negligence, who were still alive anyway, were herself, Tony, and perhaps his two friends, Pepper and Rhodey, but she wasn’t sure about them.
Eventually though she had to wade those waters of dark, cold memories.
Steve said one Tuesday afternoon, “You don’t have any pictures of Howard up.”
She didn’t have many pictures of Maria up either, but he hadn’t known her. And she had several of Tony around that Steve hadn’t commentated on.
She shrugged. “He’s in my picture of the Howling Commandos,” she said easily, pointing in towards the black and white photograph in the bay window. It was a washed out photograph, more sienna now, but it was still pristine every time she looked at it.
It was also one of the last times she could actually remember loving Howard Stark as a friend.
Steve took a deep breath and looked at his hands resting between his thighs. “Peggy?” he asked.
She turned her eyes toward him, her lips pressing thin in anticipation of whatever-whoever-Steve was about to ask after.
“Why doesn’t anyone talk about Howard anymore?” She opened her mouth to answer, but he shook his head. “No, no, not the inventor or the creator of Stark Industries…just Howard. I’ve…I’ve tried finding out more about him, but…it’s like he’s gone. And sometimes I try to talk to Tony about him…”
Peggy stiffened marginally, turning her head to him. “You do what?”
Tony hadn’t mentioned that in their several conversations. She made a mental note to herself to ask him about that when she saw him tomorrow.
“Tony, his son,” Steve tried to explain.
“I’m aware of who he is, Steve. You ask him about his father?”
Steve gave her a confused look, which was only logical for him to do, because she hadn’t told him anything about Howard. He didn’t know not to ask. She heaved a sad sigh and shook her head. It suddenly made sense why Steve wasn’t what Tony thought he was…if Steve had been…
“What else do you say about Howard?” she asked.
Steve didn’t answer her question. He stared at her, his brilliant blue eyes trying to sleuth out everything she had never said about Howard, and probably all Tony had hidden about his father beneath angry words, sarcastic comments, and well timed retreats.
“What happened to Howard?” and his words said that he didn’t mean how he died. Any news article could tell you that. His words said that he was finally figuring it out.
Peggy met his gaze evenly. “I don’t know, Steve, but who Tony and I remember isn’t the man you do.”
+++
Her son, Gregory had died by the time Tony was three. Her daughter had moved off to a college in North Carolina. She and Walter had struggled through the time for a while, but they had finally overcome it. Tony had helped them heal a little more, and after her explosive argument with Howard, when Peggy had called Edwin Jarvis and started scheduling outings with Tony, they had healed as much as they could.
Many of the pictures she had in her living room were the only ones anyone had of Tony’s young life. Howard and Maria had never been picture takers. Edwin had taken as many as he could, but they were few and far between with the many things the Stark family entrusted to him. Peggy and Walter had both delighted in having a young child around the house again, even if it was only once or twice a week and only for about three hours.
They were both getting older. So Tony could have been like a grandchild to them, but he always called them Aunt Peggy and Uncle Walt. Even when he went to boarding school, MIT, and all the colleges he decided to attend, he would call them once every two weeks at the very least and wrote whenever he felt bored enough, which, granted wasn’t often, but he wrote to them, chicken scrawl making up the letter with equations and computer codes scribbled hastily in the margins.
She still had each and every one of them.
She was sitting on her back porch, rocking on the little swinging bench and staring at a photograph of Tony and herself, when the front door opened and Tony called out, “Aunt Peggy!”
He sounded raw, open.
Peggy was honestly surprised it had taken him this long to show up, or Steve that long to bring up Howard…and what Peggy had admitted to him.
It had been a week since Steve had demanded to know who Howard had become. Quite honestly, she had expected Tony to come to her condo that very night, but Steve apparently tried to bring it up naturally.
She sighed, and stroked the glass over the picture, her finger smoothing down a seven year old Tony’s wild hair, as she called out loudly, “I’m here, Tony.” She set the picture of them beside her, turning to the open sliding glass door just as Tony came out.
It was easy to see that he had escaped his lab to come see her, as he was dressed in an undershirt and ruddy jeans. When he was younger, she used to tease him about being underdressed, and he would look down at himself with a confused expression. Walter used to say it was a joke from their time, and Tony would nod, still curious as to how he was underdressed.
He leaned his weight against the sliding glass door, deflating marginally under the strain of his emotions. Tony was never good with his emotions when they came more than one at a time. He had been ten when he’d stopped processing all of them, preferring to shut them down, focus on his work, or drink, or, for a heart stopping few years when he was in his early twenties, take drugs.
She sighed, patting the empty space next to her. Watching with a heavy heart, she took Tony’s hand as he fell into the seat next to her, squeezing with all her strength. This was probably the first time since Tony had come back from Afghanistan since she had felt so old, like no matter how hard she held his hand, Tony would never be able to feel it.
He did though, and he gave her hand a gentle squeeze in return as he stared over the lake with unseeing eyes. Finally, Tony asked, “Did you tell him everything?”
“No,” she said quickly. “No, I told him the bare minimum. He was…He’s always been very intuitive, dear. He’s always been able to see bits and pieces and make a full picture out of them.” She looked into Tony’s eyes, dark and hurting. “Everything I said took place before you were born.” Tony remained quiet, a very unusual habit for him. “Why? What did he say?”
“He apologized. For insinuating that dad was a better man than me, for calling me spoiled and selfish. That part didn’t make sense, because I am. I’m very spoiled and very selfish.” He sighed, shaking his head disbelievingly before admitting quietly. “I didn’t want to tell him about dad. Or I did, but I realized that that would probably be a dick move even for me. Guy just woke up like six months ago. He doesn’t know anybody, doesn’t know this time, or what’s changed. I didn’t think telling him that…telling him dad wasn’t the white hat he remembered was a good idea.”
Peggy gave a proud smile, touching her hand to his face, so much older than he had the right to be. “He would have found out one day, Tony. Better to rinse the wound now than to let it fester.”
Tony made a face. “That is disgusting. Really. I know you were in the war, but can you just…not do triage jokes? They make me my skin crawl.”
She patted his cheek lovingly before pulling him down by the neck to press a kiss to his forehead. “You’re a good man, Tony. And he is too. I think you just need to learn each other as humans, not aliens from different times.”
Tony sighed, but put his arm around her shoulders. “Yeah. Maybe we’ll come to you for therapy. Peggy Carter-Holt, bridge between the futurist and the man out of time.”
“I expect hazard pay.”
+++
Two weeks later they did actually come to visit her together.