While both Tony and Steve had offered her a place to live in New York, Peggy simply could not make her home there. Nor could she return to England, both places had featured too heavily in daydreams never meant to be. So she chose to find a place in Washington D.C. that would allow her to easily return to New York if the Avengers were needed, access SHIELD resources if she needed them, and kept her close to her newly discovered family. Her nephew, James Martin Carter Rogers, was born in 1962, seventeen years after Peggy went into the ice, over twenty years since she and her parents had been told Michael had died. Twenty years of a life lived primarily as a brainwashed enemy agent, used by wartime allies turned cold war enemies, to spy, sabotage, and kill. It was still hard for Peggy to wrap her head around Michael's story, she simply couldn't picture her beloved brother as the man in the SHIELD file Steve had given her. It was much easier, however, for her to believe Michael would sacrifice his own life to protect that of his child's. Peggy had no doubt that the man was Michael's son. She could see Michael in James Martin's features, in his eyes, he hard those dark Carter eyes, just like her, and so did his daughter.
Meeting James Martin, which is what Peggy had chosen to call him, was strange to the say the least. Peggy had been twenty-one when she'd been given the super soldier serum, she'd been twenty-four when she went into the ice. Though chronologically she was ninety-two, she looked as if she were the same age as Sharon, while her brother's son appeared to be the elder of them. While he looked like her biological brother, James Martin reminded her a lot of her chosen brothers in the way he acted, spoke, and even laughed. He was very much Steve's and Bucky's son, and that warmed her heart. James Martin was a university professor and his wife, Sharon's mother, was a nurse. They were lovely and had welcomed Peggy home with warmth and joy.
Peggy's apartment was a rooftop loft with small garden spaces, half an upstairs the looked out over the open floor plan of the rest of the space, brick walls, and a spiral staircase that Sharon and Phil helped her furnish and decorate. Every morning, just as the sun was coming up, she went for a run through the city, which is how she met Sam Wilson. Sam's a veteran from a different war, but he still understood her in ways that Sharon, Phil, Tony, even Natasha couldn't. He understood why she had plywood between her mattress and box spring, the nightmares that woke her covered in sweat in the middle of the night, and her reluctance to attend gatherings of other World War 2 vets. Though she does give in on that last part eventually and is soon a regular face at the V.A. center. Slowly but surely, Peggy builds a life for herself as she adjusts to living in the modern age.
Although her introduction to things in this new modern age she found herself in wasn't always smooth or gentle. Sometimes the differences in the way things were now slapped her unexpectedly in the face.
She awakens with a gasp, her body covered in sweat and shivering from the cold that lingered in her mind and chest from the nightmare. She's gotten maybe three hours of sleep, and she knows that's all she's going to get so Peggy gets out of bed and heads downstairs to her kitchen to make tea. With a good strong cup of Barry's slightly sweet with a healthy splash of milk, Peggy settles on her sofa and reaches for the television remote. She turns on the wall mounted television for background noise as she pulls out her files. The Avengers were a hammer and chisel, if they were going to uncover what had led to the nuke launched at New York, she would need a team that allowed her to be a hidden blade. That team consisted of Sharon, Phil, Natasha, a woman Phil trusted unconditionally named May, and Sharon's recommendation of a woman named Morse since Fury would be lost without Maria Hill at his side. They'd managed to discover the identities of the World Security Council, and Peggy was studying them, their lives, their pasts, every single aspect of their existence no matter how large or how small.
With tea in hand, her toes scrunching into the sofa cushion under a throw pillow, and a soft blanket tugged on over her shoulders, Peggy looked over the file for Louise Hawley, who as it turned out was the daughter of Pamela Hawley, a Red Cross nurse Nick Fury Sr. had dated for a time during the war. Peggy looks up from the file from time to time, her gaze drifting over to the television where it would appear some kind of medical drama was on. It was the one Sharon and Phil talked about, the one with McDreamy, McSteamy, and the Twisted Sisters. The scene playing out on screen seemed to be taking place in a bar, where a dark haired, dark eyed, curvy woman in a leather jacket appears to be upset about something. Peggy sort of watches as the rather attractive woman flees to the bathroom and is soon followed by a cute blonde with short bouncy hair and bright blue eyes. The blonde says some sweet things to cheer the brunette up, and the more she talks the more Peggy pays attention because there seems to be something more happening between the two women, but she can't quite put her finger on it. Peggy takes a sip of her tea just as the attractive brunette laughs while asking for the names of people who might be attracted to her, and then Peggy chokes on her tea as she watches in disbelief as the cute blonde kisses the attractive brunette. It was the kind of kiss that had Peggy blushing, followed by the kind of smiles she'd seen only in private, secret, moments.
This discovery leads Peggy down an internet rabbit hole full of google searches and YouTube videos. Apparently, finding a person of your own gender attractive, loving someone of the same sex, was no longer a dark, sinful, shameful, illegal secret. Being Out and Proud was a thing, there had been riots, and movements, and changes to the laws. There were parades every summer, and flags, and same sex couples on television, and celebrities with partners and children, and the kind of happy lives Peggy had only ever fantasized about. She misses her run, and her morning at the V.A which prompts a text from Sam wanting to know if she was alright. Peggy apologies and reassures Sam she's fine, she'd just gotten caught up in some research. Then she calls Steve to tell him off for not telling her about all of this sooner. Not that she would need to act on this new information any time soon. She was too focused on getting her life back on track to deal with matters of the heart. There was still so much she needed to learn about the world she was now living in before she even thought of pulling her heart out of its little shadow box of pain and grief. Her heart and soul still belonged to Angie, and for now Peggy would just leave them with her. But knowing of the possibilities was exciting.
"Say, Cap, I've been thinkin'." Sam says a few days later as they're leaving the V.A. center after a group meeting.
"Oh dear." Peggy replies, a soft, warm, but sad smile on her painted lips. Time spent at the V.A. was very bittersweet for her. While she enjoyed the camaraderie of being with other vets, being around them was also a reminder of the passage of time she hadn't been a part of, as well as evidence that her war had not been the last war. Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq, and a dozen or more other wars or 'military conflicts' happened while she was away, and Peggy was starting to understand the anger and resentment her father felt when her war broke out. His war, the Great War, had been meant to be the war to end all wars.
"You're funny." Sam says deadpan at her teasing. "Anyway, I was thinking that it wouldn't be too hard or too much trouble to get a reunion of the 107th together before the museum exhibit's grand opening. Maybe set up a private sneak peek before the big shindig, that way you're not slammed by all the stuff that's bound to come up."
"And by stuff you mean the emotional baggage that comes with severe PTSD and Survivor's Guilt?" Peggy raises an eyebrow at Sam. She'd told him to stop using kid gloves with her, but he was her friend, so he continued to be gentle about such things anyway. "I'm not emotionally stunted, Samuel. I'm English." She grumbled at him. "Just say what you bloody need or want to say."
"Ok, I think you should face the exhibit and your men on your own, before the official party and publicity." Sam replies but their conversation is cut off as they near the parking lot. There's a woman with red hair, in tight fitting jeans, and a leather jacket leaning against a restored Harley Davidson Liberator that Sam knows is Peggy's.
"Hey Grandma!" Natasha calls out to Peggy with a smirk. "We gotta go. If we leave now, we could catch the early bird special after."
Peggy replies with something rude in Russian that makes Natasha laugh.
"Friend of yours?" Sam asks while eyeing the redhead.
"Not sure yet." Peggy admits before saying goodbye to Sam and walking over to her bike and Natasha. She says something else in Russian as she mounts the bike, and Natasha laughs again as she gets on behind her.
Bobbi Morse was a talented undercover agent. She'd been able to uncover that Alexander Pierce was the one pulling the strings at the World Security Council, and before him it had been a man named Malick. The two men, and a second WSC member named Rockwell, were up to something, but what? That was the question that Peggy and Natasha were going to try and answer. Sharon had tracked Pierce's digital footprints to what appeared to be an ocean tanker in international waters. The mission was to infiltrate and see what they could find.
"So," Natasha says as they're gearing up on the cloaked quinjet piloted by Melinda May. "Fly boy is pretty cute."
Peggy glances over at the redhead with a furrowed brow. "Fly boy?"
"Tech Sergeant Samuel Thomas Wilson, U.S. Air Force, non-active." Sharon says from Peggy's other side. The three of them were the strike team on this, with Coulson and May as backup.
"Are you two…" Natasha asks with a smile and an eyebrow raise that fills in all the blanks.
Peggy rolls her eyes. "We're just friends."
"He seems like a pretty nice guy on paper, Aunt Peg." Sharon says while giving the other woman a warm smile, unlike the innuendo filled grin Natasha was flashing her.
"What did you do?" Peggy demands as she looks at the young woman. "Run a background check on him?"
Sharon held up her hands and shook her head. "No, Aunt Peg, of course I didn't." The blonde reassures her. "Nat did."
When Peggy's gaze cut to her, Natasha just shrugged. "We're hunting big game. I wanted to make sure he wasn't someone planted to get in the way." The look Peggy continued to give her told Natasha she only partly believed her. "Coulson was worried?"
Peggy rolled her eyes as she placed her shield on her back. "I'm not ready to even consider seeing someone, and while Sam is lovely and a wonderful friend, he's not my type."
Natasha, blunt as she was, and knowing the era in which Peggy had come from, asked, "Because he's black?"
"Because" Peggy replied as she walked towards the opening hatch. She smiled to herself, and her spur of the moment decision, and continued just as she jumped, "He's male."
"Good to know." Natasha replies with a smirk.
Sharon blinks, but not because of what her aunt had just admitted to, but because, "Did she just jump without a chute?"
Natasha laughed. "Yeah, she does that, a lot."
While Sharon took care of security, keeping them all off any video feeds, disconnecting alarms, and guiding the other two through the ship, Natasha went to retrieve the data they were looking for. Meanwhile, Peggy was exploring the ship. What was Pierce hiding on this ghost ship of his? She found the answer below deck in the cargo hold and it twisted her stomach while sending ice through her veins. Reaching into the crate she'd just opened Peggy pulled out the hauntingly familiar goggled, black and green mask, and stares into its lifeless, nightmarish face before clenching it in her fist. Hydra.
Hydra fell apart after Schmidt's death. Bucky and the Howling Commandos spent the years after the end of the war cleaning up any remaining cells and collecting technology and weapons. But a few of the higher-ranking officers managed to slip away despite Bucky's best efforts, men like Heinrich Zemo, who according to Junior Juniper was the man who'd fought with Angie on the edge of that bluff, the man who stabbed her, who sent her over the edge to her death. Hydra had taken Peggy's everything in their attempt at world domination. She would be damned if they returned to take anything else from her.
Once Natasha had the data they came for, the team was extracted by May and Coulson. The tension rolling off Peggy quickly filled the compact space of the stealth quinjet, and for a few moments the four SHIELD agents played a quiet game of 'you ask her' until Natasha finally looked at Peggy and asked, "What did you find?"
Peggy threw the mask to the floor. "Hydra. Pierce is trying to revive Hydra."
"We need to get that data back to Fury ASAP." Coulson says firmly.
Sharon shakes her head in the negative. "I don't think taking it directly to SHIELD is a good idea."
"Why?" Peggy asks, her frown deepening.
"I saw Sitwell on that ship." Sharon answers.
"Are you saying SHIELD could be compromised?" Coulson looks doubtful and yet extremely worried, as well as angry that someone would dare come at SHIELD from within.
"Let's be overly cautious, but let's not jump to worse case scenarios." Peggy orders. "Coulson, I'll leave it up to you to get Fury up to speed. Carter, poke around a bit at the Trisk, see what you can uncover on the sly. May, reach out to Morse, see what she knows. Romanoff and I will deal with the data."
Natasha tossed Peggy the keys to her company car once they'd landed at the SHIELD airfield, and then slipped into the passenger seat. Peggy watched the other spy pull a laptop from under her seat and raised an eyebrow. Natasha just smirked as she opened it and went to work. It didn't take long for the redhead to start muttering and swearing in Russian. There was an embedded failsafe that was triggered as soon as Natasha tried overriding the evolving encryption that kept all the copied files locked up tight. "Well," Natasha says as she looks up at Peggy. They share a look that lets the other know they are having the same bad feeling about this. "If they didn't know someone was sniffing around before, they do now."
"We need a safe place to try again." Peggy replies with a nod of acknowledgment to Natasha's statement.
"I know a place." Natasha says after a moment of thought. "But I'm going to need a few things before we head there, and if Pierce knows he's being targeted, he's going to go on alert."
Peggy nods again. "Agreed."
Natasha reaches into the back seat and pulls out a gym bag. She has several changes of clothes and a couple of hats, glasses, and sunglasses, the types of things she would need to conceal her identity. When she handed Peggy a long sleeve shirt with a hood on it, a zip up sweatshirt, a pair of glasses, and a baseball cap, the older spy blinked.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Peggy asks, eyeing the pile of random things in her lap.
"We have to assume we're being tracked." Natasha tells her. "We need to disappear into a crowd."
"So, this is your idea of disguise?" Peggy questioned and then shook her head disapprovingly. "Darling, this isn't a disguise, this is a lazy Saturday afternoon." She smiles a little as she adds, "Let Auntie Peggy show you how it's done."
She drives them to the airport and leaves the SHIELD car in a tow away zone. Natasha is fairly sure the laptop she'd used now had a tracker on it, so they left that behind as well, taking only the USB drive with the data on it. Peggy leads Natasha into the airport, making it seem as if they were buying tickets and going past the gates, but what they really did was slip back out of the airport and into the long-term parking garage. Thankfully the carrying case Coulson had made for her shield looked like an art portfolio backpack, otherwise it would be a bit harder for them to blend in. Peggy walks up to a mundane looking pickup truck and screws off the ball shaped part of the trailer hitch and shakes out a pair keys. Under the backseat of the truck's cab Peggy has an army issued duffel bag stashed away. She smirks at Natasha as she opens it and after a few moments of searching pulls out two blonde wigs. "We're in a blind spot for the garage's cameras, we should change here before leaving."
"Well damn, Carter, I'm impressed." Natasha replies as she takes the short bob styled wig from Peggy's outstretched hand.
"Wait until you see what I can do with a bit of makeup." Peggy replies as she pulls out a travel sized makeup case and shakes it a bit to cause its contents to rattle.
They go to an electronics store to get whatever it is that Natasha needs to make things work at their next destination. While she's getting what she needs, she'd asked Peggy to grab a couple of prepaid smartphones, the kind that travelers often take as a way of saving money. No one looks twice at the pair until one of the employees starts to flirt with Peggy. Men, Peggy had discovered, were no longer like the men she had known. Today's men could be very aggressive and entitled in their pursuit of an attractive woman, not that the men of her time couldn't be that way as well, but these days those traits seemed more prevalent than in her time. While the men in her time undoubtedly believed they owned their women, especially after marriage, at least they were charming about it. Normally Peggy had no problems dealing with these kinds of men, then or now, but today she was simply not in the mood for it. This man seemed particularly thick skulled and Peggy was about two seconds from incapacitating him.
"Babe?" Natasha's voice with a Boston lilt to it called out. "Did you get the phones? I really do think it'll be cheaper this way, rather than running up our bill with roaming charges."
Peggy plays along easily, her own voice sounded perfectly midwestern American. "Yes, I think I got the ones you wanted."
Natasha smiles as she steps up to Peggy, glances at the phone packages in her hand, and then leans up and kisses her in a way that makes the employee wander off to hide the bulge in his pants. When Natasha pulls back, she's smiling a huge smile. "Not half bad, 'babe'."
Peggy smirks. "Not half bad yourself, but don't get any ideas, dear."
Once they're back on the road Natasha tells Peggy where they're heading, and Peggy's hands tighten on the steering wheel. What kind of ghosts would be waiting for her at Camp Lehigh? What memories would come flooding back to haunt her dreams and fuel her nightmares? Lehigh is where she'd meet Steve, where she had trained him and their friendship had started. It's where she would stay up late into the night talking to Abraham Erskine until she inevitably failed at hiding a yawn and he would send her to bed with a gentle pat on her cheek and a soft, "Gute nacht, Liebchen. Pleasant dreams, my dear." Lehigh is where the lone spy learned to be a soldier, where she learned to command soldiers. It's where she first set eyes on Angie.
"You alright there, Carter?" Natasha asks softly.
"Fine." Peggy replies as she forces herself to loosen her grip on the steering wheel. She needed to distract herself so she could focus on driving and not her memories and apprehension over the pandora's box they were about to walk into. "So, you seemed pretty at ease back there, kissing a girl in public like that."
"I've kissed my fair share of girls." Natasha admits with a warm smile. "Most for my own personal enjoyment, some for the job."
Peggy thinks about what she's observed between Natasha and Sharon and asks, "My niece?"
Natasha snorts and shakes her head. "Sharon and I are just friends, but Hill and I have been known to have some fun together."
"Hill?" Peggy glances over at Natasha, eyebrow raised. "Really?"
"Yeah," Natasha smiles fondly. "We started out all, I don't like or trust you but I'm going to fuck you anyway, but now, now it's completely different."
Peggy's quiet for a moment before admitting, "It's strange for me, this openness about such things."
"Living in the future does have some perks." Natasha replies. "There are still some real assholes out there, but you can be a girl kissing a girl and not worry about being thrown in the loony bin and electro shocked into mindless oblivion."
It wasn't that Peggy missed the past; she missed the people she'd left behind in the past. Angie certainly, but also Howard and Bucky, and even Steve. Yes, he was still alive, he was once again a presence in her life, but he wasn't her Steve anymore. She grieved for them, all of them, and for the dreams she'd had of her future. "The food is also better, no polio is a good thing, and a female prime minster was a pleasant surprise. Though I'm not sure I'd have gotten along with the Iron Lady very well."
Lehigh had been SHIELD's first base of operations but had been abandoned long ago. It felt like a ghost town now, eerie, and quiet, and full of specters from her past. Peggy could almost see the synchronized marching of the men stationed here, the hurried rush of officers, and that stray dog that adopted the camp as his home. The air smelled of the trees surrounding the camp, clean and crisp, but if Peggy closed her eyes, she could almost smell the gunpowder, grease and oil, and sweat of hard training soldiers. She and Natasha, both experienced and highly trained spies, made no sound as they walked towards what used to be the command building. But Peggy heard the shouts of drill sergeants, the bawdy chants of drilling units, weapons fire, and Phillips swearing a blue streak.
She and Natasha make their way inside the main building and then deep underground. Natasha has explained that there is an old computer system down there that is self-contained, and after some tinkering to make it compatible with the USB drive, she'll be able to work at decrypting the files. "We're far enough underground that the tracking failsafe embedded in the data shouldn't be easily picked up. I'll need to find that and isolate it before transferring the files onto a clean drive."
"Do what you need to do." Peggy reassures. "I'll keep watch." She watches Natasha work, and realizes that some of her training and skills need some serious updating. Peggy wonders for a moment if perhaps she should ask Tony to give her a crash course in working with modern technology, not just being entertained by it. While Natasha works, Peggy explores a bit and comes across an office with Steve's and Bucky's names on the door. She smiles with fondness and amusement as she tries to picture Sergeant Barnes behind a desk. Soon Peggy's nostalgia is overcome by a sense of unease, something triggering her instincts, and she heads back to Natasha. "I think you need to pick up the pace, Nat."
"Almost there." Natasha replies.
Peggy's dark eyes scan everything around them as she reaches for her shield on her back and the gun on her hip. Peggy moves towards the doorway of the concealed computer room and scans the room outside of it carefully. "Natasha."
"Almost, just a few more minutes." Natasha calls back.
They're not alone, Peggy's sure of it. She's just about to call out to Natasha again when the redhead says she's done. Peggy watches her pocket a small black rectangular device while dropping the USB drive to the floor and smashing it with her boot. Natasha doesn't question Peggy's defensive stance, shield held at chest level, gun held just below the edge of the shield, she simply draws her own weapon and nods at Peggy, indicating she should lead.
The gunshot echoes in the corridor but not as loudly as the sound of the bullet hitting Peggy's shield. Peggy looks in the direction of where the shot came from but sees nothing. She and Natasha scramble for the surface and the truck. They need to get the information to Fury more than they needed to hunt down who was shooting at them. The problem was that whoever was shooting at them didn't want them leaving. The tires on the truck have been slashed, but they were able to stumble across an old jeep which Peggy hotwired. They didn't get too far down the road before Peggy caught sight of a motorcycle following them. The rider was helmeted, dressed all in black, slender build, and aiming a gun at them.
"Friend of yours?" Peggy asks Natasha as she tries to lose the person shooting at them.
Natasha shrugs as she returns fire. "Doubtful, I don't have many friends, and the ones who would want to kill me, wouldn't do it without showing me their faces first."
Peggy gets a good look at the bike in the rearview and makes the choice to take the jeep off road, knowing the bike couldn't follow. It's a rough, sudden turn, and she reaches out to grab Natasha by the waistband of her jeans to pull her back into her seat.
"I managed to send Hill a text before we were so rudely shot at, but we'll need a place to lay low until we get a response for a rendezvous." Natasha says as she holds on as the jeep bounces around.
"I know a place." Peggy replies.
They ditch the jeep and take two buses and a subway train before walking to Sam Wilson's house and knocking on his sliding glass door. "Sorry about this mate." Peggy says as Sam stares at her and Natasha. "We need a place to lay low for a bit."
"Someone's trying to kill us." Natasha adds.
Sam stares at the two for a moment and then steps aside to let them in. "I'll make breakfast."
"Thank you, Sam." Peggy tells him as she passes him.
They take turns cleaning up in Sam's bathroom. When Peggy comes out in a pair of Sam's sweats and a t-shirt, she finds Natasha sitting on Sam's bed. She knew of Natasha's past, where she came from, who she used to work for, and Peggy wouldn't lie and say she hadn't been concerned about partnering up with the Russian. Now though, now, Peggy's instincts told her she could trust Natasha. "You ok?"
Natasha nods. "Guess that bear we've been poking since New York is finally awake and roaring in anger."
"It was bound to happen." Peggy replies as she sits beside the redhead on Sam's bed.
"Makes things harder." Natasha says.
Peggy smiles. "Makes them more interesting."
Natasha laughed. "I like you Carter." The two share a laugh, defusing some of the tension they'd been under since May had announced they were coming up on the ghost ship. Reaching out Natasha picks up the dog tags resting against Peggy's U.S.A.F t-shirt clad chest and reads the names. One set is Peggy's of course, but the second set, Natasha asks about in a soft, almost reverent voice, because she understood why a person would wear a second set of tags. "A. Martinelli? As in Angela Martinelli?"
"Yes." Peggy replied with a nod. "How do you…"
"Her name is the second name listed on the Wall of Valor." Natasha replies. "Yours is the first." She gently lays the dog tags back against Peggy's chest. "Was she your girl?"
Again, Peggy nods as she presses her hand against the tags. "Yes, she was."
"That explains the sadness in your eyes." Natasha says gently.
Sam knocks to say breakfast is ready. Natasha stands, tells them to save her some, and then heads for the bathroom for her turn in the shower. Peggy stands and follows Sam to his kitchen. Sam makes her a plate and sets it on the table for her and smiles at her in a way that has her demanding, "What?"
"You and the redhead?" Sam teases with a cheeky grin.
"Me and Natasha?" Peggy has to fight the habit of denying that she was a woman attracted to other women. She isn't seeing judgement or disgust in Sam's eyes, in fact his smirk is teasing, and almost hopeful? "We're just friends." She reaches for her dog tags again. "I'm not ready for anything more than that."
"I get it." Sam replies as he hands her a cup of coffee. "I do, I'm no stranger to grief. Everyone deals with it differently and in their own time. But just make sure you're moving through the grief, Peggy, not standing still in it and letting it swallow you up."
When Natasha joins them, she commandeers Sam's laptop, and they start going through some of the files. Pierce and Malick, they had already suspected as being at the top of this Hydra revival plan. The senator from Pennsylvania, Stern, was a bit of a surprise. They weren't surprised he was corrupt, only that he had the backbone and stomach for what it would take to recreate Hydra. It was clear that what they needed to do was get Pierce, he seemed to be at the top of this pile of vile men, but they also needed to figure out which of these plans was the closest to being launched and stop it. The answer to figuring this out hit Peggy in a very peculiar way. "My grandfather was a gamekeeper on a country estate. When he was a boy, he loved hunting burrow animals using ferrets." Natasha and Sam looked confused. Peggy rolled her eyes. "We catch the big game using a little weasel."
"Sitwell." Natasha clues in and smirks. "Ok, but how do we catch the weasel? If Pierce is onto us, Sitwell isn't going to just come along quietly."
"That's where I come in." Sam says as he tosses a stack of folders onto the table. "I'm not SHIELD, but I do have something to offer."
Natasha is familiar with the ops in Sam's files and she's impressed which impressed Peggy even further. When Peggy picks up the second file and looks over what's in it, she raises an eyebrow as she looks between the schematics and stats to Sam. "I thought you were a pilot?"
"I said I flew, didn't say a thing about what I flew." Sam replies with a cheeky grin.
"I can't ask you to do this, Sam." Peggy says gently. "You got out for a reason."
"And I ain't lookin' to get back into the Air Force." Sam tells her. "But my friend, who happens to be freaking Captain Britain, needs my help, so I am all in."
Peggy struggles with the choice for a moment, but in the end, she knows Sam wouldn't be offering if he didn't understand what he was getting into. "Alright. So, you got one of these falcon things just laying around?"
"No but I know where to get one." Sam answers. "Won't be easy though."
"Easy is never as much fun as doing it the hard way." Natasha smirks.
Sam blinks. "You're a little scary."
Peggy laughs as Natasha just shrugs and smirks.
Once they have Sam's exo-7 falcon wing suit, they set the trap for Sitwell. Sam isn't half bad at this, easily getting Sitwell to join him, and bringing him to the car where Peggy is waiting. She takes him to the roof where Natasha had been aiming the sniper rifle at him and shoves him up the stairs and out the door, onto the roof, bombarding him with heated questions the whole time. Sitwell is shaken, and clearly terrified of the Black Widow, but he's also fairly certain that the war hero and beacon of hope and justice that is Captain Carter, won't allow the Russian assassin to hurt him. Sitwell must have mistaken her for someone else, because Peggy has no problem dangling the little weasel over the edge, and then letting go when he refuses to answer her questions.
"Ya know, Peg," Natasha says casually as they stand there. "You were in the ice for a rrrreeeaaaally long time."
"Was I?" Peggy replies deadpan and with a straight face. "I hadn't been aware of that fact, thank you for mentioning it, darling."
Natasha smirks, "I'm just saying, ya know, that it's been a long time since 1945, and if you were to have an itch that needed to be scratched, I know a couple of girls who would be happy to help. I know this lawyer, friend of a friend, Jen. Oh, or Lauren in accounting is great at keeping it casual. Unless of course the thought of casual sex is an afront to your grandma sensibilities."
"I've spent a casual evening or two with a young woman." Peggy huffs. "But they never had bright blue hair and an earring in their lip."
"A lip piercing is basic, so are belly button and tongue piercings, though tongue piercings can be really enjoyable." Natasha educates her friend while they wait.
Peggy raises an eyebrow, "Those are basic? What else could you pierce that…"
Natasha takes Peggy's hand and presses it against her own breast and smirks.
"Oh, well, that's, interesting." Peggy blushes crimson.
Sam drops Sitwell at their feet and the weasel starts spilling his secrets. Pierce was planning a major terrorist attack using helicarriers that he was going to blame on SHIELD. Unfortunately, that's all they got out of Sitwell before the sniper's bullet hit him perfectly between the eyes. Peggy quickly pushed Natasha down to cover her while scanning the area for where the shot could have come from. She spots what looks like a quick flash and manages to reach her shield just in time to deflect the second bullet. Then she jumps to her feet and takes off running across the rooftops, leaping the gaps between buildings like a child leaping over little streams of rainwater on a sidewalk, towards where she'd seen the flash. She sees the same black clad figure who'd been on the motorcycle chasing them out of Lehigh, running ahead of her, only the helmet is gone, and Peggy can see a long braid of dark blonde hair. Pulling her shield from her back, Peggy throws it hard right at the retreating assassin, confident in her throw, knowing it's worked hundreds of times before in stopping an enemy in their tracks. Only this time her quarry stops, reaches out, and catches the shield like it was a child's toy disk.
Peggy only gets a second or two to be stunned before the figure is turning to face her, weapon drawn, her shield still in hand. The face that greets her is blank, expressionless, but it knocks all the air from her lungs. Peggy's heart stops as she looks into empty, soulless, blue eyes. Her mind is too busy trying to process who she's seeing to autoregulate silly little things like beating her heart and breathing. It can't be! It just can't be! That's impossible! And yet she takes a step closer to the woman, then another, and another despite the fact that the woman's gun was aimed at her head.
"Angie?" Peggy manages to force out despite there not being any air in her lungs.
The woman tilts her head to the side and blinks. "Who the hell is Angie?"
Sam swoops in, crashing into the woman, and grabbing for the shield she'd held in her hand. He calls out to Peggy as he flings it in her general direction. Instinct kicks in for Peggy and she catches the shield easily. The woman who looks so much like Angie that Peggy's reacting on muscle memory alone, draws another weapon, and aims it at Sam. Peggy dives in, shielding her friend from the spray of bullets. When the shooting stops, and Peggy peaks over the shield, the woman is gone and Sam's on the rooftop with a busted machinal wing. Seeing that her friend was possibly hurt snapped Peggy out of her trance like state and she takes in a sharp breath. "Sam? Are you alright?"
Sam moans a bit. "Yeah, fine, think I scraped my damn knee though."
When they regroup with Natasha the redhead asks, "What the hell just happened?"
Peggy shakes her head. "I don't know."
By the time they make it to the street below Maria Hill is waiting there with a black hummer. They discreetly retrieve Sitwell's body, and then Hill takes them to one of Fury's secure little hidey holes. Peggy gives herself over to her training, allowing Captain Carter to dominate her personality in order to keep herself focused on the mission. She could not get lost in the past right now, she had no time for emotions, or memories, or thoughts about how that woman could look so much like Angie. She'd even sounded like Angie. The helicarrier attack was imminent and Alexander Pierce needed to be stopped.
"Ballistics say the bullet used to kill Sitwell was the same make as the one used to kill Natasha's Iranian nuclear engineer." Hill reports.
Natasha frowns from where she's sat on the edge of a table covered in printed out files and pictures. "The Winter Soldier? The Winter Soldier is Russian, why would Hydra have access?"
"Who or what is the Winter Soldier?" Peggy asks, her dark gaze shifting between the other two women, Sam, and Fury.
"One of Russia's attempts at making, well, you." Natasha replies. "World War One was a reality check for them. They weren't the most powerful power in the world after all. So, they started these programs to reclaim and ensure their place in the world. The Red Room trained little orphan girls to be elite spies and ruthless assassins. The one left standing at the end of each class of girls is given the title Black Widow." She pauses and looks at Peggy as if she's worried this will chance how Peggy feels about her. "That's the program I came out of."
"You're talented and skilled, Natasha." Peggy says gently, her tone letting the other woman know they were still good. "But I don't think you'd be able to catch my shield at full force. What were the other programs?"
"The Wolf Spider program, a boy version of the Black Widow program, but it never really got off the ground. The Red Guardians." Natasha relaxes a bit more knowing she still had Peggy's trust. "Russia's attempts at making super soldiers. They came marginally close once, but never had any real success. The Winter Soldier, however, was a thing all on its own. Russian's ultimate secret weapon."
"Your pinko counterpart, Cap." Fury tosses out and then goes on. "We have to assume that the Winter Soldier is in play when it comes to taking down Pierce."
"You let me worry about the Winter Soldier." Peggy says firmly.
Fury smiles a huge smile as he kicks his feet up, putting them on the table as he leans back in his chair. "I can't wait to see the look on that son of bitch's face."
They were under some kind of old dam. Peggy slips away during preparations to catch her breath and clear her mind. She stands on an old bridge with her eyes closed, listening to the rush of the water below. She was trying to slip what Natasha had said into slots to make what she saw, who she thinks she saw, make sense. But she didn't have enough information to decode this particular mystery.
"Are you sure you got this?" Natasha asks as she steps up beside Peggy. "The Winter Soldier has you shook, Carter. Are you positive you can do this?"
"It's like Fury said, the Winter Soldier was meant to be my counterpart." Peggy replies. "Created because I'd been created, yes?"
"Partly, yeah." Natasha nods. "But not entirely."
"Either way, the Winter Soldier is my responsibility." Peggy says firmly. She looks down at her compass, which is open in her hand, and brushes her thumb over Angie's flower. If the Winter Soldier was, by some miracle, Angie, then Peggy was absolutely going to try and save her.