If only Sousa had never caught her looking through those files.
She didn't expect him to pry—and he didn't—but he brought her a cup of coffee and leaned on his crutch for a moment, levelly gazing at her, as though he wanted to say something.
Peggy drank the coffee and set the cup down, listened to the clink, stared at the stained chip on the edge of the saucer.
"If you need anything," Sousa said, and left it at that.
"Everyone has an anniversary," she said, lightly. As though it hadn't been a time still countable by months. As though—"And death is not a choosy mistress, Agent Sousa. Children cross their hearts and hope to die. We're left wondering what the world would look like if we had."
He huffed a laugh that sounded more like a sigh. "Not much different."
"No, I don't suppose it would. St—even the greatest heroes are relegated to a file cabinet. Where does that leave us?"
"We didn't die."
"Not every part of us, anyway."
"Right." He tapped his leg. With that wry smile, he looked a little bit—no, not like Steve, but like someone very different from all the other men who shouldered in every day with their guns and briefcases and loud demands for coffee. Peggy was used to humiliation; it was the loneliness that was somehow harder to bear.
"I'm sorry." Peggy's fingers closed around the curving handle of the cup. "I didn't mean—"
His eyes twinkled. Funny, that there were still eyes that twinkled in a steel-grey world like this one. "You've yet to call me peg-leg or gimp. I'll take it."
"And you've yet to call me any number of insulting little names," she said, and returned his smile. "I'll take that, too."