Time Converges

“I dare you to put that in your mouth!”

It was a test of wills. Had it been anyone else making the challenge to Steve Rogers, Peggy was fairly certain they would have lost, as no one was more stubborn than him...no one. But she had learned his bull headed ways, had experience, and knew how to work around it like few others. She was just as single-minded as he, just as focused, and also refused to yield. Besides, she knew Captain America’s weakness. If she were to tilt her chin down just so and stare up at him through her lashes, her dark eyes wide and full of mischievous challenge, he would do it just to prove a point.

“Peggy,” he groaned, frowning down at the plate between them. “You do know it’s raw.”

“That’s the point! Don’t tell me you never had a raw oyster!”

Steve looked decidedly green at the idea. “With the sort of constitution I had when you met me, you think I ate anything raw?”

“I’ve never known you to be a coward,” she pushed, ignoring his quiet, pleading expression.

“Coward? I eat that and I’m sick all night!”

“You’re a super soldier, my love, you don’t get food poisoning. Besides, you ate stranger things than raw fish during the war.”

Steve still eyed the two pieces of fat, pink salmon sashimi on the plate as if she’d asked him to swallow raw plutonium. “You know when you said that trying sushi would be an adventure…”

“Do it or I will mock you mercilessly the whole way home.”

That did the trick. Looking as if she had asked him to fall on a grenade again, he moved his hand, lightning quick, plucking one of the pieces up with the bamboo chopsticks between his fingers, plopping it in the dish of soy sauce in front of Peggy so fast that it splashed across the table, and then shoved the whole thing in his mouth before she could even gasp in impish delight. He screwed his eyes shut as he chewed, wrinkling his nose, ignoring Peggy’s peels of laughter at his very earnest expense. If the other diners in the very elegant sushi restaurant thought it strange or were bothered by their antics, they were polite enough not to say anything. Peggy clapped softly as Steve swallowed, triumphantly holding up his chopsticks, glaring at her in mock affront.

“That was…” He paused, swiping his tongue around his mouth, seeming to weigh the experience as he wobbled his head, considering. “Not as bad as it could have been, I admit it.”

“See! I did tell you it was better than you would expect!” Peggy wiped at the corners of her eyes, still giggling as she regarded the mess they had made on the table. “You always have to make everything so dramatic!”

“Well, because it makes you laugh.” He grinned, unapologetic, politely using one of the linen napkins to wipe up the spilled brown sauce from off the table. “Also, it’s raw fish!”

“And you just ate it. I’m rather proud of you!”

He chuckled, a challenge in his eye as he jerked his chin at her. “And how long did it take Sharon to convince you to try that?”

“A lot longer, I assure you, but she wasn’t as persistent as I was, or maybe you are braver than me.” Peggy had to admit that she had been rather skittish on the idea of sushi and sashimi, some of Sharon’s favorite food, and had held off as long as she could before shame and peer pressure from the likes of her friends Juan and Julio had forced Peggy to cave. “I have to admit, it’s grown on me. It’s one of those things that when you just hear it, the principle of it, it sounds utterly disgusting, and then you try it and it’s really not nearly as horrible as you’ve made it out to be in your mind.”

“Not so different from lox at a Jewish deli, I suppose.” He snagged the second piece with playful sneakiness, making much less of a mess as he neatly plucked it up and ate it, with a look as if he was analyzing every morsel of it. “It’s fatty. I suppose, that helps.”

“I’ve yet to graduate much beyond some of the basic fish, but I do like the rolls. Those are always safe.” They had already tried those, which Steve had inhaled without too much complaint. Peggy eyed his long, dexterous fingers as they set down the chopsticks that came with their meal with a certain envy. “It’s really not fair you managed those as quickly as you did. I was a perfect idiot with chopsticks for months.”

“Of all the things that you could complain about the serum giving me and that’s the one you choose?” He leaned back against the cushion of their booth, tapping his fingers on the table between them. Without hesitation, Peggy reached across to lace her fingers in his.

“I approve of most of the rest of them,” she said, pointedly, pleased at the bashful smile and flush that spread over his high cheeks. Judging from the way his thumb had snuck in to caress the inside of her palm between their joined hands, she didn’t think he minded overmuch either.

“What time is your flight tomorrow?”

“Early! I’m catching one of the first flights back up. I think Cassandra is wondering if I will ever come back home.”

“I wish you weren’t,” he admitted, honestly, despite the fact they both knew that she would, that this would be the new fact of life of their relationship for now. “I’ve been spoiled having you here, around, all the time. No...missions, no orders from Phillips, no HYDRA or Nazis to chase, just the two of us and all the time in the world.”

“You have been spoiled,” she admitted, though, in fairness, she had been too. All the time in the world for the two of them to just be Steve and Peggy, not Captain America and Agent Carter. In all the other madness of the last six months, that quiet had been a blessing in disguise, the space to breathe, to adjust, for Steve to find his bearings and for them both to discover who they were now and how to move forward. Now they would be separated again, not by a war, this time, nor by ice and loss, just by their work and a few hundred miles. What was a few hundred miles compared to decades?

“Let’s pay up and go for a walk!” She broke her spiral of morose thoughts. She wanted to think of something cheerful and happy, not the gloom of their coming parting. “There is a coffee house just down the block here, they will have warm things to drink. Let’s grab something and wander on the mall a bit!”

They waived down the waitress and handled the bill - Steve paying with a credit card because he felt much more modern doing it, he admitted proudly - and wrapped themselves up in their light coats to wander into the chill of evening. He followed Peggy’s lead as she pulled him to the shop in question, a quaint establishment that looked locally owned, smelling of coffee grounds and steamed milk. She ordered them both steaming cups of spiced cider, fairly wiggling in delight as she took her paper cup in hand, the scent of mulling spices - cinnamon and clove, mostly - redolent as she wrapped her fingers around the still too hot to drink liquid. Steve stared at her as if he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or choke.

“What!” She prodded his shin with the tip of one indignant, booted foot.

“You,” he gave her a slightly star-struck grin, eyes the color of a summer sky sparkling with delight. “You just did a dance like a toddler.”

“It’s spiced cider!” She pronounced that as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“It smells great,” he admitted, still bemused. “I just don’t think I’ve done a dance over it.”

“You didn’t ever dance over much, did you?”

“Not till I met someone to dance with, no," he admitted, slipping a hand to her free one, tugging her out of the door and into the night again.

The lights were on over the National Mall, the monuments scattered across the expanse of sere grass, glowing reverently in the night. They strolled past the various buildings and memorials, arm-in-arm, smiling at other couples and groups out in the crisp air. One comfortable looking couple ahead of them walked their dog, a lovely golden retriever, chatting to one another and wandering along, while in the distance a group of young people shouted and laughed over some game they were playing among themselves, cellular phones out, shining in the twilight.

“We should get a dog,” Steve murmured out of nowhere, eyeing the beautiful canine ahead with a sort of boyish longing that said it was one of those long cherished and private dreams he had, likely from his boyhood long ago in Brooklyn.

“You never had one, I am guessing.” Reading Steve was often like a book, and the longing turned to wistfulness and that slightly unfocused look he had whenever he recalled his old neighborhood and childhood days.

“There were always the local mongrels we’d find, feed scraps to, but none that were ours. Bucky and his sister managed to keep a little terrier hanging about their place for a while, but then he got spooked one day and ran off. Never saw him again.” He said it with the sort of adult wisdom that said the dog likely came to some sort of sad end. “The both of us are so busy now, though, maybe it would be wiser to wait.”

He had a point. “Perhaps, when things with the Avengers settle down and once Barton’s back on with Romanoff, we can think about it. Find a place in Brooklyn to settle down, get a dog.”

“You say that as if you plan on sticking around, Carter.”

Every so often, if she closed her eyes, she could swear that it was just the two of them alone in that moment, in their old headquarters in London after some planning meeting. The way his soft, Brooklyn-roughened baritone would break, just a little, with his dry humor, his gaze sharp and filled with more emotions than Peggy could name. Just like then, she pulled an answering, crooked smile, her gaze coy as she lifted a shoulder playfully.

“I don’t know, Captain Rogers, I did come through all of time just to find you in the ice. I would hate to think I did that just to give you to Romanoff and have her set you at things to run at.”

“Ahh, well, it’s what I know,” he replied, though there was something rueful as he said it. “Getting out there, picking up the shield, trying to help people, do something good in the world. It is a purpose, at least.”

“It is,” she agreed, sipping from her still piping hot drink, sweet and spicy all at once. “But you could have other purposes, you know. I’d support you in anything.”

They’d had this discussion before, several times, as a matter-of-fact, over the months since he was awakened. But this had been the one he had landed on. Perhaps, in a world that was so new and strange, holding on to something that was familiar to him as a soldier was what he needed and she couldn’t begrudge him that. Half the reason she took up the Avengers from Fury was for the very same purpose, something familiar to ground herself in a new world.

“Well, I can get to know Romanoff better, see if I can crack that hard exterior of hers.”

“Good luck,” Peggy saluted him with her apple cider. “It took me two years to get Romanoff as warmed up to me as she is now.” In truth, Peggy wasn’t even sure why it was the former KGB assassin turned SHIELD operative ever truly disliked her or even warmed up to her. Romanoff was a mystery, and considering her line of work, Peggy imagined she preferred it that way.

“I don’t know, she gets on well with Sharon,” he observed, lightly. “I heard them discussing some case she is working on.”

“Mmm, yeah, a terrorism case, some man who calls himself the Mandarin. He is tied to that bombing in London yesterday.”

“I saw that.” For the briefest of moments his tone shifted from Steve, the man she loved, to Captain Rogers, the man she worked with. “Serious damage, people hurt, but no fatalities, thankfully. They have a beat on who this guy is?”

“Outside of the fact that he is the same man who heads up the organization that kidnapped Tony Stark, no.” She had yet to talk to Stark about it. Part of her didn’t want to. The Mandarin hadn’t been the one to personally kidnap him, and besides, he had so much on his plate of late. Reliving the trauma that had put an arc reactor in his chest and nearly killed him in the middle of an Afghani desert, far away from home, was not something she suspected he wanted to do.

“So that is where Sharon headed, then?” She had stopped by Steve’s place long enough to pass him her spare key and ask him to water her plants, a task that Steve had taken with all the gravity of babysitting a child.

“London, yes, she’s going to head up the SHIELD team investigating it. It’s a big deal for her, her first major case by herself.” Peggy couldn’t help but be proud of her, in fact. She had been tempted on many occasions to bring Sharon into the Avengers fold, mostly for selfish reasons, but had resisted. Her niece had wanted to make her own way in SHIELD, not riding on family coattails, but as herself. Peggy had chosen to respect that and let her do so.

“She’ll be fine, I’m sure,” Peggy said, more as a reassurance to herself. “She is good, very good. And besides, she hasn’t been back to our motherland in a while.”

Steve was a long moment, pulling at his own cider, before speaking. “You haven’t been home in a while, either. What, two years since you’ve been here?”

“Mmm,” she confirmed on a hum, somewhat uncomfortably. “It’s been more like over three years now since I was back in England, I suppose. Hard to believe it has been so long.

It had been the last time she had seen her parents and brother alive. She tried not to think of it overmuch, honestly, one couldn’t when one had picked up and started over as many times as she had, but when she did, the ache of it was knife sharp, a reminder of the life she had left behind to step into the future. She hadn’t thought twice about it at the time, with her hastily written letter, scrawled as Scott Lang had lolled, bored, on her sofa. She tried to pack a lifetime’s worth of feelings into a few scratched lines to be sent by post. She would never know how they felt about it, not really. All she had were Sharon’s stories.

“You know, you never told me the story of how your supposedly dead brother ended up alive and well and a father in all of this.”

Peggy glanced up at Steve’s quietly expectant expression. She supposed she hadn’t. Months ago, when he first woke up, she had promised him she would, and between aliens and invasions and the Avengers, she just hadn’t. Perhaps she had been avoiding discussing it, if she admitted it to herself. It wasn’t a time she looked back on with particular fondness.

“I was working on a case in Los Angeles,” she began, at least deciding to start at the beginning. “Do you remember the actress, Whitney Frost?”

“I do,” Steve intoned with the sort of diplomacy he would use around particularly prickly politicians. “I remember her rather fondly.”

“I bet you do,” she snorted, at least secure enough in his feelings for her that she could laugh about both his admiration and his caution in admitting it. “Most of the men I knew were in love with her.”

“Bucky and I may have seen a few of her movies,” he admitted, only slightly abashed. “How was she involved in a case you were on?”

“Well, as it turns out, she was more than a pretty face. She was a genius who was meddling with quantum energies, except she played with something she couldn’t control. She unleashed it into the world with predictable consequences, and long story short, it was the end of her career and we saved the world from exploding.”

It was of course much more involved than that, painfully so for the Jarvises, but it was the gist of the situation. Still it was just strange enough for Steve to pause with his cup halfway to his mouth. “That story took a few turns I hadn’t expected it to.”

“I will tell you that whole story some other time,” she promised, pushing on. “The case drew a lot of attention from the FBI. This was at a point when things were shifting after the war, jurisdictions were being redrawn, people were feeling threatened. There was a man over there, named Masters, who was making political hay over all this. He went to the New York section chief, Jack Thompson, who was my superior, and gave him a file he said was my war record. Because of my work on Project: Rebirth, as well as a few choice other things I was up to, my files were classified. That was all anyone knew. So when Thompson got a classified file with the name "Carter, M." on it, he assumed it was mine, except, it couldn’t have been mine. The few things he did mention I know I had nothing to do with. Unfortunately, I never did get a chance to see it or defend myself because as we were wrapping up the Whitney Frost case, Thompson was shot and nearly killed by someone who took the file.”

It had been a near thing with Thompson, honestly, and that he survived at all was perhaps a testament to the strength he never thought he possessed. He had lived, though, and would go on to join SHIELD eventually before she had chosen to jump to an unknown future. Unlike Daniel, who had disappeared without a trace, Thompson had gone on to a distinguished career in SHIELD, retiring and passing away many years after he had nearly died in a Los Angeles hotel room.

“Since the file was supposedly about me, I made the call to look into it, against orders, mind you.” Phillips had told her to stay put while they figured it out, sidelining her as the LAPD had asked uncomfortable questions on her involvement. “Of course, we all know that I wasn’t going to sit quietly by, and Howard was more than willing to go with me to London to get to the bottom of it. The file had been illegally obtained from the old SOE files, all of which were supposed to be destroyed when it was shut down after the war. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only M. Carter working for the SOE.”

“Michael,” Steve uttered, tracking along. “So this Masters guy gets your brother’s file and passes it off as you to Jack Thompson, got it. So what was in the file that was so dangerous they had to nearly kill this Thompson for it?”

“Several things, actually, but specifically it was the illegal weapons experiments being done by the British government during the war on enemy civilian populations.” Her voice grew cold and tight at that. Even now, she still burned with the silent rage of knowledge of what had been done, the atrocities committed by her own country during the war. “The program was called Darkmoor, housed in a facility in the north. The whole purpose was to create the sorts of weapons that could challenge what Johann Schmidt was creating with the Tesseract. The things they were doing...what they did…whole villages in German occupied France were gone. Towns just across the Rhine, ones filled with just farmers and villagers...and those were just the test subjects.”

She shivered even now, remembering it. Steve’s arm, warm and solid through hers, held her steady as she hugged it tightly, gulping at the warmth of her cider and wishing it made her forget the truth of what the project had done.

“They said it was in the name of Britain, of winning the war, of bringing peace.” She sighed, shaking her head. “The things we do sometimes and say we do it to bring peace. I have to wonder if these things don’t turn us further into monsters.”

Bless Steve and his ever-present and constant strength. “We all did horrible things during that way, every one of us.”

“Not like this,” she sighed. “Michael had been recruited to work in one of the squads. It was so top secret they had to fake his death so that we would think he was gone. He...thought he was doing something good for the war, I suppose. He was told that he was doing something heroic for king and country. In the end…”

She supposed she would never know with any certainty how Michael reconciled any of it.

“Of course, his supposed death meant he couldn’t return to his old life after the war. He settled near Darkmoor, married a lovely woman, Moira, and had young Harry and Maggie. I don’t know if I would have ever known he was alive if it weren’t for Masters and that file. Well...needless to say, once I did discover what happened, things got out. There was a scandal, of course. The man who ran the facility, Lord Haldane, was forced to shut it down. He didn’t see jail that I know of, though there was talk of some sort of military inquest into it all. I had to use what influence I could pull between Howard, Phillips, and everyone else to keep Michael as much out of it as possible. It was complicated. I just remember feeling so angry, so betrayed and hurt, not just that he lied to all of us, but about the whole thing. The idea of what they did, of what they were doing, of knowing that as much as we held ourselves up as being somehow better than everyone, the good guys, the heroes in this war with our righteous cause, we were no better in some ways than Hitler or HYDRA. And we justified it all because it was war.”

The truth was, as horrified as she had been, there were many - Howard included, if she were honest - who hadn’t been nearly as upset about Darkmoor and its experiments as she had. If anything, the larger concern was the scandal it had caused, the embarrassment, and the many apologies that had to be made afterwards. Peggy couldn’t imagine any sort of apology could make up for lost lives, homes, and ways of life.

For long moments they walked. Peggy turned up the color of her coat against the cold wind blowing off the Potomac River, chilling her. What had been a sweet, happy evening together had suddenly turned dark and cold, the air damp and biting. It felt full of regrets and recriminations from long ago.

“As part of an agreement with the military and His Majesty's government, a deal was brokered in which Michael would provide as much information as he could regarding the Darkmoor Project. In exchange, he would be remanded to SSR custody, later SHIELD custody, with the plan that as long as he played ball with the SSR he would be able to eventually be a free man. Darkmoor was the inciting event in the creation of SHIELD, the scandal of it all was the leverage we needed to get all the major members of the UN to sign on board. SHIELD subsumed the SSR and with it Michael. He was part of the creation of the London office, along with Fred Wells, who was its first chief. He was, as far as I knew before I left, well behaved.”

She trailed off, sadly, picking through the threads of her own complex feelings on all of it, the hurt and the betrayal of what he did. Even now, years later, the anger she felt and the sense of loss still felt heavy in her chest, despite the fact that her brother - her once beloved brother - was now really dead and gone, lost to her forever.

“You know, the worst thing of all of it was that he was my hero. He always had been, even when we were small children. From the moment I could pick up a wooden sword I was trailing after him in the garden, trying to horn in on his adventures. He always used to tease me horribly, take my sword away and make me work to get it back, but he’d give it eventually. He always said that working for things like that would make me stronger, teach me not to give up no matter how hard things got. He never belittled me for doing it or thought I couldn’t just because I was a girl. If anything, Michael believed I could do anything, should try to be something other than a silly school girl or a vapid debutante. We always talked about how we would go on adventures together, me and him, off to find treasure or some ancient lost city, just like in the adventure pulps. It was always going to be the two of us, out changing the world, fighting bad guys and living a life of danger. And then...he died, or at least I thought he did. And I left everything; Fred, my family, my wedding, and joined the SOE because he told me to, because he thought I could. I became what I am now because of him, and then I found out that he was living a lie...that it was all a lie. He lied to me, he lied to Mother and Father, he let them think he was dead and gone. They had grandchildren they didn’t even know about! As for me...I don’t know, I couldn’t quite bring myself to talk to him or discuss it, to hash it out or come to any conclusion about it. I left him in London for Fred to deal with, gave the excuse of important business in America. I promised him I would talk, eventually, but...a year later and Scott Lang showed up and I was off to the future to find you and figure out the Avengers.”

For long, still moments they walked, now facing the US Capitol Building, the white stone shining in the cold darkness. Steve beside her pondered for long moments. She could tell he was processing, that line had formed between his brows, the one that always formed when he was concerned or deep in thought. By now, she suspected he was rather used to having a great deal of mad information thrown at him. How he could process it all with any sort of grace still somewhat awed her.

“So you never got to hash it out with him,” he finally asked, quietly.

“No,” she admitted with equal parts regret and sadness. “I never did. I suppose I couldn’t allow myself enough time to think of that.”

He nodded, stopping in the middle of the walk along the side of the reflecting pool. Without a word, he turned to her, unlinking his arm from hers in order to pull her close. Peggy went, willingly, wrapping her own free arm around his middle, burying her face in the cold of his jacket. It smelled of leather, of sandalwood, and of him. She wished she could bottle that scent to take with her back to New York, and she was struck anew with a pang of their coming separation.

“I can’t imagine how difficult that all was,” he sighed into her hair, softly kissing the top of her head. “And how hurt you had to be when you found out. I don’t know what I would do if I were in the same place as you.”

Peggy chuffed, not sure she did anything particularly heroic in any of it. “Thank you. It was...well a while ago, now. And besides, Michael is gone for real now. I couldn’t have that conversation even if I wanted to.”

“I know.” He pulled back, enough so he could reach up and tip her chin up just enough for him to bend and kiss her, softly, chaste compared to most of their kisses now that they were together as a couple. It still left Peggy breathless and weak. She wondered if it would ever stop being that way and vaguely hoped it wouldn’t.

“I love you, you know.” He said it as a matter-of-fact, like he would discuss the weather or baseball. Still, it thrilled her and made her grin like a mad person.

“I know,” she laughed, her spirits lifting almost immediately, returning some of the charm of the evening. “You better, I did come through time to find you.”

“And I am glad that you did.” He took her arm once more, tucking her chilled fingers in the crook of his arm as they began to meander once again. The casual walkers that had been out earlier had thinned somewhat. The crowd of teenagers had settled to chat among themselves, no longer shouting and shrieking. The couple with the golden retriever had long since moved on. They were by themselves now, not that Peggy was worried. The mall was usually safe enough of an evening, and it wasn’t as if she and Steve weren’t highly trained soldiers without the ability to defend themselves. But there was something nice about being tucked up against his side, safe and protected, knowing he was there and real, supporting her even with an old, regretful hurt.

They were most of the way through the mall and back towards the way they had come before Steve brought up the most obvious question. “Does Sharon know about any of this? About her grandfather?”

“Most of it,” Peggy admitted, though the two of them had only ever discussed it in the most cursory of ways. “I know Harry knows of it. I suppose Maggie does, and I am guessing their spouses. Sharon knows the most because she has SHIELD clearance and because it obviously came up. I try not to discuss it at the family dinner table when I’m there.”

“Understandable,” Steve agreed. “Do you ever wish you could go back then? Just to talk to him? Clear the air, maybe tell him how you feel?”

Peggy’s chest ached at the thought. “Just about every time I think of it. There are...a lot of dangling relationships I left back there, Steve, people I wish I could have had a chance to speak to once before I came forward in time; Howard, Edwin and Anna, my parents, Daniel. I didn’t. I can’t keep looking backwards, though, if I do I will just get mired there, unable to move. I’ve never been that sort of person anyway. I regret that we never got to clear the air, that I never tried to. But it is done, and I suppose I will have to move forward.”

It was after all what she was good at - moving forward and starting over.

He said nothing, only squeezed her arm as they continued to walk towards where his motorcycle was parked. He glanced at her, silently asking her the question of if she was ready to head out of the cold. She nodded, tossing the remains of her drink into the nearest trash as he dug in his pocket for his keys.

“Take me home, captain,” she sighed, physically and mentally weary. “And maybe make me forget regrets and things left unsaid for a while.”

He knew very good and well what she meant by that statement, but his all too guileless look was filled with the devil’s own mischief as he swung a leg over the Harley. “Well, I mean, I know of a good Whitney Frost movie we could put on and maybe forget for a bit.”

“Mmmm, not as good as spending what is left of our last evening together making love in that lovely, large bed that you put together.” She put her hands on his shoulders as she crawled behind him, leaning in to murmur in his ear. “After all, I will be gone for a whole week and I will need something to remember you by!”

She loved the nervous and flustered swallow that she still could illicit out of him. “Well...I think we could maybe manage something.”

“I thought that would be better than Whitney Frost,” she purred, snuggling close to him as he turned on the engine.

“Whitney who? I don’t know of this person you are speaking of!”

“Good answer, soldier,” she chuckled as he pushed off the curb, back to his new apartment, where he absolutely lived up to his promise.