Chapter Eleven

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"Pepper?"

She appeared in the doorway, wrestling with an armful of papers, two tablets, and her phone. "You've got a meeting with the vice -"

"Pepper, cancel the rest of my meetings today." Tony finished off his drink and set the empty glass on the counter, staring out the window.

His CEO sighed resignedly. "Tony, we've talked about this, you can't just do that kind of thing on a whim. Other people have schedules too, you have to…"

He cut in, talked over her like he always did. She was the only person who wouldn't give up when he tried to interrupt, and he loved it in her. "I know, I know, but this really can't wait. I need to go to Maine."

Pepper broke off in the middle of her sentence. "Oh. Now? Do you need…"

"To do this by myself." Tony finished her sentence for her. He fidgeted with some loose nuts and bolts in his pocket, and then turned to look at her. "Thanks though, Pep. You're wonderful."

She took a long breath, and leaned her forehead against his shoulder for a moment before drawing away. "Okay, but this is the last time I'll reschedule that man. Thursday morning at nine, and don't you dare…"

"Aww, Pepper, that's the middle of the night!"

"... cancel him again. Don't you dare."

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The elderly couple had been installed in the house on the Maine coastline after Howard and Maria Stark died. Tony hadn't been there in ages, though he paid regularly for the upkeep and, since Ana's stroke, the live-in caretakers.

He landed a hundred yards down the road so the noise of the repulsors wouldn't startle them, and collapsed the suit into briefcase form. It was too heavy to carry conveniently for long distances, but he was close enough to the house that it wouldn't be much of a problem.

"Anthony! What a pleasant surprise." Edwin Jarvis started to rise from his seat on the porch as Tony skipped up the stairs, but Tony waved him back.

"Sit down, J." He collapsed into the other rocking chair and put his feet up on the railing, enjoying the sound of the ocean waves not far away. "How's Mrs. Jarvis?"

Jarvis settled back into his seat, carefully adjusting the cushion behind his back. Years of service had stooped his shoulders and neck, but he still carried off dignity better than almost anybody else Tony had ever known. "She's resting at the moment, but doing quite well. Speaking of which, sir, we wanted to thank you for your gift of…"

"Yeah, yeah, never mind." Tony shifted his feet on the rail. "This house should've had one of those installed years ago. Raises property value and all that."

Jarvis watched him closely for a moment, and then returned his gaze to the ocean. He'd known young Anthony for the boy's entire life; he could tell when the boy had something on his mind, and the best course of action was to back off and wait. He knew his patience had paid off when the toes of Tony's shoes started twitching.

"I bet your vacuum's broken again, isn't it?" Tony interjected suddenly, flinging himself precipitously out of his chair, leaving it rocking wildly in his wake. "I bet it is," he repeated, only just remembering not to slam the screen door and wake Ana on his way into the house.

Three minutes later, he was back, dragging the brand new vacuum cleaner after him. Comfortably situated on the floor, he produced a screwdriver from some pocket or other, and started busily taking the thing apart. Jarvis smiled to himself. In the many years since he'd first met young Anthony, the boy had never been able to talk about things that disturbed him unless his hands were busy. It was a dead giveaway, but Tony himself had never noticed.

"Jarvis, tell me about Peggy Carter." It was a shot in the dark, but Tony figured it was a good one. Jarvis had stood by Howard's side since the war. Howard had known Peggy Carter, so chances were good Jarvis would have as well.

Jarvis blinked, his only concession to being startled by the question. He didn't answer right away, but his gaze grew distant for a moment or two.

"Miss Carter," he finally said decidedly, "was one of the most remarkable women I ever had the good fortune to meet." He nodded to himself for a moment, but then added after a short pause, "Regrettably, she was also the most stubborn."

"What happened to her?" Tony wouldn't make eye contact - he was busy taking the dust bag out of the vacuum cleaner, scattering fine dirt across his lap.

"She died in a plane accident not long after the war," Jarvis managed to say. Even though it had been over half a century, it was hard to get the words out.

Something snapped, and Tony grumbled under his breath about cheap plastic pieces made in China. "Why didn't I ever hear about her, if you two were such good friends?" he finally asked.

Jarvis folded his long, knobby hands carefully, a smile quirking at the corners of his mouth. "Don't you remember all those stories I used to tell you when you were little?"

Tony finally looked up, confused. "Which stories? Like, Goldilocks and the Three Bears stories?"

"Of course not, sir. You never could stand those stories. I mean the other stories, the ones I used to tell you if you promised not to tell your father about them." Jarvis watched his young master's face carefully, and saw the exact moment when the light dawned.

"No, I - wait. The Miss Carver stories?" Tony's face was open and blank with astonishment, and vacuum parts scattered as he gesticulated with his hands. "The ones where you and Miss Carver went out and saved the world before nine-o-clock? Those stories? Don't tell me those were true, Jarvis."

Jarvis looked as much like the cat that had caught the canary as any ninety-something-year-old man possibly could. "While I confess I took some liberties with names and plot lines, the basis of the stories was absolutely true. Agent Carter got me into quite a lot of trouble, but she always got me out again, and we saved each other's lives a number of times." He trailed off, nodding absently as he looked back into the past.

Tony was still not quite over his astonishment that the fictional heroine of all his favorite bedtime stories was currently lying unconscious in his personal medical center, and it was several minutes before he got his thoughts back together again.

"So why didn't my fa - why didn't Howard want me to know about her?"

Jarvis's creased face fell into deep lines of sorrow as he remembered. "Her death was hard on all of us, but especially on your father."

Tony looked up from under his eyebrows to gauge the effect of his next question. "Was she one of his girlfriends?"

If Jarvis had been any younger, Tony would have gotten a spanking for suggesting such a thing. As it was, the older man straightened indignantly, speaking in his crispest, most displeased tones. "Anthony Stark, she most certainly was not. She was the only woman who ever stood up to him. If your father could have had a sister, it would have been her."

Tony abruptly dropped all pretense of fixing the vacuum. "So she was a friend. Howard lived through WWII, he lost lots of friends. Cap, Bucky, Willard, I heard their stories; they were all he ever talked about. So why didn't he ever tell me about Peggy Carter?"

Jarvis readjusted the pillow behind his back, deciding how much to tell, and finally sighed, meeting Tony's eyes directly.

"Your father took her death as a personal failure. I do not believe he ever forgave himself."

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Jarvis knew something had gone wrong as soon as he stepped back into the radio tower. Ten minutes before, when he had discreetly excused himself to get the sandwiches from the car, Howard and Peggy had been sniping back and forth like normal. Now, however, Howard had half risen and was gripping the edge of the table tightly with his good hand.

"Not again," he panted desperately, not even noticing Jarvis' presence. "Please, please, not again."

Peggy's voice crackled faintly over the speaker. "Howard, we've tried it, we've tried every switch."

Sandwiches suddenly forgotten, Jarvis stood frozen against the wall, helpless and aghast at the disaster unfolding around him. For a moment, he was thrown back to the day when Peggy had talked a delusional Howard safely out of the sky. She had been calm then, even in the face of disaster. She was still calm now, but he could hear the edge of tension in her voice. Howard paced back and forth, a bundle of nervous, hysterical energy as he frantically tried to figure out what had gone wrong.

"Marry a nice girl… invent all those marvelous things you used to tell us about… move on…"

Her voice cut out, and Howard almost launched himself across the table. "Peggy? Peggy? Peg, talk to me!"

Heartbeats later, the radio crackled and went dead. Jarvis closed his eyes for a moment, and realized that for as long as he lived, he would never be able to forget Howard's despairing cry.

"He would not stop trying to raise her for an hour, and he refused to leave the radio upon request." Jarvis' voice was heavy with sorrow, even after all those years. Tony bowed his head, unwilling to watch as the old man relived the last awful moments.

Howard stayed by the radio through the night, regardless of efforts to move him. At nine-o-clock, Jarvis went to the phone and mechanically dialed Ana.

"I'm afraid I won't be in tonight," he explained to the concerned woman on the other end. "There's been a - situation. No, I'm quite all ri..."

His voice abruptly choked off, which was vaguely surprising, but he squeezed the telephone tightly and got himself at least partly back under control. "I'm not hurt. I'll call again in the morning and let you know where I am."

"Go, Jarvis."

The hoarse voice momentarily startled him, until he realized it was Howard. The man still held the radio receiver with his shaking hand, and his eyes were trained vacantly on the wall, but he tipped his head ever so slightly toward the door. "Go."

Jarvis hung the telephone up. "I would rather not, sir."

They sat in silence until morning, only broken every half hour when Stark sent out his call signal. In between, he sat rigid, strained far past the breaking point.

As dawn broke, Howard groped once more for the receiver. "Peggy," he rasped, and his mouth worked as he tried to form words. He never did, dropping the receiver with a crash. For a long moment, he stood bowed over the table, gripping at the edge, suddenly old before his time. Then he wheeled and staggered to the door.

"I need a drink, Jarvis. Take me somewhere - I need to get drunk, I need to get drunk."

Following him out, Jarvis stooped and carefully picked up the fallen receiver. For a moment he hesitated, finger tightening on the button until he pressed it down with a decisive click and raised it.

"Miss Carter," he paused and then straightened his back to attention. "It has been an honour."

He released the button, gently put the receiver back into place, and left the room.

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"He was never quite the same after that," Jarvis remembered, voice shaking a little with age and quiet emotion. "For weeks, he cycled down a self-destructive course. More than once, I feared for his life or sanity. Later, we discovered one of the airstrip employees had sabotaged the plane. We never discovered who he worked for, but I would suspect Hydra. While Howard still blamed himself for overlooking it, the knowledge that it had not been a malfunction helped him begin to recover."

For a moment he paused, looking down at young Anthony. He was older now than his father had been, way back then, but the physical resemblance was striking.

"He was a changed man though," Jarvis finally continued. "If he had been a perfectionist before, he was doubly so afterwards, and far less trusting. Still, I believe Peggy Carter was the best influence he ever had. He married your mother, he pushed forward the boundaries of his field, he did everything she had begged him to do. I know he never forgot her, and his failure haunted him until the day he died."

There was a long silence. Tony had gone back to the vacuum, working diligently to hide his face. Somehow he couldn't help but put himself in his father's shoes. What if it had been Pepper or Bruce or Rhodey in that plane, and he was the one stranded at home, without the suit, without any way to help them but to stay on the phone and hear them die? What kind of a man would he have become after that kind of experience?

"Did he ever look for her?" he finally asked offhandedly, rooting busily through the heap of plastic parts for a screw.

"Of course he did," Jarvis patiently replied, "but it took months. He would have gone on his own, but was prevented. Winter storms started early, and the only two rescue teams that got off the ground crashed and needed to be rescued themselves. By the next spring, new snow had fallen, and they were never found."

Tony could guess who had stopped Howard. SHIELD would not have agreed to have their co-founder and chief inventor go gallivanting off on a suicide mission. He nodded, beginning to reassemble the vacuum and all the dreadful little plastic pieces. Honestly, what kind of quality was this?

"If I may ask," Jarvis interposed after a few minutes, "why the sudden interest in Miss Carter?"

That question took a lot of consideration. Tony wasn't sure how much to say, especially if SHIELD was tracking his movements, which he hated to admit was a possibility. The last thing he wanted was to tell Jarvis something that would make the elderly man any more of a target than he already was. Still, he'd been so broken up over her death… He finally gave in a little.

"Global warming has its uses." He busied himself hunting for the other little screw, not wanting to look at Jarvis's face. The soft intake of breath told him exactly when the old man figured out the meaning behind his words.

There was the oddest tone in his voice when Jarvis finally spoke. "You don't mean they found the wreckage?"

Tony looked up, just to make sure the man wasn't having a heart attack. "They did, and called me because it had an experimental version of the Stark logo on it, one I'd messed around with as a kid."

"Ah, yes, the hexagon." Jarvis' memory was impressive; nearly as good as his AI namesake. "He was so proud of the new logo, but he could never stand the sight of it afterwards."

"Yeah, tell me about it." Tony distinctly remembered his father's less than stellar reaction to his early use of it. He'd always thought it was indifference to his creations; never considered it might be the reaction to a painful memory. Suddenly he found himself looking at their interactions with different eyes, trying to make sense of them in light of the new information he had.

Jarvis' voice broke through his reverie. "Will there be any sort of memorial service, sir? I would very much like to attend." The old man was leaning forward, trying to hide his evident interest behind a mask of diffidence, but he was doing a poor job. Jarvis had never been very good at lying.

Tony, on the other hand, was excellent at the art of misleading.

With an internal wince, he shrugged apologetically. "Sorry, Jarvis. The ceremony was unofficial, short, and quick, over in England. No big fanfare." It wasn't exactly a lie, but it was nowhere near the whole truth.

Jarvis, resigned but not especially surprised, leaned back in his chair again. "I understand. Thank you for telling me. We were very good friends, she and I. I'm glad you know now; I would hate to think her forgotten when I die."

Tony snapped the last piece of the vacuum back into place, and looked up, tracing the older man's profile with his eyes, trying to imagine him as a young adventurer saving the world with Peggy Carter before or after nine-o-clock. For a moment, he almost managed. Then - it was gone.

Hopping up briskly, he gave the vacuum an experimental twirl around his feet. "No worries, Jarvis. I think I'll remember her pretty well. What did you pay for this thing, anyway? Piece of junk, needs to be replaced. I bet I've designed a better one in my sleep somewhere. I'll send you a prototype for testing."

A smile spread across Jarvis' face as he watched young Anthony leave. He knew it was the closest that Tony Stark would ever get to saying "thank you." Slowly, haltingly, he got to his feet and reached for his cane before heading inside.

Ana would wake up from her nap soon, and he wanted to tell her that Peggy Carter's body had been found at last.

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Wow, we're roughly half-way through this story! I've been playing patchwork with the last few chapters, and I keep getting really excited for you to read them.

Thanks for the reviews, people. I love hearing what you think. Yes, you.

Thoughts?