Author's Note: While I usually try to keep my stories in a consistent universe, this one will deviate a little from the events in Winter's End because I had a new idea that I really like, and I want to explore it.
Enjoy the ride. :D
Part 2
The Stork Club doesn't exist anymore, he finds out. It was torn down in 1966 and replaced with a park.
It's a nice enough park, if he's being fair.
It's just as well, he thinks, closing his new laptop with a solid click. Peggy can barely sit up these days; what was he going to do, take her out dancing at 96 years old? She can hardly even remember him one minute to the next... and every time she slips away again it's a dagger in his gut.
He almost regrets visiting her, after the first time he sees her so changed by the years that haven't so much as touched him. She's fragile, withered and weak.
It hurts him to see her this way, but he still comes back a few weeks later.
She gasps when she sees him at the door, a little bunch of daisies in his hand, and greets him tearfully again, shocked to see him alive before her; just like the first time. He swallows the jagged shards this leaves in his throat and smiles for her as best he can. It's his new pennance. He's never sure if she'll remember he's been there before or not, anytime he goes. It's just the chance he takes.
He wishes sometimes that Peggy was closer, but maybe it's better that she isn't. She's lived most of her life without him, and just because he's stuck out of time doesn't mean she is. There's no sense trying to pretend a whole lifetime didn't unfold without him while he slept, and more than that, it not right to.
He sighs, scrubbing a hand down his face. They knew each other a couple of years at best before he crashed into the ice. He's little better than a fling, a stranger. Something in him bleeds at that thought.
It ends up not mattering much. SHIELD has more than enough money to fund his flights to her nursing home in the British countryside anyway, and they've told him he has free access to it. He doesn't buy much with borrowed money -growing up poor during the worst depression in history drilled certain things into him- but this… this feels like a necessity.
Who knows how many more times he'll have the chance to see her before he loses that too?