Old instincts woke her. Peggy slid her hand carefully under her pillow, but there was nothing there except a crumpled tissue. The bed was too narrow, she thought, only a single. Then she remembered Mike was dead and there was no gun because the nurses believed she wasn’t competent to have one.
Well, at her age there little to be afraid of. Peggy Carter opened her eyes.
Little more than a shadow between the bed and the window. Probably a man from the build. A glimmer of pale skin, clothing must be dark. Metal gleam, a gun no doubt.
“I assume this isn’t a social visit.” No reply, so she tried being blunter. She tired easily now, so not a good idea to spin this out. “What do you want?”
“Some answers.” A male voice, soft.
“And if I don’t want to give them?” Peggy found she was still not afraid. If he tried any rough stuff her heart would probably give out, which would upset the children but would hardly be untimely.
“I’m not here for state secrets.” The accent was American, but if there was a regional lilt Peggy couldn’t place it. “I know what you did. I want to know why. You owe me that much, Agent Carter.”
“If we’re calling in debts, then I should know who you are and who sent you.”
“No one sent me. Not this time.” A rogue agent then, if that was true. Dangerously unstable, often, but usually simpler to deal with in the end. “As to the other question,” the man went on “what do you know of the Winter Soldier?”
“The Winter Soldier is a ghost story.” If this was an attempt to rattle her it was a poor one.
“Yes.” He moved slightly then, face still shadowed, but part of his body outlined in the light from the window. She could see the metal now, not a gun, but – body armour? No, not likely on one area only. An entire metallic arm. She had heard a rumour. Well. Perhaps that story had some truth after all. Interesting, and a shame no one would believe a woman her age, supposing she lived through this.
“Although,” he said, still soft, “I feel rather solid for a ghost. Undead, perhaps. Or manufactured. Do you know Frankenstein? See the movie with Boris Karloff? I did, read the book as well. Odd, the things I remember.”
Peggy had seen the film. It was old now, at least ten years old, but still doing the rounds, She and Steve had been comparing memories of it just – well it must have been recently. But she couldn’t dwell on that. The seemingly random change of topic had to be a crude attempt to put her off balance. The remark about memory might be relevant. Peggy found she was enjoying this, she couldn’t remember when she’d felt so alive.
“The question is,” he went on, “who was the bigger monster? The Creature that never asked to be made, or the one who brought it into life, then turned and looked the other way? The Creature killed, but were the hands of the Creator who cared nothing for the thing created clean?”
“I think my daughter did this essay,” Peggy said brightly. “Surely you didn’t come here for help with your homework?”
“Change of subject then. Armin Zola.”
Ah, that was more like it. Peggy waited. He would say more.
“Red Skull’s chief science man.” The voice, still quiet, now had a sharper edge. It was a young man’s voice, she was sure. “Appointed to SHIELD after the war. Other HYDRA scientists also. Why?”
Deliberately cool Peggy said, “They were good at what they did.”
“And that was good enough?” Peggy knew this one. They had been well prepared for the challenges, had known the choice would be questioned.
“We need them. The world is a dirty place, and SHIELD needs to deal with that.”
“You make it sound like scrubbing a floor. Zola experimented on POWs.”
“This man is a torturer,” the lawyer protested.
“That was…
…never proved,” Peggy said.
“Ahhhhhh,” a long expel of breath. “Of course not,” he said, voice dripping sharp edges, “It’s hard to prove things when all the witnesses are dead.”
“Let’s not deny it helps us,” Howard said in one of his deliberately provoking moods, “that the only man to survive Zola’s lab fell off a train in ‘44”.
“It’s not a cause of satisfaction,” Peggy snaps. She doesn’t remember Sergeant Barnes well, but she remembers Steve in a wrecked bar trying to get drunk. Remembers telling him to respect his friend’s choice, and his voice saying ‘This is my choice’ before he died.
Goddammit Steve… She doesn’t miss him, not anymore, but she wishes, so hard, he’d got the life he deserved.
“So you handed him the keys to SHIELD because there was no proof,” the visitor said. “That’s a really bad excuse.” Was he a journalist? If so it was strange they were in the dark.
“It was a difficult time,” Peggy said, reminding herself not to sound like a particularly superior school teacher. It was hard with the young sometimes. “Tough measures were needed. Let us not forget that our Western ideals, our democracy, were menaced by an iron monolith.” She sounded like a newsreel now. Didn’t matter if it got the point across. “We needed their science. We needed the defence.”
“I’ve got news for you there.” He moved again, light sliding down his arm and she remembered he was an operative, maybe a legend. His right arm came up, this hand was flesh and it traced his shoulder. There was a dark coloured star there. Red?
“Oh no, I was made in the US of A. The star is smoke and mirrors. Like the Soviet ammo. Oh, I was kept in the Ukraine a while, and the handlers wore Soviet uniforms, but they cared no more for Lenin than Zola cared for George Washington. The star was there to be seen. Another kill put down to the Reds, and the cold war gets a little hotter. Or sometimes it was US bullets and a Soviet target.”
She’d known some of that. Known or guessed. She remembered looking at a blurred picture, a star outlined on cold metal, saying “This is too obvious. We were meant to see this.” She’d thought the idea of one man behind those hits a fabrication.
“Camp Lehigh. Right under your feet, Agent Carter. Been to a lot of places since, though I didn’t even know where a lot of them were. Don’t know how many I murdered either, though I’m trying to make a count now. Making sure they’re remembered is all I can do. Camp Lehigh. That’s where they made their murderer.”
“They?” Peggy echoed. It was a crude prompt, but his words were speeding up, the sign of someone who is getting reckless with speech. Camp Lehigh though? What was behind that?
“The Captain only cut off one head. What did you expect? Did your scientists all swear on scout’s honour they’d turned in their HYDRA badges? You handed Zola the keys to SHIELD.”
“That’s rather an overstatement.”
“You’d like it to be overstatement. It’s not. That’s why I’m here. You didn’t just use them for science, you gave them power. There’s a secret base under that secret base you were so proud of. How did they put that in, did they tell you it was drainage repairs? There’s a secret HYDRA base.”
“Prove it,” said Peggy sharply. It had to be a lie.
“How would I do that? Show you pictures? They could be from anywhere. I could show you news reports from the internet, but you’d forget how they started before you finished watching them, most likely. I’ve read your medical file. I know how it is. Except when a memory goes for you it slips away, no pain, no screaming. It must have been soundproofed, down there. I screamed so much even they tired of it.
“I can tell you what they showed me, though. There were cameras down there. They’d linked to your security system, I don’t know if there was a point to showing me or if they just felt like it. Your hair was shorter than it had been in the war. Phillips had a limp. Stark had found a taste for checked ties, and one day he came in with his left eyebrow missing.”
It was those last words that shook her. A lab accident. Peggy hadn’t thought of it in decades. But this man was a pro, he’d have done his research. It proved nothing.
“Steve Rogers took a plane down to wipe out HYDRA, and you let it grow back. More, you planted the new shoots in your yard, and watered them, and called it good work.” The words were coming fast now, a vicious twist to his voice. “And you called it SHIELD. Did you pride yourself on being Captain America’s legacy? You think he would ever have put Zola on the payroll?”
Peggy wanted to snap at him to leave Steve out of this, but that was what he wanted so she bit it back. It was starting to nag at her that he kept his face so carefully in shadow.
“Always a cool one, Agent Carter. Are you going to play the ‘how could I have known’ card? Thirty-four.”
“What?” Peggy couldn’t help the sharp question this time.
“Thirty-four men died from Zola trying to recreate Erskine’s serum. Not counting me, although whether I’m alive is debatable. No idea why I didn’t go the way of the others, and Zola hadn’t either, can’t have, or he could have done it again. Some died on the table, and some he put down. Sixteen POWs, and don’t give me ‘that was never proved’. Thirteen from various sources in his hidden base, before he gave up. And five from Project Eagle, though one of those lived ten years in a padded cell. The files are out now. The world knows what you wanted from Zola.”
“Those men were volunteers.”
“Death Row inmates. At least one was most likely innocent, there’s been a lot of discussion of those cases since the files went out. Your failed attempts to make a new supersoldier.”
“It was what the times demanded. I do not apologise.”
“Did I ask?” He leaned sideways slightly, and she saw the flesh hand reach out and lift one of the photographs that stood there, the one of herself with Angela and Graham. “You’ve done a lot of living.”
“Put that DOWN!” There was steel and cordite in her voice. He did not flinch.
“Why? Afraid the blood will come off? Your family is safe from me, Agent Carter. They know what mother did in the Cold War already.” He angled the picture, to catch the faint light. “I used to want children. Not in a hurry, but one day. I think I could have been a good parent, back when I was human. I haven’t remembered murdering a child yet, but I’m pretty sure there’s more to come back.
He put the picture down with a metallic clink. “We both became monsters at Lehigh, Agent Carter, but only one of us got to go home to a welcome kiss and play at being a regular person.”
It hit too close. She and Mike had always left work at the door, Mike because of patient confidentiality and Peggy because of state secrets. But after a day of hard choices, at night in Mike’s arms, she’d feel cleansed by knowing that a good man loved her.
“Are you here to kill me?” She made the question blunt. “Since that’s what you do.” There was an intake of breath sharp enough she knew she’d got to him.
“Not to kill.” There was a shaky note, but only for a few words. “If they’d sent me a few months ago I would have. Would be easy, I’d only need the right hand.” Then she did feel a chill, still not afraid of death, but dying so helplessly, being so powerless, an enemy killing her like breaking a toy; that frightened her. “But now,” he said “It’s me who decides, nobody else. And whatever you’ve done, killing a helpless old woman in her bed would just be nasty.”
“Who are you?” It was a misstep, she knew it. Too urgent a demand, making her need to know too obvious.
“The Winter Soldier. That’s what I am now. Before that I was nobody much. Just another man who wanted to do his duty and protect those he cared about, and maybe, if he was lucky, go home.
“Believe me yet? Believe you compromised so much you forgot what the fight was for? A guy who tortures prisoners, now, that’s a pretty big clue you don’t want to pick him for your team. Did he tell you he was repentant? Claim he’d been coerced by Red Skull?” She could see the glint of his eyes on her face. “He didn’t, did he. You just thought you could use him anyway. A tame monster. But you can’t use monsters, Agent Carter. They use you. And then they reproduce in their own image. You’d forgotten the fight was supposed to be against the bullies. SHIELD.” There was fathoms of bitterness in his final word.
“We didn’t forget! We just had to see the bigger picture. It was a different kind of war.”
“Not his kind of war at all.” Howard talked about Steve far more than Peggy ever had. Although it was often hard to tell if it was Steve the man or Captain America the highly successful supersoldier experiment that preoccupies him more. She’s sure a good part of why he’s so bent on finding Steve’s body is he still hopes to unlock Erskine’s secrets. Today it’s Steve the man on Howard’s mind, although mostly, perhaps, to needle Peggy.
“I can just hear what he’d think of McCarthy. In fact he’d probably have denounced that Committee so loud he’d get himself hauled in front of it.”
“McCarthy’s a bully and an oaf.” Peggy says crisply. “But he’s a powerful oaf at the moment. You know as well as me we need powerful friends to maintain SHIELD. The latest funding budget justified a few greasy handshakes.” Phillips’ handshake had been too warm for her liking, just as Phillips’ views on Reds are sounding more like Joe McCarthy every year, but nobody calls the Director obsessed out loud. Not even Howard wants to admit the Old Man’s judgement might be going.
Howard knocks back his drink. Occasionally Peggy worries about his drinking, but his hands are always steady in the lab, so she assumes it to be under control. Of the three of them it was always Howard who took the hard choices hardest.
And yes, she had always known, that Steve would never have agreed to some of her choices. On cold, grey, days she had known that Mike wouldn’t either. Yet she’d taken Mike’s love still, hugged it to her through the cold hours. She missed him.
“I’m making a list,” the man who might be the Winter Soldier said, tone changing, conversational now. “My kills, of course, though I’ll leave off the ones that were HYDRA killing HYDRA. Secret evil conspiracies have their infighting too. The men Zola killed experimenting while he was on your payroll. All those who died because you and Stark and Phillips opened the door. Haven’t decided whether to put Stark himself on it yet, that’s a tough one.”
“Howard?” It came out through stiff lips. Howard hadn’t been an easy man to work with, but they walked so many miles in the same shoes, sometimes she’d felt more connected to him than anyone.
“It was HYDRA. Phillips’ stroke was natural enough, as far as I know, but Stark’s car crash wasn’t. Don’t think it was me, though I can’t be sure. But it’s not the sort of thing they would have defrosted me for. I was pretty high-maintenance. Could have been anyone, could’ve been the SHIELD garage-parker. But it was HYDRA. They’d had a lot of value out of Stark, and not just SHIELD. The arms he made, the ones he sold in wars they fostered. His company was almost as infested as SHIELD itself. But he was a loose cannon in the end. And Stane was a company man, heiling HYDRA all the way to the bank. So out with Stark and in with Stane.”
And Peggy believed. Because it had never sat right, although she knew it was investigated, although Howard always did drive too fast and wouldn’t admit he was getting too old for it. Because people like Howard, like her, they don’t die in accidents. She’d just never been able to put a finger on why.
Sorry, Howard. We rather messed it up. A flicker came to her, a memory of Steve trying to reassure her when she told him that. But that was impossible. Steve was dead, and he was not a man to tell comforting lies.
“When the list is complete enough I’ll put it on the internet,” he said, quite serious now. “Put your picture and Stark’s and Phillips’ at the top, because those dead are your legacy. It’ll be like that wall of remembrance at SHIELD. Did they have that in your day? The one at the Triskelion is gone now of course. Still don’t know if they ever took Steve’s name off.”
Peggy could see the wall of remembrance clear as day. She didn’t know what the Triskelion was or why the man was talking as though the wall was gone, when it was right there in the bunker at Camp Lehigh, and that made her angry because she felt she should know, but to show anger in front of him would be weakness, just as demanding what right he had to speak of Steve in such a familiar way would play into his hands.
“Don’t know how many of the names on your clean, lying wall were HYDRA either. I doubt they’ll make a new wall. Be a sordid joke, now everyone knows what SHIELD really was. Maybe they’ll list the ones that died in the final battle.” His voice faltered. “I’ve been trying to put names and faces to the ones I killed. But I didn’t look at them. They weren’t even targets to me, just collateral. But they knew what they fought for and why. They shouldn’t have died.
“So many people should have lived,” Peggy said wearily. So many, over the years.
“We agree on something then. We’re not so unlike. Difference is I only did HYDRA’s work when they’d wiped me and wiped me and wiped me until I didn’t have a self left, only the missions and the orders, and then they did it again and again every time they took me out and every time they put me back and every time I asked questions. I don’t kid myself that absolves me. That I didn’t choose to be a monster doesn’t make me less of one. But it’s a difference all the same.
“There was a man once who had a name, who knew what he was fighting for. His name was on your wall. He died.”
“Which name?” Peggy ground out, fear running sharply through her now, but he was already sweeping on.
“That part’s not important. It was war, people die, he knew that. But he wasn’t left in his grave, and everyone deserves a grave. Even an unmarked one at the bottom of a mountain ravine. ”
He moved forward again, deliberately letting the light from the window fall across his face.
“Oh no,” Peggy heard her voice saying, weak and broken and so very old, “No, no, no, no, no. Not you, not him, no, no.”
“Why the surprise?” The hair was longer, pushed back behind the ears, but the face was barely older than the last time she’d seen him. “You knew what Zola had done to that young soldier, not the results of course, but what he’d done. And you didn’t care enough to want him brought to justice. Why care now you know he did it all over again and more besides? Are you afraid Steve will hate you?”
She flinched, because he was right, because her first clear thought had been that Steve would never have forgiven her for this. Whether he’d loved her, how much he’d loved her, those had long since become unimportant might-have-beens, but that he’d thought highly of her had been a talisman carried through the years. Steve Rogers, a man too good for this dirty world.
“Steve’s probably forgiven you already. He’s a sap when it comes to people he cares about. I don’t forgive you, but I don’t suppose you care about that. The families of those I murdered won’t forgive either of us, but that won’t mean much to you now either.
“And perhaps it’s not anyone’s forgiveness on your mind. Perhaps it’s the knowledge it could have been Steve down there, under Camp Lehigh. If he’d been the one to go off the train, if HYDRA had found the plane decades ago. It could have been Steve shackled to a table, screaming until his throat bled. Because Zola was good at what he did, and that was good enough for you.”
He moved to the window.
“Goodbye, Agent Carter. I’m glad we never danced.”
*
When the nurse came in the next morning there were deep cracks in the bedside table like the marks of fingers, and the young woman fretted over how they’d got there.
Peggy couldn’t remember. Hadn’t it been like that for a long time? It must have been. She said firmly, “But it’s always been that way. Nothing’s changed.”