March, 1953

In which knowing the future is comforting.

Steve sighed and sat his newspaper down, staring over at the phone. He'd been waiting for it to ring for…he glanced down at his watch. Two hours now. Just because Peggy hadn't called, it didn't mean there was anything wrong. If she was going to be late, she usually did call, but sometimes interrogations ran long, or time-sensitive leads popped up. And really, if something was wrong, Rose or someone from the office would call and let him know. So she was probably fine.

Still, she was awfully late, and he sighed and snapped the paper shut and reached for the phone. Being the Deputy Director's husband meant he had a direct line into her office and didn't have to go through the switchboard out front. It still rang a few times before the other end picked up.

"Deputy Director Carter's office," a woman who was not Peggy answered in a clipped, formal tone.

"Rose?" Steve asked. Peggy must be away from her desk if Rose was answering her phone. "This is Steve Carter."

"Oh, hi, Mr. Carter!" Rose replied, dropping her official 'assistant voice'.

"Hi," he said. "I'm sorry if I'm interrupting anything, but it's getting kind of late, and I was calling to see if you knew where Peggy was."

"Oh," Rose said. "Right. I was, actually, I was debating whether or not I should give you a call."

"Is everything alright?" he asked, trying not to worry. That didn't sound like the tone of voice someone would use to work their way up to telling you that your wife had gotten shot in the line of duty or something like that.

"Well, kind of. I mean, Peg's not hurt or anything," Rose clarified quickly. "There was just…There was a big, important meeting today, and it did not go her way at all." Steve remembered her saying something at breakfast about a meeting with the Security Council, though she hadn't said about what. "Um, she…She's been downstairs at the shooting range for a couple hours now," Rose continued a little sheepishly, like she wasn't sure she should be telling him that, but her worry for her friend was trumping protocol. "I was thinking maybe…maybe you should come down and talk to her."

"Okay," Steve agreed. "I'll be there soon." This was probably dancing a little close to that line of overstepping things—Peggy had not asked for his help—but Rose was worried, and she knew better than to call Steve down to the office for just a bad day.

He hung up the phone, considered a moment, then picked it up and dialed again. "Hello, Mrs. Markle? This is Steve Carter."

"Why, good evening, Mr. Carter," their neighbor replied.

"I'm sorry to be calling you at this time of night," Steve said. It was getting close to nine o'clock, but he could see her lights still on across the street. "But I'm in a bit of a dilemma. Peggy's having some car trouble, and I need to go out and get her, but James is asleep and I can't leave him here on his own."

"Oh, of course, of course!" Mrs. Markle replied. "Not to worry, dear, I'll be right over."

"Are you sure it's not an imposition?" Steve asked. He could call Jarvis, who was always happy to babysit, but it would take him longer to get here. "I could call someone else—"

"Nonsense!" Mrs. Markle declared. "Just give me a couple of minutes."

"Thank you," Steve said gratefully.

Mrs. Markle arrived a few minutes later. "Thank you for coming," Steve told her. "Again, I'm sorry about the time."

"Don't give it any thought, Mr. Carter," she said, waving his concern away. "What are neighbors for, hm? Besides, I can do my knitting just as easily here as I can in my own living room," she added, patting the bag slung over her shoulder.

"Thank you," Steve said again. "Hopefully we won't be out too late. Please feel free to help yourself to tea or coffee, or there's some banana bread in the bread box."

"I do like your banana bread," she said with a smile. "I might take you up on that." She waved him toward the door. "Go on and make sure your wife is alright. Don't worry about me and the little one; we'll be fine."

Steve thanked her again and grabbed his coat, heading for his motorcycle in the garage. There wasn't any traffic this time of night and it didn't take any time at all to get to Peggy's office. The regular front desk worker was out for the night, but Steve knew where the button was that opened the door behind the filing cabinets.

A couple of agents working late cast curious glances in his direction as he walked in, but they recognized him and didn't say anything. He waved to Rose as he passed Peggy's office, and she nodded and pointed at the staircase, indicating that Peggy was still down there. He took the stairs all the way down. The lowest level was dark, the labs and records rooms locked up for the night, but as he passed the locker rooms, he could hear the steady cadence of gunfire coming from the direction of the shooting range.

He paused at the top of the little flight of stairs that led down into the range. The lights were on, and Peggy was the only one in the room. There was a target hanging on the far wall that was shredded to ribbons around the center, and Steve took a moment to be proud of how good of a shot she was. The problem at the moment was how to get her attention: she was wearing protective ear muffs, so calling her name wouldn't do it, and coming up behind her when she couldn't hear him was a good way to startle her and possibly get shot on accident.

He settled for reaching over and flicking the light switch a couple of times. She whirled around with fire still in her eyes, though her expression softened when she saw it was him. He raised a hand in greeting, and she set the gun down and took the earmuffs off.

"Steve?" she asked. "What are you doing here?"

"Well, it was getting late, so I called to see where you were. Rose said you were still here and she sounded kind of worried, so I thought I'd come see what was going on," he said as he walked down the steps.

Peggy looked down at her watch. "Oh," she said. "It is late." She looked back up at him. "I'm sorry, darling, I completely lost track of time."

"Don't worry about it," Steve said, coming over to stand beside her. He reached up and put a hand on her arm. "What's going on?"

Peggy drew in a deep breath and sighed heavily. "It's the bloody Security Council," she snapped.

"What did they do this time?" Steve wondered. Back when he'd been an employee of S.H.I.E.L.D., he knew that Nick Fury had often butted heads with the Council, and usually on matters that didn't paint them in the best light for Steve. Peggy's complaint about them used to be that considering they were above the Director and technically ran the organization, they tended to be rather oblivious to what life was like on the ground. Her dislike had gotten much stronger last month—Phillips had passed away suddenly (but not terribly unexpectedly, considering his age) from a heart condition, and as his second-in-command, Peggy should have been the natural choice to take over as Director. For reasons the Council had not been able to articulate well (that, when read between the lines, added up to her being a woman), she'd been passed over in favor of an external candidate. Peggy had been very upset, but had given the new Director her support. Knowing how hard she'd tried to take that blow gracefully, Steve couldn't imagine what had happened tonight to make her react like this.

"Zola," she snarled. She laughed dangerously. "No need to worry about accidentally changing the future, darling. It appears we're in a fixed timeline after all, where nothing changes, no matter how bloody hard we try, because it's 1953 and Arnim Zola is out of jail and officially a member of S.H.I.E.L.D.!" She was shouting by the time she was done.

"Zola's out?" Steve asked quietly.

She bit her lip and nodded, drawing in a couple of deep breaths to calm herself down. "The Council's wanted him out for ages," she said. "Oh, he's served his time; oh, he's turned over a new leaf; oh, he's so clever and we could really use his brains!" she sneered in a mocking voice. She sighed again. "Phillips would never have it. He knew the kind of man Zola was, and he had enough pull outside the organization that even though the Council could have over-ruled him on it, they didn't. No such obstacles now," she said. She snorted disdainfully. "Three bloody weeks." She shook her head. Gruff and blustery though Phillips had been, he'd been her mentor for years, someone who'd respected her and relied on her and who she counted as a friend. Losing him had hurt Steve, but it cut painfully deep for Peggy. "What a way to respect the dead."

She sighed and stepped forward, dropping her head against Steve's chest, all the fire gone out of her. "I tried so hard, Steve," she said sadly, and Steve's heart ached at the defeat in her voice as he brought his arms up to wrap around her. "Even if I didn't know everything you'd told me, I learned more than enough about him during the War to know better than to trust his word. I tried everything I could to make them see. Everything," she whispered.

Steve closed his eyes and rested his head on top of hers. It wasn't a surprise—based on what he'd gathered from Bruce and Tony, and some of the semi-cryptic things the Sorcerer Supreme had told him when he took the Time Stone back, he'd kind of figured the future was fixed. So, Zola joining S.H.I.E.L.D., it didn't surprise him, but even though he'd known it was coming, it hurt, and it hurt deep. "I know you did," he whispered into her hair. "I'm so sorry."

"I even…" She sniffed. "I even thought about quitting. Not so much because I thought it would change their minds, but because I was just so angry." She sighed. "I caught myself before I said anything, though. Even with, with him here, I…There's a lot of good still that I can do, and if I stay, maybe I can keep what he's doing from getting as bad as it might have been otherwise."

Steve smiled and kissed her hair, knowing how hard a choice that would have been. "I'm so proud of you," he told her softly. "Taking all these hits like this and getting up time and time again just because it's a fight that needs fighting."

He felt her smile against his chest. "To quote an old flame of mine, if you start running, they'll never let you stop." She looked up at him, and her eyes were still sad and hurt, but she was smiling. "I can do this all day."

Steve chuckled softly and leaned down and kissed her. "It's a fight we're gonna win, Peggy," he told her, reaching up one hand to cup her cheek and stroke it gently with his thumb. "It may take a while, but we're gonna come out on top of this thing."

"I know," she said. "That helps. And knowing that I'm going to live to see it…" She nodded. "That helps even more." She sighed. "I just really, really, hoped, just for a moment, that we could win it right now."

"I know," Steve said. He pulled her back into the hug. "I did too."

They stood there for a moment, then Peggy pulled away and straightened her shoulders back. "Alright. I suppose we should go home. Who's watching James?"

"Mrs. Markle." Steve looked down at his watch. "We should probably go home and let her go to bed."

They switched off the lights and headed upstairs, saying goodnight to Rose on their way to the parking lot. Rose followed to her own car at a discreet enough distance to tell Steve that she'd just been waiting to make sure Peggy was alright before heading home.

After they got home, Steve walked Mrs. Markle home while Peggy ate the dinner he'd saved for her, then they headed up to get ready for bed.

"You know," Steve said as he slid into bed. He waited until Peggy had laid down and then wrapped his arms around her and gathered her close to him. "I've been thinking about fixed timelines and things."

"Yes?" Peggy prompted.

"Well, so, apparently, Hydra's going to happen. We know that. But I keep thinking about what happened in 2014, when I learned they were still there. I mean," he said with a thoughtful sigh. "If we go off Zola coming into S.H.I.E.L.D. as the year they kind of resurrected, they have sixty-one years to put this plan together. With that kind of time, and with Zola staying consistently at the helm for all of it, there's no way they should have failed."

"If you're trying to make me feel better, it isn't really working," Peggy said.

Steve smiled and kissed the side of her face. "What I'm saying is, they shouldn't have failed, but they did. Bucky and I talked about this a little before I left, and I think he was right. If this timeline is fixed, which it seems to be, then I'm supposed to be here. You're supposed to have this knowledge about Hydra. We only won in 2014 because there were little chinks in the armor, little mistakes that Hydra made that gave us a fighting chance. And we wouldn't have had that if you weren't back here in 1953 doing everything in your power to make Zola's life hell."

Peggy smiled at that.

"We cut off the last head, but you weakened the monster enough so that we could," Steve told her.

"You really think that?" Peggy asked.

"I really do," Steve said. He kissed her again. "When Hydra crashes and burns, it's going to be just as much your victory as it is ours."

Peggy smiled at him warmly. "You do know just what a girl needs to hear, don't you?" she nestled her head against his shoulder. "I still wish there was something I could have done now, but…The long view does help tremendously. I know that there's an end, and I know what I have to do to get there." She planted a kiss on his jaw. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," he said, kissing her back. "And I'm sorry that such a long fight is ahead, but…" He kissed her again. "You're not alone in it. You've got me, and I am more than happy to help you dig up nests and stomp out all the little snakes that haven't wormed their way into the immunity Zola has."

Peggy smiled. "I did always enjoy hunting Hydra with you."

"Well, then, it's a date," he told her.

"And if I recall your story correctly," she said. "Zola dies twice, doesn't he?"

Steve nodded. "Once in 1972, from a fairly painfully debilitating illness, and then again in 2014 in a ballistic missile strike."

"Good," she said. "I suppose at some point, I shall have to run into the little snake at work, but now I can just look at him and picture him going up in a ball of flames. I imagine that will help somewhat."