Chapter 21

Zaria turned and left quickly before Peggy could retaliate as she had had more than enough. Peggy tried to go after her but was stopped by Samantha stepping in the way.

"I think you, Steve and me need to talk." Samantha said coolly.

"I don't have anything to say to you." Peggy answered briskly.

"No but I have plenty to say to you and you're going to listen before you decide to go off again," Samantha turned and opened the door to the lab room she had just been in. "After you."

Peggy stared at Zaria for a long moment before finally entering the room ahead of the blonde doctor.

"J.A.R.V.I.S. if you could please find Steve and have him meet with me I would appreciate it."

"Of course Ms. Davenport."

Samantha entered the lab room and took a seat at the workstation where she turned to face Peggy. "Well I'm going to go ahead and get started now before Steve shows up as I have a few things to say to you that you probably don't want Steve to hear. You're being childish."

"I am not." Peggy snapped.

"Yes, you are. I think you're feeling jealous that Steve happened to have moved on to another girl. Which, I can understand, at least a little bit, but you need to also understand that Steve was frozen in ice for seventy years. When he woke up he had left behind everything he knew about civilization and cultural norms along with losing the one person he had been in love with; it was very difficult for him. He struggled to understand everything there is to know about a culture that is as foreign to him as India's culture is to most of the American population. When he finally began to open up to someone and basically seemed to brighten up and begin to accept this weird society we were all really happy and very concerned. We had no idea who this person was or what she was like, but we didn't want to see him revert back to that shell he had been in when he woke up. He struggled to accept her history when he finally learned it all but he moved past that and was able to grow and learn. He was doing well and then out of the blue you reappeared in his life and suddenly he had something from a life he had thought he had lost forever.

"Zaria may have been the one who made the choice to move out of his life, but don't presume that choice was an easy choice for her. From the information I gathered I can piece together that they day you showed up was probably around the time that she also found out she was pregnant, so that decision was probably more difficult for her to make, but she made it because some part of her knew that Steve would have chosen you over her if she hadn't been pregnant and forcing him to do something he did not fully wish or intend to do would be both cruel and irrevocably damaging to any relationship they may have had together.

"I don't see how this is relevant."

"I went the long way around but what I wanted to say is this; though you may be jealous of Zaria, she, in turn, is jealous of you. If you don't see that, let me explain something to you that you may not have known; Zaria is dying."

"That's not possible."

"But it is." It was Steve's voice from the door. Both Samantha and Peggy jumped as they had not been paying attention to his arrival. "Zaria is dying because she continues to bare the child."

"I don't see how a pregnancy could be that damaging isn't the technology and medicine of this day in age able to prevent things like this?" Peggy asked.

"If this were a normal pregnancy you would be right, for the most part anyway. But since this pregnancy is so far from normal Doctor Banner and I are barely able to keep her healthy, let alone stop what it is that is causing the damage to her." Samantha stopped as she took a long, slow breath. "I wanted to explain to both of you why she is basically demanding that Peggy not be involved with any of the pregnancy and that is because the reality of the situation is that she may very likely die giving birth to her child.

"What she is doing now, seeing the ultrasound, picking baby names, everything that is necessary for a child before birth may be the only thing she gets to do with the child. The reality that she will not be around to raise her child is very well known to her and who do you think would be the ones to raise that child for her?"

"Us," Steve answered the nearly rhetorical question. "Peggy and I would be the ones that would raise the child."

"That's correct. Peggy and you would raise the child as your own. Now, I have no idea if you will ever tell that child that Peggy is not the mother, and I am sure that Zaria has also thought about this question, but it stands that Peggy will be the child's maternal figure."

"I have yet to see what this has to do with why she is acting like a spoiled brat now." Peggy stated.

"Coming from a woman who did not give birth to her child, I missed out on something very important and dear." Samantha answered. "It is said that the mother and child make an instant connection within the first few seconds of birth upon seeing each other. I didn't have that with my daughter, but my daughter's biological mother did not get to send her daughter to her first day of kindergarten or see her daughter lose her first tooth. She will not be there for her daughter's first date or her first dance. She will not be there for her daughter's wedding or her daughter's own first child. These are all things that I will be there for as her "mother" but not as her biological mother. My daughter was lucky though to at least have known her birth mom, even if it was for a very short time, Zaria and Steve's child will not have that. Zaria may not be there to change her baby's first diaper or hear the first word or watch the baby's first steps. She may not send her child to preschool or kindergarten or any other grade. She may not see her child's first date or their first dance. These will all be things that you, Peggy, will be there for and not her if this pregnancy goes the way it is heading now. What Zaria is here for is stuff that she can share with Steve who, in turn, can share it with their child, but that child will have no actual memories of their birth mother.

"You can complain all you want that Zaria is being selfish, but in my opinion, it is you who is being selfish to push your way into something that may very well be the last thing Zaria ever does.

"And you Steve, I know that you can be dense, that you can sometimes miss important things that are right in front of you, but this, this has topped the cake and frankly I am more than a little shocked that you have done so." Samantha sighed before she stood up. "I know that I have stepped over my boundaries as a Doctor, but these are things that I felt needed to be said and needed to be cleared up before things got further out of hand and ended terribly for Zaria, the child, or both. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to speak with Bruce and see how he is doing."

With that she left the room with a firm and final snap of the door, leaving Peggy and Steve sitting there to contemplate what she had left them with.