A/N: Did I say light?... I may have lied.
It takes her a couple of hours to find him, sequestered in what's left of the pub where the Commandos first formed. Rogers is an artist. She's not surprised that he'd seek out such a poetic place to drown his sorrows.
She's equally unsurprised to find him alone, and morosely staring down into a glass of what looks like top-shelf bourbon.
His bleak, red-rimmed eyes are painfully sober when they turn to her.
Steve's new metabolism won't allow him to get drunk, though he's clearly been trying valiantly for some time. Erskine had thought that this might be the case, but she highly doubts that he'd expected the circumstances at the time.
Steve looks utterly shattered sitting there, completely destroyed; hunched over a dirty glass - a study in misery.
Peggy slowly rights a battered, but intact, chair, and pulls it up to the table to join him. Steve barely looks at her. He fell quiet after his initial, miserable greeting, and she can scarcely pry two words from him after that. His face is bitter and disbelieving when she assures him that he did all he could. That none of this is his fault. He asks her tersely if she read the report. She has. She demanded it of a petrified staff sergeant before coming to track him down.
Steve is convinced she should see his guilt. The blood he imagines staining his hands.
Peggy is convinced that Steve is erring close to dark and dangerous territory.
She can see her words aren't making much of a mark on him, at any rate. No matter what she says, he'll blame himself for everything from now to the day he dies. It's just the way he is. Steve has always taken too much responsibility onto his own shoulders, even when they were narrow and thin. Now that he's grown, he seems to think the weight of the entire world belongs balanced there.
She talks gently at him for a while, not entirely sure he's listening, in the dark of the burnt-out bar - set on an empty street, in a deserted block. The desolation is palpable, and she can sense Steve quietly feeding on it. He's harder, sharper, than she's ever seen him. Shrinking in on himself in a way he never has before. The Steve she first met was unassuming perhaps, but his presence was large. There was always a sense that he was too big for his body. Expansive, despite his humility. ...Now, though, he feels collapsed. Sunken. Like a part of him has been drained away.
So much pain and anger are simmering in him now, it's like they've simply pushed everything else out.
He's going to do something foolish, she realizes grimly. He's going to do something foolish, and nothing she says will prevent it.
"You won't be alone." she tells him softly, futilely, when he swears to lay waste to HYDRA, laying one hand gently over his. Steve stares into the worn wood of the table and nods. He's clearly far away.
For a long moment, they sit this way in the stillness. She studies Rogers across the table, noting how lost he seems. He looks so... incongruously small. For all his new bulk, for all his strength, he's just so fragile.
She can't stand it any longer.
Peggy stands briskly and abandons her chair, moving to his side and pointedly opening out her arms. She meets his startled eyes with authority. Daring him to refuse. Steve blinks for a moment, surprised... but he takes the implied invitation with a visible droop of relief.
Between one breath and the next, he lurches into her arms with a painful whimper. His face tucks tight down into her shoulder, arms clutched desperately around her waist. He shudders and goes still; taking ragged, heaving breaths that he's trying vainly to quiet. His fingers twitch and bunch in the fabric of her coat as Peggy slowly pets through his hair.
"You aren't alone." she murmurs soothingly into his scalp. Steve trembles in reply. She lets the damp that's slowly soaking into the collar of her jacket go uncommented upon, and goes on gently stroking his head.
They share a common guilt, Rogers and she. That they could have done more. Should have done more. That they've let this happen.
Against all logic, they're both so sure that they could have prevented it… somehow.
The thing is done now, though. There's no fixing the mistake; no turning back.
Wishing won't raise the dead.
"Not alone." she repeats softly, pushing her own grief and guilt sharply away. She concentrates on holding Steve to her, feeling the warmth of his big hands through her shirt, the little tremors that are passing through the big man in her arms. She refuses to examine her own thoughts. Nothing good nor productive awaits down that path. Right now, Rogers needs her to be solid. Strong. He can't carry himself at the moment, so it falls to her. She will come through.
Peggy makes herself as much an anchor for him as she can. Murmurs soft, soothing nothings into his ear as he shivers against her shoulder. Focuses on the damp face pressed into her neck, the soft golden hair under her fingers. Lets him tremble and sob silently in her arms, for as long as he needs to.
She lets him come apart, break down, and just mourn - at least for a little while.
Things will get worse. The war isn't winding down. If anything, it's winding up for a massive showdown. Steve will be called upon to work more miracles than usual; and he'll do it, even if it bleeds him dry. She knows him too well to believe otherwise.
There's nothing she can do to shield him from what's coming, but she won't send him out to face it shattered and barely functional. She helped bring him into this. She will help bring him out again.