Pairing: Steve/Peggy

Disclaimer: All characters property of Disney and Marvel.

A/N: I hate that this is happening to me, but apparently I write stories about Steve and Peggy now. Have a nice AU where Steve is found a year later and not 70, because 70 years of separation is stupid, if you ask me. Give me happiness any day.

Peggy Carter did not like to look backwards. Looking back invited thoughts. Looking back invited regrets.

When she was five years old, she had broken a vase in her grandmother's home, a family heirloom. She was heartsick over it, practically sobbing with the shame as she confessed to her wrongdoings. In that way that only grandmothers can, Peggy's own had tut-tutted away her tears and insisted that she not give it another thought. The vase was broken and tears could not serve as glue.

Peggy carried that mentality with her throughout her life. Poor marks in school, rare as they were, could only be fixed by more rigorous studying. Her first relationship, a skinny boy two inches shorter than her and afraid to meet her eyes, fizzled two weeks in, and she knew there was nothing for it except to move on. They were only fifteen; it was nothing serious.

Her first roll in the hay, as it were, was at university with a boy who talked too much of poetry and not enough sense, but whose lips could work miracles even with the cigarette that seemed to permanently dangle from them. They met in her classics course, he was a welcome distraction from the drudgery, and he hadn't shown up to class for almost a week after she'd snuck him into her dormitory. When he finally came back, he wouldn't look at her and he sat on the other side of the room. She felt the stirrings of heartsickness and promptly banished all thoughts of regret; she had learned, she had grown, and he was a prick. She moved on.

This philosophy served her well in the war. Joining the SSR right out of university, she became tough, hardened, but still aggressively feminine and her lack of regret made her stronger. It served as a cloak of detachment as she made tough calls, as men lived and died around her. The camp reeked of fear and regret; the men were unsure of the future, unsure of death, and they were scared. They had sweethearts back home, parents and siblings praying for their safe return. Peggy was not afraid because she had no expectation of the future and never looked to the past for comfort.

And then there was Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers threw wrenches into Peggy Carter's worldview like it was his damn job. He was not strong or big or anything her time with the SSR had shown her was typical of a soldier. (Peggy had her fair share of flings in the camp, though never with anyone she directly supervised. She didn't regret them either.)

Steve Rogers was kind and almost upsettingly clever and he had a hidden wit that made her duck her head to hide the smile on her lips. He was small and had a page and a half's worth of various ailments. (By the time Steve had received the serum, she could practically recite his medical records by rote. Asthma, scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles… the list went on. Forget the serum, Steve Rogers was a medical miracle for surviving into adulthood.)

Steve Rogers was just unfailingly, almost infuriatingly good. Peggy marveled how a scrawny kid from Brooklyn, scrappy and battered, could still come off as a corn-fed farm boy with a bright sunny disposition. Of course, the serum helped to feed that illusion, but the aw, shucks smile that Steve had, that hadn't been helped by the serum. And Peggy Carter, called frigid by the soldiers and exacting by her superiors, found herself warming to him, found herself sloppily emotional and jealous in the face of Steve Rogers. (Peggy Carter still did not regret anything, and she didn't regret shooting at him.)

She'd kissed him as he readied to board the plane, to do what he'd literally been created to do. She knew that they both knew the risks of battle, of combat, of what he was facing, and she could not bear the thought of regretting never kissing him. So she had and for one beautiful moment, the roar of the world had ceased. She could have kissed him forever.

Back in the radio room, she waited anxiously for news of him and had to sit idly by while he piloted his aircraft to certain death. They made plans to finally get their dance at the Stork Club on Saturday and her chest felt ready to collapse when she told him not to be late. It was easily the worst moment of her entire life and she was certain it always would be. Still, she could not bring herself to regret it. If she'd distracted him at all from the fear of what he was doing, she was infinitely glad to have been there.

She hoped that he'd known how she felt about him; she didn't regret their time together in the slightest, but perhaps she wished she had kissed him sooner.

At first, she'd sided with Howard Stark; they should find the plane. Steve deserved it, she thought. He deserved to come home; he deserved a hero's burial, an American flag draped over his coffin. He deserved a funeral. (And perhaps she desired a proper funeral, to give her the space to grieve properly.)

But after a year of searching, she recognized the futility of the search. For all Howard's wealth, for all his technological resources, he couldn't find Steve. And Peggy Carter realized that with each passing day, she was in more and more danger of tethering herself to the past without an anchor in the present. She could easily lose herself in imagining a life with a ring on her finger, as a wife, or a lover, or the meandering path their lives might have taken in another life. It was time to move on.

And so she did; she threw herself into work, she did good. Steve would have liked that. There were others in her bed, and perhaps he wouldn't have liked that, but she liked to think that he would understand. The others had names, had stories, and Peggy Carter did not learn them. To learn them would be to invite loss and she had lost too much already, though she regretted nothing.

She was the best at her job and she knew it. She carried that knowledge as a shield against the thoughts that tried to plague her. No one else could do what she could, she was the best woman for the job, and her path had led her to it. There was nothing to regret there.

Peggy Carter was hard at work, reading over a report from a debacle that had left an agent dead and another in the hospital. She was trying to figure out what had went wrong, what could have been done differently, when Howard Stark came running up to her desk with the sort of manic energy that she found particularly infuriating.

"Is there something I can help you with?" she asked, looking up and doing her best to telegraph that she was entirely too busy for whatever inanity he might want to share.

"We found it, Carter!"

Peggy's stomach dropped. Innately she knew what he meant, the gleam in his eyes told her without a word. But she needed to hear it. She needed to hear him say it. She wouldn't believe it until then.

Carefully, slowly, she arched an eyebrow and folded her hands in front of her. She would not show any sign of the fact that her heart was in her throat. "You'll have to be more specific than that, I'm afraid, Howard," she chided. "'It' is a terribly vague word."

"Steve's plane, Peggy. My guys found it. They're bringing him home."

Peggy stood calmly, pushing her chair in and swallowing though her mouth was conspicuously dry, and began to walk. She walked right past Howard Stark, who was looking at her like she might crush him, and into the hallway. She waited until she was safely installed in the ladies' restroom, locked away in privacy, to promptly lose her lunch.