Author's Note: Sooooo I don't think anyone is reading this story but if you are let your voice be heard ahaha XD
Peggy woke up to the feeling of a gritty substance coating the inside of her mouth. She tried to draw breath, hands fisting into the grainy ground below her, and ended up coughing instead. Her mouth was bone dry but she tried to spit a few times, getting the granules off of her tongue.
She was covered in something, a substance that spread under her cheek and as far as her smarting, blurry gaze could see. It was rough on her skin, salty on her tongue-
Sand.
The moment Peggy realized that, everything came rushing back. The car ride. Dr. Coppor. The explosion. Daniel.
"Daniel!" Peggy rasped, her voice as dry as the rest of her. She pushed herself up to her knees, wobbled, and then stumbled the rest of the way to her feet. Her view of the world was still hazy, lit by a sun that had dipped significantly in the sky since she'd last been looking at it. A few feet in front of her, Peggy saw a lump, coated in a thin layer of sand, and knew immediately that it was her partner.
"Daniel," she said again, her voice a little clearer this time, and staggered to his side. He was still out cold, bleeding from a cut on his temple that must have been inflicted when he hit the object he was resting against. Peggy swallowed dryly and gazed up at the nuclear bomb in front of her, still unactivated.
For now, at least.
"Daniel," Peggy said a third time, resting her hand on his shoulder and giving it a gentle shake. The muddled feeling of being caught in an explosion was starting to fade from her senses and she felt sore but wholly unharmed. That being said, there was no way to know if Daniel had faired the same.
When she said his name a fourth time, Daniel finally groaned and started to stir. His eyes flickered open but he squeezed them shut again almost immediately, wincing.
"You have sand in your eyes," Peggy told him gently, wiping off her hand as best she could and then trying to clean some of the coat of sand from his face with her finger tips. It was dry, at least, and came off easily when she brushed at it a little.
Daniel groaned again and forced himself up. "A bomb went off..." he muttered, piecing the events that had taken place before he lost consciousness together in his head. He glanced up sharply, staring hard at her. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," she assured him, brushing more sand from his chin and shoulders with brisk motions. "How's your head?"
Daniel reached up and touched at the dirty cut on his head hesitantly. "It's alright," he concluded after a moment, before squinting around him. "Is Dr. Coppor-?"
"Haven't seen him since I woke up," Peggy said. Her eyes caught on something on the road... or rather, the lack of something on the road, and she let out a soft curse. "It appears he took our car."
"What?!" Daniel gasped, jolting forward a little. "Crap. Crap crap crap. So we're stuck out here with no car, no food, no water..." He trailed off, glancing around. "Peggy, he took my crutch."
Peggy felt her heart sink. It was bad enough being stranded. But having to force Daniel to walk without the aid of his crutch would make it next to impossible to get somewhere not stranded.
Daniel sat back against the nuke casing, letting his head fall to rest on it with a soft thunk. "I'm so sorry," he mumbled. "You're going to have to leave me here; I'll just slow you down."
"What are you talking about?" Peggy asked, looking at him incredulously. "There is no way I'm going to leave you sitting next to a nuclear bomb that could be activated at any moment! Daniel, we need to get as far away from here as possible, as quickly as possible." She cut off his opening mouth with a stern look. "Both of us. We'll find you a crutch. There has to be something around here that we could use."
Peggy got to her feet again with a little less effort than before and scanned the surrounding area. Her eyes lit on a bundle of dead, twisted branches a little ways off and she started towards it.
"Peg- Peggy!" Daniel cried, and she stopped to face him again only to see him trying to get to his feet. "Where are you going?"
"I'm getting you a walking stick," Peggy told him, before ordering, "Stay there."
She reached the branches and kicked at them with her foot. The bundle seemed pretty well bound together, splintery and cracked from lack of moisture, but Peggy thought she might be able to use them anyway.
Four splinters later, she was holding a wrist-thick stick of about waist height. She tested her weight on it, cringing as her hand slid against the wood and four splinters became five. There was no handle; nothing to rest the side of her hand on to keep from slipping. All the same, Daniel would have to make do.
When she returned to his side, he was in the middle of wrapping one of his hands up with a strip of threading cloth that appeared to have come from a newly shortened pant leg. Peggy could see the end of his prosthetic poking out from the ripped hem and it startled her a little; Daniel usually hid that part of his body at all costs.
He caught her gaze and smiled wryly. "Figured a metal ankle would be a lot less likely to burn than one with skin on it," he explained. "Also figured that I'd need something to protect from hand from that atrocity of a walking stick you're holding."
Peggy winced, handing it to him. "If I could have found anything better, trust me, I would have," she said regretfully.
"Peg, it's alright," Daniel told her, heaving himself upright and repositioning his wrapped hand a few times to get used to the feel of the stick. "We're just lucky you could find something at all."
They made it back to the road with minimal trouble, and from there Peggy glanced around. "Okay," she said. "Do we return by the same route we traveled on to get here? Or do we set off in the other direction?"
"Well..." Daniel shifted onto his good leg and squinted a little. "We know for sure that going left leads us, eventually, back to civilization. Going right could send us deeper into the desert. At the same time, we drove for nearly two hours to get out here. We're going to be walking for a long time if we go that way."
"We have to, though," Peggy decided, shaking her head. "Going right is too much of an unknown."
"I would agree with you," Daniel said, and they set off.
It was slow going. The sun wasn't directly above them anymore (Peggy would pin the time to be about 3 or 4 o'clock), but it was still cripplingly hot. Not only that, but the decrepit stick Peggy had gotten for Daniel wasn't nearly the caliber of his sleek metal crutch. On that, he was only a little slower than the average Agent. On this new cane, he could barely make it to a medium clip.
The two of them walked in silence, not wanting to waste breath on speaking, until the sun had almost reached the horizon. Then Peggy pulled them to a stop. "Look at that," she murmured, reaching for Daniel's hand. She was covered from head to toe in sweat, grime and sand and her mouth was bone dry with thirst, but she was still struck by how beautiful the place they were deserted in was. The sky was hazy with evening clouds, dyed pink and purple with the setting sun. Long shadows stretched across the desert, giving the surrounding area a blue tinge.
"It's beautiful," Daniel agreed, squeezing her hand. "But it does bring up a problem I was hoping we wouldn't have to deal with."
Peggy raised an eyebrow in question.
"Sleeping," Daniel said. "I'm sorry, Peg, but I'm going to need a break soon. I need to take off the prosthetic for at least a little while or else I'm not going to be able to walk much farther."
"Of course, of course," Peggy replied immediately, feeling a surge of guilt that she hadn't considered her boyfriend's disability until now. "I'm so sorry, Daniel, I didn't even-"
"It's fine," he interrupted. "Don't worry about it. My point still stands, though- we're going to need to figure out a place to sleep. I know we haven't seen much in the way of life out here, but there are some things that come out at night that we probably don't want to mess with."
Peggy let slip a small, almost out-of-character shudder. "I don't think we'll be able to find a shelter," she admitted, starting to move off the road a ways and fruitlessly pack down the looser sand with her heels. "But we could switch off sleeping so one of us, at least, is on guard at all time."
Daniel nodded. "I think that's our best bet," he agreed. "I can, uh..."
"You will take second watch," Peggy told him firmly. She wished she had some sort of blanket to put down, or even some bags to arrange, but they didn't have anything save for the clothes on their backs.
She settled for taking off her business coat and draping it across the sand. She'd kept it on during their walk despite the heat, not wanting to get fried by the glaring California sun, but now that the stars were beginning to come out it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Peggy sat down and tugged off her heels to dump sand out of her shoes, then started on massaging her feet a little. She glanced over at her boyfriend, who was still hovering uncertainly by the edge of their make-shift camp. "Get some rest, Daniel."
He agreed with a surprising lack of argument and busied himself with taking off his prosthetic and trying to get comfortable on the ground. Under different circumstances, a day spent together would be ended with a slow, gentle kiss outside of Peggy's LA residence (previously Stark-owned like her one in New York), but the brunette was still too on 'mission mode' to think about any sort of affectionate display. She settled herself on the sand and slipped into an alert, calm mindset to wait out the first watch shift.
"You know," Daniel spoke up, after so long that Peggy had assumed he'd fallen asleep. "I'm kind of surprised we haven't been washed in radiation yet."
Peggy blinked, the thought catching her off-guard. "With our car, Dr. Coppor would have had ample time to get out of range and test his bomb," she mused. "And if he hasn't, that can only mean one thing."
"He got caught," Daniel concluded, a faint grin crossing his face. "And that means that someone's out there and is headed to get us."
He shut his eyes again, looking considerably more contented.
Peggy settled back on her forearms, staring out at the darkening sky. She was accustomed to waiting long periods in perfect stillness with nothing but an empty street (or in this case, a barren desert) to hold her interest. But the day had been arduous and hot, and before she realized what was happening she'd slipped from her forearms to her back and had fallen asleep.