Note: Thanks to all the people who've read this story so far and added it to their favorites list. I'd like to give special thanks to Melibells, Garnet86, AoiKuroNekoSan, M.H.T. of R. and Pati G W Black, for leaving reviews. I love receiving feedback (even if it's to tell me you don't like something about my writing 'cause that helps me make the next chapter better) so please feel free to make this story a two-way exercise…

A change of tone here. Back to the real world. The one without super-ego's exploding all over the place.

X

Chapter 9

"It wasn't your fault, Steve," Peggy said, her voice tired and thin.

"No," Steve said. "I know. It's just…"

"You never asked for this," Peggy said. "You never asked for any of this." Peggy reached out with one frail hand, her skin parchment thin and cool, and took his hand in hers. "Stark always feared you'd balk after Doctor Erskine died."

Steve thought back to his early days, gate-crashing every enlistment station in New York trying to get somebody to overlook his poor athletic abilities and asthma.

"Actually," he said, giving the first hint of a smile he'd had in days. "I distinctly remember I did ask for this. The gods must be laughing about giving me my wish."

Peggy laughed, a mere echo of the brassy laugh she'd possessed back in 1945, but it was still Peggy's laugh. She coughed and lifted her oxygen mask to her blue-tinted lips, snorting as she both gasped for breath and laughed all at the same time. Her exuberance in the face of her own mortality caused Steve to see his insecurities for what they really were. Insignificant. Peggy laughed at him, and it caused him to laugh at himself along with her. She'd always had that effect on him. Perspective. Steve plugged away at whatever idealistic goal he'd set his mind to achieving and never gave up, while Peggy viewed everything with a pragmatic eye. Together … they'd been stronger.

"You okay?" Steve asked, concerned when she clutched the mask to her face a bit longer than the previous time he'd visited. He waited while she calmed her coughing before answering him.

"Of course I'm not okay," Peggy snapped. "I'm 94 years old and dying. But I'll manage."

Her voice was filled with humor, but in her eyes was a mixture of weariness and longing. Peggy was tired of this world and anxious to cross into the next one, to be reunited with a husband and siblings who'd long since passed before her. Steve thought back to the young Lieutenant who'd died, who'd claimed to see a woman beckoning him to a place where soldiers got to go when they died. If such a place really existed, he knew Peggy would receive a hero's welcome. He was certain of it.

His thoughts turned back once more to the Chitauri ambush. He'd come to visit Peggy, not pick her brains, but she was the only other person still alive who'd seen first-hand what happened when the Schutzstaffel, the German SS, took over a village. Only this time, instead of using blonde-haired, blue-eyed white supremacists for hosts, puppets, whatever the Chitauri were doing to their victims, they were using blonde-haired Aboriginal men.

"How's your friend?" Peggy asked, tapping his hand to bring his mind back into the same room as her.

"Natasha?" Steve said. His mind travelled back to the last time he'd seen her. "Nothing's changed. Banner isn't sure if she's really brain dead, or if they injected something into her brain to sedate her higher brain functions that isn't showing up on the PET scan. He said her bodily functions are moving too smoothly for it to be brain death, but they're reading no electrical activity at all. Not even enough to generate the reflexes she still has left."

Peggy sat quietly, as though turning over something in her mind.

"You should tell your friend Stark to do a little archeological dig in his father's basement," Peggy said. "I think he'll find things that might be useful."

"Stark!" Steve snorted. "Like father, like son. Although personally, I think the father was a better man."

Peggy's faded brown eyes crinkled around the edges, her expression clouded with some emotion Steve hadn't quite been able to nail down whenever he mentioned the elder Stark's name. Not for the first time, he wondered why Peggy had left Stark's employ after the war and deliberately made herself scarce.

"I think you judge the younger Stark too harshly," Peggy said softly. "I can't imagine what it was like for him to grow up under Howard's shadow. It's why I…"

Peggy trailed off. Steve opened his mouth to ask the question he'd asked himself a thousand times, and then shut it again. It was none of his business.

"No," Peggy said as though reading his thoughts. She gave him a grin that was so like the sarcastic grin she'd had in 1945 that for a moment, it was almost as if the younger version of Peggy was sitting before him. "That wasn't why I left."

Steve cocked one eyebrow, weighing whether to ask the million dollar question. So why had Peggy gone so far to disappear that all record of her had vanished along with her. Peggy looked down at her hands, her fingers trailing over the liver spots marring her skin. Steve waited for her to gather her thoughts.

"Every man in the unit that stormed the inner sanctum of Red Skull's fortress was killed," Peggy said at last. "The only evidence we had he possessed alien technology was your last radio transmission saying you were going after some sort of power supply. There was nothing left but shrapnel from whatever technology had been in that room before Red Skull blew the place to hell."

"I wouldn't know," Steve said, his tone low. "I wasn't around to be debriefed."

"No you weren't," Peggy said. She paused, looking at her hands as if, just for a moment, she didn't recognize the wrinkled claws that time had ravaged. "Stark … the elder one … he'd been going downhill for quite some time. The paranoia. The obsessive rituals. The mood swings. His fear of germs. It was my job to help him keep it all together and make sure the world didn't find out the boy genius had a few screws loose. But after we lost you, he got downright scary. Ranting about alien conspiracies and tessaract cubes when all we had was your last radio transmission. And then…"

"Then what?" Steve asked.

"He'd been after me to marry him for years," Peggy said. "Always told him no. Howard didn't have it in him to be faithful. But after your plane went down, he became … callous. As if he wanted to taunt me you were gone. Howard always had an element of unbalance about him, but he'd never been deliberately cruel."

"I'm sorry," Steve said.

Peggy looked up at him, tears visible in her eyes beneath her coke-bottle glasses.

"He was jealous of a dead man," Peggy said, her voice a hoarse whisper. "I'd always been able to handle it when he bought off any other man I had an interest in or chased him off. But then he tried to imply you'd done something wrong pursuing Red Skull and the loss of the alien technology was your fault. He tried to falsify your service record so they wouldn't posthumously give you the Congressional Medal of Honor."

The Congressional Medal of Honor. The highest award a soldier in the armed forces could be given, often after making the ultimate sacrifice. Their life. The medal had been tucked amongst his few personal effects, along with the engagement ring. Both Stark's had a habit of viewing what was theirs as … theirs. He could see why Stark may have been jealous after discovering there had been more between him and Peggy than either had let on.

Had Stark told Peggy about the ring? No. He didn't think so. Especially given this new piece of information. The yellowed packing log which had been tucked into the small sealed trunk of personal effects marked 'classified' had been signed by Howard Stark personally. It was an odd duty for one so … important.

It was in the past. A past neither of them had any power to go back and change. Peggy's fatalistic acceptance had a way of calming his desire to obsess over things that had occurred 67 years ago as if they had happened yesterday because, for him, they had happened yesterday. It quelled some of that frantic urgency clamoring in Steve's chest to do something. To go back and fix things that had happened so long ago, most people in the world had forgotten these wrongs had ever even existed.

"So I quit," Peggy said. "I had enough connections from my days with the Office of Foreign Service to make sure even he couldn't find me unless I wanted to be found."

So in the end, Stark had lost Peggy anyways. Even though she hadn't known about the ring. They sat in a comfortable silence, Steve's hand placed reassuringly over hers. His eyes wandered up to the pastel portrait Peggy's niece had sketched on the wall. Not a bad likeness. He'd seen plenty of idealistic sketches done by adoring fans of the myth called Captain America back before most people had possessed cameras, but this was the first sketch anybody had ever done of him. A nobody passed in a hallway.

"She's very talented," Peggy said, her sharp mind following the direction of his gaze.

"Yes, she is," Steve acknowledged. "She even captured my 'helmet head' that day from wearing a motorcycle helmet.

They both laughed. Combing his hair had been the last thing on his mind that first visit, but he'd made a point of running a comb through his hair every visit since then. With her too-sharp artist's eye, the last thing he wanted was some other damning detail memorialized for posterity in one of her sketches. He hadn't crossed paths with her since, though, which was disappointing. Steve tended to visit mid-morning, while Peggy's niece was still a student.

"What's it like?" Peggy interrupted his thoughts. "Babysitting a whole gaggle of super-egos?"

Steve gave her a wry smile. "Babysitting is the operative word."

"It gives you a new appreciation for what I did back then," Peggy said. "Doesn't it?"

"You only had to babysit Howard Stark," Steve said. His smile disappeared. "And me. Although all I ever wanted to do was serve. Here's a mission. Rally the men. Do the mission. Mission done. You slap each other on the back and move on to the next one. But with these guys…"

His words trailed off. Charismatic leaders had a way of rallying the men around them and inspiring them to put themselves in harm's way, but a true charismatic leader, like Howard Stark had been, or his son was like now, often took unnecessary risks. They were so wrapped up in their own sense of invulnerability that they often forgot the troops they sent into harm's way were not bulletproof.

If anything, that failing of human leadership had gotten worse while he'd been asleep. In 1945, all but the highest ranking commanders fought at their sides. If the troops got shot, they did too. Heck! Even Old Blood and Guts had put on his flak helmet and ridden out amongst his troops to keep up morale while storming the coasts of Normandy! But today? Today decisions were made from distant command centers using spy satellites, unmanned drones, and generals so removed from the troops they commanded that spotting one on a battlefield was about as likely as spotting a unicorn.

The lives of soldiers had always been chess pieces. Pawns used to achieve objectives in a larger war. But nowadays soldiers were electronic ghosts in a machine like those training videos Fury had tried to get him to use instead of training for real with the enlisted men. As though you could just reboot a soldier and create a new one out of thin air? At least in chess, the generals had always understood you only got so many pawns and then it was game over!

"They mean well," Steve finally said, realizing Peggy had let him think things through without interrupting his thoughts. "They just … I guess I shouldn't complain. At least they get their hands dirty."

The younger Stark had, after all, come up with an inexpensive, lightweight version of Steve's bulletproof Captain America suit for S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to wear. Something as mundane as body armor for ordinary soldiers had been beneath the elder Stark's notice. Perhaps Peggy was right about the son?

Peggy gave him an enigmatic smile and raised her oxygen mask to breathe. Her health was deteriorating. Her lips and fingernails had the bluish cast indicative of oxygen no longer getting to where it was needed. Steve visited every chance he could to reconnect with the remnant of what he had left of her, the friendship which had survived a 67-year separation. That frantic urge to keep her here clamored in his chest, but even if he did discover some secret fountain-of-youth, Peggy didn't want to stay. Her eyes were already turned into the next world and the family she wished to rejoin, just like Lieutenant Hernandez's had been. The Peggy who sat before him was the echo of someone he had once loved, and lost. It hurt, but slowly he was beginning to accept the loss of the dream.

"What are you doing with your spare time?" Peggy asked.

"It's pretty boring," Steve said. "Days, often weeks of doing nothing but trying to keep in shape. Then you get a call from Nick Fury and all hell breaks loose. And then you get sent back to boredom once again."

"Ah!" Peggy laughed. "The life of a soldier. At least that much hasn't changed."

"Yeah," Steve said. He looked down at his boots which weren't military issue combat boots, but still looked like them anyways. His next words came out as almost a mumble. "But at least back then they'd stick me in with the enlisted troops to endure the tedium along with them. Nowadays…"

"The last thing you want to do is go hang out with super-egos in your spare time?" Peggy guessed.

"Yeah," Steve said. "Clint and Natasha were the only ones I could really relate to, and they were always wrapped up in each other. Now Natasha's brain dead and Clint hasn't accepted it yet."

Peggy nodded.

"Why'd you buy that old gym?" Peggy asked. "I'd thought the guys who used to beat you up back when you were still a ninety pound weakling used to work out there?"

"They did," Steve said.

He didn't really wish to reveal the hare-brained impulse which had caused him to plunk down his entire 67-year back salary and buy the dilapidated old building on a whim. He'd driven past the old neighborhood, seen it was for sale, and bought it on the spot. Peggy gave him an expectant look, her enigmatic smile letting him know she wasn't going to let him off the hook. Impulsivity, they both knew, had never been a failing of his.

"When I was trying to join the Army and they wouldn't let me," Steve said. "I went to that gym and tried to join so I could get some boxing lessons. The owner laughed me right out of the place. Said I didn't have what it took."

Peggy tilted her head to one side, her brown eyes sparkling with interest. "Go on."

"I shouted back at him that he didn't know nothing about what it meant to be a fighter," Steve said. He gave Peggy a guilty smile. "I told him that one day I'd be such a good fighter that I'd own that place and he'd be working for me."

Peggy laughed, pulling her mask to her face to gasp for breath.

Steve's smile disappeared as the empty feeling that had taken up residence in his chest since the day he'd woken up in the future reasserted its presence.

"Too bad the guy isn't still around to see I'm now the boss," Steve said. He looked down on the ground. "It's nothing but an empty shell." He didn't add 'just like my life.'

"You should reopen it," Peggy said.

"I get called out at weird times to do the Avengers thing," Steve said. "I couldn't give the patrons the kind of consistency they deserve."

"Hire someone," Peggy said. "A manager. Someone like you used to be. Some skinny guy with lots of spunk who'll inspire all the kids out there getting beaten up by the bullies. Maybe dealing with them will help you deal with these Avengers you have to work with?"

"That's a good idea," Steve said. A mission. What his life had been lacking since he'd woken up in a different century than he'd gone to sleep in. "Peggy … you're a genius."

Their conversation turned to Peggy's friend who'd recently retired from Stark Industries and the kinds of potentially alien 'bones' the elder Stark may still have buried deep within the bowels of Stark Enterprises. Peggy procured a promise he'd look into whatever secrets lurked in the Stark Industries basement.

A knock on the door interrupted their conspiracy…

"Come in," Peggy called out.

Peggy's granddaughter, Bernice, poked her head into the door.

"Mrs. Schnieder said you have company … oh!" Bernice said. "Hi. Again. I mean…"

"Hi," Steve said. He noted the differences between Peggy and her granddaughter. Where Peggy was self-assured to the point of being smug, even in old age, her granddaughter was much more skittish.

"If you want … I can come back … um …" Bernice stammered.

"Nonsense," Peggye said. "You took two busses and a subway to get here."

Peggy was tiring from his lengthy visit. It would be easier on her not to have to entertain two guests at once.

"I was just about to leave," Steve said. He rose and gave Peggy a kiss on the cheek, noting how cool her skin felt beneath his lips. He paused, not enough room for two people to pass in the narrow space between the foot of Peggy's bed and the wall. Bernice squeezed past him. The subtle scent of Lux, a soap from his generation which he'd thought was no longer manufactured, filled him with a longing for home. For a moment, it felt as though her bare flesh had brushed against his bare flesh, not just cloth touching cloth. Bernice glanced up, her eyes startled, as though she had noticed the spark of electricity which seemed to leap between them, as well.

"Ex-excuse me," Bernice said. She froze, her chest pressed against his as she looked into his eyes like a deer in the headlights. Her pupils grew so wide her eyes appeared nearly black. "Um … sorry … not a lot of room here." She finished squeezing past, pulling her artists portfolio to cover her heart as though it were a shield. An errant thought jumped into Steve's mind. What it would be like if it was his shield she wielded instead of the large, flat portfolio he suspected would be filled with more sketches of naked men?

Steve glanced up at his likeness taped to the wall in the midst of the jungle of photographs of Peggy'sfamily. As though he was one of them now. He glanced at Peggy, and then her granddaughter. With everyone he'd once known now dead and in the grave, Peggy was all he had left to anchor him in the bizarreness his life had become.

"Nice picture," Steve said, not sure how to acknowledge her talent without sounding like he was acting conceited. "I guess … well … Peggy's happy with it."

The color crept up to Bernice's cheeks as she avoided eye contact. She pretended to suddenly be very interested in her shoes.

"Grandma was so happy her old friend's grandson had taken up his mission that I thought she might like it," Bernice stammered. "All my friends … um … grandma said I'm not supposed to talk about you to anyone. "

So that was the cover story Peggy had given her family? He was his own grandson? He met Peggy's eyes. Peggy smiled as she gave him a conspiratorial wink. She'd warned him she kept most of her family in the dark about what, exactly she had done back when they'd walked in the same period of history.

"You know I can't … um …" Steve said. He gave Peggy a pleading look to help him out. He'd never been any good at cloak and dagger deception and he had absolutely no idea what else Peggy had told her all-too-perceptive granddaughter about him.

"You know that information is classified, Bernice," Peggy said, her tone patient and firm like a teacher scolding a preschooler. "Don't get Steve in trouble or we'll have Mr. Fury in here yelling at us again."

"Don't want to have that happen," Bernice said. Her full red lips curved up in a smile that was eerily like Peggy's. She plunked down in the seat he had just vacated, doing her best to avoid eye contact as her cheeks turned flaming red.

"I'll be in to see you in a few days," Steve said to Peggy.

Peggy shot him a friendly smile, but already she'd turned her attention to whatever Bernice had carried in with the enormous art portfolio she always had tucked under one arm. He was dismissed. Her attention turned to whatever new fire burned for her attention. It didn't matter that the command center Peggy now ran centered in her nursing home room instead of a command center full of four-star generals or that she was now old and frail. Peggy still liked to be in charge. It felt … reassuring.

Feeling better than he had in a long time, Steve strode out to the parking lot to mount his vintage Indian motorcycle. With a kick of his heel, he rode the wind home.