Been Losing Grip / Oh, Sinking Ships
Been losing grip,
Oh, sinking ships
You showed up just in time
~This Love, Taylor Swift
Even when faced with a man like Agent Thompson and his blunt, cruel words, Peggy knew there were men in the world who would prove that Thompson was utterly, unequivocally wrong. (Spoilers for E04 The Blitzkrieg Button)
"You're a woman. No man will ever consider you an equal. It's sad but it doesn't make it any less true."
Tears were smarting her eyes, much to her own horror. You're wrong! she wanted to scream at his smug, smirking face.
She didn't.
The screaming truth was, it would never matter. Not to men like Jack Thompson, who felt it their place – their right – to slouch around, telling her to wake up and smell the coffee (which she brewed). They told her that this wasn't her place, even if they'd probably accidentally staple their hands to their desks if they were left to their own filing.
Jarvis's words came back to her, ringing even more clearly now than it did in the dead of the night.
No, these men would never respect her. Everything they did was only to tear her down.
What burnt her most was that they were not doing it because that was all they knew, because that was all they had been taught. They weren't doing it out of blind ignorance. No, men like Thompson knew exactly what they were doing. Peggy didn't deserve to be treated like a glorified secretary and errand runner when she was a field agent, five times more competent than even Thompson and any of his goons. It wasn't just Peggy either. There were millions of women out there who worked just as hard as she did before, during and after the war, to create this peace they were so tentatively enjoying. They all deserved better, and men like Thompson knew it.
But they simply didn't care.
They couldn't give one single, solitary damn.
And why should they? Why should they indeed, Peggy asked herself bitterly.
It was enough to make her want to cry until her throat was raw. She knew, crying about it solved nothing. Yet, sometimes it was so unfair, she couldn't hold back the angry tears.
She'd be damned if she let her tears fall in front of Thompson, though. She didn't need to give these idiots more reason to dismiss her. Thompson was allowed to look morose then give a rousing speech about Krzeminski but God forbade Peggy had emotions.
For all that Peggy knew she had achieved, could achieve if given the chance, for all that she knew she was capable, sometimes it also was all too clear to her that she was only a single person.
A woman.
A woman who wanted so much, who wished so desperately for the world to change, for them to see her worth, knowing she deserved to be recognised for it. She and every other woman out there. They all had their own worth, and Thompson could just go to hell for stating otherwise.
What infuriated her most, made her most want to scream, was the realisation that Thompson and the rest of his ilk were not blind. They knew she was capable. She had demonstrated it amply, from the first moment she walked into this New York office, even if they would all try to deny it, to press her into a corner. They clutched at the smallest of reasons, the tiniest of faults as proof that she didn't deserve to be here and looked the other way at her every contribution.
To them, this was the way of the world. It was made this way, to stay this way. Because it was convenient to them, why should they care to change the world to cater to how Peggy Carter thought it should be and needed it to be?
It was moments like these when she desperately missed Steve most of all.
In these dark moments, when Peggy almost caved to the pressure of the words and almost believe them, Steve broke from her heart and into her mind. Steve was the proof that those like Thompson were all wrong.
It was sad, and it was true, but that also didn't make any of it right.
And Steve knew it.
Steve considered her more than an equal, and unlike Howard, he expected nothing from Peggy, and didn't try to use her for any shady means.
He was just Steve, and with him, she was just Peggy. No man, no woman, no super soldier, no labels or qualifiers. Just two people saw such a beautiful, bright future, and would have given their lives to bring those around them such a future. Steve did.
And he left Peggy behind to fight against the world which should be on her side, against the men who lived in such a world.
They had won a war together, and were all on the winning side of it. The war was over now. Yet why did Peggy still felt like she was fighting every single day, more doggedly, feeling more exhausted against her own colleagues than against the Nazis?
Suddenly, Peggy felt so very tired, so very weary, more than her twenty-seven-year-old self should ever have the right to be. Then again, the war aged them all, some more than others. Some others reverted back to being adolescents instead, finding it easier to stupidly laugh in the face the deaths they barely survived and whistle at the cold-faced girls back home who, unlike those in Europe, never went a day without, than act the men that they were.
Then there was Daniel.
But Daniel, like Peggy, was just a person.
He couldn't scream at the world and expect it to bend to his will any more than she could.
Peggy sighed, as she often did thinking of Daniel. He was more decent by a wide mark than any of the men Peggy worked with. In another time, perhaps Peggy would have done something about that already. Contrary to the gossip the men spread around the office about her (and working in an office full of men taught Peggy that news spread around just as rapidly as it would do in a secretarial typing pen), Peggy was not pining. She missed Steve, but she had decided early on not to hold up either Steve Rogers or Captain America as her measuring device for men. It wasn't even because others would fall terribly short; it was simply because none of them deserved the comparison, fair or not, Steve or the other men.
No, Steve was not the obstacle between her and Daniel Sousa. Everything else was. She suspected that Daniel knew as much of normal as she did, and was dealing with this world of peace as well as Peggy was doing. The truth was, as long as they were stuck in this office together, the lunch-girl and the-one-in-the-crutches, they would remind each other of how not normal they both were. It might sound so romantic, Daniel and Peggy against the world. Yet Peggy knew, after all that they had both been through, and considering all the not-normal that Howard Stark was continuing to bring her way, she needed normal if anything ever became of her and Daniel.
Now was not the end, but it was not the beginning, either. They were in an in-between. Daniel Sousa deserved better than a Peggy Carter who had no idea how to navigate this world where she was assaulted at every turn with insinuations that her place was making coffee beside typewriter or a telephone switchboard or at a stove. Until Peggy could convince the men around her who thought like Thompson that he was wrong, or admitted defeat herself, until Howard Stark stopped sending her around New York as his own version of an errand girl, she was in no position to consider anything more than friends with any man, least of all Daniel Sousa.
Peggy was not ready. She would not be ready for a long time. She had no expectation that Daniel would be there for however long it took for her to be ready, but perhaps she would take her chances. If her gamble paid off, may be Steve Rogers would not be the only man who could prove to her that Jack Thompson was just plain wrong.
A/N: This started out as tags on a tumblr gifset. Eventually it mutated into this, going a completely different direction than I thought it would. Please let me know what you think :)