He'd followed her into the tube station and onto a tram car. They sat near the back, with her by the window and him by the isle, and he watched as she trembled and rubbed her arms when the tram started forward, her face a vision of anguish. He couldn't find the courage to ask her why she was scared of Philips' men.

Arriving at the next station, he followed her out and he kept following her as she kept moving. They darted from one borough of the city to the next, doing so for the rest of the day and all of the night that followed. Sometimes they'd think they'd gotten away and begin to unclench, but there would be a policeman, or a soldier, or a man in a coat who looked too well built or shady, and they'd take off again. In twenty hours, though Steve did not tire, by the time they were walking down that ally in Paddington, it felt like they'd been drifting for months.

He trailed Peggy as she hurriedly shuffled on her way to the friend she claimed could help them. She'd gained a slight limp, brought on by fatigue and strain. Then there was something about her ankles and the way they shifted one second, and through instinct, he knew to get out of the way as she spun around, brandishing a gun then opening fire.

On the other side of the alley, two men in woolen coats took cover in a doorway, not out of panic, but out of practiced discipline.

"Run!" Peggy barked, firing again as she hurriedly backed away.

Though he didn't exactly freeze, Steve was torn whether to follow her lead or reach to her and take the gun away. The two men on the other side of the alley peered back out and tried to take aim with a little too much care, which gave Peggy the opportunity to hit one of them in the leg. He fell to the ground, howling his lungs out, while his friend vengefully returned fire.

There was a flash of light and a spray of crimson out Peggy's upper left arm, and Steve's eyes shot open. She winced at first, and that gave way to a cry that was brief, and then she gritted her teeth and fired again.

It was then that Steve moved. He wrapped an arm around her waste and pulled her away, almost carrying her as he stalked away from their assailants.

A bullet tore into the mortar on the wall two feet away from him, spraying him with tiny bits of stone, and he heard the howling man bark at his friend, scolding him in a Southern accent, demanding that he be careful not to hit their primary.


"It's over." Peggy said tearfully, the pain gnawing at her with every step she took.

"It's not over." Steve replied, trying to reassure himself as much as he wanted to reassure her.

In yet another underground station, he'd somehow managed to make it with her all the way to the platform before the train was to leave the station without being accosted. Inside the train was another matter. As soon as they walked in, their fellow passengers turned to them, realizing there was something wrong with the two. That being London, however, they let them keep to themselves.

As the train moved, he looked to her and saw she was silently weeping.

"I'll get you to a doctor," he said with a voice he tried to be brave and strong, "Don't worry."

"You don't even remember this city." She said with a pained sigh.

"But you do. Isn't there someone who could take a look at your wound?"

"What's the point?" she sobbed.

"Don't say that." Steve begged, "Please, don't say that!"

He hadn't known her for long that he remembered, but he knew that it wasn't right, her giving up. It wasn't a Peggy Carter thing to do, it couldn't be.

"We're beat." She said resignedly as she hung her head.

We can't be. This isn't how it ends. Something inside him assured. He squeezed his eyes shut, not caring that many of the passengers were staring at them. He pressed his hand to her arm where she was wounded, hoping to slow the bleeding. He'd helped her with a makeshift bandage earlier, but it wasn't enough. She reacted with a slight flinch, but did not shriek or recoil.

"Then maybe we should stop running."

"I can't…" she said with conviction, "That's… I couldn't."

"We have to. If you don't see a doctor, you might lose that arm. We'll got off at the next station, wait for them to how up and surrender."

"No."

"They obviously want me alive. Maybe I can talk to Philips and-"

"That isn't how it works. They want you back for what you are, and they want me captured because of what I did."

Steve drew a deep breath. For a long time he let her have her secrets, unsure if trying to pry them out was in his right or his ability. He'd also been afraid to find out on some level, but if this was what it had come to, he needed to know.

"Peggy, what did you get yourself into?"

She looked away from him, out the window at the city where she was born and raised. She took in every last bit of it that she could, not fearful, but certain, that she'd never get the chance again. She thought of faces she would never see again; Rose and Maud, her vapid, dimwitted older sisters, god bless them. She thought of Harrison, her favorite idiot, following in her steps as he'd done since he could walk Mother and father, now in retirement, wanting nothing but for her to leave her line of work.

"I was a soldier for almost ten years." She said, pausing to sniffle.

"I heard of what went on in Guernica and I was incensed. I joined S-O-E straight away, convinced someone I was worth more than being kept in the typing pool, found myself a Lieutenant around the time Dunkirk happened."

She was now calmer, but unmistakably sullen. Sunlight shone through the window, illuminating a tear as it slid down her reddening cheek.

"I never told you this before, but I worked undercover in Hydra for a brief period. That's how we got Erskine out of Germany. I joined the SSR after that, as an Agent. I proved myself to Colonel Philips just as I did in the Executive. He valued me, he trusted me… All of them, they all did. But I threw it all away."

She sniffled again, and seemed on the verge of breaking down, but pulled herself together, cleansing the weakness out with a sigh.

"When you were missing, the Navy launched expeditions to find where you'd crashed, kept it up for a year. Eventually, they… We lost all hope. The ships were recalled, and you were declared Killed in Action. I stayed on at SSR, was put in a subunit charged with of rounding up valuable rogue Nazi scientists. There was one scientist I found last year, Erich Werner. He worked under Dr. Erskine when he was still with Hydra.

"After Erskine defected, Werner joined a separate project overseen by Heinrich Zemo, Schmidt's rival. Werner claimed that while never able to create anything approaching a working duplicate of Erskine's serum, but they did manage derivatives. Formulas that could enhance the performance of soldiers in such ways and degrees as to make soldiers more resistant to factors like starvation, cold, and hypothermia. It was a modest success, only applicable to troops fitting certain physiological constraints, but of the handful of soldiers that had received his derivative, there was one that had survived being trapped without food under rubble on the Eastern front for four months.

"I asked him if that was an inherent attribute of Erskine's formula. It wasn't a wise question to ask, he could easily read what I wanted to hear. He said yes, but he'd have said anything to get taken in by the Western allies. Except that he wasn't lying after all."

"I don't understand." Steve said, "Why'd they-?"

"The Soviets intercepted us. I only barely got out alive, Wener didn't. I made my report when I got back, expecting them to act on it and for the search to be resumed, but they refused. Too much expense for something sounding very shady. I appealed to Philips, General Coulson, even Senator Brandt, but my pleas fell on deaf ears. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less than a year in the past, and it was nuclear arms rather than biologically altered infantry that was captivating everyone's attention.

"One of the scientists at SSR, Philo Zogolowski, I'd assigned him to study the designs for the Valkyrie after Stark was done with them. He performed complex calculations that had lead him to divine where the Valkyie had crashed. He died before he could bring them to anyone attention, but I found the report in his desk. Zogolowski was a bit of a crackpot, and I doubted anyone would've believed him in life. I knew that if the ships were to leave again, I had to make them.

"There were two scientists, incompetent frauds, both, but I'd falsified intelligence to make them seem more valuable than they were. I was sent to recruit them, one at a time, made my report when they got back that the Soviets got them first. It was sloppy, and they'd noticed and began to foster suspicions."

Peggy went on to explain her actions. The game of shadows she'd played with men of power that culminated in the Navy sending ships to scour an area off the coast of Greenland, but it was a game too dangerous to play. Elements entered the equation and matters escalated beyond her control, when it was all said and done, she'd been branded a traitor, believe to be a Soviet agent, loosing credibility and going on the run.

It was all too heady for Steve to fathom. He'd been born the son of Irish immigrants, grew up an insignificant urchin, missed out on years of his own life, and wound up following a woman he didn't understand.

"I've seen how traitors are treated." She muttered, dejected as all hell, the tears now drying on her face, "I can't… I can't go through with it! I can't… I can't go through it."

Steve was at a loss. Conversations in the carriage had grown scarce, everyone deftly trying to pick up what the strange couple were talking bothered about.

"We'll figure something out."

She looked toward him, all brown and red eyes, bright with tears and puffy nosed.

"Kiss me?" She pleaded.

And despite never in the habit of being asked for a kiss, he did as she asked, taking her face in his hands and bringing it closer to his own. He kissed her, and that was when he didn't remember, but knew, they he'd been in love with her before, and was in love with her still.

There was a ping, and their lips parted, and he felt something drop in his lap. He looked down to see it was, it was the handle from a pineapple grenade in his lap, the grenade itself in her hand. His eyes went wide as she, her eyes full of grief and shame, said,

"I'm sorry."

Without being delicate, he pried it out of her hand, shoving her further toward the window than she was, and then dove onto the ground, as far away from anyone as possible, planting the grenade firmly beneath him.

"Get away!" he roared, "Get back!"

Panic ensued. The passengers got out of their seats and headed for the other side of the train. Amid shouts and screams, someone was able to open the door that lead to the next, and then passengers spilled out. Only Peggy remained where she was.

Steve didn't know if he'd done enough good or not or what sins he might've committed without realizing, so curled up atop a live grenade on the floor of a London tram car, trembling as he anticipated to learn what it was like to be torn to pieces, Steve Rogers tried to remember the words to the Lord's prayer.

What he remembered instead was the aroma of sunbaked dirt and sweat, and hearing the panicked screams of men as they jumped for cover. He'd never been to Latham, New York, but he could swear that's where it had happened. After that, the rest started coming back, one horrible memory at a time.

He remembered feeling every fiber of his being twisted and seared. He remembered Erskine's bony finger poking his chest twice before life left him. He remembered the slave Camp in Austria.

He remembered Chanson and the bodies of six-hundred German and Frenchmen, their blood and ashes caking the cobblestones of the town square. He remembered the Netherlands and the hopeful push that ended in absolute calamity, the hot-blooded kid from Leeds who saw the Ack-Ack blow the legs from under him as soon as he jumped out of an airplane under a deployed canopy, and lived long enough to land. All for nothing.

He remembered Belgium, sitting out in the snow for weeks, surrounded by the enemy, supplies and ammunition running low, relief distant, re-supplies getting dropped into the German's hand rather than theirs. The kid from Alaska who almost won the Medal of Honor, even thought he lost the ability to form any words even resembling 'Medal' or 'Honor'.

He remembered smell of a clearing in the woods created by artillery and the bloodcurdling cacophony of machine-gunfire, like a rabid choir of murderers. He remembered every son he killed and every father he couldn't see get back home. He remembered every family he was too late to keep together and every action he chose against that might've changed everything and would never know if it would.

He remembered Bucky, hanging on for dear life, his whole body whipping in the wind, desperately clinging on with one hand and reaching out with the other, trying to catch him, and the look in his eyes right before his fingers gave away. A frantic, hopeless look that said;

'You're Steve Rogers. You're Captain America. You're my best friend in the world. And you're not going to save me.'

He did not remember the words to the Lord's prayer, and even after quite a few tense moment, he did not learn what it felt like to be torn asunder, neither fact mattered to him as he broke down where he lay, succumbing to years of grief, weeping without restraint for the world to see.

From where she'd sat, Peggy looked on in breathless suspense. It pained her to see Steve like that, particularly as it was her that inflicted him, but she was eager to know with certainty whether her ruse worked or not.

She heard a curse dripping with vitriol and heavy steps approaching. Quick as a whip, she pulled out her gun and aimed it steadily after she'd turned, ignoring the pain the sudden movement caused. A rough, burly Cockney in a wool cap and coveralls loomed before her, having stopped in his tracks. He caught sight of the glare she directed at him, and like many men before him, he realized she was one not to cross. Resentfully, sneeringly, he backed away.

As soon as he was out of sight, Peggy's feet could not get her to Steve fast enough. Her gun dropped to the floor with a resounding klang, and she placed her hands on Steve's shoulders.

"Steve?"

"I couldn't…" he sobbed, unable to find the rest of the words, "I couldn't…"

"I know." She said as she cradled him in her arms, stroking the nape of his neck as he bawled, "It's alright. It's all over."

When the train came to a stop, she kept cradling him and shushing him, trying to calm his soul. When they finally came for her, she surrendered. Her wounds would be treated before she would face the consequences of her actions. Steve was paralyzed with grief the whole time, never speaking. Within hours, he was handed to Lt. Colonel Ross.

He was neither fond nor caring, simply satisfied the assignment came to a successful conclusion.

"Welcome back, soldier." he said before putting him in a car with him that headed to Heathrow Airport.

It wasn't until they were in flight did he speak to Steve again, asking, without any genuine concern, " Are you feeling alright?"

"No." Steve mumbled, burying his face in his hands.


R&R