Peggy's Letters 10
A/N A touch of Ultron here… And a nice wrap up for our Best Gal, Peggy Carter. And some comment on the Easter Eggs left at the end of 1.08. (chant with me… season 2 season 2 season 2!)
Steve and Bucky caught a cab back to Brooklyn and decided to take a walk to cool off their tempers from lunch before heading home.
"What an ass." Bucky muttered.
"Me or someone else?" Cap tried to smile.
"Punk. Shuddup." Bucky ribbed back, "You know, while he was fixing me I saw a lot of tech that looked banged up real bad. Like some of those things we saw when we went in for Fury."
"Those weird robot things?" Cap asked as he adjusted his bomber jacket with the file still inside.
"Yeah." James replied and then went silent. Steve wondered quietly what the hell Stark was up to and why Nick wanted it stopped so badly.
After a few blocks of quiet, only the city providing the soundtrack, Barnes broke it, "Those letters. They helping you any?"
Steve looked at his friend, a boyish smile over his lips, "Wait. You're asking me if I need help?"
"I can't stay broken forever. Neither can you." Bucky replied honestly.
"They are… interesting." Steve gazed down the street, "They have a lot of feeling to them. Like I'm there with her."
Barnes nodded in agreement, "Wanna get take out tonight and look over them together…. if that is not too intrusive."
Rogers regarded at his best friend and clapped him on the shoulder, "That would be fine with me. A little walk down memory lane for both of us."
"I want to see what I missed." James gave a sad smile..
"It's called Google." Cap replied and they turned the corner to their apartment.
The Thai take out was cleaned up and the two men sat at the kitchen table under the overhead light, beers in hand looking through the SSR file Steve had pilfered from Stark. Both of them knew that Stark knew they had it, but didn't care. In the background, a spinning vinyl record played some Big Band classics softly.
Bucky paged through the SSR reports of various missions Peggy and Jack Thompson had undertaken. Laughing in hindsight at some, growing quiet and introspective at others, he commented after finishing one case, "Leviathan was shut down. All thanks to Peggy."
"It appears so. I wonder how that went over at the office." Rogers answered with a knowing look, flipping over a few schematics in the file.
"I'd bet it wasn't a champagne reception for her." James commented dryly then he added after a swallow of beer, "Then the boogie men became Hydra." The bitterness in Bucky's voice was thinly veiled.
"Yeah. To think they put Zola in the same cage as Fennhoff." A frown formed over Steve's face like a thunderstorm recalling all the pain that Zola had wrecked over his and James' life in the past century.
"What was Phillips thinking?" Bucky eyes glazed a bit with the beer.
"Whatever Zola promised to tell them or make for them outweighed any caution that he was a double agent. Or he was an amazing liar." Steve reasoned although it was a pathetic line of logic, it had already passed as history.
"And Natasha." Bucky snorted with disgust, "What kind of man does that to children?"
"Make them natural born killers?" Rogers asked rhetorically, "A very sick and twisted one."
"And dead." James added.
"As far as I know you and I are the only time travelers here." Steve affirmed. "Here, put these files away. All they will do is raise your blood pressure. Read some of these instead." He held out the letters from Peggy reverently.
James looked at them and then at Steve his eyes dark, "You know, you don't have to do this."
"Yes. I do. Some of this is your history too. And I want you to see how I got along with the gal who never gave you more than a glance." Steve said with some satisfaction in his tone.
"For the record… She was the ONLY one to resist my charm." Bucky accepted the letters gently.
"If that's what you want to call it." Rogers agreed sarcastically, not raising his eyes from the last letter in the stack. He hadn't read this one yet.
July 1946
Dearest Steve,
I apologise for the passing of time between my last letter and this one but I have been rather busy. Imagine that, a woman busy at the SSR with tasks that have nothing to do with the alphabet or caffeinated beverages.
Jack Thompson is our Chief now, as it was expected to be and Howard Stark is back in our good graces. It was he I was protecting all this time because that fool of a man is one of three who actually respect me for who I am. With some hard work and determination, plus a shattered interrogation room window, I proved him innocent of conspiracy.
Howard searched for you in the North Atlantic for weeks after the Valkyrie went down. He found the Tesseract, but never your plane. That guilt of being so intelligent and gifted yet so helpless has remained with him for a very long time. It is only recently he has been able to put it to rest and resume something of a normal life, creating insane inventions for good, instead of war.
Steve paused. He and Howard were not fast friends, but more so than he and his son. Stark was part of Project Rebirth and without him, Rogers would still be some shrimp getting beat in back alleys. Cap rubbed his chin thoughtfully and reflected on their friendship. He was deeply touched that Stark had looked for him just to see if, perhaps, his friend was alive out there in the ice.
Leviathan is dead, but I worry about 'Dottie' or whatever her name may be if she has one. She fights like a hellcat, better than any man I've ever encountered and she got away. I'm not sure what her next target will be, or if she will 'snap out' of her programming. Either way, I will not rest well until she is captured.
Another matter on my radar are the files we uncovered not only about the Black Widow program, but something called the 'Winter Soldier'. There are vague references to creating almost automatonic men to fight for the Russians as if they were not made of flesh and blood. Fennhoff's notes are incomplete and ambiguous but I have a persistent feeling that it somehow is connected to the photo of your best friend, James Barnes, I found on the floor in the Russian lab. What that association is, I am not clear, being that Sgt. Barnes is deceased. It is a puzzling matter.
Rogers noted the pause in her handwriting and a subtle change in the slant of her letters suggesting that she may have become saddened at this point.
Jarvis gave me your last vial of blood. I owe him deeply for that gift as he used subterfuge to obtain it. He is a man of high standards and deep morals. I am honoured to have worked with him and to call him a friend.
I took the vial to the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset. There, I said goodbye with the last remaining part of you I possessed and poured the vial into the river. No longer could people pervert what you had been and what you are to me.
Steve closed his eyes and imagined the sight; the skyline not as big as today, the old river tugs navigating the waters, the bridge not clogged with earsplitting traffic. As a boy, he recalled how peaceful it was to be up on the bridge lifted away from the grime of the city and able to take the borough of Manhattan in as the last rays of sun melted into the west.
How lovely Peggy must have looked with her chocolate hair and red lips. A light breeze would have tickled her cheek. He was confident she didn't eulogize him with an outpouring of words but maybe just a phrase or two, perhaps. Rogers imagined that some of those words were 'I love you'. Cap felt hot tears pooling in his eyes but blinked them away. Bucky didn't seem to notice as he was deeply reading other letters.
I am starting a new chapter in my life with Agent Daniel Sousa. We have had a shared mutual respect for each other since my beginning with the SSR. He is a wonderful man with many of the same qualities you possessed, Steve. Daniel is a man of good heart and sense of purpose. I think that I like him well enough. We will have to see where this takes us.
In no way can any man replace you, Steve. You were always my one, my true and first love. I have always known my worth, but you were the first to appreciate it with honor, humility and grace. For that life lesson, I will forever be grateful.
I miss you Steve in so many ways. I look forward to the day we will meet again.
Always Yours,
Peggy Carter
Rogers pushed back from the table in disbelief, almost forgetting where he was. Bucky looked across at him, "You ok?"
"Why?" Rogers' voice cracked.
"You're crying." James observed, concerned.
Steve realized that the tears he thought he blinked back were streaming down his face like small rivers cutting canyons through his heart. With a lopsided smile and half sob, half laugh he put the letters down, "I don't know Buck. I don't know."
"Need some air?" James asked putting his reading on the table.
Steve took several deep breaths, wiping his hands up and down his face. "You know, I didn't think about her moving on. But right now, it just hit me." He glanced to where Peggy's black and white photo sat on the console table by the front door. "She did it. Without me."
"I know. It's hard to understand." Bucky sympathized.
"She lived her life. Lived it fully and completely. And I'm sure she did it with some damn style. I just hope that guy loved her as much as I do." Steve was openly crying now, head in his hands staring down at the floor, tears dripping off his nose.
"Maybe it's time for you to let go too, Steve." James stood up and went to his friend putting an arm around Rogers' shoulders that were shaking up and down with sobs.
"I miss her, Buck. I miss her so bad." Rogers mumbled between catching breaths.
"I know. Even I miss her and she never gave me time of day." James tried to lighten the mood.
A half hiccup and laugh came from Steve, who looked up at his best friend, eyes red rimmed and nose running, "I guess I got to let go."
"You've come full circle, just about, pal." Barnes let Cap go and gave him a brotherly shove in the shoulder. He handed Steve a box of tissues.
"Yeah, I just wish it didn't hurt like hell." Rogers agreed as he wiped his eyes. The record played "The Way You Look Tonight". Both men looked at the record player as if it was an ironic twist of fate for that song to be playing.
"Steve, I'm here for you. I have no plans of going anywhere." Bucky stated.
"I know, Buck. I know. We have each other. I'm grateful for that." Rogers replied.
"Punk." Bucky smirked.
"Jerk." Cap returned clearing his throat and gathering the letters together neatly, putting them into their envelope. Rising and going into his bedroom, he placed them in the special box that was below his shield holding all his WWII mementos. Goodbye, Darling, he thought to himself, and thank you.
A/N 2: for you young-uns, Angie gets excited for the phones in each room at the end of 1.08 because "back in the day" you had to BUY or RENT the PHONE FROM the phone company, in addition to paying to use it. It was only relatively recently a person could have any handset to use on their landline without paying some sort of gratuity to the phone company. So for Howard to have phones in EVERY room of his residence was quite lush.