Chapter 11
She lay awake that night, in her childhood room, seeing ghosts. Peggy had no one to blame, really, outside of herself. As she tossed and turned she lay with her eyes closed, hearing the voice of her family; her mother as she stood by Peggy’s mirror, adjusting her veil, murmuring how proud she was of her, her father surreptitiously whispering to her that he had picked her up another adventure magazine, Michael as he woke her in the middle of the night to watch falling stars streak across the night sky in the garden. Finally, well into the small hours of the night, she fell into an exhausted oblivion, images of her long ago childhood flickering in and out of her dreams, like bits of cellulose film, cut and pasted together in disjointed ways, played back to her with no rhyme or reason except to remind her what she had left behind. At least she slept.
There was, however, at least one other person who would also be upset at her decision to pick up and fly to London, one who called her after what felt like only minutes after falling asleep.
“Unfh, what?” Peggy muttered, growling, somehow managing the phone glowing in the pre-dawn light.
“Wondered if I would wake you up.” Steve’s rumbling voice on the other end was deceptively light and apologetic, well practice and perfectly executed. She knew him well enough to recognize that was a polite cover. He wasn't happy.
“You got my message then?”
“I admit to being a rather old man in a new century and that I’m still learning this technology, but I eventually saw the text message that said ‘Off to London to follow a lead. Will let you know what I find. Will miss this weekend.’”
Peggy winced. “You said you would be out at the Farm this week, training. I didn’t know what you and Romanoff were up to.”
“Clearly not what you are up to? What’s your lead?”
Peggy sighed, rolling over on the bed. It wasn’t the same one she had when she had lived in this house, instead, it was a more modern one, made of foam and feeling impossibly soft. “Sharon’s case, the pharmaceutical company, Betty Ross mentioned that it was involved in some work which may be tied back to Erskine’s formula.”
Steve loosed a long breath, floating over the line. “You think these attacks are tied to that?”
“I don’t know...maybe.” Laying in the pre-dawn, staring at the quickly silvering sky, she now had to wonder why it was she rushed off like a madwoman to pursue this. “It was marked enough for me to assume it wasn’t a coincidence.”
Steve was silent for a long moment on the other end of the line. Peggy could see him in her mind’s eye, considering, weighing words, always so careful in what he said until he wasn’t. “There were other attacks, right? Did any of them tie to this company?”
“No, but they are tied to military targets. Considering it was Betty Ross who gave me the lead, and knowing her father’s work and the history the army had with the serum, you can hardly blame me for making assumptions.”
“Perhaps not blame you, but maybe caution you. It’s a leap in logic to go from an off handed comment from Betty to you taking off to fly to London in a mad dash.”
Peggy cringed, knowing he was right and hating to admit it. “I’m saying that it’s a possibility for why the attack happened, not that it’s a surefire explanation for it.”
“And I’m gently pointing out that you jumped to several different conclusions all at once. So...what’s that about?”
For several long moments she stared at the ceiling, the weight of Steve's words sinking in. She didn’t think it hit her till he put it that way that it was about anything...except perhaps it was.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, softly, but honestly. “I don’t...I know, it sounds mad, but when you think about it…”
“I’m not saying your theory is wrong or that it isn’t a cause for concern, I just wouldn’t necessarily board a plane for it.”
“You boarded a plane to stop Johann Schmidt.”
“You know, Romanoff accuses me of deflecting things I don't like to talk about. She may be right. It's me, Peg. You know you can talk to me.”
It was an old habit with Steve, one she had always appreciated about him, his solid persistence with her as she sorted through any myriad of feelings she didn’t want to look at too closely. That had been his way during the war too. Somehow it had always worked, getting her out of her own head.
“Perhaps I heard Erskine’s formula and a terrorist in a sentence and panicked.” She admitted that freely enough. “That was always one of the biggest fears, you know, that the formula would fall in wrong hands, HYDRA's mostly.”
“I threw myself in the East River to stop that, remember?”
She did, rather well, considering the death of Erskine himself and how much that had hurt. “We aren’t dealing with Nazis or HYDRA now, though, but global politics that are far more complicated than they ever were in our day. That formula out there with the sort of enemies they have now could be catastrophic, not to mention the fact that the only person it ever worked on without something horrific happening was you. If it is done wrong…”
“I remember what Erskine said...an evil man will be worse.”
They had been lucky with Steve. He was a good man, impossibly good. She doubted those who really wanted that serum would have the high standards that Erskine did, and that was what frightened her.
“This man, this Mandarin, when he kidnapped Tony, it was so he could build the Mandarin a weapons system with which he could rule Asia. Whatever bomb he is using is so intense, it is like a small nuclear device going off. So far we’ve been lucky, he’s not hit civilian targets. Next time, maybe not as much. And now he may be going for Erskine’s serum, and if that is the case…”
“Peggy...HYDRA is gone!”
His words were so incongruous as to catch her short, enough to notice the panic in her voice, the stutter in her own heartbeat. Where had that sense of awful dread come from?
“I know,” she replied, trying to be matter-of-fact and sounding very small and somewhat frightened instead. “I know they are.”
“You sure?”
“I know, Steve, I was there when we caught the last one of them.” Still, his comments touched something horribly fearful within her. “It isn’t about HYDRA or Hitler, neither of those things?”
Steve’s silence on the other end of the line was eloquent.
“You think it is?”
“I don’t know anything about Freud or psychology,” Steve replied, hedging his bets.
“No, but you did have an opinion enough to share.”
She could almost see him wince. “I’m merely saying that, as someone who lived through that war as well and who fought by your side through a good deal of it, I know what it’s like to see those shadows in every corner. And I’m not saying that this Mandarin is the exact same thing, but there is no way we could go through what we did and not come out the other side without being terrified of that happening all over again.”
It wasn’t even an angle to any of this that she had considered. “You know, after the war, it felt like...like things like HYDRA would never stop. We just had put them down and then we found out about Leviathan and the Red Room. Then there was that foolish Council of Nine and Whitney Frost. That was followed by Haldane and Darkmoor. Every time I turn around there is another one, another group...and now this.”
“Peggy!” His voice was whisper soft on the other end, cracking achingly across an ocean. “Honey, it’s not your job to fix every group that pops up like this.”
“Steve, this Mandarin person isn’t a new thing. They’ve known about him at least since Stark was captured. It’s only now that he’s begun attacking direct targets that they care. Meanwhile, what has he gotten his hands on that he could use against the world. They’ve done this before, and yet…”
“It’s not your job, Peggy.” The man she knew and loved shifted, slightly, to the man who once had led men into battle. As if on instinct, she paused in what she now recognized was her slightly panicked babbling, his calm, firm tone giving her something firm to hold onto in a swirl of fear and anxiety that had lain beneath the surface, tipped and triggered by...what exactly?
“I suppose there will always be someone, won’t there?”
Her voice sounded so small as she said it.
“HYDRA’s gone, Peggy. Let other people focus on other fights for now. I think the Avengers is big enough for us for the moment.”
He was right. Still, she had made this much of a fool of herself, she may as well see something through here. “Let me at least go meet with this connection Sharon has at the pharmaceutical company. Perhaps she can answer questions satisfactorily and I can go back home knowing I made a giant fool of myself, but at least a bit wiser. Then I will turn the whole super soldier serum business over to Betty where it belongs.”
She sighed, rubbing her eyes as she gazed at the pearly skies outside. “Meanwhile, I’ll...wrestle with my own ghosts here in Hampstead. We are staying at the house.”
“How is it?” There was a wealth of quiet empathy in Steve’s question.
“Sad,” she admitted, glancing around the changed room of her childhood. “Strange, it’s all so different now. They've changed it over the years, modernized it. I took anything I wanted with me long ago, so I’m not worried about things missing or gone, but still...I keep turning a corner expecting to find my father’s moth-eaten cardigan or my mother’s flowers. It’s like a strange juxtaposition in my head. I remember it one way, I see it another, like ghosts hanging about just beyond where I can see them.”
“That’s how Brooklyn feels. We blinked and life moved on without us.”
Some things you leave behind...and some things, apparently, you take with you.
“It’s after midnight for you, I should let you sleep.”
“I’m a super soldier, I can live on no sleep.”
She could hear the smile in his voice, the gentle teasing. “Still, you have training in the morning. Besides, I should wrap this up quickly and leave Sharon to it. Then I will make my way home and back to wrangling with senators and the World Security Council and all of that idiocy.”
A part of her - a large part of her, if she admitted it - would much rather stay to see this all out rather than deal with the politics waiting for her at home. But Steve was right, her reasons for coming were her own and not pertinent to Sharon’s investigation.
“I love you,” he declared on the other end of the line, his words filled with the same earnest honesty of feeling he always had. Peggy didn’t think she would ever get tired of hearing it.
“I love you, too. I’ll let you know when I get back. Go to sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am. Goodnight!”
“Night, darling.”
The phone went silent as Peggy stared at it in her hand. Was she really chasing after ghosts here? Was this really just the knee-jerk reaction of someone who had fought against too many different shadowy figures for too long. Was she inserting herself into this just because she didn’t know how not to? She sighed, setting it on the end table, pulling herself out of her bed to wander to the window. It was gray outside, the sky still lightening, slowly. She moved the silky softness of the sheer curtains to stare down below. Once, long ago, soldiers had driven up to their door to give her parents the horrible news of Michael’s death. Her mother had fainted at it, broken at the idea of her eldest, her precious son, dead across the ocean in France. It had been a day that had changed Peggy’s life forever.
It had also been a lie.
This was all far too complicated for such an early morning.
Without much more thought, she dressed quickly in athletic wear, warm for the chill she knew she would find outdoors. She crept quietly through her old home, knowing Sharon would still be sleeping. Stepping lightly down the stairs, she managed to avoid the old, familiar squeaking step out of habit, lightly moving through the house and out the door, her footsteps already off at a run before she even thought about it. In the pre-dawn coldness she raced, her steps light, like she hadn’t run in the area since she was a little girl, her breath coming out in puffs of silvery clouds as she pushed her athletic shoes down the pavement. The heath was not so far away from the house, and it took her only minutes to find it, the ground sere, the grass blasted brown and frosted with overnight condensation. She ran along the footpaths cut through the swaths of field, her eyes trained forward, pretending, at least for the span of an hour or so, that she was still a little girl, that this was 1932 instead of 2012, and that she still lived in this place. That her father was still puttering around his library, with its tumbles of papers. That her mother was still working in her garden in her house dress, her apron and gloves as she dug and pruned, humming to herself. That Mrs. Jenkins still puttered about the kitchen seeing to their tea, slipping she and Michael biscuits and shooing them out the door to keep them out from under foot. That her brother was still the hero she remembered him being.
She huffed, gasping, as she made it back into the house, going through the kitchen door around the back. By this point, Sharon was up, already brewing coffee, half an eye on her tablet, the other on her toast, before glancing up at Peggy’s reddened cheeks and heaving chest.
“You’re up earlier than I thought.”
Peggy nodded, moving to find a glass for water before answering. “Steve called. I’m afraid I left him a rather terse explanation of things.”
“Ahh.” Sharon passed her a cup. “I got a response from my contact over at MST Pharmaceuticals. She’s got time at 11 AM to meet with us if you are up for it.”
“Yeah,” Peggy sipped from her cup, letting the steam warm the chilled skin of her face. “Listen...my interest is far more the super soldiers and less the Mandarin business. I don’t want to step on your toes in this case. Once we’ve spoken to Ms. Mathews and see what they have to say on that I am happy to pack my bags and take my investigation back to New York. I can leave you to work on this Mandarin and if I find anything pertinent to your work I can let you know.”
Sharon arched an eyebrow over her egg-in-a-hole, pausing with a bit of fried bread and egg in her mouth, pondering Peggy’s statement, before chewing for a quiet moment. Peggy decided to busy herself with her coffee and perhaps contemplate toast as her niece studied her with an inscrutable gaze.
“Where did that come from,” she finally asked, setting aside her knife and fork.
Peggy shrugged, pulling out bread, butter and marmalade for toast. “It occurred to me that perhaps I’ve been perhaps chasing ghosts of my past without it considering that the fight can be someone else’s too.”
A line formed between Sharon’s brows, her mouth puckering as she pulled it to one side, pursed in consideration. “You sure on that?”
“Yeah!” Peggy shrugged, sorting out slices of bread and the toaster, not quite meeting her niece’s curious gaze. “After all, like you said, you deserve an opportunity to prove yourself, and you don’t need your great-aunt and her reputation getting in the way of that.”
“You do know I love working with you and think we make a good team.”
“I know.” Peggy pushed the lever down on the toaster, managing a smile at Sharon. “But I have to ask myself why I felt the need to inject myself into all of this. As was pointed out to me, the Avengers are my focus now…and I can’t keep fighting HYDRA forever.”
Sharon processed that for long moments as Peggy waited for her browning toast. It was after it popped up, as Peggy dressed it with marmalade, that Sharon spoke again. “How about this, we go speak to Mathews, see what she has to say. You stick around a day or two, the two of us can dig into this super soldier angle. If it turns out to be useful, then I get a bit of added insight into what the Mandarin is up to and you get a bit of added insight into who is doing what with that serum. If it doesn’t turn out useful, all we’ve lost is a couple of days digging at a dead end, no more, no less. You can go back to New York and the Avengers and that mess, I stay here and work on the Mandarin. Does that sound reasonable?”
It did, as a matter-of-fact. “I think we can make this work.”
Sharon nodded, firmly. “See, compromise! Besides, I’d hate for you to fly all the way over here to not get what you came here for.”
Peggy shrugged, frowning at the gray countertop, so out of place in her memories of this kitchen. “I don’t know, you kept saying I needed to come home. Maybe you were right. I needed to face this at some point.”
With that, they finished their respective breakfasts in relative silence.