There's something to be said, Peggy thinks as she walks home from the telephone company, for women in a time of war.
It's how it's been for centuries and longer; the men go off to fight and the women wait at home for news and terror. The men in Japan might be ten-thousand times different from the American men, but their women still sat at home and wept the same, bitter tears of widows and orphans and sometimes…
Sometimes not even that.
It's an epiphany-moment for a girl who's never really had much to do with clichés; Peggy's always liked to tussle in the dirt more than pour tea. But sitting in the last table of the crowded diner, cupping cooled chocolate in her hands, she just stares out into the misty rain and tries not to think about the war.
And, sure, she hasn't lost a leg or an arm or even most of her comrades. Everything she's lost has to do with one man in a red-white-blue uniform and that's a loss the entire nation feels.
God, she doesn't want to feel sorry for herself.
Self-pity is a useless emotion at the best of times, and she has never had much use for it. Just work past the war, she'd tell herself when the blood on her hands refused to scrub, just work past the darkness. Then it was just help Howard out, and that quickly spiraled into helping found SHIELD and everything else that comes with running a shady defensive military organization.
Now, she barely has enough time on her hands to sit down and study her hands- if she looks too closely the fine lines are dust-smudged and her right thumb has a trace of her red lipstick. A breath later and she can't quite differentiate from the lipstick and blood, and her mind is spinning like she's on Coney Island and Steve's just kissed her.
She shoves her way out to the front, lets the freezing rain soak through the starched lace of her blue uniform. Even she can't tell whether it's rain or tears that run down her face, but she knows her eyes are red and raw.
Leaning a shaky hand against the stone façade of the bar behind her, she rubs a desperate hand against her face. Her mother had always told her she was unattractive when she cried, and the red splash over her cheekbones didn't leave her dignified- it made her look… broad. Heavy. Gasping.
Closing her eyes, she turns her thoughts, deliberately, from that- to the generals of the war they had just fought.
An unimaginable divide, people said, between Japan and the United States.
(A circle is always closed, Peggy wants to shoot back, the line curved into itself so that two edges become one.)
She'll walk into her office tomorrow, day after, for years- will never show the fractures hidden behind steely professionalism. She'll persuade Howard to walk away from Steve and an icy wreck, and maybe even learn to get on with life.
She'll be the soldier-general she's been all her life.
But for now, she is not Peggy, Steve's love-interest, or Miss Carter, polite stranger, or even Agent Carter, leader of SHIELD.
She is Margaret, and she resists touching her lips because her fingers come away stained a blossomed red.
(She'll find her happy ending sometime later, between war and death and blood. Peggy knows nothing if not how to march past destruction, and Steve is undeniably gone.)
But for now, she is a young girl with too much on her shoulders, and she lets the hairline fractures over her soul shine unmistakably real in the daylight.
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-Dialux