agent carter; (behindtheline) wrote in thegalaxy, @ 2016-02-07 09:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | !locale: naboo, peggy carter, steve rogers |
WHO. Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter
WHERE. Their quarters on Naboo.
WHEN. Hilariously backdated to not too far post-arrival. We write lots.
WHAT. Reunion. Catching up. Planning. Those kinds of things.
WARNING. Friskiness, implied sex & nakedness. & also sadness.
RATING. PG-13
***
He’d picked her out from down the hall with ease, and he knew. Without even seeing her face, he knew, and it nearly knocked him on his back.
But once he’d gotten over his shock, knowing that Peggy Carter was there with him did wonders to settle his nerves. They’d been through hell together already, and even though the war was years in his past, he knew instinctively that the same things he felt then were still true: there was nothing they couldn’t handle together. As long as she was by her side, Steve knew everything would be okay.
The transport ship to the surface wasn’t a great place for reunions, not with the lack of privacy and so many other things to take in instead. He kept glancing at her, every chance he got. She was just as beautiful as she always had been. Her hair was different, but then Steve was used to seeing a much, much older Peggy. She was still beautiful, even in her nineties. When she was present, he could see the same spirit in her eyes that he’d seen when they’d first met. She was still the same person he’d loved, no matter how old she was.
Steve wondered if she’d met her future husband yet. He rarely asked questions about her life in the years between his disappearance and his recovery. He knew enough -- husband, family, SHIELD -- to fill in the blanks, and beyond that, he was fine not knowing much. Truthfully, it hurt to hear about the life he missed. As glad as he’d been to know she’d been happy, it still hurt.
He didn’t fully relax until they were in the house they’d been assigned. It was big enough for both of them to have space of their own, if they wanted it, but Steve hadn’t felt comfortable living too far away from her on a strange planet neither of them knew. Once the door shut behind him, he exhaled and turned to face her. “Peggy…”
It was an act, the composure which held her like glue on the satellite station and by his side on the transport ship, over the verdancy of Naboo to, at last, this private place. And because it was an act, she felt her resolve shake with the knowledge that he, incomprehensibly alive, would be here by her side in an alternate world and an alternate universe. The only truly intelligent thing she could do in this case was to let go of her compunctions and launch herself at him. And, as ever, Peggy Carter was a hellaciously tactical woman.
The space between where her small bag of belongings hit the sofa and his place at the door was only a few blessed feet. Two quick steps were all it took to silence him with arms flung around his neck and lips heavy upon his own. If he thought otherwise, if there was some other world in which he had blamed her for believing him dead, she would find out later. For now, Steven Grant Rogers was warm and alive and within the protective circle of her very capable arms.
“ … Yes?”
For years, he'd held onto memories of her like a life preserver, holding him afloat when the world around him wanted him to sink. He'd gotten used to knowing they'd lost their chance. He'd even found himself feeling glad that she hadn't been alone all those years, and that she'd been happy. The feel of her lips on his brought all of the feelings he'd long ago buried back to the surface, and his heart swelled, threatening to burst. He'd never stopped loving her. He'd just figured out how to live without her.
He slipped his arms around her waist to the small of her back, and returned the kiss with equal enthusiasm - and desire. So many nights, he'd stared at the ceiling, thinking about her. What he imagined during the war was full of promise and hope; after, full of regret and lost dreams. He could barely believe she was real, but she fit against him like she always had, like that was where she belonged.
Breathless, he stared at her. “It's really you?” he asked, even though he knew the answer. “You're --” His fingers dug into her back a little more, clutching at her like she might disappear at any second. “I missed you.”
"I should think that's my line, darling --" She leaned hard against him, entrusting her balance in order to perhaps even greedily drink in the headiness of his presence, as she again walked her lips over his jaw.
What was breath? She'd lost it long ago, and didn't want it back, not with the steady point of his heart against her breast. A smile, then.
"Steve, I know I should reach for logic but in the case I'm rather gobsmacked and happy that what shall be will be. Better not to interrogate, better to embrace."
Steve shuddered. He'd tried to move on. Peggy often said she hated thinking about him all on his own, and Steve knew she meant it, even as she wished she were younger and more capable of keeping him company herself. So he'd tried, but it was easy to make excuses when no one was right. Too many people knew Captain America now, and he never had enough time to spend getting to know someone. The emptiness persisted, and Steve knew it wasn't their fault. They just weren't Peggy. How could they fill that hole in his heart?
“I don't understand how we're here either,” he murmured, “but right now, I don't really care.” He smiled and brought a hand up to trace his fingers along the side of her face. This should have been impossible, but here they were. “You're even more beautiful than you were when we met.”
" ... now you know how to talk to women," she softly chided, hyper aware of the iron vise in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to know more about their setting and she wanted to twist herself up into something useful for the right people here.
But she was also determined that she and Steve should have their due, when time had previously been so hateful to them. She laughed.
"Darling, you're a mite lined at the eyes."
“Well, I'm 97 now. I hear that's normal at my advanced age,” he joked, though… there was some truth to it, wasn't there? And it was inevitably going to be a sore subject, too, when she realized just how much time has passed for him. Steve hoped she wouldn't notice, but he knew she would.
Undeterred -- or hoping that some humor would help -- Steve added, “I hope that's not a problem. I know we'll get some strange looks, since I'm so old, but if you don't care...”
“You know, I don’t so much mind the rebellion.” The math was easy to do and though the truth gave her pause - seventy years without him, seventy years believing him dead only to be so indelibly wrong - though she trusted him to broach the subject when he was comfortable. Humour, in this case, was simpler.
At last, she stepped back, giving their new quarters the once over.
“We’ll stay together.” It wasn’t a question.
Steve felt the loss of her warmth immediately, and far deeper than on the surface level. He'd spent so much time away from her that he didn't really want to be apart now that they were together again -- or could be, if she wanted. Whatever doubts he might have had about how she felt were fading, between the kiss and the statement that they'd stay together. If she didn't still feel the way she did when he crashed the plane, she'd react differently. He knew that.
He reached for her hand so she wouldn't go far, and although she gave the room a once-over, his eyes never left her. Did she mean in general, or…?
"Peggy," he began, his eyebrows furrowed slightly. He'd held back so many of his thoughts during the war, not wanting to risk Peggy's career, and now that he had the freedom to say whatever he wanted, he was at a loss. He could barely focus on what she'd said. "I want you to know, I hope you know, I loved you. I never said it, and I should have, I should have told you every day, I just…" He looked helpless for a moment as he shrugged. "I thought we'd have more time."
Immediately her fingers vined with his and she held his hand tightly, stepping back toward him. These words she’d imagined - the ones she’d longed to hear, the ones she believed went unsaid over the long separation - brought tears welling to the corners of her eyes. How many times had she wished she told him the same? If mourning could stretch as long as guilt and doubt, she’d lived several lifetimes hoping that he’d known how she felt and all the hopes she had.
Yesterday was for waiting. For past tense.
“Steve, I love you.” Her tremulous voice grew with the strength and resolve of her words. “I loved you then and I love you now. This time right here is all we’ve got.”
He hadn't wanted to make her cry, but truthfully, Steve was feeling the same swell of emotion bubbling up inside of him. They'd missed out on so much. How many times did he make comments about how he was an expert in waiting too long? Steve wasn't going to make the same mistake ever again.
He squeezed her hand and leaned in for another kiss, taking his time. "I know," he said gently once he pulled back. "We'll make the most of it this time. There's nothing I want more than to be by your side, for however long we have. That's what I want." He might not have known it as soon as he should have, but he knew what they'd had was something that only came around once in a lifetime.
“Let’s make the most of it.”
She’d imagined taking her full liberty with him in a myriad of different ways, and under a thousand different circumstances, no matter the time or the place. Here she’d not imagined, which made it all the better. And what she wanted, what she imagined he wanted, was the same.
Along Steve’s waist her arm eased while she, on the tips of her toes, returned his kiss. The press of time was no longer so instant, nor the spying eyes which followed them everywhere. So, her fingertips insinuated themselves beneath the band of his trousers to grasp a handful of flesh and squeeze.
Steve's groan slipped past his lips before he thought about holding back, and then he remembered he didn't have to hold back anymore. They were truly alone for the first time, and Peggy wanted to take advantage of it. Steve wasn't about to deny her that after everything they'd been through.
"Somethin' on your mind?" Steve mumbled, grinning through the kiss. Years ago, he might have frozen and panicked at the mere thought of someone touching him at all, but Steve was better at listening to his instincts now.
He dropped his hands to hoist her up into his arms. He broke the kiss only so he could glance around and figure out which door led to the bedroom. Luckily, one of them was ajar, and he could see a bed beyond it. If they were going to make the most of it, he was going to do it right.
***
This coupling was both languid and desperate in equal measure; nerves singing, breaths panting and in the end, only them. She wanted at him again, wanted to test that famed stamina, but found dozing within the full circle of his arms to be the instant thing, everything this strange land required.
When, later, she woke with her cheek warmed upon his chest, she gave a cat-like stretch (warm, decently worn out, delightfully fuzzy) and rolled the back of her hand across the broad plane of his jaw. Was that light stubble? Her thumb traced the generous bow of his lip.
"My love. We are going to compare notes."
The sheet, tangled round their legs, was kicked up so that she could inch it over them and drop it at their waist. She had no immediate intention of moving, only lying here with him and plying her questions further. Her fingernails arched delicately down his solar plexus.
"And I will give the gentleman the first go."
“Hmmm.” Steve hummed through a soft smile, keeping his eyes closed for a moment longer. He'd dreamt of a moment like this one for so long that he was afraid to wake up and find it was only that, a dream. She was warm beside him, though, and her skin was soft under his fingertips.
“I thought I made it pretty clear how I felt about being with you, but maybe I wasn't vocal enough. I'll try harder next time,” he answered, struggling a little to keep from grinning as he peeked at her. “I'm up for constructive criticism. I'm a fast learner.”
He didn't think that was what she meant, though. “You want me to tell you about what I've been up to?”
… which earned him a light slap to the chest with a flat palm. “You are a scoundrel.” Of course, a very tactile and reverent scoundrel who needed little in the way of instruction. She was quite sure he could do much with a look - but his hands. Good God.
Using her knee and her forearm as leverage to pull herself to a slightly better place to see his face, she arched a brow. “In all seriousness, of course I want to know what you’ve been up to. Don’t think the simple maths evaded me. Seventy years, Steve. How?”
The grin Steve flashed at her didn't last long. He couldn't keep that up and face her question at the same time. He knew that he wouldn't be able to avoid that topic for long, but that didn't mean he was looking forward to it. It was going to hurt; there was no getting around that.
"SHIELD found me. Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division." Steve wrinkled his nose. The name had always been such a mouthful. "I think someone just really wanted to use SHIELD as an acronym. Probably Howard. You, Howard and Phillips founded it, actually. Counter-terrorism and intelligence agency. They dug me up. Thawed me out." He still had a hand wrapped around her, and he was still gently tracing patterns over her skin as he talked. "I never got a good handle on the science, that was always Stark and Erskine, but it was like… I was just frozen in time for almost seventy years." He gave her a half-smile. "I took out a bunch of their agents when I woke up. They had me in this room that was supposed to look like it was '45, but they got details wrong. I broke out. The director of SHIELD-- former director now, he explained what had happened. Got me an apartment in the city so I could get acclimated."
“ … oh good god …” It wasn’t so much that she started a counter-terrorism organization with Stark and Phillips, but that they’d let Steve languish for as long as they had.Seventy years on ice. Blast the science and blast the others. Their technology and resources had been stretched to the limits looking for him. Howard had driven himself half mad and oh god, they’d missed him the entire time.
She could hide the welling of guilty tears with a kiss to his shoulder, her cheek laid across it as she concentrated upon the gentle movement of his fingertips. “I’m so sorry, Steve.”
"Hey," Steve began gently. "It's not your fault. I know he tried. You had no reason to believe I wasn’t dead."
He'd never -- not even once -- blamed her or Howard for not finding him sooner. He'd been angry, of course, and devastated, but he'd never directed that at either of them. Howard was long dead by the time he'd been found, and Peggy was long retired. What good would it have done? Over time, he realized just how much energy Howard had devoted to finding him, and that had been enough. They'd tried, and then they had other battles to fight. Steve understood that. That didn't mean it didn't still hurt, but there was nothing more his friends could have done.
"If it wasn't for the serum, I wouldn't have survived at all. So for that, I'm grateful. I don't know if he and Erskine expected it to work that way, but…" He took a deep breath. "But it kept me alive." He eased his other arm around her shoulders and hugged her tighter. "I'm sorry I was late."
“We all tried. We should have tried harder …” But the silver lining - he wasn’t dead. He was simply a man out of time. Now, however, they both were. She didn’t think the guilt would lightly ease but bearing it was a must with him here, with all his lively warmth. She could perhaps protect him better. She could be a better woman for him.
“ … shhh.” Her fingertip rested upon his lip. “Don’t be sorry. You did what you thought was right.” Every tall man with blonde hair from the back might have been him. The Stork Club could have held a thousand when she sat at the bar, drowning in her sorrow and her old fashioned. She took a deep breath. Smiled.
“What did you do after you clubbed my agents, Rogers?”
Hearing those words from Peggy's lips here and now helped soothe the ache he felt in his chest for abandoning her. Much like the one he suspected she had, he thought, for leaving him in the ice. They had that in common. Steve didn't know how to fix that, aside from trying to embrace what time they had now. That was all he'd figured out, in the years he'd been out of the ice.
He was, however, glad that she understood why he'd made the choice to bring the plane down. He'd always wondered if she'd understood, or if she'd been angry at him, or some combination of both.
Steve chuckled. "After I clubbed your agents," he echoed, "I got recruited for a team called the Avengers. We, ah… we do what the Commandos and I did, only on a much bigger scale. Stand up against threats, protect civilians. Several of us are enhanced in some way. We actually have a god on our side. Thor. You'd get a kick out of him. And I went to work for SHIELD for a while. HYDRA's still a problem, but it's not the only problem we have. I hadn't even been awake for two weeks when we faced an alien invasion led by Thor's brother, Loki, so…" Steve puffed out his cheeks a little and exhaled, eyes widening. "I've been busy."
Her brow arched and stretching forward, she fell to the perusal of his face with her fingertips, as if she were to draw him. Steve being the artist however, meant that she simply chose to delight in a new way to touch him freely. The back of her arm stretching over his breast, her own chest heavy in the hollow of his arm. These new sensations would be cataloged for later perusal.
“Aliens, is it? We’d been discussing other worlds and timelines when I was pulled through to you … the thought that any of it could exist, admittedly, wasn’t too far off base.”
"It's all a lot more possible than any of us realized. I never told you what happened to Schmidt when we were on the Valkyrie, how he touched the cube and disintegrated. I saw stars. I don't mean because I got hit in the head, I mean I saw a galaxy. It was…" It had looked like the portal over Manhattan. Steve shook his head. "It's all possible, different worlds and dimensions. It's all real." It was still overwhelming, to say the least. And that was only the beginning of it, too.
"Do you think you can handle a couple more shocks? Or do you want to tell me what you've been doing first? I don't… I know the bare bones, but not a lot of detail."
So Schmidt wasn’t dead either. Fine. If he showed up here, she’d put a bullet in his brain and end him once and for all before he could get his red hands on Steve again.
“Lay them on me.”
"Okay." One of them wasn't bad, the other was. Steve knew Peggy was tough, but he asked because even she had her limits.
Steve decided to start with the good news. "I work with Howard's son. Tony. He's… he was an Avenger too, but he quit recently. He built a suit of armor that he flies around in. Iron Man. He's… he's a pain in my ass, but he reminds me so much of Howard sometimes that I forget where I am. He funds the Avengers. I couldn't do it without him." Despite their many differences, Steve was fond of Tony, as long as he wasn't causing trouble. He wasn't really a bad person, in the end. Just misguided.
Bucky was going to be the more difficult pill to swallow. "And Bucky's alive, too. He…" It was still hard for Steve to wrap his head around, honestly. "He was brainwashed, by HYDRA. He was sent to kill me not too long ago, actually. They used him as an assassin, keeping him in stasis in between jobs. I've been trying to find him, but he's…" A ghost, a voice in his head whispered. "He knows how to not be found."
Peggy's reaction to the knowledge that Howard had a son bordered on incredulity, however she offered a smile, laughing softly when it came to the description of his duties and his relationship to Steve. The Starks certainly hadn't changed very much over the years.
Then to Barnes. She took the news with that same stalwart air with which she took most anything that required interrogation upon and later date.
"Did he come back to his mind, Steve?"
“I --”
Steve frowned. He wished he had an answer to that question, but he didn’t. He had suspicions, he had hopes, but he had no proof. He didn’t even know if Bucky was still free, or if his handlers had found him.
“I don’t know,” he admitted quietly. He looked away for the first time in a while, and concentrated at the ceiling instead. “I shouldn’t have survived. He’d shot me… I didn’t want to fight him. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. We were on… a flying aircraft carrier. He had me there, but he didn’t finish the job. I blacked out and fell into the Potomac. They found me on the riverbank nearby. I know I didn’t swim there.” Not for the first time, Steve was thinking about how he had bad luck with aircraft and bodies of water. “I don’t know, Peggy. I think I got through to him in the end, but I haven’t seen him or heard from him since.”
Peggy knew the power of the bond between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. She had seen it cross boundaries and then ride back over them victorious; seen it keep two friends warm in the coldest of times and the darkest of places. What she needed - wanted - more than anything, was to give them both the time they lost. And she couldn’t.
Instead she levered herself to a sitting position, letting the sheet fall from her as she looked through a near window. There was a steady hum of activity and through it, a faint screen of trees. Naboo was beautiful. At least, when Steve needed him the most, Bucky could cut through the brainwashing to shine on. She didn’t know how to say it without weeping for both of them, for the lost years in which she could have done something. Instead, she directed her next statement toward the window.
“It is right that he found you and saved you, Steve. When you fell.”
When Peggy moved, Steve's gaze returned, watching her as she looked out the window. He didn't know what to say, or how to make her feel better. He knew that everything that had happened to him was going to weigh heavily on her, too, but it was all a part of who he was now, so he wanted her to know. He wasn't the same Steve Rogers who'd crashed into the ice anymore than she was the same Peggy who'd listened to static over the radio. He had few confidants in his time, too. He had Sam and Natasha, but neither of them were to him what Bucky and Peggy had been. He'd lost so much. No one could really understand the magnitude of that.
"I think so too." In his heart, he knew what Peggy said was true. He didn't need any more evidence besides the fact that he was alive. That was enough.
He sat up slowly and leaned over to kiss her shoulder. "Are you okay?"
“C --” Why put on the face? Why lie when he would see through it? She let her hand snake over her shoulder to ghost along his nape. “Not particularly. But being here with you will make it that way. If I could but take my memories with me, and save the both of you …”
So many things would be different, if she could. Time could right itself. But her mind could not be forward-pitched. It needed to yet live in the present. And maybe this was Time’s own attempt. So she turned to catch his cheek with her lips.
“I’m in Los Angeles right now, and am presiding over what I think to be the death throes of the SSR. I’ve met a Russian woman named Dottie Henson and also come upon a whole conclave of rich, powerful, incomprehensibly stodgy cocks who are rather running things.”
Steve wished she could take her memories, too, and the knowledge that he held in his hands. There were so many terrible, wrong things about the world he’d woken up in that Peggy could stop in her own time. He remembered the way she’d told him about how he’d saved the world and they’d made a mess of it after. He couldn’t fault her for the decisions she’d made after losing him, whatever they’d been; he knew she would have done the best she could have, under any circumstances, to do the right thing. The right thing would have been different, though, with the wealth of knowledge he had.
But Steve knew that changing history in her time would have drastic impacts on the future. He’d seen enough science fiction movies now to know that messing around with history didn’t always give you the outcome you wanted. Maybe they’d be in worse shape. Not that it mattered a whole lot. If she went back remembering any of this, something would have already changed.
He eased his arms around her waist and pulled her back in close, tucking his chin over her shoulder. “What else is new?” he commented dryly. “The World Security Council’s a bunch of those, too. How’d you run into Dottie?”
“ … I find that most groups of powerful, old white men stem from the same source. World Security Council, HYDRA, whatever this Club is. My gut tells me there’s a connection.” She leant into him then, losing herself within the breadth of his armspan and feeling, for the first time in ages, wholly secure and loved. Despite whatever was in their past and in their future, here they were in this beautiful and verdant land. Together. And if they had to fight? It would be back to back as ever it was.
“She lived in my building. But I learned more about her with the Commandos … she’s a part of an all girls operation, they handcuff themselves to beds and learn to infiltrate Western targets. Dottie’d been set upon New York with the sole intent of using some of Howard’s technology to kill us all.” A snort. “She was unsuccessful, of course. And I’d only just caught her before being transferred to L.A.”
If Peggy's gut was telling her that, then Steve trusted it. Her instincts were always good, and always along the same lines as his own. He wished he'd been able to talk to her more since waking up. Silently, he wondered what she might have said, what insight she might have had about their world, the Council, what she'd faced all the years he was gone. He shouldn't have waited so long to reach out.
His grip tightened a little and he frowned. An all female group of operatives? "Of course she was unsuccessful," he said, "she hadn't counted on running into you. You know, it's interesting how little has changed over the years. People want to use Howard's technology to kill everyone, people want to use Tony's… and then Tony's still trying to accidentally kill us too." The tone of his voice was dry and unamused. "How are the Commandos doing?"
“Bloody Starks. If they weren’t so useful, I’d suggest putting them in padded rooms for our collective safety.” She felt the reflexive tightening of his trip and smoothed a kiss along the side of his mouth. She could almost see the thoughts churning within him.
“Last I saw they were still cleaning up on the other side of the newly minted Iron Curtain. And doing a bang up job.” She didn’t want to talk about Juniper, or their ranks that had thinned within the midst of the operation at the very unsettling base.
Steve agreed, wholeheartedly. The way things were going, he often found himself wishing he could have Howard back, somehow. He and Tony butted heads too often to work well as a team. He'd been disappointed with himself at how relieved he'd been to hear Tony say he was going to step back from the superhero life. It'd make both of their lives easier, with any luck.
"Good," he answered quietly. The faint smile that had graced his lips after her kiss faded slightly as he thought about the Commandos. He missed them all more than he could say. "I never doubted they'd do great things, with or without me. I hope they know…" He took a deep breath. "I'm proud of them. Of all of you. I wouldn't have amounted to anything without all of you. You, Bucky, the Commandos…"
“They know.” She wouldn’t tell him of the long faces in those days after his death, or the many rounds poured out in grief and despair for losing their captain and their friend. But the Howling Commandos were resilient, even in a way that Peggy was not. It took so long to find a way to move again, after Steve died and the world collectively mourned him. She was within and without that grief, living through both he and Michael, and then some.
The backs of her knuckles grazed along his elbow.
“ … hey flyboy. What do you say we get all dressed up and head into town to see what’s to drink? At the very least, we can scout about for trouble to avoid or sink our teeth into.”
Steve looked at Peggy and felt his heart skip a beat, like it had the first time he'd laid eyes on her. She was the same woman she'd been all those years ago -- and then some -- and he felt more grounded knowing she was there to get into trouble with him.
And hopefully out of trouble with him, too.
He slid a hand up her neck to her jaw, cupping her face gently as he leaned in for one more kiss. "That sounds like the perfect first date to me."