Chapter 39
“So the object of the game is to tell three things about yourself, only two of which are true.” Ashley Carter explained the very basic rules of “Two Truths and a Lie” to the table, which Peggy suspected mostly for her benefit. She didn’t want to tell her young niece that she was already well aware of this game from her years of training, so she gamely listened along with another of her nieces, one of Maggie’s daughters, Brooke.
“What if we can’t come up with a lie,” Brooke worried, glancing up and down the table filled with extended Carter cousins.
“Then just make something up,” her cousin, Mikey, quipped, earning chuckles as Brooke glared at him and tossed an orange and brown paper napkin at him.
“That’s not what I meant. I don’t know how to just lie well!”
“Then don’t play against Sharon and Aunt Peggy,” Maggie teased her daughter as she gathered plates to take to the kitchen. “The two of them are spies, that’s hardly fair.”
Peggy shot Sharon a mischievous glance, knowing it wasn’t an incorrect assessment. “I may be horrible at this lying game. You don’t know.”
“Fair,” Mikey agreed, pulling from a glass of amber beer. “But I’m not going to lay odds against the woman who founded SHIELD. And I know Sharon lies like a champ, lest we forget Brody Anderson.”
“Hey,” Sharon shouted, reaching a leg under the table to kick her elder brother’s shin. “What happened to sibling codes of secrecy.”
“Please, Sharon, you don’t think we didn’t know you weren’t going to Laura’s house in high school?” Her father, Harry, eyed his daughter with the same twinkling, knowing smirk Peggy's father used to employ on her when Peggy was a girl.
Sharon only scowled, shrugging as if it didn’t matter, which it did. “I thought I hid it well enough!”
“Well enough that I didn’t know about it till Laura’s mother spilled the beans,” Harry teased.
Sitting on the other side of Peggy, Cynthia explained the small piece of family drama. “There was a boy that Sharon liked in school and wanted to date, but her father said she was too young, So she would sneak around and pretend she was at her friend’s house and meet up with him.
“Ahhh,” Peggy delighted in this small bit of family scandal. “Seeing boys on the sly! What would your grandfather say?”
“More like what would my grandmother say,” Harry replied, shooting Peggy a knowing look. “I heard a story or two about you growing up.”
Peggy wasn’t sorry about any of it. “Those are just the ones your father knew about, dear.”
A general rumble of laughter went up from the table among the Carter cousins. There were a lot of them, all adults, some married with children of their own. Said offspring were entertaining themselves in the next room over, having eaten their dinner, and were now engaged in watching an animated film involving living toys. The adults now relaxed, enjoying each other's company, now very full of Cynthia’s fine cooking. Thanksgiving was not a holiday that the English ever celebrated, though Peggy was well aware of it from her time living with and serving alongside Americans. It was such a shame it wasn’t one, it was a perfectly lovely holiday, free of the mad bustle and commercialism of Christmas. In her time she had celebrated it last year with her friends - Howard, the Jarvises, the Commandos in town. It had been a cozy affair, but nothing like this one, sitting around Harry and Cynthia’s long table, the ruins of a well-made meal left around them, laughing at her brother’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as they teased and joked and interrupted each other, a happy tumble of laughter and voices...a family.
In her pocket, her ever-present phone buzzed.
If there was one thing about modern living she had become disturbingly attached to, it was that item, and she found herself quickly glancing at the screen, seeing the unregistered number. She excused herself to everyone, quickly taking the call out through the kitchen and to the back deck overlooking Cynthia’s lovely garden. It was now more brown than green, fall already turning everything blustery, the leaves of their maple trees a bright, orange-red, a riot of flaming color. Peggy focused on it as she answered her phone. “This is Director Carter.”
“Sorry to disturb dinner with your family.” Fury at least sounded properly apologetic. “Hope I didn’t interrupt the pie.”
“Not at all, we were about to play ‘Two Truths and a Lie’ and see how badly Sharon and I trounced them all at it.”
“They do know you both work for SHIELD, right?”
“Yes,” she chuckled, leaning against the railing. “Did you talk to Stark?”
“Last night,” he affirmed, but not with any sort of pleasure.
“He said no, then.” She had a feeling that would happen.
“Emphatically,” Fury grumbled, unused to anyone telling him that. “He seems to think he can handle himself just fine doing this superhero business.”
“Of course he does, no one has figured out how to stop him, yet. The minute that happens, all bets are off.” Peggy knew that Fury wouldn’t be able to sway him and she’d told her counterpart so. She had much preferred to wait till they found Steve and propose the idea jointly to them, work it out as a team, but Fury’s impatience had gotten the better of him. He made the call to approach Stark directly, thinking that by pointing out he wasn’t the only one out there trying to keep the world safe he could perhaps convince him to be a team player. Peggy had tried to warn him that Starks didn’t like to be team players unless they were requisitioned and commanded to do so, and even then it was usually only if they found it interesting and intriguing. Fury’s bluster would get him nowhere.
“So, I suppose this means we are back at square one with him?”
“For now,” Fury rumbled, momentarily defeated but not deterred. “In the meantime, I’ve kept Romanoff on Stark’s case. I have a feeling this is all going to blow up on him sooner rather than later, and I want trusted eyes on him from a distance. She’s the right sort of asset to dangle in front of him to get close enough that she can watch him like a hawk, but she has her wits about her enough to keep him dangling without getting too close. I can hear the politicians sharpening their pitchforks already and it’s better to have eyes on him and ensure he doesn’t do anything stupid than hope that we get lucky and he doesn’t.
He wasn’t wrong about that, Peggy conceded. “I am sure Romanoff will appreciate the additional weeks of employment at SI with all their employee perks, including the massages.”
“Why we don’t get those perks, I don’t know. Saving the world all the damn time, I could use a damn massage,” he groused, loudly, earning a chuckle out of Peggy. “By the way, I have a tidbit to throw your way, maybe you can sick Kam on it, and do some follow-up. I’ve heard some scuttlebutt through back channels and you are the only person alive I know that could speak into this with any authority on the subject.”
“What is it?” Her curiosity piqued, excitement tingling at the prospect of something different.
“Have you run across the name of General Thaddeus Ross yet?”
She frowned, something ringing a bell. “He’s with the Army, in their division...I don’t recall the name, it’s what they replaced the SSR with.”
“That would be him. He got his hands on a lot of things that SHIELD wished he hadn’t gotten hold of, but we couldn’t get it out of the Army’s hands. One of those happened to be the Army’s work on Project: Rebirth.”
Her fingers tightened hard around the phone, aching as the bottom dropped out of her stomach. “The super soldiers...they’ve been trying to recreate that for years but failed. They went through all of Steve’s blood and never figured it out.”
“Didn’t stop them from looking. You ever run across the name of Dr. Bruce Banner, a former research scientist, genius on a level only slightly below that of Stark.”
She had as a matter-of-fact. “He was one of theirs.”
“And he’s out there, somewhere, and Ross is actively looking for him. I doubt he’ll catch him, Ross is an idiot who thinks with his gun, going against a man who is one of the world’s greatest minds when you catch him on a good day, and one of the most terrifying monsters ever seen when you catch him on a bad one. That said, I think if we can get to Banner at some point, and offer him some help and protection if he wants it, he might make a good addition. He’s certainly interesting and brilliant enough for Tony Stark to play with.”
Peggy had eyed the poor doctor for some time now but had not considered him for the sheer fact that his other side was a terrifying, uncontrollable titan who could destroy everything in his path. But Fury did have a point, if they could protect him from the Army and keep him out of their clutches, then perhaps they could provide him for him. And there was no one she knew who could have a better chance at finding that help than Tony Stark.
“I’ll set Kam on it when I’m back in the office next week. Perhaps we can connect with Banner.”
“Approach him carefully. He’s like a rabbit, you spook him and he bolts and it isn’t pretty.”
“Duly noted. Anything else?”
He hemmed for a long moment. “No, I’ll let you get back to your family. I’ll keep you posted as I hear of things from up north.”
She knew what he meant by that. Her eyes burned, briefly. “Thank you. I had hoped...but I suppose if he’s kept this long, what’s another season?”
“We’ll find him, don’t worry. You keep your head in the game with what you got.”
“You as well, Fury. Are you spending your holiday with anyone special?”
“Me? Old friends, a beach somewhere, and a tropical drink, that’s all I need.”
“Festive in your way, then. I respect that.”
“Maybe someone there can give me a massage,” he retorted, mildly. “Happy Thanksgiving, Carter.”
“The same to you.”
She clicked off the phone as Sharon peeked her head outside of the French doors, coming out in her jeans and jumper, shivering slightly at the cool onset of the November evening. “You doing okay out here?”
Peggy nodded, holding up the phone before slipping it into her pocket. “Stark said no.”
“To Fury?” Sharon blinked, momentarily wide-eyed. “I didn’t think you could do that.”
“When you are Tony Stark, you can.” Peggy pulled the ends of her jumper over her fingers. She’d dressed down in comfortable but tight leggings and a long, knitted top that was softer and far less itchy than any of the wool she’d had during the war. “I suspected he would do it if nothing else out of the perversity of it. Fury didn’t know how to handle it.”
“But you did. Why not send you?”
“Impatience,” Peggy shrugged, not bothered by Fury’s faux pas, but realizing she would have made a different call. Still, it wasn’t her place to criticize another sitting director. It was hard enough to sit in the chair when she had done it, she wasn’t about to critique someone else in the role. “We’ll get him, I just have to finesse it a bit.”
“Please tell me that isn’t a double entendre,” Sharon grimaced, much to Peggy’s mild horror.
“You do realize that it might as well be incest, correct? Tony Stark is practically a nephew, nearly as much as you or anyone else in the house is.”
“Try telling that to him,” Sharon joked, moving to lean against the rail beside her. “You are going to tell him, though, eventually? Tell him who you are?”
“Maybe,” she replied, considering. “Probably, if he will believe it. I can’t tell him about the fact he was the one to create time travel, he’d focus on nothing else if I did. Perhaps I will tell him, but not today.”
“No, not today,” Sharon agreed, nodding. “Besides, Mom’s pumpkin pie is to die for, so you better come inside or the boys will eat it all.”
“She made five of those! They couldn’t seriously go through them…”
Sharon only nodded solemnly. “Oh, yes they could. I’ve seen things, Aunt Peggy, things that would terrify you. Do not stand between a Carter man and his pumpkin pie.”
“Oh, heavens,” she sighed, wrapping an arm around Sharon’s, tugging her to the door. “Then let us go in and snag a couple of slices for ourselves before they land like locusts on them.”
“That is a good plan. I’ll run point on it.”
Their operation was a complete success, and Peggy had to admit, it was a bloody good pie.