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A year ago, Steve was in a war where you could find the enemy at your back at any moment. These days he wears an Avengers patch on his shoulder and performs missions with a military proficiency that he lacked while in the actual military, so it comes as something of a surprise when things begin to turn sideways not while he’s on the job, but when he’s trying to get the shading right on a man’s elbow.
He keeps his phone on even when he’s in the art class he takes on Tuesday afternoons. He cleared it with the instructor first, but still gets irritated looks when the vibration breaks the focus of the room, so he glances an apology around as he sets down his pad and checks the two texts he’s received. Natasha’s says, Jet’s waiting. We have a situation. Clint’s, sent a few seconds later, says, Get your ass here now.
He does.
He knew that they were on mission in Nebraska, some ex-government scientist experimenting with interdimensional travel, although he didn’t exactly have details.
“Do they think we don’t keep track of these things?” Natasha had asked, loading her gun before they left.
“Flyover country,” Clint had said back, checking to make sure he was buckled into his vest correctly. “You feel like you’re invisible to the rest of the world.”
Steve couldn’t argue with that. He’d traveled roughly the whole of the continental United States and couldn’t say for sure whether he’d been to Nebraska.
It is pretty beautiful when he arrives, though, sunset lighting everything like a postcard. The jet’s brought him to the middle of a field, and he jogs over to the house nearby. The place looks mostly intact, although he can spot a couple of Hawkeye’s arrows, and a broken fence.
He knocks before he goes into the small house. “Here,” Nat calls, and he steps around the real mess of smashed furniture and electronics parts to make his way to the kitchen.
The scientist is cuffed hand and foot but actually seems to have fallen asleep. At second thought, he notices one of the little bulbs of knockout gas that Tony made for them, empty on the table.
Clint is standing behind the scientist’s shoulder. Natasha is by the window, eyes watchful. He’s about to ask what the problem is when he sees her, arms crossed, in the doorway to the incongruously untouched dining room.
“Peggy,” he says, just the name, and none of the surprise or confusion or elation he feels is in his voice. He lowers himself into one of the kitchen chairs.
He knows that Peggy is ninety-two years old. He knows that she just moved into a new nursing home last week. He knows that she is standing right in front of him, no more than a few years older than when he went into the ice. Dark hair, dark lipstick, dark jumpsuit, and his shield on her back.
“It seems,” she says, voice neutral, eyes on Steve, “that flyover country has more to offer than I might have thought.”
“In 1944 I was very badly injured in a skirmish outside Riga,” Peggy tells them once they’re all on a jet heading back to New York. They’ve finally gotten ahold of Tony, who is fiddling with something in his lab, although even Steve can tell that he’s actually listening intently. “Steve donated significant amounts of blood for a transfusion in the field. It worked to save my life, but it also changed my cells. I acquired a version of his abilities, which enabled me to do some particular work during the war, and for my body to remain preserved in the ice until I was found a year ago.”
Steve remembers Riga in ‘44. Remembers Peggy turning to tell him to get a bloody move on, raising an eyebrow when a bullet flew through the place where her torso had been a second before as if to say “clearly no time to waste, Captain.”
“So you and Cap teamed up? Couples heroics with matching shields?” Clint calls from the front of the plane.
“Couples—No. This is Steve’s shield.” Steve tenses in shock. He loves Peggy - then, now - but he can only think of one reason she would have his shield. “Steve was killed days before I fought the Red Skull. He and his friend Bucky Barnes fell from a train. The shield was still inside when I arrived.”
Steve speaks for the first time since Nebraska. “I don’t understand how this happened.”
“The multiverse is speaking and you’d better answer,” Tony says, looking up, his face magnified on the screen. “I’m going to have to talk to this guy about whatever dimension-jumping he was playing with in his living room.”
Tony tries to send Peggy back. He and Natasha work whatever channels they have and get Bruce in too. Even between the two of them, and with whatever they salvaged from the scientist, Dr. Hardgrave, who is refusing to talk, they can’t figure it out.
Which, of course, means that they’re all treated to several weeks of progressively more snappish Tony Stark.
Steve isn’t sure how to feel about any of it. He knows that Clint was right when he said that it wasn’t fair for their dimension to be a Cap hog; Peggy’s version of reality would be missing her, more dangerous because of her absence.
And on the other hand, seeing her, talking to her, is incredible. He feels shaky every time it happens, made slightly giddy by her baseline presence as he always has been, but also by the opportunity. In so many ways she is the same as he remembers, that solid ease he had admired from the first. But there is a shadow to her eyes, a weight that is new. At first it reminds him of one of the moments he missed, President Kennedy, who rose and died all while Steve slept, telling the nation that they are “tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” Later, watching this Peggy, a shade away from what he knows, he realizes that she reminds him of no one as much as himself, shielding himself from the familiar and the unfamiliar and the memories most of all.
Having someone who understands is a very difficult sort of wonderful.
She fits in with the Avengers almost well. She anticipates their reactions and even their movements naturally. She can shut Tony up with a glance, brings Banner just the tea that he wants at just the time. It is incredibly odd for them all to realize that whole conversations were repeated between the timelines. Natasha and Clint still talked about flyover country there, just with Peggy suiting up beside them instead of Steve idling as he prepared for class. Natasha is the most off-put by how well Peggy knows them. Her stories have come slowly to Steve, each one a trust-gift. Peggy has her own collection, but for Natasha they are weapons held by someone she does not know.
Overall, it’s like Peggy has perfectly suited inside jokes with a group of amnesiacs.
In her reality, Peggy has Steve’s role on the team. He’d been ready to hand over the job to her - she was always an excellent tactician, she’s had more experience, and everyone treats her with more respect, as though she is somehow exempted from the aura of forties naivete that they still ascribe to him - but the rest of the team had said no. They were used to him, they said. Bad idea to change captains in the middle of a fight.
The first time they’re sent out on a mission, she tosses his shield back to him without looking, flings hers in the way of a bullet meant for Barton, and answers to “Cap” over the comms.
“Oh, God,” she says, shaking out her hair once they’re back on the jet. “They had the most ridiculous names for me back in the day, once it got out that I was a woman. The English Rose, Brittania. But after New York, people saw the shield and started just calling me the Captain.” She leans away, taking a bottle of water. Steve can’t see her face as she adds, “I suppose Steve’s image endured more than mine did.”
They strategize together after that, despite Tony’s background complaints about Peggy cutting in the chain of command. Peggy goes by Agent 13 on comms and, when called for, in the press.
“I was always meant to be an agent,” she explains.
“Seems like an unlucky choice though,” Natasha comments neutrally, testing the weight of a throwing knife.
Peggy shrugs, tightening her gloves. “Seems fitting,” is all she says.
She is perfectly polite when she and Steve work together. She understands almost all his references easily, so naturally that he feels gripped and anchored in a way he hadn’t thought he needed anymore.
But their relationship now reminds him of the months after he got his shield. Peggy had been businesslike, dependable, and still he’d known that she was angry. Then, months later, they had met in the field and she had been warm again, and all she would say was that she had gone to the cinema while he was away and it convinced her of something.
It’s three weeks before he breaks and finds her alone. Every day could be the one where Bruce and Tony, here or there, figure out a way to send her back, or when the universe snaps and does it on its own. He wants this settled, he wants them to be settled. He wants warmth, and possibility.
“You’re angry at me,” he blurts out the afternoon he goes to her in the training room at the Tower. He tries to look casual, leaning against one of the padded walls, hands neatly triangulated and settled by his belt. He suspects that it is less than convincing.
She stills the heavy bag she had been punching. He hasn’t done something like that in some time. “I’m not angry with you.”
“Do I make you uncomfortable? I know this isn’t exactly normal, and if there’s something I can do—”
“It isn’t anything that you’ve done.” She rests a hand against his arm on her way to get a towel. “It’s nothing you could have changed.”
“Is it because of the…?” He gestures, trying to indicate whole dying thing in the alternate reality you came from.
She blots at her face carefully, so elegant and effortless he has to force himself not to stare. There’s a sharp cut to her eyes. He knows that Peggy here grieved for him, but he had only seen it decades later, after a life well lived, the love potent but smoothed.
She sits on a bench against the wall, and glances at him, accepting. He joins her. “I was on the train. I had gone with Jones to get Zola. By the time I got back, the shield was all that was left, lying on the floor of the car. We used the tracker Howard had placed in Steve’s suit to find them. They died on impact. Howard,” she lets out a breath in stages and then continues onward. “Howard said that had it just been one of them, they might have survived, but the force of the two of them was too much.” She speaks carefully, her head tilting, the towel pressed in her hands. “I wondered at the time about Steve slipping. I knew that he would have reached as much as he could for Barnes, and perhaps he had just misjudged how much he was able. There was the windshear to consider. The snow. Not even Steve was invincible. Obviously.” She twitched. It was disconcerting, unfamiliar to what he knew of her body. “But then I came here, and Clint and Tasha told me that you had managed to hold on. And the only difference I could see was me. So I began to wonder if perhaps it was not a misjudgement as much as a sacrifice, a choice that he was able to make because I was there to complete the mission.”
No one could identify with the loneliness of waking up after the ice like Peggy could, the futile anger of knowing that everyone was gone and it was only him, surviving and surviving and surviving. But that had been no one’s fault, just time and chance and his choice in desperate circumstances. The idea that someone, some version of him, might have decided to leave her behind unnecessarily, even in grief...the training room seems suddenly acutely subterranean to him.
“I don't know what happened to him...to me...to your Steve. I've never met him.” He says it with a touch of wryness and she laughs softly. “But I do know that when I was on the train, as much as it hurt to lose Bucky,” as much as it still hurts, even with time, even sitting beside Peggy now, “I didn't just survive because of what I needed to do. I hung on because of what I would get to do.” Her eyes are on him as he carefully says, “We never had an agreement, but I hoped, after everything was over, we might have…”
She nods. “A future. A life.” And for the first time since she's come through, she takes his hand. They sit in silence. Things don’t feel fixed, but they feel easier.
Steve and the Avengers PR team sometimes have friction about what public events he should do. The things he suggests are sometimes politicized in ways that still confuse him. Everyone agrees on children's causes, though, so he is untroubled as he and Peggy go to spend an afternoon at a children's hospital.
“You're my favorite,” a small girl confides as his mother snaps a picture.
“You're my favorite too,” Steve confides back, smiling despite the ache that her tiny, delicate hospital gown gives him. He glances over behind the mother. “What about your brother?”
“He likes Agent Carter,” the girl tells him, a bit of scorn in her voice. “She’s good too,” she amends, with some reluctance, “but you and me, we have the same hair.” She reaches over and pats the spiky tufts left from when he had showed off the cowl earlier. It is remarkably similar to the blond fluff that covers her head.
Later, he goes and sits next to the girl’s brother. “What are you reading?”
“An Agent Carter book.” He picks it up to show Steve. Steve blinks. It’s part of an easy reader series, one he drew the concept art for months ago, before he gained a second Peggy, back when he had seen books about the origin of Captain America and had wondered why no one seemed to have remembered that he had never worked alone. There are more now, about each of the Commandos, and Agent 13. His favorite is a different Agent Carter book, one that’s supposed to be good for kids because of the pattern of the text but that he likes because it talks about the things they wish for. (“When we get home, I will show you the best place for ice cream in New York,” says the book version of Steve. “When we get home, I will show you my favorite trees to climb,” book Peggy says back.) Still, the one the boy is holding is the first Steve helped with.
“I like this one,” he manages.
“Me too. I like that Agent Carter is sad and strong and that she and and Captain America miss each other. I have people that I miss. But even when I’m sad I’m strong.” The boy leans over, showing Steve a picture of Peggy wearing a hat and crossing her arms, determination familiar even on the illustrated face. People didn’t believe that Agent Carter could do a good job, but she did! reads the text.
Steve keeps his hands still, doesn’t reach to touch the page. “Would you read it to me?” he asks instead.
A few pages in, he glances up and sees Peggy looking at him looking at the book. She is holding a baby in her arms, making a casual rocking motion.
They both turn away, but Steve doesn’t think it’s for the same reason.
A few days later, Peggy kisses his cheek on her way into the jet.
“What was that for?” he asks, charmed. He has to consciously keep from touching the spot, too aware of the rest of the group nearby.
When she speaks, it’s with a warmth that he’s been missing for years. “I went to the library. It convinced me of something,” is all she says.