The skin she wears may be made of calm, but her bones are made of chaos.
Nikita Gill
She comes into his life again like a hurricane.
Daniel is on the other side of the country; his life is orderly, and quiet, and easy. He likes it that way. No, he loves it that way – until, suddenly, he doesn't.
Until the winds change and Peggy Carter sweeps into the office with her bright eyes and tenacity, and all at once Daniel remembers how much he likes living in the storm.
The problem with hurricanes is that they destroy (even when they try not to).
The little box hits the floor like a thunderclap.
There's a sharp edge to Peggy's surprised expression as she stares down at a ring meant for another woman. Daniel's gut roils in a way it shouldn't; Peggy falters over her words, but it's her parting shot that tears at him.
"I'm very happy for you, Daniel."
Peggy doesn't sound happy, and he doesn't feel happy, and this isn't how it's supposed to be. Moments ago they were – he can't call it flirting, because they shouldn't be flirting, but no other word jumps to mind. The important thing is that moments ago, Daniel didn't feel like throwing up.
That sick feeling stays with him longer than it should. Eventually, though, it does go away. He refuses to beat himself up over Peggy's voice and expression for another minute. Daniel turns his thoughts to his impending dinner with Violet and determinedly ignores the treacherous little voice in the back of his mind that tells him that if it were Peggy, he'd probably have to propose in the middle of a firefight.
That doesn't matter, because Violet isn't Peggy, and he doesn't want her to be.
Daniel is leaving the office when Rose stops him. He puts the phone to his ear and the sound waves that greet him shove his heart out of his body. The dinner is forgotten, Violet is forgotten; Daniel's hollow chest reverberates with the echo of a beating heart as he speeds to Isodyne.
"Don't bother, there's no way anyone survived that," the emergency responder says of the blast. Daniel looks for Peggy anyway, because Jarvis is here and they're always together so she must be okay, and because he can't face any other possibility.
Daniel propels himself forward the second he sees Peggy. He studies her for injuries, but she seems unharmed. He thinks that she's okay until his eyes fix on her face; until her words tumble out in a frantic rush that Daniel recognizes as shock. Peggy tries to push her way through it.
"Peggy, stop. Stop. Are you okay?"
"Y-yes, I'm fine."
Peggy will go until she's got nothing left. She'll drive herself into the ground, which is what she's trying to do now as she mumbles some nonsense about how much still needs to be done. As if any of that could take priority over her well-being.
"You're going home," Daniel tells her.
There are tears standing in Peggy's eyes; she doesn't argue. Daniel wants to hug her, but he sends her away instead.
Daniel doesn't remember Violet until he finds her standing in front of his house. He's not sure which weighs more: the ring in his pocket or the concern for Peggy that pesters him even now.
When he wakes in the morning, Daniel tells himself that nothing has changed – and nothing will.
Peggy falls, and takes Daniel with her.
For the rest of his life, Daniel Sousa will be haunted by this moment: Peggy with a shaft of rebar piercing her side; the fast, shallow huffs of her breaths hitching in her throat; and the naked fear and pain in her eyes as she tries to understand what's happening.
He presses a handkerchief into her side to staunch the bleeding and yells for help. All the while, Peggy watches him with glassy eyes.
Jarvis is the one to appear, and his reaction is only slightly less visceral than Daniel's was. Peggy nods when they tell her they need to lift her off the cinder block bed on which she's found herself.
Her scream as the rebar is pulled back through the wound is nothing like Daniel's ever heard: it's too full of pain to be piercing, but it rips through the fabric of his world like a knife through silk. Had he never been in battle, Daniel might have seized up – as it were, a nasty tremor began to slide down his spine and into his legs.
In the car, the sounds of Samberly panicking and Rose's sharp instructions to mind the uranium cores they're transporting are background noise. Peggy is laying on her back on the bench in the back of the van, her legs draped over Jarvis and her head resting on Daniel's thighs. She's sweating and her naturally pale skin is already a full shade lighter.
His phantom limb tingles in remembrance and commiseration.
Peggy refuses to be taken to a hospital, so Daniel directs them to Violet.
(This is the moment it ends, Daniel will realize later. It's not the moment Violet realizes what she's walked into, or even the moment she breaks off the engagement. It's this one: a bleeding, clammy Peggy fighting for her life, and Daniel desperate to save her at any expense.)
After, Peggy watches him from her spot beneath a blanket on the couch, and Daniel knows himself for the fool that he is, because it's too domestic. He doesn't want calm, he wants this – sans traumatic injuries, but he'll take those too if he must – in a way that makes his chest ache. The two of them in the same home after a mission; Peggy's eyes on him as he moves away from a conversation with their friends and colleagues, the lights low and the air full of comfort and familiarity.
Peggy uses her dry humor to assuage his fear and tension – "Get impaled? Yes, Chief." – and her smile is tired, but fond. The way she looks at him in those few seconds of silence makes Daniel think, for the space of a stunted breath, that maybe she might want something like that as well.
Daniel is a fool for believing that he could live the quiet life he's been chasing.
Peggy Carter is a tempest, and Daniel is a man made to live inside the storm.
He regrets injuring Violet, and part of him regrets that he's lost her – because he did love her, even if it wasn't enough in the end – but his real mistake was in running away.
Peggy is bleeding in the back of a van again, but there's no stinging fear this time, only a quiet compassion and understanding. Daniel understands the frustration of being willing, but unable.
But it's when she professes outrage on his behalf, and then nearly kisses him, that Daniel truly despises himself for running away from New York, and Peggy – for not returning her calls. Blaming himself will get him nowhere, but he does it anyway.
Where would they be now if he had stayed, or even just returned her damn phone calls? Perhaps in a place where his chances were more certain; perhaps in a place where kissing Peggy was a habit, rather than a possibility.
Blaming himself seems like the thing to do.
Daniel wonders if the threat would be as effective if he didn't already have a foundation to base it on.
"Tell me or you will never see her breathe again!"
Does Jason know? Does he know what it sounds like when the air hisses and stutters out from between Peggy's lips; how her scream resonates in Daniel's atoms? Can Jason know that Daniel has been too close to that abyss before, and that the thought of a world without Peggy Carter makes his soul wither? He must.
Daniel gives up the location of the uranium rods, and he can't regret it no matter how angry Peggy is at him. No matter what she would have done.
He doesn't blame her. If their positions had been reversed, she would have let Jason shoot him – her silence confirmed as much – and Daniel doesn't blame her for it, because he understands. No single person should come before the well being of the world. That tenet has shaped most of Peggy's life, and he knows that. He appreciates that, and he won't be angry with her for upholding the principle that makes her who she is. She's a protector, a guardian, and he loves that about her, because he loves her.
He's just not strong enough to embody that belief, if Peggy's life is the one in the balance. She always has been the stronger of the two of them.
Daniel snaps her picture in a moment of resigned whimsy (if such a thing can exist). He can almost convince himself that he doesn't care that Peggy is going back to New York. He tells himself it's better this way, that he squandered his chance with her when he ran across the country to escape the intensity of what he felt for her – and the dismay of another rejected attempt to cultivate a closeness between them.
The cruelty, of course, being that Peggy had come to him with the assumption that he'd asked for her, and even upon discovering that he hadn't – on top of his transgression of unreturned phone calls – asked him out for a drink in direct imitation of his own offer. An offer he'd had to decline, of course, because Violet was waiting and he'd moved away. Not moved on, because the harsh truth is that he probably never will.
So he tells himself that her imminent return to New York doesn't matter. Her life is in that city, and she's happy there, and that's truly all Daniel wants for Peggy. He takes her picture and wonders how California will change with her departure – what echoes the state will hold now that it has known a force of nature such as Peggy – until duty calls them away.
Duty that quickly turns into a cataclysm.
Daniel had lost his leg at night, on a hazy battlefield full of gun smoke and artillery fire. Maybe it's the atmosphere that has stayed with him, or the deep fear of that moment in time; at any rate, he's always held the notion that his death would come for him in the arms of darkness.
As it turns out, he's not wrong. The darkness isn't night, but something far more alien and sinister that he never could have imagined, and still can't, though he's seen it first hand more than once. Zero matter makes that battlefield in Bastogne seem like a stroll through the flowers. At least guns, and mines, and heavy artillery had been a known entity; at least Daniel had understood the nature of such things. Zero matter is all the more frightening for its mystery.
Daniel is clinging to a rope and the sky above him is full of that unknowable nothingness, sucking him into the vortex, when Peggy dives for the other end of said rope. She tries to pull him in toward her, but the pull against her is too formidable. She yells for him to hold on even as they lose ground.
If this is his end, he will not take Peggy with him.
"Let go!" he tells her. "Let go, or it'll take us both!"
"Don't be ridiculous!"
Peggy is so stubborn and determined, and even more so in the face of what would be hopelessness to others. Even from this distance Daniel can see the way her expression hardens: there's a job to do, and she'll tear herself apart to do it.
Luck is on his side – well, luck and Peggy Carter – and Daniel doesn't die. He does, however, drop several feet out of the air and onto the concrete. All things considered, he'll call that a victory.
There's an air of relieved triumph about their group as they clear away the evidence of the averted crisis. Howard Stark insists that everyone retire to his mansion for cocktails and God knows what else; Daniel has insisted that he hasn't broken any bones, and that's true, but he is banged up and exhausted, so he begs off immediately. He volunteers to take the equipment back to the SSR headquarters and leaves no room for an argument.
No one argues, but they do insist on helping him. So they pile the equipment and themselves back into the vehicles, and Daniel waits until they're on the road to sigh tiredly and close his eyes against the events of the day.
He disappears at the first chance and returns to his office, where the developed pictures from Howard's cameras stare silently up at him from his desk. Daniel sits down and leans back in his chair before rifling through the pictures to find the one he took of Peggy. She looks beautiful, as always, with half of her face hidden in shadow and her eyes luminescent even in the poor lighting. Daniel tips his head back until it rests against his chair and studies the picture for another moment before dropping it onto his desk.
Peggy's arrival had upended Daniel's life, and her departure will do the same.
He closes his eyes and falls asleep.
Daniel wakes to a dark office and a suit jacket draped over him. He's less confused about being in the office – he does remember falling asleep in the chair, after all – than he is about the suit jacket. It's his, but it's not the one he was wearing because he's still wearing it; after another second he recognizes it as his "emergency work jacket" that he leaves in the office as a backup. Not many people would know that said jacket was in his office, or where to find it, and even fewer people would care to drape it over him like a blanket while he slept.
His body aches and protests as he shrugs the jacket off of him and sits up in the chair. The watch on his wrist tells Daniel that it's not as late as he first assumed: a little past eight in the evening, which explains the empty office. Though that means he was asleep in that chair for far longer than he could have anticipated.
Daniel retrieves his crutch from its spot leaning against the desk and pulls himself to his feet with a grimace. His crutch makes the only noise in the building as he moves to the doorway and hesitates in surprise: Peggy is standing at one of the bullpen windows, her arms folded and her silhouette gleaming in the half-light of the room.
"Peggy?"
She turns her head to look at him over her shoulder, though she doesn't move, and the shadows slide over her cheekbone in a way that tells Daniel that she's smiling.
"You're awake. How are you feeling?"
"Like I lost a fight to a guy with cement hands. What are you still doing here? Why didn't you wake me?"
"You were exhausted," she says, and turns her attention back to whatever waits outside the window.
Peggy isn't often pensive, or at least not in spaces where such a grey mood is easily observed by others, but Daniel has caught glimpses of it before. He can't determine whether this is a melancholy or thoughtful moment, however, so he approaches with slow consideration.
"Peg?" He prods softly as he comes to stand next to her at the window.
She doesn't look at him. "There was a time when I would have let Jason shoot you," she starts.
The words are an echo of the ones she spoke to Thompson with her gun aimed at his head. "There was a time when that was true," she'd said, and there's that same undertone of regret in her voice now as there was in that moment. Daniel wonders, and not for the first time, if Peggy has divided her life into sections in her mind: the time before the war and Steve Rogers, and the time after.
"A time when the fate of one person over that of the world, or the greater good, would have been no choice at all."
Daniel isn't a mind reader but he knows that she's remembering just such a moment.
Steve's voice is, indeed, resonating in Peggy's thoughts. "I've gotta put her in the ice … this is my choice." Behind it, or perhaps underneath it, she hears Michael's voice encouraging her not to hide who she is, and not to marry a man who will never understand her.
Peggy's voice is decidedly less even when she continues. "But that was before I knew what it was like to carry on in the absence of those you love; to find yourself victorious, but alone. I will make the hard decisions if I must, but, as I've been forced to acknowledge recently, their consequences only become more difficult to bear over time."
Daniel shifts on his crutch. He doesn't exactly move closer, though he wants to; there is so much pain hidden and buried in this woman that he feels it like a wave that tries to tug him out into dark waters.
"I was irritated with you," Peggy admits. "Irritated that you would put a powerful weapon in dangerous hands on the chance that it might save my life. Only to discover not long after, that, when faced with the same situation and with the metaphorical gun pointed at you, I would make the same choice."
Daniel's heart flutters. She's just admitted that if she has a choice, she is no more capable of letting him die than he is of letting her do the same. The knowledge warms him exquisitely: to know that, whatever else happens, his life weighs so heavily on the scales of what matters to her.
Peggy turns to look him fully in the face, then. Her eyes glitter with tears that have yet to fall, and the force of all she's holding back makes her bottom lip tremble minutely. Daniel steps forward on impulse, unable to keep his distance, and she doesn't move away. He reaches for her with his free arm and places a warm hand over the bare skin of her forearm.
"I seem to have a nasty habit of losing those I love." Her voice is a whisper, thick with ghosts and anguish, and so much loneliness that the ache in Daniel's body pales in comparison. "I don't think I can stand another loss."
A lone tear slips its bonds and escapes down her cheek. Daniel brushes his thumb soothingly across her skin once, twice, and thinks about the wounds they hide.
"They tell us we're lucky because we came home. I wonder if they'd use a different word if they knew that sometimes the cost of living is that we have to carry on," Daniel says.
Peggy's gaze is intense and full of something that he's afraid to name as she studies him. It's the moment in the surveillance van all over again, except this one is heavier, more honest. Daniel is going to kiss her; she'll go back to New York and he'll build another version of his life in her absence, but first he's going to kiss her.
They're moving together slowly, with a surety of purpose that leaves no room for doubt, and Peggy's lips are so close to his that Daniel feels the brush of them ghosting over his lips when she speaks.
"I'm frightened, Daniel."
"So am I."
The kiss is electric. The tension that has been building between them sparks in points of light behind Daniel's eyes, and he's free falling even as Peggy anchors them together. She grabs a fistful of Daniel's shirt, her fingers warm through the fabric as they brush the area just above his hips. The arm that isn't occupied with his crutch loops around her waist and pulls her closer, and she doesn't resist.
Here, with the heat of her pressed into him and her rose petal lips against his, Daniel admits the truth: Peggy is an ocean of storms, and her bones are made of chaos, and, oh, how he loves her.
He'll always love her, even if he has to do it from half a world away.
But Peggy doesn't leave; she stays, and comes to terms with her fear with the same strength of will that she does everything in life.
When they do come together – finally, wonderfully - it's neither as simple nor as difficult as Daniel imagined. Instead, it is so much better, because they butt heads, and love with force, and remain a team throughout.