Chapter Five

The next time wasn't a dream. Peggy wasn't even sleeping when it happened. One moment she was standing in the California office, arguing with Howard over something or other, and the next…

Music.

Somebody was playing dance music.

Peggy turned to look and see where it was coming from, and discovered that the office had disappeared entirely. Howard was gone too. When she reflexively reached for her gun, she found that it was gone as well—in fact, her entire outfit was different.

She was wearing a party dress, and standing on a dance floor.

And there, not two steps in front of her…

Peggy's throat closed entirely at the sight of the broad shoulders, the closely-cut blond head. Even with his back to her, she knew him in an instant.

It was Steve.

Her feet moved without her conscious volition. Peggy watched her own hand raise to touch his sleeve.

It was an actual shock to feel the wool of his uniform jacket beneath her fingers. It was an even greater shock to see him flinch and turn at her touch—and then his eyes landed on her and stayed.

He could see her.

Peggy's heart stopped short in her chest, and then resumed beating so hard and fast that she could barely hear her own voice over the pounding of blood in her ears.

"Are you ready for our dance?"

Steve didn't answer. He seemed to be every bit as dumbstruck as she, devouring her face with his eyes as though he hadn't seen her in an age.

Peggy heard her own voice again. She didn't know what she was saying—the words didn't seem to be hers somehow, as though somebody else was speaking for her. She thought one of the words might have been 'home.' But all she could see was Steve's face, the wounded expression in his eyes as though she was offering the one thing he truly wanted—the one thing he could never have.

And then, quite suddenly, the world slipped sideways.

And they were dancing.

They'd never danced together before. All that talk about being the 'right partner,' and yet there had never been the right time or opportunity to make it happen.

But now Steve's hand was big and warm and strong against her ribs, and her fingers were tangling with his, and he pulled her close against his body like he never wanted to let her go. The look in his eyes was enough to leave Peggy breathless, his face alight with interest and adoration, his lips coming achingly near her cheek…

It was effortless. It was glorious.

And except for Steve, none of it was quite right.

But Peggy didn't want to think about that. She didn't want to think about the half-heard gunshots, the scream of bombs just outside her range of hearing, the mad freneticism of the other dancers. She especially didn't want to think about the fact that her body didn't feel quite like her own, as if some invisible puppeteer had a grip on her voice, on her limbs.

Because whatever else was going on, Steve was here. He could see her and hear her and touch her, and they were dancing. She could feel his regard, his unspoken love for her as strongly as she had ever felt it during the war.

Everything else might be wrong, but Steve—Steve was real.

And with that thought, the world burst like a bubble.

"…ggy? Pegs, can you hear me?"

Howard's face was about an inch away from Peggy's nose. She gasped and jerked backwards, sucking in a breath of air. Her lungs felt tight, as though she'd been underwater.

"Are you okay?" It was Sousa, face filled with worry. "You were talking, and then you just…"

Peggy gulped another lungful of air, acutely aware that everyone in the office was staring. Her legs were quite suddenly her own again, and she sat down abruptly—which probably would have worked better had there actually been a chair behind her. Sousa tried to catch her, but his cane slipped and they both ended up on the floor.

"I'm fine," she croaked, finally regaining her voice. "I… mm. I'm fine."

Howard joined them on the floor, crouching next to her, reaching for her pulse. Peggy swatted irritably at him but Sousa caught her arm instead, his fingers slipping inside her wrist to feel the vein.

Peggy couldn't find it in herself to shake him off, even though everything suddenly felt far too bright and loud and close. "What happened?" she managed to ask.

"You stopped yelling at me," Howard said, his face creased with worry. "And you just stood there like you were in some kinda trance. I don't even think you were breathing."

Sousa's hand was on her forehead now, probably checking her temperature. Peggy had no idea what he would find—she felt flushed and chilled all at the same time. "Has this happened before?" he asked gravely.

There were no words. How did one explain that it felt like her mind and body had been ever-so-briefly hijacked? Such a fact would raise questions not only about her fitness to do the job as an agent, but also about whether she posed a security threat.

And how could she explain to the man she was 'going steady' with that she had seen her dead sweetheart again, alive and well and heartbreakingly real?

Peggy's throat closed convulsively, and she simply shook her head. "I'm fine," she rasped again, and somehow found the strength to drag herself to her feet. "It's just a trifle warm in here, is all."

She dreamed of him again, only a few nights later. Steve stood on the threshold of a home that was everything every returning soldier dreamed about. From inside the house Peggy could hear the voices of friends, the laughter of children.

And yet Steve stood outside looking in, a man apart.

Peggy drew near and experimentally tried to touch his shoulder—but just like in all the other dreams, her hand slipped right through.

Something in her heart cracked at that, but she swallowed her pain and looked at him, really looked at the weariness in his bearing, at the new creases across his brow, at the uniform so similar and yet so different from the one she had known.

This man was unspeakably tired, alone, and very, very sad.

Peggy licked her lips and tried to remember the words from the vision—the words that had not been hers, but which had sparked such a reaction from him:

We can go home. Imagine it.

They were strange words for a woman with no home to say to a man who was dead—a promise that neither could hope to fulfill, though she would have given everything to make it so.

"We can go home," she said aloud, willing him to hear.

And Steve heard.

His head whipped around, but his eyes swept right through her, searching, seeking for the woman who stood unseen in the path of his gaze. For one instant she saw hopeful longing in his eyes, quickly shuttered by sorrow. His lips tightened and he held himself in check for a very long moment before allowing himself a slow, tightly-controlled breath.

And in that moment Peggy understood something she had never truly known before.

This thing she had offered him, these words that had been placed in her mouth—they voiced the deepest desire of his heart: the home the two of them could have made together, in a life they'd never had the chance to live.

She woke up confused, and lay frowning up at her ceiling.

Steve Rogers was dead. She had heard him die. But these rare, distinct dreams of him all seemed to connect one to another, forming a continuum across literal years of her life. As for the recent experience-which-was-not-a-dream—well, Peggy had dreamed of dancing before. As a matter of fact, she'd had a very vivid dream of dancing with Sousa not so long ago. But this had been real to an extent that nothing else could match.

Could it be Steve's ghost, calling out to her in some way?

Peggy shifted uncomfortably under her sheets. She had never believed in ghosts that lingered on to speak to their loved ones. As far as she was concerned, any afterlife involved a heaven and a hell, and Steve should certainly be in heaven.

So what was his spirit doing, mucking about in her dreams? Or was this her own grief, long-since laid to rest but still extant, making a reappearance in her subconscious?

Or else…

Peggy thought again of a certain blue cube with seemingly unlimited power—a cube which had gone down with Steve and which Howard had only recently rediscovered.

Might there be a different explanation for all of this?

Author's Note: Somehow I accidentally came up with an entire background story for Peggy's disbelief in ghosts. It didn't fit in the chapter, so I'm including it here for those of you interested in history: In the wake of WWI, many people (famously including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) became involved with Spiritualism as a way to deal with the losses of the war. I headcanon that Peggy's mother was among these people, and that she dabbled in Spiritualism when Peggy was a child. Peggy, of course, was very levelheaded and annoyed at the fraud perpetrated by many so-called psychics, and this provided the foundation for her disbelief in ghosts.