Time Converges

Six months ago, the world had changed forever.

To Peggy Carter the world had changed more times than she could count. When she was only eighteen everything had plummeted into another world war, the second within a generation, sweeping up her entire family and herself with it. The next six years sent her careening from a school girl pulling pranks oh her headmaster, to a code breaker using her keen intellect and skills at recognizing patterns as Bletchley Park, to a spy, first the SOE, then the SSR in America, working side-by-side the likes of Abraham Erskine and Howard Stark. It was how she had met the singular force of nature known as Steve Rogers, how she had been pulled into the orbit of the Howling Commandos. She had fought alongside Captain America and his men, and had earned their respect. But then Steve Rogers gave his life to save the world, and he had taken her own broken heart with him, or so it seemed at first.

But the war ended, and the world shifted again, leaving ruin and chaos in its wake. London, like so much of Europe, was in tatters, a place left in shambles, and no place for a woman of Peggy’s talents. She had taken the offer to go to New York and work, to join the SSR as an investigative agent, despite the ridicule and dismissiveness she knew was coming. Peggy couldn’t say her time in the SSR was good or even easy, frankly she had been resented at nearly every corner. The only ones who hadn’t were Howard Stark, of course, and his faithful butler, Edwin Jarvis, Colonel Phillips, as well as Howling Commandos...and of course, Daniel Sousa, a man she thought she could perhaps build a life with. It was this core group she had turned to when it came time to build SHIELD. For two years, Peggy had bent her energies to the project, had just gotten it off the ground to allow it to soar on its own and then the world turned upside down yet again, all because one day a man with a time travel device arrived and told Peggy that the future needed her.

At the time, Peggy had thought Scott Lang crazy, and in fairness, who wouldn’t? Time machines and aliens, someone named Thanos and half of the population of the entire universe wiped from existence? It all sounded so insane and fantastical, and yet, Scott Lang had told Peggy several key pieces of information...that a group named the Avengers could stop it all, if she came forward with him and managed to keep Howard’s son and Steve Rogers from breaking it all apart. Peggy, recklessly and impetuously agreed to come forward, reasoning to herself that the world and the Avengers would need her. Arriving alone two years before she had planned, she had once again figured out this new world, the new challenges of a life so different than everything she knew before, finding those points of familiarity with it.

She had upended and shifted her life so many times, with every new challenge or calamity, that it seemed only a matter of course adjusting to this new world. She found that despite it all, she still had family - the family of her brother, once believed dead, but whose children and grandchildren now served as Peggy’s connection to this world. She had a place at SHIELD, the agency she had helped to found so long ago. Though she no longer ran the agency, she was responsible for one of the key parts of it, the Avengers, the organization of gifted people who could use their unique talents to help protect Earth, whether they be a god like Thor of Asgard, or the victim of a science experiment, like Dr. Bruce Banner, or particularly deadly and capable operatives, like Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff, the maddening genius of Howard’s son, Tony Stark, or the steady, strategic leadership of Steve. They all played a key role, supported by the likes of Dr. Jane Foster and Dr. Betty Ross. The Avengers were Peggy’s life now, the new focus and goal of her work.

She had picked up and put her life back together again so many times, and each time someone stronger, smarter, more capable came out of the other side. Now, as she sat in a room full of distant monitors, the faces of men and women whom she did not know staring down at her, she pulled herself to her full height as she perched on the edge of her chair, meeting the many-eyed gaze of the World Security Council, unflinching.

“The world is asking pertinent questions,” Peggy tossed to the collective group, particularly to the cool-faced woman who sat as spokeswoman for the council on this meeting. Councilwoman Hawley met Peggy’s disapproving air with unflinching pragmatism, much as she had this entire meeting. “President Ellis has openly threatened to bring up the question before a Joint Session of the UN, and I can’t give him a good reason as to why he shouldn’t. SHIELD launched a nuclear warhead on a sovereign nation at a critical moment when the Avengers were about to handle the situation and stop it, and if it hadn’t been for the efforts of Tony Stark - who might have died in the attempt, I might add - the city of New York and much of the northeastern seaboard of the United States would be devastated right now.”

“A call was made in the moment,” Councilwoman Hawley retorted, firmly and authoritatively, in the same clipped, British public-education tones that Peggy herself had, which was why it hardly phased her.

“It was a horrible call and you all know it now.” Peggy eyed the members on the call. Not all of them had been on the video conference that horrible day earlier in the spring. Peggy could pick out a handful of faces that were, no more. The media was calling it the Battle of New York, a stark name for a horrific moment, and yet it could have gone so much worse. SHIELD had not walked away from that day looking particularly heroic.

Which was why Peggy was here, chastising them all.

“There are many on Capitol Hill right now who are questioning whether or not the United States intelligence apparatus should still continue to keep supporting SHIELD.” She let her gaze slip to Alexander Pierce, the lone other human being in this room. “There are a lot of angry senators and congressmen, many of whom want answers as to why SHIELD, an agency that is supposed to be answering to the United Nations, can work with such carte blanche, and I am telling you that they will want answers as to why.”

Pierce sat with an elbow resting on the arm of his chair, slouched down in thought as he rested his chin on his right knuckles, index finger framing one sun-wrinkled cheek. He was thinking, calculating, ever the careful politician. He nodded, glancing to Hawley and the council on the bevy of monitors. “Carter isn’t wrong. I will call President Ellis and speak with him. I’ll even offer to chat with the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, maybe get the CIA, NSA and FBI heads in there. I can smooth things over, but I will have to give them something for it.”

Hawley pursed her lips in a way that reminded Peggy very much of the sorts of ladies her mother used to have over for tea. “You want Gideon?”

“Malick is the one who called the order,” Pierce replied, equitably, not looking happy with it, but not all together displeased. “Worse, he had the council override Director Fury’s orders and ignored Director Carter’s advice. The Avengers had the situation nearly under control, and if it weren’t for Stark we’d be having a whole other conversation. Hell, I wouldn’t even be here as I’d have been blown up myself.”

His wry smile met the stern faces of the council on the monitors. Clearly, none of them appreciated gallows humor. It hardly seem to bother Pierce, who sat up, pushing himself up from his large, leather seat, away from the table. “Malick has been a liability for a long time. He was against the Avenger Initiative from the beginning, and his stalling tactics nearly cost us what turned out to be our most valuable resource and line of defense.”

“It wasn’t as if we knew that at the time,” Hawley counted, hotly, her mouth turning even more to prunes and prisms. “The entire idea was mad from the beginning. Super heroes? A team of people who can by themselves endanger a city and all of its occupants?”

“As you can see, Councilwoman, that while the city of New York sustained material damage, the populace was evacuated to reduce as many civilian casualties as possible,” Peggy shot back, lifting her chin as she did. “And I would like to note that my team worked closely with the Mayor of New York and his office to manage that extraordinary feat. Evacuating lower Manhattan is no easy task.”

“She’s not wrong about that,” Pierce offered as he strolled behind where Peggy sat. “The Avengers Initiative was never the problem in all of this. It was unorthodox, yes, but it was supposed to be part of a system that worked together. When the other pieces failed, they were our last line of defense. Like it or not, the Avengers did what had to be done and are here to stay. Had the council not been so resistant to it, they could have been even more prepared.”

Peggy glanced around the faces of the council members. She had never met any of them in person, but a few she had seen on other meetings. Some seemed to agree with herself and Pierce, others were more neutral, giving nothing away. Only Hawley still seemed staunchly against it. She intrigued Peggy in her vehemence on the subject. Was it really a fear of the Avengers? A dislike of people with their abilities? Maybe it was just a point of pride after all of this, the sting of being on the losing side of the argument?

“Be that as it may,” Councilwoman Hawley said, pushing the conversation along, ”the Avengers Initiative isn’t what we were here to discuss. Director Carter, do you think that Secretary Pierce’s suggestion regarding Councilman Malick would suffice to appease the United States government?”

“I think it would go a long way to assuring them that the World Security Council and SHIELD can and will be on the same page in the future,” Peggy agreed, though she doubted something as simple as removing one blowhard from the council was going to ease tensions or smooth the feathers of the US intelligence and military establishment. “As for rebuilding trust, that will take more than removing Malick from the roster.”

“I believe I can discuss that with them,” Pierce cut in, assuringly. “Matt Ellis and I are old friends, pledged the same fraternity, though...I have a few years on him.”

His self-deprecating smile encompassed the monitors and the people on them, some who smiled back, others who at least appreciated Pierce’s efforts to cut the tension. He could play to a room, that much was clear. It was an impressive skill set, especially in dealing with the fractions and quarrelsome lot that composed the World Security Council. He had a deft hand and he displayed it as he paced back to his chair with the sort of humble aura of a well-worn statesman

“My suggestion to all of you is to let me handle the politics here.” Pierce’s worn, affable gaze lingered longest on Hawley. “The decisions this body made crossed a lot of lines and you don’t fix that in a day. SHIELD is meant to be a global protection body and this council overstepped that mandate and nearly cost a lot of lives. You all will have some explaining to do to your own home governments, I am sure.”

More than a few of the members shifted in their seats. Even Councilwoman Hawley looked discomfited. Perhaps she had been having those conversations with Downing Street already. Peggy felt it probably would do the old hag good, but kept her expression as even as she could manage.

“If there is nothing else?” Pierce glanced around the council members, most who shook their heads. Hawley murmured a "no" so cold it was a wonder her monitor didn’t freeze.

“Wonderful! I will give my report of my meetings as soon as I can.” With that, Pierce made his goodbyes, flicking a few keys on the keyboard at the table, the screens flicking off at once, turning black enough to reflect the site of New York, and specifically Stark Tower, in the distance.

“Well, they managed to fuck that up!” Pierce didn’t mince words as he threw himself into the leather chair again, rubbing lightly at his graying temples under what had been strawberry blonde hair. “God almighty, how the hell they managed that…”

“I was there,” Peggy reminded Pierce, quietly, remembering all too well the awful moment six months before. “Fury refused the order, Malick forced the issue. You know in the investigation, the SHIELD officer responsible for executing the order said it was Councilwoman Hawley who did it.”

“I know, but Malick was the easier target.” Pierce rolled his head against the leather seat, regarding Peggy evenly. “She threw him under the bus so fast, they hadn’t even started clean up on the site before she was turning on him. I think once it became clear that you and Nick were right and the Avengers had handled the situation, she realized just how much egg she had on her face and knew Malick was an easy pawn to take all the blame.”

As disgusting as Peggy found it, she couldn’t say that Hawley didn’t have a point. “Rats fleeing the sinking ship and all that. Do they even realize the situation that SHIELD and the World Security Council is even sitting in right now? I had the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff screaming at me two weeks ago about protocols and procedures and rules of engagement. I didn’t point out to him I was in fact fighting wars before he was even a spark in his father’s eye. I believe that would have just made it all too awkward.”

“A bit,” Pierce agreed, chuckling. “The thing is the World Security Council will never admit that they were wrong or just how wrong they were.”

Peggy sighed, unsure as to whether she wanted to laugh or scream. “Is this what SHIELD has become, then? A bunch of politicians busy trying to save their own arses while they watch the world burn?”

For his part, Pierce seemed sympathetic. “Not precisely what you and Howard had envisioned, hmm?”

“Not at all.” She pushed back from the table, turning her own leather chair to face the Secretary of the World Security Council. For all that he was physically older, he was technically younger than Peggy by fifteen years. He’d barely become a teenager when she and Howard had founded the organization he now sat as head of.

“You know, the real impetus for SHIELD was born because of this sort of mindset.” Peggy frowned at the now blank screens, a wall of dark glass, black and empty. “We had grown up in the aftermath of the first world war, when national interests overrode common sense and thousands of young men died marching to the drum of national pride, only to watch it happen all over again with the second world war. The idea had been that if we could take the weapons out of the hands of those placing nation before global existence, we could prevent those things from happening again. Now, I have to wonder if that wasn’t a rather huge mistake.”

“I don’t know,” Pierce drawled, regarding her from the depths of his chair. “You missed out on all the middle part where the two most powerful nations in the world still growled at each other and threatened annihilation while SHIELD stood in the middle, trying to keep them apart.”

“I suppose I did.” Peggy frowned, picking up a pen to twiddle briefly against her notepad. “The world has changed since then, too, a few different times. Now we are facing much larger threats, ones that require deftness and agility to handle. You can’t just point a bomb at everything and call it good.”

“I don’t disagree. A new kind of threat requires a new kind of weapon to handle it. The Avengers handled Loki well enough.”

Peggy snorted, conceding the point while acknowledging it had been a near thing. “The World Security Council will continue to fight that as much as they can, to put hampers and oversights on the team. They can’t work that way.”

He frowned at her, a mild scowl in his weathered face. “Are you suggesting that the Avengers not be under SHIELD’s control?”

“Not quite,"Peggy hedged, carefully. "After all, I’ve been insisting to the President, US Senate, and their military that SHIELD is still important and that the Avengers need to continue to be under SHIELD’s purview to have international oversight. We can’t bloody well let the United States have sole control over them or anyone else.”

She paused, considering. She had a gambit, one six months in the making that she had been holding in her pocket with the hopes that the timing would be right to present it to the World Security Council. Given their mood of late - feeling attacked and penned in by a rightfully outraged United States - she had refrained. But if there was ever a time, now was it.

“There is an idea that I have been working on with Tony Stark,” she pressed, reaching for her briefcase. “Fury knows of it, and I will say he is no fan of it, but he recognizes it may come down to this. I said I would run it by you and the Security Council.”

She pulled out a neatly collated file, put together by someone at Stark Industries and emblazoned with its logo on the front. With it she had what everyone called a thumb drive, a ridiculous name for a bit of technology she found fascinating, able to store files on its digital memory. She passed both over the dark varnished oak table to Pierce. He reached for them curiously, slipping on his glasses with his other hand as he read the label on the front. “A collaboration with Stark Industries?”

“It’s an idea,” she replied, leaning against the table as he scanned quickly through the prospectus in the front. “We both know the World Security Council is never going to agree to fully fund the Avengers, not at the levels we are proposing here. To make them a team, to give them what they need, they will need a lot of money and a singular focus. Stark is willing to do that.”

“Gets out of making weapons and instead being the weapon?” Pierce arched a grizzled eyebrow over her thick rimmed glasses.

“For Stark that is a positive step, he now cares about who has control of the weapons and where they get pointed.” There had been a time in Stark’s life when he hadn’t. “He will foot a large portion of the bill and in exchange SHIELD will maintain oversight on objectives and work directly with the Avengers in terms of intelligence and security threats. You have to admit this solves one of the biggest problems we had six months ago. If the Avengers have a space to themselves, a facility and a team dedicated to seeing that they are prepared, this makes them more able to handle the threats that come our way.”

Pierce was listening as he continued to scan, nodding as he pulled on his chin thoughtfully. He was long moments before answering, meeting Peggy’s eye. “You aren’t wrong, neither of you are, but I’ll have to think on it, maybe float it by some of the council members who aren’t pissed as hell right now. Honestly, most of them will likely hate it.”

“Which is why Fury said I should come to you first.” She shot him a dry smirk. “I wasn’t ever precisely a political creature, though I was a very talented spy. Perhaps, had I stayed and not come to the future, I might have been more capable in handling politicians with conflicting interests. But you have straddled both the worlds of global intelligence and politics. If you approve of our plans you are the only one who could convince the World Security Council to consider it.”

“Such confidence!” He snorted, slightly, chuckling. “But you aren’t wrong. I can keep this, I assume?”

Peggy nodded, relieved he would consider it. Fury had been confident he would, but after the last scene with Hawley and the World Security Council, she hadn’t been sure. “Of course, we are happy to answer questions as you have them.”

“Stark’s team is fairly thorough, but if I have them, I will ask.” He pushed himself up from his seat, gathering papers and files to tuck into his own briefcase, including the file she had just given him. “I hear he is much like Howard in that he thinks so big he has to hire people to think of the details and minutia for him, and he doesn’t settle for second best.”

“No, that he doesn’t.” Peggy thought of the inimitable Pepper Potts. As Pierce gathered his things she rose herself, tucking away what little she had out as she considered the bank of screens. “Do they understand, do you think, just how much the world has changed since that day?”

Pierce paused, looking at her mildly. “Since aliens made themself readily apparent for all the world to see?”

Peggy nodded. “This isn’t just a matter of shooting them before they can get us. There are whole civilizations out there, people...I know that SHIELD was aware of it, I’ve spoken to Maria Rambeau at SWORD. The Avengers are needed, yes, but not everything out there is a threat. Do they have a plan for what steps we as a planet will even take? Can even take?”

Pierce looked as if he hadn’t even considered the question himself. “I mean...the idea that aliens are real was something most of them became aware of the minutes they joined this council. But thinking of other civilizations much beyond that, I don’t know if they have. Why? Is Thor offering some sort of alliance with Asgard?”

“No,” Peggy assured him. “Well, not outside of his own personal protection. He will be here on Earth more often, I believe, but I think that will just be on his own and not at the behest of King Odin.”

“You do know how strange it is to hear you speak about Odin as a foreign dignitary we need to have diplomatic arrangements with.”

“Not nearly as strange as being caught in a battle with an alien army because of an Asgardian family quarrel. That they are the gods from legend is strange, yes, but they are real and here, and they aren’t the only ones in the universe, or so Director Rambeau has told me.”

Pierce mulled that for a long moment. “You know, when I was a kid, the biggest thing I had to wrap my head around was the idea of a super soldier with a shield. Who knew I would be seriously talking about how to approach alien peoples about mutual security interests?”

“If it makes you feel any better I am in the same exact place you are. I still remember when Limburg was the greatest feat of air travel out there, and now Tony Stark can do that in a metal suit.” If she had told her younger self that years ago when she was little more than a skinned-knee hellion hiding from her mother in the back garden, Peggy doubted she would have ever believed it. “Thank goodness I am adaptable.”

“Which is why you heading up the Avengers is what we need.” Pierce made to leave, waiting to walk with Peggy out of the council meeting room. “Nick can’t give them the full attention they need. You can. I know this is why you found yourself in this time, but I have to say it, we didn’t know we needed you on this initiative, and as it turns out, we do. Without you, the Avengers would be a side project and ignored, left to their own devices.”

Peggy shuddered to think what would happen had this been left for Fury alone to manage, particularly the very different personalities of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. “I will do my best to keep them together.”

“See that you do.” He held a hand out to her for a perfunctory farewell shake before patting his suitcase. “I’ll read this over the weekend and tell you what I think.”

“Thank you.” She watched Pierce go, already pulling out his phone as he checked messages, an assistant gliding in from the lounge area, reviewing other business with him as he bustled to what Peggy guessed was to a flight to DC and the main SHIELD headquarters there.

As for herself…

She glanced out of the large glass windows that made up the curtain wall of the UN compound. On one side was the East River, Queens and Roosevelt Island, but on the other, mere blocks away, stood the edifice that was Stark Tower. Like most of the buildings in the area, it was currently surrounded by construction cranes, replacing glass on the outside. All of the letters that had once made up the name “Stark” on the outside were now removed, they had been destroyed in the Chitauri invasion. What was going to go up in their place now remained a mystery.

“I suppose I should go bother him,” Peggy murmured, more to herself, as she looped a thumb around the strap over her shoulder.