Title: Believing in Magic
Rating: PG/K+
Originally posted: August 2015
Originally written for: a challenge at Avland on Livejournal
Characters/Pairings: Peggy Carter (mentions Peggy/Steve).
Notes: Set after Captain America: The First Avenger. Angst warning.
Only children truly believed in magic.
It was easy when you were young and innocent. A child's view of the world was very simple; right and wrong, black and white. The good guys always prospered and bad people were appropriately punished. Everything always worked itself out to a happily ever after in the end, tears dried, wounds patched, no problem. Magic cured every ill and soothed every hurt. There was no such thing as heartbreak, not when the end of the story came.
Perhaps the problem was that it was the beginning that had hurt Peggy rather than the end. They were just starting out in a lot of ways, hadn't even had their first date yet. That wasn't how fairytales worked. She was at least supposed to have had all the good times, all the fun. The slow dances, trips to the movies, kissing in the dark where nobody could see. Peggy wasn't sure if it would be harder or easier to accept her lack of happy ending if she'd had all of that first. Now she never would know.
Steve was gone, and there was nothing in the world that could bring him back to her. Agent Carter moved on, pulled herself up by the boot-straps, stiff upper lip and all that. She would go on in her work for the S.S.R., be the best agent she could be, make everybody proud. That didn't mean she felt nothing, that her heart wasn't breaking every moment. Her happy ending went down with the ship that crash landed, taking her fairytale prince with it. There was no way to fix it, to make it all better. This was just the way life had to be now, all by herself.
Peggy wished she still believed in magic, but she couldn't.