Chapter Text
Her clock goes off, bells clanging like a three-alarm fire, at precisely six in the morning. Peggy Carter rolls out of bed, groans, slams down the latch, stretches, rubs her eyes, and jams her feet into her slippers, padding out into the kitchen and fiddling with the stove.
The flame turned up, the kettle on: she gets her teacup out and slips out the back door, picking up the milk and carrying it back in, putting the bottles into the refrigerator. It's a lovely fall morning, brisk and clear. The milk has stayed cold. It's quite nice and convenient, and she likes things to be convenient.
She sits on her kitchen chair at her kitchen table (the dining room is hardly ever used) and sips her tea with milk, going over the morning paper. The evening one keeps being left at the front and not the back: she's going to have to have a word with the delivery-man about that if it doesn't stop at once.
Howard's face takes up a goodly portion of Page Two: he's working on some fancy what-have-you or other, nothing she can pretend to care too much about until he inevitably calls her on the telephone and yammers her ear off about it. She's already got enough on her plate, what with the construction plans she's got to sign off on today, the trip she's got to make down to the site by Thursday, and the meeting Wednesday she's got noted down neatly in her daily planner, and her thoughts go directly to work. She finishes her breakfast and gets dressed: stockings, sensible heels, a gray suit with a pencil skirt and matching hat. Hair: taken out of its curlers and brushed out, pinned up. Gloves, handbag, briefcase, scarf and pin—and she's out the door, locking up and heading down to the bus stop.
She takes the bus to 23rd and Virginia, and from there walks to work. It's not an ideal situation, sharing space with the Central Intelligence Agency, but until they can get the site up and running it will have to do. Mend and Make Do, she remembers the old posters saying during the war, and smiles to herself as she heads into the imposing building and shows her pass to the guards, passing them, signing in, and heading down to her office.
Lunch swings around, and she's once again faced with a sandwich at her desk, alone. She can't very well go out and have a hot meal with the secretaries at the five-and-dime, and it's awkward for everyone when she joins her male peers, so she sits alone, chewing ham and cheese and taking the time to go over more of the building plans.
"Carter?" asks a familiar voice, and she looks up to see Colonel—no, the war's been over for four years, he's just Mr. Phillips now—Phillips, poking his head around the corner of her door. Age has barely changed him at all, maybe another wrinkle around his eyes, but he's as crusty as ever.
"Yes?" she asks, mouth full, and swallows hurriedly.
"I'm thinking we should leave at ten tomorrow to go oversee the new site. I'll drive. That work for you?"
"Oh, certainly. How's the progress coming?"
"Pretty well so far. These new guys seem to know what they're doing." He gives her a once-over and nods. "You oughta wear coveralls. It's not too clean, and I know how you like to be hands-on."
She pretends to sigh. "I suppose the SSR simply can't handle another dry-cleaning bill?"
He chuckles. "Not with all our funds being shuffled around by our Strategic Homeland whatever-it-is."
"Very well. I'll show up looking the very image of Rosie the Riveter. Anything else?"
"Yeah. Uh, Agent Sousa called again." He looks vaguely uncomfortable, and Peggy's heart sinks.
"Did he," she says flatly. "I shall have to call him back, then. Thank you."
"Oh, and I want the updated blueprints on my desk so I can sign off on them after you. Stark make it in yet?"
"Who knows where Howard Stark is or what he's doing," Peggy says dismissively. "No, and I don't think he's signed off on them either. I'll call him and drag him in to have a look; he seems to think deadlines are suggestions."
"You do that. Thanks, Carter." Phillips leaves, and Peggy finishes her sandwich and picks up the phone, dialing Howard's private number. It rings twice, and is picked up, which means Peggy knows immediately that Howard hasn't picked it up: he lets it ring until kingdom come.
"Stark residence. Jarvis speaking."
"Hello, Edwin. It's Peggy." She smiles as he blusters in delight.
"My goodness! Hello, Miss Carter! We haven't heard from you in ages; how are you?"
"I'm very well, but look—we've got to get Howard into the office to sign off on these blueprints for this thing we're doing, and nobody's seen him all week."
"Oh, yes," says Jarvis after a moment. "Yes. One moment." There's a distant voice, a conversation that's muffled—he must have his hand over the receiver—and Howard picks up, voice slightly slurred.
"Peggy!" he almost shouts.
Peggy winces and holds the receiver away from her ear. "Yes, good afternoon, Howard."
"Is it afternoon?"
"Yes. It's nearly one. Look, not to be a bother—"
"You could never be a bother, Peg—"
"Howard, are you drunk?"
"Maybe. What's going on?"
"You have to sign off on these blueprints at the office. We've got them all ready. You don't even have to go over them; just get down here and sign the papers."
"What, you can't just sign 'em yourself?"
Peggy presses a hand to her face. "No, Howard, I really can't. You and I and Phillips all have to sign off on this together, because we're all founding members. You do remember that, right? Getting authorization from Congress? The top-secret meeting? Founding the Strategic Homeland Intervention—"
"That can't be right," he interrupted. "If I'd founded it, the name would be much shorter."
"Can you please," she says stiffly, "just get here and sign them. Please, Howard."
"Anything for you, Peggy," he says, and smacks loudly through the phone as if blowing a kiss, then hangs up. Peggy sets the telephone back into its receiver and groans, sitting back in her chair and pressing her hands to her eyes.
Stark gets there as they're closing down for the night, disheveled and stubbly. He signs off on the blueprints without even giving them a look, and whirls back off into the evening, Edwin Jarvis long-sufferingly looking at Peggy from the front seat of the Rolls-Royce.
She nods at him, and he drives off.
It's not until Peggy gets back to her house that she remembers she never called Daniel Sousa back, and she shoves that knowledge into the farthest corner of her brain, because if she tries hard enough, she'll really forget about it. Just like how she'd forgotten the letters, the other phone calls, the arguments.
You're not staying? he'd asked, eyes wide and wounded, and she'd said, no, I have something extremely important to attend to in Washington, and he'd said, more important than us?
And of course, of course she'd bungled it and looked at him incredulously and said I think the safety of the country as a whole and working to defend people from threats is far more important than us and he had—
Well. They'd fought. It hadn’t been pretty, and she'd come back to Washington: that had been two years ago and Peggy had given up on Daniel. She had loved him, truly, in her own way—but work came first, work always came first because if she didn't have her work she had nothing.
It didn't stop her from feeling horrible about not returning his calls.
Peggy sighs and finishes her dinner, then takes a bath and climbs into bed. Tomorrow's going to be busy as a beehive and she's got to be rested.
She spends all of the next day tromping about the construction site in coveralls and boots with a kerchief over her hair, asking questions with her clipboard under her arm and getting Phillips to ask them when the workmen give her sideways looks. It's exhausting, and she bloody well wishes just one man in the world would look at her without confusion or contempt when she's trying to do her job, but in the end she's satisfied with the progress they've made, and they head back to the car at four, open a pair of thermoses Phillips brought along, and spend a good amount of time gulping down tea and eating sandwiches.
Phillips made the sandwiches, too. Pickle and cheese. Peggy doesn't exactly like them, but he is, after all, a bachelor, so she smiles and washes the vinegary taste from her mouth with tea and buckles back in for the long drive home.
He drops her off at her house, waving good-bye in the glow of the new electric streetlights that the street only got a month ago, and drives off, the car rumbling away down the road.
Peggy wipes her forehead and steps inside off the porch, the door shutting behind her. It's seven o'clock and she's exhausted: the sweat of today is clinging to her neck and cheeks and she didn't even put on powder this morning. She can't wait to get into the bath and soak the grime and concrete dust off.
Off come her boots, caked in mud. She heads into the kitchen in her woolen socks, putting the kettle on, and opens the back door. No newspaper greets her, and she locks a frustrated word that is most certainly not ladylike behind her teeth. She must have missed it on the way in: the idiot deliveryman must have thrown it into the bushes or something, and the last thing she wants to do is go rooting around for it right now.
"Bloody hell," she says under her breath. Then, because it makes her feel better, and because she can: "Fucking hell."
There's a tentative knock on the door, tap tap ta-tap tap, and she glowers in the direction of the living room. "Oh, you had better not be trying to apologize after two weeks of this," she spits, quite incensed by this point, and stamps toward the door, furious. She can see a dark silhouette of a man outside, just past the door, and she barks, "I hope you've brought an apology letter, because if I've got to run a rat race to get my evening Times Herald again, I'm going to—"
She yanks the door open, and all words die in her throat.
Once, when she had been very small, her father had shown her a trick. He had laid a table out with plates and glasses, a cloth underneath, then whisked the cloth out from under everything neat as you please, leaving the glasses and cloth standing, and Peggy had shrieked in glee at the sight. "It's inertia," he had explained, "the force that keeps the glasses and things staying still while the cloth is pulled. Do it too slowly and everything crashes to the ground."
That's exactly how Peggy feels: as if the earth under her feet has been yanked sideways, threatening to topple her—as if the only thing keeping her upright is some unseen force she has no name for yet.
Steven Grant Rogers is standing on her porch, and he's looking at her, and he's holding her evening paper: and she must be dreaming, she must be, because how can he be standing here?
"Hi, Peggy," he says, and he's got the most extraordinary expression on his face, as if he's just as shocked to see her as she is to see him.
"Steve?" she gasps, clinging to the doorframe.
"Can I—can I come in? Uh, and I think this is your paper."
"You came back," says Peggy, and her knees give out. Steve makes to catch her quickly, and she bats him away, dragging herself back upright and staring at him. "It's been—so long." Tears are welling up in spite of herself, her hands shaking, because this cannot be happening, but it is, it is. "So long."
"Yeah. I know." His eyes are wet, too: watery and just as blue as she remembers. "I'm sorry."
"Five years," Peggy says. "Five years—where have you been?"
"It's a long story," Steve tells her. "A really long story."
She gapes at him, and in the silence her teakettle goes off, screeching from the kitchen. "Oh—my tea," she gasps, and turns about. "Yes, get inside, I'll—I'll make you a cup, and for heaven's sake don't disappear while I'm in the kitchen, or I'll never forgive you."
"Wouldn't dream of it," he says as he steps into her living room, and something clicks back into place for Peggy; something that hasn't been in place for a very long time.