Chapter 3
“Tony is a dear,” Angie chuckled, perhaps a bit tipsy from the wine and good cheer at Stark’s house. Steve, ever the gentleman, helped to navigate her into the house and settled at the kitchen counter as Lauren bustled about getting water and medication for her grandmother. “I remember when Howard was building that house! Don’t you, Peggy?”
“I do,” she laughed, patting Angie’s arm. “He wanted to see if he could build a house that hung off the side of a cliff. It worked, apparently.”
“Howard was always doing crazy things. Tony is like him that way. But he’s like Maria too.”
Peggy, who had not known Maria, couldn’t help but ask. “How so?”
“He’s got a good heart. He likes to pretend he doesn’t, but he does, and it’s easily hurt. He also likes to pretend he doesn’t care what others think, but he does.”
“Howard cared what others thought,” Peggy countered mildly.
“Not the same way, though,” Angie insisted, perhaps a smidge loudly, her old, New York accent peeking through. “Howard cared that people thought he was a good person. Tony I think cares because he realizes he can be a good person, but he’s still figuring it out as he goes. Who knows, maybe he will get it all put together after all.”
“I think,” Lauren cut in, putting a glass of water and a box of various medications for the evening down in front of Angie, including two headache pills, Peggy noticed, likely for the wine, “you have had a bit more to drink than you should for a woman on your medication regimen.”
“You going to tattle on me to your mother?”
Lauren laughed outright at the petulance in Angie’s voice. “No! It’s a Christmas party and you don’t cut loose that often. Besides, I like being in the will.”
“You’re a good girl,” Angie patted her granddaughter’s round cheek. “And I do love you!”
She turned to Peggy sitting across from her. “And I love you, English, even if you have led the craziest life I’ve ever heard.”
“I never have deserved you, but I adore you, too.” Peggy squeezed her delicate, wrinkled fingers between her own. “And I am glad I got a chance to tell you that.”
“Me too,” Angie whispered, just a little bit tearily. She turned in her seat to regard Steve leaning against the counter by Peggy. “And as for you, Captain America, you are ridiculously handsome, and I don’t care if I say it!”
Perhaps Steve in 1943 would have flushed scarlet at Angie’s compliment, but Steve in 2012 had the grace to only turn slightly pink and smile. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Now that Peggy’s found you, you plan to make an honest woman out of her?”
Peggy only just did manage not to choke at the implication of Angie’s words.
“Nana!” Poor Lauren’s outraged squawk was rather ruined by the giggle that burst out along with it.
“Oh, I know, there was never a more modern woman than Margaret Carter, but I’m just saying you two kids are crazy for each other. You waited decades! Just do it already!”
Peggy resisted the urge to point out she sounded like her mother.
Steve, bless him, at least had the presence of mind to smooth out Angie’s fond, if tipsy, persistence. “When we are ready, I’m sure you will be the first to know.”
Angie settled for that, at least for the time being. “Well, I suppose you both will want to get to your hotel. Where are you staying?”
“Downtown,” Peggy supplied, pushing herself up from her seat, reluctant to leave Angie’s presence.
“And then you are back to your crazy, fabulous life. What are you two doing for the holidays?”
“Something quiet,” Peggy supplied, emphatically. “This year has been…”
“Insane,” Steve filled in.
“Madness,” Peggy muttered just behind him.
“You don’t say,” Angie snorted with an acerbic eye. “I suppose the aliens coming out of the sky wasn’t a dead give away.”
“Not at all,” Peggy laughed, looking up to Steve. In some ways it had been worse for him than for Peggy. He woke up just weeks before Loki's invasion to a whole new world, decades into the future, and was still adjusting. She had at least had time to make sense of all of this. “In any case, we are spending it in Washington DC with my family.”
“And seeing Gabe,” Steve cut in, gently. Gabriel Jones was the only one of the Commandos still alive in this time, living in the Washington area, and Steve had made the effort to reconnect with his old comrade and his family. “Old army buddy of ours.”
“There are precious few of us around these days,” Angie replied, knowingly, more matter-of-fact than regretful. “I’m glad you are seeing him.”
Peggy, who had not been as diligent on the matter as Steve, nodded somewhat guiltily. “That will be our Christmas. Then it’s back to New York for the New Year. My friends, Juan and Julio, hold an annual New Years celebration that I managed to weasel out of last year. I don’t think they will let me do that this year, and I’ve been told I absolutely must bring Steve.”
“To be young and living that carefree life once more.” Angie only looked slightly regretful, nodding towards Lauren. “But I wouldn’t have by kids and grandkids, and I really like them.”
“I know.” Peggy wrapped Angie in a tight embrace. “Thank you for coming out with us. I’ll call you on Christmas.”
With that, they finished their goodbyes, wandering outside of Angie’s lovely home. Despite knowing the area far less than Peggy, Steve as a super soldier could not get drunk, and Peggy had happily let him get behind the wheel after several glasses of cheer at Stark’s get together. He started the car as Peggy settled in the seat beside him, snuggling in against the mild chill of a Los Angeles December.
“She is amazingly nice,” he offered, as he pulled away from the curb and into the relatively quiet streets of Toluca Lake.
“She was one of my dearest friends after the war,” Peggy replied, thinking back with fond sadness to those years right after she moved to America…after she thought Steve had died. “I met her at a diner not far from the SSR office. She was an aspiring actress then. Whenever I had a problem at work or just needed an ear to listen to me, she was there, with a cup of coffee and a shoulder to cry on.”
The number of close, true friends Peggy could say she had over the years she could count on one hand…maybe two now. Angie was one of those. “I’m glad you got to meet her. I always thought you two would get along. She reminds me of you.”
Steve hummed in the darkness as he navigated them towards the freeway that would lead to their hotel. “I could see that, though she is a Yankees fan. But not everyone can be perfect, I suppose.”
Peggy snorted, rolling her eyes, but laughing all the same. Americans, specifically New Yorkers, and their fixation on baseball was not something she would ever understand. “It was a good day. I’m glad Stark invited the team out together.”
“It was good seeing everyone,” he agreed. “I wish Romanoff could have made it out.”
Her noticeable absence had been remarked on by several people, including Stark. “Any word from her?”
“Only that she is on an assignment for Fury.” Despite the lightness of his tone, Peggy could hear a thread of tension there. She had noticed it when she had asked about Romanoff’s absence in the first place.
“That bothers you.” Peggy said this more as a statement of fact than as a question.
“Yes and no,” he admitted, pausing as he pulled into traffic onto the freeway, effortlessly merging their vehicle into it all as if he had been born driving in this city.
“Which part is yes and which part is no,” she prodded, quietly.
He was silent for several moments, as he shifted them into the lane he wanted to be in, before answering. “It’s hard to build a partnership with a team member when you don’t know just who she is working for and if she always has the same goals or agendas as you do.”
“You’re afraid Romanoff doesn’t have your back?”
“Not that, per se, but I do think that she tends to prioritize certain objectives over others. She works closely with Fury, and I have a feeling that if Fury asked her to do something that overrode the team’s goals or went beyond our mission parameters, she would do it no matter what.”
Peggy considered her own rocky relationship with Romanoff and the distance between them when she first arrived, done partially at Fury’s instigation. “I think he does tend to put her in awkward situations, yes. I think he does it because he trusts she is one of the few people who can manage them.”
“I respect that, but it’s hard to build a partnership off of that, and harder to build a team.”
He wasn’t wrong. “Do you trust Romanoff to have the team’s best interest at heart?”
“I trust she wouldn’t willingly jeopardize the team,” he drawled, slowly. “But I don’t know if I trust that she would put that first if she was asked to have other objectives.”
It clicked with Peggy what Steve was driving at. “Do you not trust Fury?”
He was silent for long moments. “Do you?”
It was on the top of Peggy’s tongue to say “yes” without thinking, but she paused, considering. “I think that Fury, as the director of SHIELD, does the best that he can given the parameters.”
She could see Steve’s mouth tighten in a grim smile in the dim light from outside of the car. “That’s pretty diplomatic for you.”
“I don’t know, I can be diplomatic.”
He nodded. “You always were better at this spy game than I was.”
That made Peggy laugh outright. “You never did play the spy game, Steve. You’d be bad at it. I love you, but…that’s not you.”
“Fair,” he acknowledged, gamely. “You always seemed to walk the line with integrity, though.”
“I tried to, at least.” She watched the lights of houses and office buildings flying by them in the darkness. “But then I stepped into the future and the game changed. The world changed, really. When Howard and I founded SHIELD, it was because we saw all the mistakes of the past and hoped we could circumvent them, do something different and better. Make an agency that had the interests of the world, not just one nation or government, as its focal point, putting the global need over the national one. But now I wonder if we didn’t just create a new problem.”
She had been hearing whispers now for several months, from many quarters. Rhodes comments that afternoon highlighted something Peggy had been noticing for months in regards to SHIELD - there was a level of mistrust, of worry in regards to the organization. Why, she wasn’t sure, though she was certain that things like the World Security Council’s near-catastrophic attempt to stop an alien invasion by dropping a nuclear warhead on New York only added fuel to the flames. She had nothing firm on the matter, of course, save for mutterings from various quarters of the military and intelligence establishments, and a list, given to her by Siobhan Haldane, one she had passed to Romanoff to look into. She had yet to hear anything about it. After Steve’s observations, she wondered if that was on purpose.
“You know, I miss Hitler.” Steve uttered that ridiculous statement in the growing silence, earning a surprised and somewhat horrified gasp out of Peggy.
“Pardon?”
He grinned, ruefully, underscoring he said something shocking on purpose to draw her out of her own thought spiral. “I don’t miss him personally, obviously, and I’m glad the bastard is dead. I just miss the days when we knew who the enemy was. They had a name and a face, whether it was Hitler, or Schmidt, they were someone we could point to as an obvious bad guy. Now it’s much more complicated.”
He wasn’t wrong. The wars on the global stage weren’t so black and white, or at least hadn’t been in the 70 years since. “It’s hard when you find out the world operates in shades of gray.”
“Makes it difficult for a fellow to figure out where he fits into all of this.”
Her heart ached hearing the uncertainty in his voice, the quiet frustration and confusion. When she met Steve, the one thing that had been absolute was the sense of who he was. Even when the world tried to tell him no, he defiantly challenged that, safe in the certainty of what he believed and that what he was doing was right. It was harder to be that sort of man in a world whose rules had changed and on a playing field you little understood.
“It’s hard,” she admitted, quietly, reaching across the seat to lay a hand on his knee, offering what comfort she could. “Starting over, moving forward. I know as well as anyone.”
“Better than most.” He dropped his right hand to hers, picking it up to thread her fingers in his. “You seemed to do it effortlessly.”
“Maybe not as much as you would think,” she qualified, thinking on the many times she had to start again over the years. “I just have more experience in doing it is all.”
“You’d think I would. Ever since Mom died, the world has just kept shifting under my feet. The war, Captain America, Bucky, the ice, now this, I feel I am just grasping at something I understand.”
Oh how it hurt to see Steve Rogers of all people so uncertain.
“You know, when I lost you, the very idea of moving forward almost felt impossible.” She paused, her chest aching with the memory of those awful days and weeks. “But there was still a war to be won then, and even when HYDRA was dead, and then Hitler and the Nazis were defeated, we were still months searching out former HYDRA operatives. When it was all done, I will admit I found myself floundering at the end of it all. We had won, but we had lost so much in trying to do it.”
She tightened her fingers around his. “And maybe that was why Howard and I believed so much in SHIELD, the idea that we never wanted to have to face those sorts of losses again. We wanted to build something that was good, and strong, and protected everyone, something inspired by you. That was always at the heart of SHIELD, to do what was right for the most people and save lives doing it, whatever it took, because it was what you would have done.”
He was quiet for long moments. “Do you think that you could still say that about SHIELD?”
To be honest, she wasn’t sure she could. “Has something come up to make you doubt that?”
“Nothing specific,” he admitted, shrugging his broad shoulders, the leather of his jacket creaking at the gesture. “Just things I noticed with the culture there, things I hear, things that are said and unsaid. Threat assessments seem to assume the worst and seek to impose order and control more than protect against potential threats. SHIELD feels more like it's in the business of making the world do what it wants, how it wants, and shutting down anyone who might have a desire to do otherwise.”
To be fair, it was an assessment Peggy didn’t have about SHIELD, not in her dealings with them at least. But then, her dealings had been far more limited than Steve’s. She had come in and taken the Avengers and had hidden in her corner of SHIELD with Cassandra, uninvolved in the vast majority of its dealings. She was now coming to regret that singular focus as more and more questions were being raised.
“I can only say that in my time working with Fury, I have only known him to have the bigger, global scope in mind. He is serious in SHIELD’s mission of protecting the world from global threats.”
“But Fury isn’t the one calling all of the shots,” Steve pointed out. “Alexander Pierce and the World Security Council are, and you saw how that fell out. It wasn’t just the bomb on New York they authorized, they were using the Tesseract to create HYDRA style weapons. They said it was because of the threat that Thor presented, of alien races making war on Earth, but I don’t precisely see them banging in the door.”
“Except there is this Thanos sometime in the future,” she offered, quietly.
“Except that,” he conceded. “Still, they don't know what they are even expecting and they are arming up like this was the war again. Why are they building up such powerful weapons?”
“Their distrust of the Avengers Initiative is well known.”
“Which is fair, but it still begs the question as to why ramp up when there isn’t a war looming?”
On that, she couldn’t be as certain.
“So what do we do,” she asked, softly, as they slowly made their way into downtown, the sparkling towers of the center of Los Angeles rising up below them like a glittering crown.
“For now, I guess we wait and see. I think that we keep our eyes and ears open. And I think you should maybe reach out to Stark about that plan you two cooked up about having Stark Industries partially fund the Avengers. It will make it easier if we need to pull the team out of SHIELD’s influence.”
Despite the weight of their conversation, Peggy found a faint smile quirking her lips. “Listen to you!”
It broke the tension that their discussion elicited. “What,” he chuckled, his gaze flickering sideways towards her.
“Prepared to take on SHIELD if you see them as a threat.”
“You stood there while I ordered Phillips around, demanding the status of Bucky, and you are shocked by this?”
“No,” she laughed. “No, I’m not, it is very you.”
“Let’s be fair, you did your own share of standing up to do what was right.”
“Also correct,” she admitted. “But I hope you don’t judge me too harshly when I say that I rather hope that this time we are both wrong. I hope that Pierce and Fury are able to stem the worst impulses of the World Security Council and we don’t have to resort to this.”
“I hope so, too," he echoed, quietly.