There are a hundred ways to look at someone with pity.
Sousa has seen them all.
.
The ribbons on his breast are heavy. The crutch pinches his arm and he's quite forgotten the exact moment his leg took the lead.
.
This is what he does not tell them: the pain never goes away.
Sometimes an ache, sometimes a throb—and sometimes only the slowness, the lurch and lean.
Left behind, and that is its own kind of pain, the pain of standing very still.
.
He's lucky to be an agent.
He's lucky to have a job.
He's lucky to be alive.
But pain can't be forced away, any more than contentment can be created out of nothing. He's hollow inside, practically aluminum himself. Hollow, and rattling.
He thumps his crutch against the floor a few extra times to get used to it.
Familiar and comfortable are very different things.
Just as mercy is not the same as pity.
.
Peggy is a mercy, and a flash of pain, all at once.
His eyes are drawn to her instantly. The red lips and the smooth waves of hair and the way her eyebrows lift when she's angry. All the others' eyes are on her at once, too, but they don't know when she's angry.
They don't know her.
.
Daniel. She always says his name like a caress in three syllables, and it sends a shiver through him, like a length of silver wire stretched taut from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. He doesn't have Thompson's bullish grace or the easy conversation of most other men, and he doesn't have one speck of her hero's bearing.
So he just tries to crease his smile like the fold of a letter he'll never send her, make jokes with a serious look in his eyes, say the things that have no meaning except a backlit kind of glow.
It all amps up—he loves her most in that moment right when he tells her that if she runs away, he'll know she's a traitor; he falls hard and she rises up again, ivory and blood and always, always righteous.
And always right.
.
Sometime after that—after Dooley, after Stark, after bloodshed—he can't take it anymore.
.
The mad doctor called him a virtuous man.
And maybe he is. And maybe there were thousands of virtuous men, who choked on blood all across Europe, and maybe there are worse things to bring home than a bum leg and handful of ghosts.
Peggy, after all, lost a heartful.
.
He remembers running.
"I miss it."
Peggy smiles, and he, the virtuous man, would kill for her. "You're allowed to." And her brow furrows, dangerously close to the ninety-seventh version of pity, and she says, "Does it still hurt?"
But he only shakes his head—he knows how to smile too.
.
California, a promotion, three thousand miles—all to remind him that leaving is its own kind of pain.
The pain of running, whether he misses it or not.