AN: This story is inspired by and is a follow-up to The Desk by scullyssahnequarkbroetchen on Archive of Our Own (which can be found at that website /works/5178725 ), which you should read, because it is fabulous. Thank you to that author for letting me play in the little pre-season 2 world she created.
. . . . . .
I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I'll be looking at the moon
But I'll be seeing you
. . . . . .
It's been four weeks since he saw her last, but that doesn't matter: she's everywhere.
The street corner, the local deli, the drug store, the post office—no place is safe from her ghost. Time and again Daniel will catch a flash of dark hair or blood-red lipstick out of the corner of his eye, hear a certain laugh or a British accent across a room, and he'll turn around so quick it nearly makes his head spin . . . and each time, it's a stranger's surprised face looking back at him. Someday he'll stop doing that, he's sure; he just doesn't know when. What he does know is that it clearly takes more than four weeks to get over Peggy Carter.
He hasn't heard a word from her. Not that he expected to; they don't work together anymore, and they certainly weren't socializing outside work hours before he left. Why would she make a long-distance call to ask how he's doing?
He knows she's all right, though, and that she's still at the SSR's New York office, from Thompson. Daniel's had two phone meetings with Thompson so far, with more to come, and to his surprise they are one of the highlights of the job. Not because he's that keen to talk to the guy, but because the balance of power has suddenly shifted in his favor, and it's a great feeling. Back before . . . everything, they were the same rank, but Thompson always had a leg up because of Dooley's favoritism and because, well, he was literally one leg up on Daniel. Now they're both chiefs of SSR offices, but Thompson, though he tries to hide it, is jealous. He would have preferred the LA gig: warm winters, Hollywood stars, pretty girls in bathing suits. (Daniel would have preferred the NYC gig, to be nearer his family and . . . everything else, but they didn't offer it to him and that's just the way it is.) For the first time, Thompson wasn't handed everything he wants on a silver platter, and maybe it's petty but Daniel can't help the feeling of satisfaction he gets when Thompson asks, with forced casualness, whether he's had a chance to go to the beach yet.
(Answer: no. What's a guy with a prosthetic leg and no friends or family for three thousand miles going to go to the beach for?)
So from talking to Thompson he knows that Peggy's still there; it took until their second phone call for him to get up the guts to bring her up, but he finally just bit the bullet and asked how she was doing. Thompson, mercifully, did not comment, just answered the question. Daniel also knows that he's been replaced by some greenhorn named Beyers who, according to Thompson, has a "good head on his shoulders" and "follows orders well."
"But," Thompson says after a moment of thought, "he's no Daniel Sousa." And the thing about Thompson is that even after all this time, even after all they've been through, Daniel can't tell if he means that genuinely or as an insult. Bit of both, most likely, knowing that guy.
And he really doesn't miss that. He misses a lot of things about New York: his old apartment, being a quick train ride from his family (although to be honest it's not like he was making that trip often), the electric feeling of being in the greatest city on Earth and knowing that the whole world is at your fingertips. But he does not miss Jack Thompson's derision for anything outside the Jack Thompson Norm™, and the way the other guys would always follow Thompson's lead in looking down on the black guy or the short guy or the egghead—or the crip and the dame who had the chutzpah to try to be SSR agents. Daniel can't even imagine being in the New York office with that gorilla in charge, and he doesn't know why Peggy puts up with it.
Yes he does, he corrects himself. Of course he knows why.
. . . . . .
The point is, all things considered, he's glad to be here. He likes the warm weather, he likes his new place—he has a house, an actual house, not a third-floor walkup that always left his bad leg in agony—and he likes the new office. He'd been worried about how these guys would react to getting orders from someone with one leg, especially someone they'd never met before, but either people are more evolved out here in California or someone higher up really read them the riot act before Daniel's arrival, because they're on their best behavior. Besides one or two of the agents asking conversationally if he got that lead in the war, no one comments on the leg . . . unless they're doing it behind his back, and even that would be an improvement on the New York office.
And he's determined to keep it that way. He's determined that the LA office of the SSR will be a place where people are judged on their ability, not their skin or their sex or whether they have the usual number of limbs. To that end, he's already given assignments to some of the agents who usually get overlooked; they haven't disappointed him yet, and he can see a change in the way they hold themselves after completing their first successful assignments. He'd like to think that he's creating an office where anyone could feel welcome, even if she's—
And always he stops his thought process right there, because it's not like he doesn't already think of her often enough at the office. They don't have any female agents—something Daniel would like to change if he gets the chance—but Joan at the front desk wears high heels and when she comes to the back to run an errand and those heels clack against the ground . . . well, he'd be a little ashamed to admit how quickly he looks up, only to be disappointed again. Someday he'll learn. But four weeks is not long enough.
Four weeks is not long enough to forget the way she smiled at him—a smile she never gave anyone else at the SSR—when she passed his desk in the morning. It's not long enough to forget the way she'd glance at him and roll her eyes whenever Thompson said something irritating. It's not long enough to forget that he was the only person she was happy to get coffee for, and that she'd told the chief that she didn't mind that Agent Sousa was the one to get credit for finding that ship full of Stark's inventions, and Daniel had hoped against hope that it meant something but clearly he was wrong. Because Peggy shot him down about those drinks and never said a word to him about his deciding to take the LA job, besides a simple congratulations. He still replays their goodbye in his head, those four emotionless, meaningless words, over and over again.
'Take care.'
'You too.'
And that was it. Nothing more encouraging, nothing more personal, and sometimes he wonders if he was wrong and she never saw him as a friend at all.
. . . . . .
The guys in the LA office are nice enough; they kid around with the new chief and invite him for drinks. Daniel's even made a friend, a guy named Langley whose brother lost a leg at Pearl Harbor and who catches Daniel's eye and makes a face when someone says something bull-headed. (When that happens, he forces himself not to imagine the last person who filled that role in his life, to picture her standing like a burning brand against the dull browns and grays of the office, her face alight with amusement.) It helps that they all know how Daniel was part of a group of only three agents who single-handedly—triple-handedly?—stopped a Leviathan plot to kill thousands in New York; that's a nice credential to have when you're trying to convince a group of agents you're qualified to be their chief.
They have a hard time believing it at first, that a crip and dame saved the day, but when Langley shows them that it's right there in the official report, they stop questioning it. And that's enough to earn him the respect he needs to run this office: the men aren't just polite to him, they believe in him, and that makes all the difference. The one problem is that now they want to hear all about this dame: is it true she was Captain America's girl? Is she really as good as Sousa's field report makes her out to be? Is she pretty?
(Answers: yes, but that's not the reason the SSR keeps her around; no, she's even better than that; and . . . yes. Gorgeous, actually. At which Langley gives him a knowing look that he pointedly ignores.)
. . . . . .
It does get better, slowly. After the first month, he only finds himself stopping dead in the street to look at a woman in a red Stetson once a week, instead of once a day. He's only bothered occasionally when he arrives at work and remembers that no one is going to greet him with that smile she never gives anyone else in the office. He's coming to terms with it; he's finding some peace of mind.
Until the day he gets a telegram from the Washington office and finds himself staring at it with a curious mix of excitement and dread.
He can seeing an imagined Peggy, because he's going to see the actual her, with his own eyes.
Peggy Carter is coming to Los Angeles.
. . . . . .