Time Converges

“You know I always thought that the whole quaint, British village trope you see on all those television shows was just a shtick until Dad made us take a train up to Scotland.” Sharon had her nose practically pressed to the glass of the train speeding up out of London and across the country towards the northern York moors. They had boarded the first one leaving the city that morning, bleary eyed and still not quite used to the five hour shift in time. Tea and coffee had revived their spirits, and Peggy sat watching the quickly passing trees, villages, and fields, memories of long ago excursions flickering by as they did.

“I didn’t see the country - the true countryside, that is - until I was in the SOE. We trained at various estates. It was the first time I really saw life outside of the city.” It hadn’t occurred to Peggy till then just how pampered and protected a life she had led in Hampstead, in the quiet and idyllic home her parents had created together. “I still had it better than most of the boys, though. The only ones among them who had ever seen a cow were Falsworth and Morita, the former as he spent time in the country, the latter because his parents had a farm in California. I don’t believe that Steve, Barnes, or Dugan had seen a tree outside of a park ever in their life.”

“I don’t suppose there would have been a lot of opportunity where they lived?”

“No,” Peggy conceded, remembering her first impressions of New York in general and Brooklyn in particular. “I remember thinking that it seemed impossible for that many people and all of those buildings to occupy such a small space. But then I suppose London was like that as well.”

“Makes you think of how good the Carters had it,” Sharon pointed out, leaning back into her seat, facing Peggy across a table between the two of them holding only their bottles of water and empty paper cups from their chosen forms of caffeine. “I mean, wasn’t our family descended from nobility or some such?”

“A minor baron, nothing terribly exciting, I’m afraid, two-and-a-half centuries ago. Our line came from the second son who made his fortune in the military in India, or something like that, and that is what set the family up for generations of soldiers, lawyers, and doctors, all very respectable but never looking above our station.” Peggy found herself mimicking her mother’s airs and graces and laughed, softly. “My mother’s family were mostly in the clergy, if you can believe it, though a few took up positions at Oxford and Cambridge. I’m afraid all the excitement and adventure comes through the Carter side of things. It never failed that every generation or so there would be one or two of us who would run off to join the army, or the navy, or get caught up in some expedition somewhere. I suppose it was my mother’s own cursed luck that gave her two of us.”

“And then me as well” Sharon seemed delighted that in her own way she was carrying on a fine family tradition. “Of course, when you and Steve get married and have kids they will be doubly cursed. Imagine what Grandmother Amanda would say then.”

Ignoring the fact that Peggy was far from some blushing prude on the matters of sex and intimacy, the idea of marriage and children still seemed so strange, like a hope of a dream, much like a relationship between her and Steve had felt during the war. She found herself flushing, softly, as she smiled, thinking the idea didn’t sound nearly so unpleasant as it would have once upon a time, long ago. “Mmm, my mother would likely have laughed mockingly and told me I deserved everything I got, before spoiling them rotten, like she did your father and aunt.”

“True, but they were relatively well-behaved, or at least that’s the story they told me.”

“And you believe that?”

“No,” Sharon snorted, tapping her nails against her water bottle. “Still, I heard stories about her from the pair of them. She sounded kind, but very proper.”

Peggy considered that against her own memories of her mother. “She was complicated. She was quite loving, in her own way. She was never demonstrative, but she never stinted on affection. But she did grow up in a very different time, with very different understandings of life and the way it operated. Having a son who wanted to fight for his country and be a hero was one thing, she’d already sent one sweetheart to war and lost him. That was something she understood. But her daughter...that was something different. She never had those sort of dreams, not really, and it seemed odd to her that I did. And when she finally accepted I wanted a life beyond garden parties and raising children she was terrified of what the world would do to a woman like me, how I would be treated, if I would spend it alone and unwanted. It didn’t help that I lived so far away. She was half-convinced I would be murdered in my bed.”

“She didn’t know about the gun you keep in the bedside drawer?”

“She didn’t know about the gun.” Peggy snorted. “She loved me in her way, and I loved her. And I miss her. I miss all of them, really.”

Sharon studied her for long, quiet moments, searchingly. “Even Michael?”

Her niece had cleverly led her around to this. Peggy had said little of her brother at all in all of this, despite the fact that his presence clung to everything having to do with Darkmoor and her last visit to her ancestral home. Despite it having been years, the pain of it still tugged at her, a half-healed wound she never had quite allowed to fully recover.

“I miss your grandfather, yes.” Her words were careful and she knew it. She also knew full well that Sharon would not simply allow that to lay between them.

“But you haven’t forgiven him yet?”

“He’s dead and gone for real now, Sharon. What is the point?”

“The point is less for him and more for you, letting go of the past and moving forward.”

“I did move forward, quite literally, as you recall. I just did it by several decades.”

“You know what I mean,” she retorted, quietly. “You keep throwing yourself at things, and in things, and through things, all the time moving, and you never really stop and reflect or deal with the things that you are running from, things you never finished.”

Sharon’s argument was starting to sound eerily like Steve’s from the other morning. “The world seems determined to force me through some sort of therapy I didn’t ask for,” she grumbled, sourly, distracting herself with her bottle of water rather petulantly.

With that they fell into an uneasy and reluctant silence for long minutes. Peggy glared mutinously at her bottle of water, as if it had somehow insulted her in all of this. Sharon took the opportunity to check her phone, thumbing the screen, before sighing and slipping it into her pocket once again. Out of the corner of her eye, Peggy could see Sharon watching her, looking for a new in to approach through Peggy’s wall of stubbornness.

“Well, if you don’t want to talk about your brother, could you at least tell me more about Darkmoor.”

That wasn’t a means of attack that Peggy expected. “I thought you had read the files.”

“I did, when I first joined SHIELD. They didn’t want to blind side me. But that was years ago and what wasn’t redacted was rather cut and dry. Grandpa was gone, I couldn’t discuss it with him. You were there, though. So…”

Peggy sighed, shifting uncomfortably in her seat, not any more happy with this line of conversation than the last. “I doubt anything I would have to say is much different than what you read.”

“Fair,” Sharon agreed, shrugging as she crossed her arms over herself. “But, if we are going to be at the estate and discussing this, I’d really like to know more than what SHIELD let me see.”

She had a point, one Peggy couldn’t really refute. Internally, she swore, loudly. Externally, she pulled herself up, setting her bottle down again on the table. “During the war it became quite evident rather quickly that one of the biggest threats we would have from the German side was HYDRA. We knew so little of them then, only that they were Hitler’s secret science division, that they were led by Johann Schmidt who had for years been postulating his theories about science and magic. Half of the scientific community thought him mad, the other half thought that even in his madness, there was likely some merit to what he was speaking of. Before the Americans joined the war effort, there was really only Britain and its empire and the few allies we had in the fight. We were rather alone here trying to fend off the Third Reich. There were some in the SOE who felt that, mad or not, if Hitler had HYDRA, that we would need something to match them.”

“Wouldn’t that be breaking, I don’t know, some treaty somewhere? I mean, obviously Germany was doing it, but then again, I think we can safely establish that Germany were not the good guys in this scenario.”

“Can we assume anyone is a good guy in a war,” Peggy opined. “After all, we all end up with dirt on our hands when everything is said and done. But you are right, in an ideal world there are ethics to this. But I suppose it was hard to see that when you are standing alone in a war knowing that there are two madmen with strange weapons pointed at you. This is where Lord Ranulph Haldane becomes involved. He was the loudest voice suggesting that we should fight fire with fire. He was a scientist himself and had been doing research in his own laboratory at his estate of Darkmoor. He wasn’t well-known, but he was respected. Even Howard called him a genius, which for Howard was a compliment of highest praise. Haldane managed to use his connections to influence the right people within Churchill’s government to give him funding enough to expand his research, to essentially create his own facility and projects for the war effort, all under extreme secrecy. He was given all the resources he could want and left primarily to his own devices, working exclusively with the SOE. I am not even sure that Downing Street was fully aware of what he was doing up there.”

Sharon eyed her with equal parts rue and doubt, clearly having trouble buying into the idea of someone having that much complete autonomy, especially during a war. “How could no one be paying any attention to him or what he was doing?”

“The Haldanes are an old family, ancient by most standards. They’ve held their lands for centuries, which means that they have wealth and influence. This was still the good old days of gentlemen meeting together in their supper clubs over port and cigars, making agreements with one another to manage world affairs without ever officially putting down anything in writing. My guess is that agreements were made and the SOE never really asked too many questions about why...and it is through the SOE that Michael became involved.”

Whether she liked it or not, Sharon had gotten to the heart of what she wanted to know about, the truth of her grandfather’s involvement in the Darkmoor affair. Peggy couldn’t decide if she wanted to be angry with her niece or congratulate her for her cunning and cleverness. “I didn’t know that your grandfather had joined the SOE, none of us did. At the time I was was working at Bletchley Park and planning on marrying Fred Wells, so I admit I wasn’t paying the closest attention. As far as any of us knew he was a part of the regular army, fighting on the front lines. That was where he was supposed to be when we got news that he had died.”

Even now, knowing the truth, the moment still ached within her, no less for knowing he had lived a full life and died years before she reappeared again.

“What we didn’t know and what I only found out later was that he had been had picked by Haldane for his new secret project. He was putting together a team of operatives to send out as his own personal spies in Europe to look for the very same items Johann Schmidt himself was trying to capture. Most of them were mythical or mystical in nature, many of them only known through vague legend and accidental archaeological discovery. Haldane argued, much like Schmidt did, that there was power to be found in some of these. If tapped right, they would prove to be a powerful force in the war. Michael was one of the first members of his new team. He called them his Warheads, a not particularly flattering name, but one that hid their true purpose well enough to throw off HYDRA or anyone else who looked too closely. Their purpose was to use any means necessary to get to these items first, before HYDRA or anyone else could.”

Whatever Sharon thought of her grandfather’s activities, she hid it well. “Did they find anything, then?”

“Oh, yes, they did. How much of it was real and how much of it was fantasy, I don’t know. A few things worked. Knowing now what we do of Asgard, I wonder if it wasn’t bits of their technology left behind, or perhaps some other strange alien race. Whatever the case, things were found, weapons were developed...and tried. And that was what was in the file that was given to Jack Thompson. Haldane sent several of his teams out with some of his new weapons, using technology they little understood and had no right to be playing with. What they did…”

Peggy trailed off. She had read the reports, seen the photographs. She frankly didn’t think she could unsee it, like so many other things about the war. Whole villages had been wiped out, non-combative men, women, and children, attacked in the dead of night, slaughtered with weaponry that terrified even Howard Stark. Not even he could figure out how Haldane was getting the sort of power he was managing without something like the Tesseract.

“Haldane of course had carte blanche to do as he wished, so he was able to cover up most of the worst of it all under a sweeping policy of national security. It certainly didn’t stop him. If anything, the war, Schmidt, HYDRA all convinced him that his cause and his purpose was even more worthwhile. He felt the need to ensure the protection of the kingdom and its empire against all threats that could be posed against it. His efforts continued well after the war ended and the SOE dissolved, all carried on under the banner of national security and mutual understanding. The truth was that few people really understood what was happening at Darkmoor. They knew that Haldane was doing research, but they didn’t know about his private operatives that he had trained to send out, the secret weapons research, or the fact that it was largely funded by the British government at a time when they were struggling to feed people and rebuild the country. It likely would have remained that way, had a very foolish clerk in a general’s office not tried to make some extra money on the side. Your grandfather’s file would never have gotten out and into Thompson’s hands, nearly getting him killed in the process. Had that not happened...things might have gone very differently.”

For long moments silence reigned between the pair of them. Peggy found herself staring at the browned countryside, the flaming trees rolling across the fields. Sharon quietly toyed with her bottle, lost in thought for several miles. When she spoke again, it was with the careful worry of someone who knew she was asking a dangerous question and wasn’t so sure she wanted the answer.

“What about Grandpa? What role did he play in all of this.”

Peggy hadn’t wanted to answer that question, but she waited for it all the same. “He was involved with one of the Warhead units, one that had been stationed in Alsace-Lorraine, just on the French side of the Rhine. They were testing a new, top-secret artillery weapon, they called it ‘Hellfire’. It was just that. There was a town on the German side of the river, important only in that it was a strategic crossing point for German forces into occupied France. Most of the people living there were rural townfolk, no different in some respects than most you would see here. It was the first place they tried the weapon out. It burned down everything and everyone in it in minutes. Michael said it was how he always imagined the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah went up, in a flash of red light. No one survived.”

Peggy almost pitied her niece's sharp intake of break, the pained lines forming around her dark eyes. For Sharon, who had only ever known the kindly man from her childhood, the idea that he had involved himself in something like this had to be hard to hear. “He willingly did that?”

“Led the expedition,” Peggy nodded, solemnly. “In his defense, and it is perhaps the only one I have for him, many soldiers and operatives were asked to do many horrific things during the war, not just German ones. It’s not like Steve or I didn’t kill people in what we did.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t kill civilians, did you?” Sharon’s voice was soft, but there were hard, hurt edges in her tone.

“No,” Peggy admitted. “And to that, your grandfather didn’t last long testing Haldane’s weapons. He was injured in the field shortly after that, broke his leg in three places. That was where he got his limp. He spent the rest of the war at Darkmoor as a data analyst, reviewing the intelligence coming in from the other operatives. Ironic that Michael was stuck behind a desk. He had run away from practicing the law to join the army. But I think what he saw over there, what he was a part of...changed him. He would have had to been a monster for it not to change him. The man I found at Darkmoor was not the brother I thought had died years before. He had seen things, done things, and wanted nothing more than to hide, to settle down with your grandmother and their children, to try and forget it all and lie to himself that by sifting through intelligence he was still keeping Britain safe and not furthering Haldane’s efforts to protect his home against all those he deemed different or dangerous. I think by the time Howard and I wandered up to Darkmoor, Michael had half-convinced himself he was doing nothing wrong by continuing to work for Haldane and Darkmoor, that continuing to create weapons of mass destruction to threaten places like the USSR and Eastern Europe was just what needed to be done to keep all of us safe.”

Peggy admitted that had been the hardest pill to swallow. All of her life, her brother had been her hero, the person who she had looked up to and wanted to become. He had been the one who had believed in her the most. He’d been brave, understanding, and stalwart...and also somewhat reckless, pushy, and a bit of a pompous, condescending ass as well. She had worshipped the ground he had walked on and had loved him for it. Everything she had tried to be, tried to become, had been out of her perception of who her brother had been, the man she thought he was. When she found out that wasn’t Michael at all, it had left her questioning everything about him, about her ideals, her foolish, schoolgirl fantasies...everything about herself. If Michael was not the golden child she had thought him to be, then what did that say about her, who had tried to emulate him?

“How did you convince him otherwise,” Sharon whispered, sadly. How it must to hurt to hear this about Michael.

“In truth, I think Michael always knew, deep down.” Peggy shrugged, remembering their argument and the things they had said to one another. “I think he knew and wanted out, but by that point he’d married Moira. Harry was a very little boy, Maggie just a baby. They were his entire life and I think he was afraid of Haldane, of what he might do if he tried to protest or leave. I don’t know, perhaps I got through to him. It was a hard pill to swallow, I suppose, being shamed by your baby sister. In the end he was the one who stood up and helped us expose what was happening. Once it all came out...well, the government was quick to want answers and just as quick to want to shut it down. It did not look good to their allies in the war that they were running secret experiments with advanced weapons, much like HYDRA, and not telling their friends about it. Not that America wasn’t doing the same, I know they were, but they hadn’t been caught out doing it. What was worse was Haldane’s politics. It was, as they say now at days, not a good look that he was blatantly fascist, even if he was Britain first. Still, Haldane had powerful supporters in the government, ones who frankly didn’t disagree with him. He was essentially asked to retire, quietly, from the public eye and the government took over his research facility, taking all the records of what he had done. Most of that ended up with SHIELD, eventually.”

“And what about the people who worked for Haldane, the ones burning whole villages down to the ground with advanced weaponry?”

Peggy knew Sharon was asking about men like her grandfather. “Each case was reviewed by a group of former Allied military judges. Most were treated lightly, especially those who were in research or analytics. They were offered other positions in the military or intelligence with the caveat that they couldn’t step a toe out of line. The most egregious cases of cruelty towards civilian populations were put on trial. Of those, most were forced to do some sort of jail sentence. Because your grandfather had seen many sides of Haldane’s operation, I convinced the British army to keep him as an advisor and analyst with the plan of bringing him onboard SHIELD once it was up and running. I am surprised I even got that much out of them, but the general in charge also happened to be one who had a run in with Howard years before, so a deal was struck.”

That part was familiar at least to Sharon, or at least it was a part of the story she knew about. Still, she asked the one question Peggy hadn’t wanted to look too much into. “If you were against what he did, why did you work so hard to protect him?”

“I don’t know that I protected him,” Peggy shot back, nettled by Sharon’s words and the stinging truth in them. “He still was under SHIELD’s jurisdiction. He wasn’t allowed to do anything in his life without someone reviewing it. I imagine he couldn’t even move to America without it going through layers of review.”

“Yeah, but it’s better than jail time in some prison.”

“Fair,” Peggy conceded, twisting her fingers together on the table top. “I didn’t know what to do, honestly, not at the time. There was Moira and the children, of course. I didn’t want Young Harry and Maggie to grow up without their father, for Moira to have to raise them without her husband. I knew the scandal would kill my parents. Mother had already had to survive Michael’s death. To know that he lived only to have it all dragged across the press...I don’t know what she would have done. Dad would have been stoic about it, stood by his son to hell and back again, but I suppose there was a part of me that couldn’t do it to them. They had been through so much. Michael had made his choices, whether I agreed with them or not, but there were other innocent people caught up in it. I gave him a second chance, more for them, I think, than anything else. And I suppose it wasn’t a horrible decision, in the end. You came out of it, your siblings, your cousins. Our family survived.”

Sharon smiled wanly. “I suppose they aren’t so bad, the siblings and cousins.”

“No,” Peggy agreed.

“You didn’t really talk to him much after that, though. Grandpa, I mean.”

“No,” Peggy admitted. “I didn’t.”

How could she quantify the wealth of hurt she had felt, the betrayal, the anger, the disappointment in him?

“You have to understand how much I looked up to him...how much he had meant to me. He was my champion. When everyone told me to stop being foolish and act the lady, he stood up for me. I thought he knew me better than anyone. He certainly seemed to. When I wanted to get married to Fred and do what my mother wanted me to do, he saw something different in me. When it all came out, I had to ask myself not only who Michael really was and what he stood for, but what I did as well. What had I become? Who did I want to be? What did I want to stand up for? Everything I believed about him was in question...and I suppose I never could figure out how to face it, to face him. Perhaps, I could have, eventually, but then Scott Lang arrived. The rest of it you know.”

What else could she say?

“He never spoke of it, you know.” Sharon admitted. “He spoke of you, of course. You were some mythic figure, a hero, but he never spoke about the war, or Darkmoor, or any of it. Dad always felt he was sorry. He said that Grandpa always wondered if you didn’t disappear in part because of what happened?”

“No,” Peggy assured her, fervently. “No, that had little to do with it. It was all just a confluence of events that night. I suppose, if anything, that can be laid more at the feet of my own impulsiveness and hard-headedness than anything. I am sorry if he believed otherwise.”

Sharon shrugged. “I don’t know, he didn’t discuss it with me, but then again, perhaps you both could say you were guilty of the same crime of impulsive decisions with far-ranging consequences. You thought you were doing something right. So did he, I suppose, even if it didn’t look that way in hindsight.”

Peggy wasn’t as sure she personally could equate the two. “Perhaps.”

Neither said much more after that as their train lumbered along to York.