Before going back to her room, Peggy took the opportunity to explore a little more around the SHIELD campus. Not that she was able to get far; passcards and fingerprint scanners barred her from anything that looked even remotely intriguing, and her clothes clearly marked her as a civilian outsider.

At length, she made her way back to the medical wing and to her own drab corridor, reasoning that she'd eat, then go for a run and work off a bit of her nervous energy.

Tony was sprawled in a chair outside the door to her quarters.

"Fancy seeing you here, Mr. Stark." She tried to move past him into her room, but he stretched his leg across the doorway, wedging his heel tight against the jamb.

"You missed lunch," he informed her. "Dodged a bullet, too. Lime Jell-O." He feigned a delicate shudder.

Peggy's empty stomach disagreed noisily with his assessment. She hadn't been given breakfast in the quiet room.

"The cafeteria, then, I suppose."

"How about somewhere without plastic trays?" He flashed her a roguish grin. "Dare to dream, Aunt Peggy."

"I'm not dressed for fine dining," she said, indicating her blood-spattered cardigan.

Tony gave a dismissive wave. "You're fine, you look fine. Overall I'd say at least… six out of ten."

"Was there something you wanted? Besides a slap?"

"I want to take you to lunch. Somewhere with a little more ambiance." His eyes flicked upwards, presumably to wherever the surveillance cameras were located.

"I haven't got a day pass."

"Word on the street is, you're not a prisoner here."

Peggy suddenly found herself rather keen to test the limits of that statement. She nodded. "Right. Give me half a tick to change."


Sure enough, Peggy was able to walk out of the hospital wing and right off the SHIELD campus without anyone so much as batting an eyelash. Curiouser and curiouser.

Tony's car was small, fast, and expensive-looking, with vanity license plates. His idea of "daring to dream" turned out to be a herd of brightly-coloured food trucks clustered near the south end of Central Park. Tony took particular delight in pointing out an establishment peddling fish and chips; Peggy ignored this very poor attempt at humour, and told him to run along and buy her a hot dog.

While she waited, she took in her surroundings: concrete and foliage, an expanse of hot blue sky, a damp and oppressive warmth rising from the street. The air was muggy, and heavy with cooking oil; Peggy could almost feel it settling in a fine film on her skin.

The corner was doing a brisk trade: a gaggle of sightseers, chattering excitedly and toting large, complicated-looking camera equipment; a pair of gently perspiring women, trotting in place, wearing garishly bright undergarments and exercise shoes; enough men and women in business apparel to enable Tony and his charcoal suit to blend in. Peggy paid particular interest to the businesswomen, trying to pick out which ones would be considered well-dressed to a modern observer. She herself was wearing a smart navy pencil dress with white nautical trim—having foolishly believed that Tony might actually take her to a restaurant.

The crowds didn't put her on edge quite as much as they had the first time in the park, though she still felt more exposed than she would have liked.

Tony returned with a monstrous creation smothered in onions and cheese and what appeared to be several sauces. It required both hands to hold and considerable concentration to eat.

"I expected tables, at the very least," said Peggy, making no effort to hide her disapproval. He hadn't even brought her any napkins; did he expect her to wipe her hands on her clothes?

Tony had his head down, both thumbs tapping the clear screen of his phone repeatedly. "I never said tables. I said ambiance."

"I know it's a towering inconvenience, but shall we look each other in the eye while we talk?"

"I am looking at you," said Tony, still typing.

As it was fruitless to argue, Peggy took a bite of her hot dog, cupping a hand under her chin to avoid spilling on herself. Granted, it had been a very long time since she'd had one, but she had to admit, it was an exceptional specimen of the breed—the meat perfectly spiced, the bread soft and warm.

After taking a moment to chew and swallow, she asked, "Am I correct in inferring that you bugged the conference room?"

Tony grinned. "You should just take it for granted that I'm all-seeing and all-knowing. Think of me as a minor deity. Or Skynet."

Peggy didn't know who Skynet was, but it was fairly safe to assume that he or she was irrelevant to the current discussion. She took another bite before inquiring, "Well? What's your assessment?"

"That you somehow found a place in that dress to hide your balls of steel?"

"Your assessment of the situation," she said impatiently.

"He's not going to show you the files."

"Of course not. But whatever he does show me will be telling."

Peggy happened to glance to her left, and spotted a familiar willowy form in a crisp white outfit striding towards them.

"You should have told me we were expecting a third for lunch," she chided.

Tony immediately straightened up, pocketed his phone, and turned to follow Peggy's line of sight. He was smiling—not the smirk or sly grin she'd grown to expect from Tony, but a warm, unguarded smile, one that made his face look ten years younger. He waved to Pepper, who waved back, her pace increasing slightly.

Pepper greeted Peggy first. "Nice dress," she said, delighted. The outfit was, of course, one of the ones Pepper had helped her choose.

"Yes, I think I look rather well." Peggy struck a pose. "Despite having scored a six out of ten for effort earlier."

Pepper cut her eyes at Tony.

"Okay, there's context—"

She ignored him. "That looks amazing," she said, indicating Peggy's hot dog.

"It's quite good," Peggy affirmed, and continued to eat. She was far too hungry to stand on ceremony—and, in any event, she wasn't sure of the appropriate etiquette for street-corner dining. She suspected Emily Post would have had little to say on the subject.

"You want one?" Tony was asking, his wallet already in his hand.

Pepper stilled him with a light touch on his arm. "White suit. Mayor's office."

"Hold the ketchup?"

She shook her head. "I have to get going. 7th is a parking lot. Remind me never to get a job as a courier." She pulled a bulky tan envelope out of her handbag and put it in Tony's free hand.

"At least let me get you a coffee, an ice cream, a shot of bourbon, something."

"Green tea?"

Tony looked pained.

"Never mind," said Pepper, amused.

He sighed dramatically and stalked off towards the row of food trucks.

Peggy, who had been observing the exchange with interest, must have given a curious look, because Pepper was quick to assure her, "They don't really have liquor."

"Ah." Peggy carefully placed her empty hot dog wrapper carefully on top of the pile overflowing from the nearest bin. "Why are you going to the mayor's office?"

"The city wants to use Stark Tower to host a press event. I'm trying to leverage it so that we get a share of the spotlight as well. I want to talk about our clean energy initiative, and about the contributions we've made to the Manhattan renewal." Pepper reached into her purse again, pulled something out of a packet, and offered it to Peggy. The item in question turned out to be a sort of wet paper towel, which Peggy correctly deduced was to clean her face and hands. It dried quickly, and had a scent like lemon furniture polish.

"Tony certainly keeps you busy," she observed.

Pepper smiled patiently. "Actually, I'm the Chief Executive Officer, and he's the Chief Technology Officer. We keep each other busy."

"Oh, I see." After their last meeting, Peggy had surmised that Pepper was some sort of personal secretary—which was an absolutely shameful assumption, particularly given the source. "I am sorry."

Pepper shook her head. "It's fine." After a pause, she added, "It sounds like this morning was a little tense."

Peggy nodded.

"If there's ever anything I can do to help…" Pepper reached into her handbag and pulled out a business card. The front of the card was black, embossed with the Stark Industries logo in metallic blue ink, as well as Pepper's name and title. Pepper flipped the card over to the white side and scribbled a series of numbers before handing it to Peggy. "That's my home number, and my cell phone. The one on the front is the receptionist at my office, she'll find me if you tell her it's urgent. And I'm… not affiliated with SHIELD in any way. In case you were wondering."

The card had rounded corners, and was printed on stock that felt velvety to the touch. Peggy rubbed it between her thumb and index finger. "Thank you."

"A little flashy, I know," said Pepper, her lips twisting in a displeased little moue. "Not my idea." She shot an exasperated glance in Tony's direction, but Peggy sensed that it was mostly for show.

Tony, meanwhile, was attempting to wade through a cluster of children who seemed to be engaged in a protracted shouting competition. A few of them were clutching at his jacket, and one particularly ambitious young man was making an attempt to scale him.

Tony said something that caused the shouts to galvanize into shrieks—the meaning of which became clear as he extracted some bills from his wallet and thrust them in the direction of an ice cream vendor, who immediately began handing out frozen confections to the elated youngsters.

Having thus neatly divested himself of his admirers, Tony strolled over to them with a steaming paper cup in one hand and a large chocolate ice cream in the other, the envelope tucked under his arm.

"What happened to that whole 'balanced meal' thing you were trying out?" Pepper inquired.

Tony gave a noncommittal grunt and handed her the tea.

"Thank you," said Pepper graciously. Turning to Peggy, she said, "I have to run, but—"

"Hey. Hey." Tony was suddenly animated—bouncing on the balls of his feet, pointing and snapping his fingers in Pepper's general direction. "I'm taking you two to dinner tonight."

"Tony…"

"Oh, yeah. This is happening. We'll come and get you after the thing. We can all go to a real restaurant. With tables," he nodded at Peggy, "and martinis." This last was apparently meant for Pepper. "You can both have one of each."

"I can't tonight," said Pepper. "Another time."

"No, no. No other time. This is the only time—"

"I'm sorry, I really can't," she said. Her tone was friendly enough, but there were small changes in her face—a hardness around the mouth, a slight narrowing of the eyes—that signaled her growing annoyance.

Heedless of the warning flags, Tony forged onward with, "Pepper—"

"I said no. Could we please not do this right now?" Her gaze was steely.

Everything about Tony stopped cold. "Fine," he snapped. "No problem." His body was tense, closed off. Peggy was reminded of the last time she'd spoken with Howard—the hooded eyes, the sharpening of the shoulders. His face when she'd called the notion of his being in love with her 'ridiculous.' That was what she was looking at, she realized: a rejection that went far deeper than a simple dinner invitation. "Pretty sure Fury's out digging an unmarked grave for both of us right now, but okay. You've got stuff going on."

Pepper winced.

"You don't honestly believe he does his own digging?" asked Peggy, feigning carelessness.

The comment served to remind Pepper and Tony of Peggy's presence. They both became horribly polite:

"Thanks for the…"

"Yeah, do you—"

"Can you—sorry."

"Sorry."

"Go ahead?"

"Never mind. Go take down City Hall." He bared his teeth, but there was no humour in it. "You got this, Potts."

"I'll call you tomorrow," said Pepper.

Tony shrugged, as if to say that he neither expected nor required it of her.

Turning to Peggy, she added, "We'll see each other again, very soon. I promise."

"I look forward to it."

As soon as Pepper had reached the end of the block and rounded the corner, Tony announced, "Come on. Steve's waiting for us on the other side of the park."

Peggy looked at him suspiciously, wondering what the devil he was playing at. "He told me he was going out of town."

"Oh, he's there," said Tony, adding cryptically, "whether he wants to be or not."


The statue was one Peggy hadn't seen before: an impassive stone colossus, en pointe at the top of a cairn of cement and rounded stones. There was a plaque, but she didn't bother to read it; she knew through long experience that it would be oppressively fulsome, and contain the words "heroic" and "sacrifice." The figure looked rather foolish, in full battle dress but with its helmet tucked under its arm and its shield resting at its feet; she supposed it was meant to give the impression that the slings and arrows of war were of little consequence to such a godlike being as Captain America—or, perhaps, that there was no use defending one's self against the onslaught of destiny.

On her date with Steve, when he'd given her a tour of the park, he'd avoided this part of it. She could see why. There were very few people about—which may have had something to do with the green-and-white signs designating the area as a "quiet zone." The concrete square around the statue felt uncomfortably like a shrine.

Overhead, flat clouds pooled across the surface of the sky, casting visible shadows over the manicured grass and stone. Peggy could almost imagine that the clouds were ice floes, and that she was drifting, cold and aimless, across an ocean floor, pausing only to observe the peculiar ruins of some lost antique civilization.

She was beginning to tire of Tony's sense of humour, or his perversity, or whatever it might be that drove him to plague her with things like this. "I've had my fill of sightseeing," she told him. "I'd like to go back now."

"I think you mean, you'd like to sit in the park and read." He put the envelope into her hands. She noticed for the first time that her name was scrawled across the front of it. It had been opened.

Peggy slid her hand inside the envelope and pulled out a stack of brown folders, the cardboard limp with age. All of them were stamped 'TOP SECRET' in red ink. She recognized the SSR's logo, and the date, and Howard's decisive handwriting.

"I thought you said your father had destroyed these."

"That wasn't strictly accurate." Tony smirked. "I figured you could use some traction."

"What do you mean?"

He jammed his hands into his pockets and stepped away from her. "I'm gonna take a lap around the reservoir. Give you and Cap some private time."

Peggy sat on a nearby bench, opened the first folder, and began to read.


The files were highly technical, and there were a few sections that had been blacked out, but there were three terms she recognized immediately: "Vita-Rays," "proprietary technology," and "Stark Industries."

The more she read, the clearer it became: the goal of Briar Rose had never been space travel.

American intelligence had indicated (Peggy knew this part) that the Soviets had been working on suspended animation since the late 1920s. At the tail end of the war (this part was news to her) Russian scientists had succeeded in creating a cadre of highly-trained female assassins, keeping the girls on ice and waking them only when their particular talents were required. These were women without names, sirens of nightfall dispatched for the purpose of harvesting ripe secrets, be it in the streets or in the sheets.

Briar Rose had been the Americans' attempt to reciprocate—taking a group of young women and treating them with the same cocktail of radiation that had given birth to Captain America. Like the Soviets, they planned to keep the operatives in stasis until they were needed, briefing them only insofar as was absolutely necessary to get the job done. Candidates had been chosen based on the espionage work they'd done during the war, as well as their individual skill sets and physical fitness. Peggy was chagrined to note that looks had played a part as well; the physical description for Subject 13 read, "Dark but quite handsome, could easily pass for Russian. Voluptuous body type."

Howard had been confident in his procedure: a low, pulsing dose of Vita-Rays over a period of months, rather than a concentrated saturation. But he'd gotten it completely backwards—without Dr. Erskine's serum to initiate transformation, the subjects had been non-reactive. The project was shelved, to be revisited at a later date, with no further thought to the young women who had given their lives for this mad endeavour. By the time the Cold War had drawn to a close, they'd been all but forgotten.

But someone had obviously kept them in his thoughts.

Goddamn you, Howard, she thought, closing her eyes against tears of anger.

This was what it had all come down to, in the end: not the promise of a brave new frontier, but a man desperate to recreate a lost success, and a government spooked by the threat of nuclear war. Twenty women's lives in the balance. And she had survived—not through any exceptional amount of strength, or character, but because of one single, impulsive moment. Because she hadn't wanted Steve Rogers to die without knowing she cared for him.

Tony had reappeared when she was about halfway through the files. Showing more tact than she would have given him credit for, he didn't speak the moment she'd finished reading; he sat beside her on the bench for quite some time before either of them spoke.

"You never asked me how I found you," he said.

"Because I found you. I asked to see you, as soon as I found out who you were. I assumed my doctor had—"

Tony shook his head. "I don't think Fury wanted anyone to know you were there. I think he would have tried to feed you some bullshit, same as he did with Steve."

"What do you mean?"

"Steve didn't tell you? Fury faked him out. SHIELD built a replica of a hospital room, tried to convince him it was still the 1940s. When that didn't work, they told him that all his old war buddies were dead—including you."

Peggy felt a chill seep into her bones, and looked back at the stone effigy again. There was very little of Steve Rogers about it: no one who had ever seen him run could have envisioned him standing so awkwardly, and no one who had ever seen him smile could have made his mouth look so spare and grim.

She thought about when she'd first awakened, the knowledge that she was completely alone in an alien world. Steve had lived like that for over a year—in a place where his "death" had become part of the collective memory, and he himself was a cultural artifact. Peggy, at least, had the advantage of her anonymity.

"Fury had a file on you that said you were MIA, presumed dead. I saw it myself. The only reason I knew something was fishy was because of the bequest." He gazed off into the middle distance. "I was looking at getting my affairs in order, and I found the safe deposit box Howard had set up in your name. I got a little curious. He left you a lot of money, you know."

"Sod it," Peggy spat.

"I get where you're coming from—and believe me, no one is more in favour of sticking it to the old man than I am. But college isn't cheap."

Peggy said nothing. They were both staring up at the statue now, and Peggy suddenly, ardently wished that she could scratch out its lifeless eyes. She wondered if it might not be possible, now—whether her strength was really comparable to Steve's.

"This one's better than the one in Brooklyn," said Tony. "That one's holding a flag and looks like he might cry about it. This one just looks constipated."

"They did get the hands right," Peggy conceded.

Tony's eyebrows leapt.

"Spare me," she said archly. "I've had quite enough of you and your theories for one day."

"Hey, don't blame me, blame inductive reasoning. How was I supposed to know you and Steve never made the beast with two backs? You two obviously had a thing, and he doesn't strike me as the type who brags. Maybe you wanted a last hurrah." He sounded strangely bitter. Peggy couldn't tell where it was coming from.

"It was one kiss. I thought I was sending him to his death," she said, very quietly.

"But now that he's alive, the romance is gone?" Tony turned sharply towards her; his face was flushed, distorted by anger. "You only wanted him because he wasn't guaranteed to be around for long, is that it? Or do you just get off on—"

The noise of the slap she gave him resounded satisfyingly. Peggy supposed that it must be all the concrete; more trees would have muffled the echo. Her palm stung, but only for a second.

"Yep," said Tony, surprisingly amenable. "Okay." There was a red mark blooming across his cheekbone.

"Count yourself lucky," she said severely. "I've knocked men unconscious for less." She knew it hadn't really been her he was railing against, but that still didn't give him the right. "If you ever speak to me that way again—"

He nodded, a hand cupped over his jaw. "Got it."

"You aren't seriously hurt?"

"I've had worse." Something about the way he said it made Peggy think that he wasn't talking about his superhero exploits.

"When you said you were getting your affairs in order…"

"Oh yeah, okay," he said airily. "I found a grey hair one morning, and I panicked and started estate planning."

Peggy looked at him steadily and said, "I don't believe a single word of that."

Tony smirked, stroking the short hairs at his temple. "I know, right? My stylist is some kind of savant."

She wanted to say something else. An apology, perhaps, for all the times that she'd told him how like his father he was; or else, an expression of regret for whatever made Tony feel as though he needed to arm himself against the entire world, and lash out at those he cared for. Because she knew that feeling, all too well: the bitter kernel of doubt that sat in the pit of one's stomach, the savage impulse to strike before one could be struck. And the people who were invariably struck hardest were the ones who deserved it least.

Instead of saying any of this, Peggy made the small concession of being completely honest.

"I'm not sure whether I want to go to school or not," she told him. "I only said that to vex Fury. I've no idea what I ought to do." Quietly, she added, "I don't know how to live in this world of yours."

Tony bumped her shoulder affectionately with his. "Then you'll fit right in."