Today on Endgame shower thoughts: the secret brilliance of Cap(?) wielding Mjölnir
Given that we now know that Mjölnir has been a tool and symbol of Asgardian colonialism and the subjugation of other realms and stealing their wealth, and it is losing it that allows Thor to truly accept and move beyond his family's bloody history, I wonder, why is Cap's wielding of it considered a mark of his character, now that we know what it's always been?
Perhaps it is because it is, after all, and the Skrull invasion is well underway
Radom mcu thoughts- time travel to Endgame is what Accords are to CW. We will never be free and never settle the discourse bc of what they are - a semi coherent plot device necessary to connect all the scenes they actually wanted to include
Well put, Anon.
All discussion about either has about as much merit in the MCU as discussion about gravity. It’s magic nonsense, which has the characteristics that the plot requires it to have at any given moment. Which is not always a negative, don’t get me wrong, I don’t care that vibranium is basically magic. It doesn’t matter that button A can fix a spine and at other times create a perfect rendition of a car. It doesn’t matter, except when it pertains to character motivations.
It matters whether the Accords were a fascist attempt to enslave every super, or a flawed but ultimately understandable cry for a little accountability from overpowered, entitled supermen. It matters that, as far as the movie in which they were the crux, they were neither and both.
It matters whether time travel causes the fabric of the universe to fray, or if it time loops are possible. It matters when the moral implications of the end of a hero’s journey depend on it, it matters especially when that hero’s whole shtick is doing the right thing.
Today on Endgame hot takes no one really wants: I don’t love the “old!Steve was just wearing a photostatic veil” as a fix it, without some solid justification to follow.
a) what it says to me is that Steve is tired of everyone expecting him to save a world, and wants to basically deceive everyone into doing it themselves, which... uh, Steve, bby, no one asked you to do shit since 2012, I think? And it was an outlier even then, you are the one who keeps throwing yourself into every conflict on the planet. In fact there was a whole movie about how everyone wanted you to shut the fuck up and sit down, remember that, Steve?
b) a corollary: m’dude, you’re not so irreplaceable you need to force people into doing things themselves, seriously, they are fine, you can just say “I’m too mentally exhausted to keep doing this”, your best friend is literally a mental health professional!
c) it is just a dick move to all of his friends? Letting them believe he had a happy life without them, and is now too old to be bothered? It’s the next level of “new phone, who dis”.
I recently rewatched part of Endgame because the person in the airplane seat next to me had it on, and with the sound off I was struck by two things: (1) Holy shit, Steve's haircut + shirt combos make him look INCREDIBLY DOUCHEY without Evan's earnestness to soften it, and ... [sending in a second post b/c Tumblr still doesn't have functional ask character limits, *shocker*]
…(2) this movie would make so much more sense if, at the beginning of the 5 years, after they fail to fix the snap initially, Steve, in Bruce’s words, gets low. Low enough that he wishes he had another plane as an excuse. But he doesn’t, and the world needs him, so he goes and finds a magician/demigod/evil scientist/Inhuman/whatever, and asks them to take away his feelings for Bucky. All of them – romantic, sure, but also brotherly, also protective, all that Bucky has ever meant to him (2/3)
(3/3) He didn’t ask for his MEMORIES to be removed: he knows those claw their way back. But all bargains have a price, and Bucky’s central to Steve’s existence. Steve didn’t need Bucky to be a good person initially, but now SO many aspects of himself (fighting for autonomy, feeling at home in the 21st century) have deep ties to Bucky that excising all feelings for Bucky blunts those too. The anesthetized shell left is Endgame!Steve. That’s why Bucky’s so resigned: he knows Steve is already gone.
1) Steve looks incredibly douchey. Whatever they did to his hair, both color and product, makes it look like rubber, his makeup makes his skin look plastic, he looks like a wax sculpture of himself,
2) I am sexually attracted to this idea,
3) No, seriously, I love it. Somewhere along the line Steve decided he didn’t need his soul, if he were to be of any use, so he dropped it, believing it’s the right thing.
[[So I kind of wrote a Steggy fic? Oops? Be warned though: I did not like how Endgame ended, and this is very much a reflection of just how much I didn’t like it]]
1.
Steve comes back on a Tuesday.
Peggy shatters at the sight of him, holds out her arms, holds him tied and weeps, weeps like she hasn't wept since the static drowned out his voice on the radio.
"It's been so long…" she whispers into his shoulder, and he bends his head to kiss her.
She keeps the lights in her living room low; she's not quite sentimental to invest in candles, but there is something about the softness and shimmer that they impart that makes her strive for the next best thing. Everything has the veneer of a secret in this light, and maybe she shouldn't crave it, not considering her job, but it is just… pretty.
"I missed you so much," he says when their lips part and Peggy sighs.
He smells good. She never had the chance to notice that before. His skin feels soft under her fingertips and his lips… Peggy digs the pad of her fingers into the back of his neck and draws herself up. To hell with her make-up, to hell with all of it.
Steve is back.
"Peggy—"
"Later," she growls, and kisses him again, fiercely, amazed at how bold she is in this moment.
He lets her tear at his buttons, undoes a few of hers, and keeps kissing her, and it is amazing, beautiful, everything she's ever dreamt of, every moment of every day since that last sputtering radio wave has taken him away forever.
And yet. Peggy finds herself on Steve's lap, arms wrapped around his neck, tears streaming down her face. "I missed you," she whispers into his mouth and his arms tighten around her waist, and they sit there, wrapped up in one another, shirt and blouse in disarray. She rubs his collar absent-mindedly, and thinks…
She thinks.
And she feels the smooth slide of fabric between her fingertips, the strange shape of the collar; it is linen, she is pretty sure, but it is… softer than it should be. Yields to her fingers, her nails slide over it.
"Steve, how did you get here?"
His arm trembles against her. "It's… a long story."
"You survived the crash," she tries again, mind racing.
"I did. I'm hard to kill."
"How did you escape the plane?" It's been over a year now. Far too long for him to have escaped the crash itself.
"I didn't. Peggy—"
She forces herself to sit up straight, one palm on his cheek. "Steve," she says, to herself as much as he says it to him. His skin is soft, and taut, but there are wrinkles around his eyes, his mouth, she doesn't recognise. Not many; in this soft, pink light it is only now that she sees what she thinks is the difference.
Peggy slides off Steve's lap and goes to flip the switch, forcing her back to remain straight as she turned away from him and touches the wall. The softness melts away, back into its corners, back into the halo around the lamp on the commode, and no further, as she looks at Steve again.
It's not immediate, even now. But something about him, something about his face, is different.
"Steve?" she asks, and it is hushed this time, soft. She is pleading and she hardly understands why. "How did you escape the plane?"
He looks down at his hands. "I didn't. I was found. And thawed."
"Who found you?" Please, let it not have been the Russians, although that could have explained the weight about him, the slop of his shoulders. "Steve—no matter what happened, we can help you. We can make it right."
He laughs. At first it's just a snort, barely even a sound, but it is followed, until Steve is laughing into his knees, his hands clenched into fists. "You have no idea."
"Then tell me."
He looks up, and she is not shocked at all to see tears in his eyes. "Peggy… I can't. I can't tell you. I've already meddled too much. We had no choice, we had to, but…"
"Meddled?" she says, but she looks at him again. He seems older, but that no surprise, those that have walked through battlefields often do. She has seen battle-age in him before, but not like this. "Steve, you need to tell me." The softness is gone now; she needs answers.
"I came from the future," he manages eventually. "From… quite far in the future. I was found eventually, frozen, and then I had the chance to come back here, and I took it."
Well, fuck me, Peggy thinks, dumbfounded. "How?"
"I can't give you the details. I wish I could."
She scrambles for the little she knows – which is nothing, no one knows, no one can know, but if she strains, truly strains, she can conjure whispers of thought on the subject – and tries to reason with the concept. "Will it cause problems if you tell me?"
"I don't know. They said that altering the past is not possible, looking from the future back, but a timeline can branch out, if something is changed in the past."
Peggy wonders how much is Steve getting paid in that future, because it doesn't appear in the relative paygrade of the entirety of the CIA. "Then… this is safe? Us, being here, together?"
"Yes," he says.
Peggy finds she cannot tell if he's lying. It's unsettling. But Steve would never put lives at risk like this, not unless he was absolutely sure this was fine.
She sits on the ottoman, clenches her hands around her knees and looks. Her lipstick is smudged all over Steve's mouth, and the effect is grotesque, scary. He's not exactly pale, but the deep red drains the pink out of his skin, makes his face sallow, like he's bleeding out. Like he bled out some time ago. She picks up a handkerchief and goes to him, lets his hands settle on her hips as she wipes the greasy red off. "Better," she mutters.
"Peggy…"
"It's late." God, when did it get so late? The clock on the wall is well past midnight, when it was barely ten a moment before. "I have work tomorrow," she whispers against his forehead.
Steve sighs; the hair curling against her neck flutters, brushing up against her ear. She feels his hand tighten around her, holding on for dear life, and that makes her realize she is clutching him just as tightly in return.
"Let's go to bed," she says, because…
Well, because she wants to.
Steve looks at her, lost and unsure, and that's fine: Peggy can deal with that. She switches off the lights, finds his hands in the dark, drags his mouth to hers for a kiss, loses track of time and space. They make it up the stairs, eventually, her by the grace of knowing the layout of her home, Steve by following her every move. She doesn't bother with the lamp in her bedroom, doesn't worry about the curtains, through which a yellow lamplight casts shadows onto the bed; there is no decent vantage point on the other side, and as long as the room remains dark, there is nothing to see.
She sees, though. She knows that Steve sees. She drags the oddly soft shirt off his shoulders, pushes up his undershirt, undoes the button on the front of his pants, while he fumbles with the buttons of her blouse.
God almighty, he is so warm…
She shucks the skirt, digs her fingernails into the lace of her garter belt, unlatches the hooks, undoes the clips, pulls Steve close again. "Put your hands on me," she commands, breathless, as she reaches back to undo her bra under her slip.
Steve obeys; his hands follow hers, press against her back, and up, taking the slip and the bra off and away, casting them to the chair by the wall, and they are skin to skin, finally. His palms feel like they are dragging hot wax down her flesh as they travel back down to push her underwear down. Peggy can't breathe, for fear of sobbing as she twists the two of them around, pushes Steve back onto the bed. The mattress yields under his weight, then hers.
She needs a condom, she thinks, as she hovers above him, struck with a moment's uncertainty. Dates fly through her head: will it be safe? Erskine said sterility is a possibility, although there was no way to know for sure, surely Steve can't possibly have an infection, she doesn't either, so…
There's a condom in the commode.
Peggy slides off the bed, rifles through her stockings and finds the think box, thank god. Steve blinks up at her once she's back, but his head falls back at the touch of her hand, and he lets her do this without interruption. She sinks onto him slowly, biting her lip, distracted by the feather-light brush of his hand against her thigh, over the top of the stocking that stuck to her knee and refused to go down with her panties.
She feels him tremble, and it's good, so good; just being in the moment, only her and Steve in the whole world. She gasps when his fingers slip down her thigh and press gently right above where he's in her, while his other hand brushes against her breasts, travels up, until it is wrapped around the back of her neck, until he can pull her head down to meet his lips.
She is breathless when she reaches completion; it is almost too much to bear, but she rolls her hips to chase the sensation anyway, until Steve, too, gasps under her.
2.
Steve sleeps in the next morning. Peggy watches him, watches the lines on his face in the sunshine, too afraid to touch lest he disappear before her eyes, even if she still feels a shadow of an ache from their lovemaking last night. She could stay forever, but the day beckons: she has a meeting, she needs to wrangle Howard, she has six field reports to review. She cannot stay.
She presses a kiss to his forehead before she goes.
Outside, her heel barely touches the pavement when she reconsiders. She rushes back inside, tears a page out of a notebook and scribbles a message, which she tucks between the mirror and its frame. Steve won't miss it, for sure.
3.
"You seem to be in a good mood," Howard observes, arms crossed.
"Yes," she tells him. The report she's reading is making no sense. She's looked at the same page twice now, and can't seem to be moving along.
Steve never slept in. Every morning he would show to the briefings bright-eyed and keen, so keen, to do his part. She doesn't even get up that early.
"Listen, I need to you to sign off on this thing."
He sets a file on her desk and drums his fingers against its surface.
"Why?"
"I figure let's do this above board, maybe you can get Congress to pitch in."
Peggy frowns, but she opens the file. "What is…?"
Arctic expeditions. Multiple arctic expeditions.
"You want to search the Arctic?"
"Why not? There's a good chance we'll find him."
For a second Peggy wants to tell him about Steve, whom she left in her bed this morning, but something stops her.
"Finding his body won't look good right now," she says, and just as the words leave her mouth she stops, as though paralysed. Steve said he came from the future, then… was Steve also frozen in the Arctic right now? Time travel shouldn't be possible, and yet she couldn't help herself: she believed Steve when he said he was from the future, no proof needed. She has seen him, seen the lines carved into his skin, faint though they may be, and there was no faking those. Steve has aged, well beyond what the three years would have managed.
But if he was from the future, didn't it logically follow that there was another Steve existing somewhere in the Arctic right now? Didn't it follow that she was falling into the arms of someone who wasn't, in a way, supposed to be there? Didn't it follow that now that she knew Steve, her Steve, was alive, that she owed it to him to find him first, before planning a life with the time-traveller?
Should she be planning a life with the time traveller at all?
Howard brings her back to reality with a scoff. He picks a pen of her desk and twirls it between his fingers. "If it's just a body. Even then finding it is going to be useful—" he has the good sense to step back and hold up his hands as he says it, "—but I know, I know, it's not what you want to hear."
Peggy looks right at him, thinks of how she woke up just hours ago, cheek pressed against the warm skin of Steve's arm, and says, "That seems unlikely."
"But possible."
"Howard… we can't allocate this kind of funds to search for the body of a single soldier."
"We can, if it's research. And I'm sure it's going to be useful for other things as well."
"Well, let me know what other things you have in mind, then maybe we'll talk. And don't pretend that's the only thing on your mind, bring me everything you've got cooking."
"What's the point of you being in charge of budgeting if you have to vet everything?" he gripes, as he always does.
"This is a government agency, Howard. Not a personal project fund. I am accountable for the money we spend, and you better believe I will get sacked if I'm not spending it right."
"This is why I hate working for the government. Erskine never had those issues."
"Erskine had a project the military couldn't say no to."
"Look." Howard takes a covert look around. "You're wrong about finding Rogers. We need to do it. We need to find him before the Russians do."
"We will find him," she says.
"We need him, Carter. Someone's gotta wrangle those bureaucrats. They'd listen to him. Do you remember what it was like during the war, anything Rogers deemed useful we got, no questions asked. Golden days. Imagine him going up to DC and demanding funds. Who would say no?"
Peggy takes a deep breath, though all she wants in this moment is to grit her teeth and scream. "Just be grateful we are not the CIA," she says, and forces herself to look down at the field reports.
4.
She gets back home at a reasonable hour, for once, though she leaves the office with thick bundle of files under her arm. Reasonable, as she got absolutely no work done. She stops along the way to pick up groceries, and she is glad she did, as Steve is waiting for her in the kitchen, staring at the stove in something akin to confusion.
"Have you eaten anything today?" she asks, and he shakes his head. Peggy grimaces. She should have thought of it, but groceries were never high on her list of priorities.
She is not a great cook, by any metric, but she bought macaroni and she bought cheese, and putting the two together does not take too much effort. They eat it together, at the table in the dining room, having waded through knee-deep layers of dust; Peggy doesn't entertain much. Not at home.
"How was your day?" she asks, once she finishes the last of the macaroni and pushes the plate away.
Steve is still eating, and it's almost fascinating: he doesn't seem to be tasting much, the fork just makes the journey from the plate to his mouth and back like it's one of Howard's contraptions. "It was fine."
"I'm glad."
She's dithering, and she doesn't love that she's dithering, but it feels awkward to start this conversation over food. It feels like an armistice, of a sort, and she'd be loath to break it, even though they aren't even fighting.
"You can't stay," she says, blurts finally, and God, though she spits them out they feel like they are dragged out of her body: she feels each one.
So does Steve.
"Peggy—what?"
"How would it even work?" she asks, unable to contain the swell of heat and dread that's boiling in her stomach. "You died! Everyone knows you died, how do we explain that you are here now? Someone is bound to recognise you, you don't know – I assume you don't know, but your face is in comic books now, the children play with trashcans painted red white and blue, there are trading cards! We can't say you were found, because when you are found—" she pauses. "You are in the ice right now, alive, and we're just supposed to leave you there? For years?"
"We'll go and find him. I know the coordinates."
"So then there would be two of you! How do we explain that?"
"We don't need to explain anything, I can just… stay out of sight."
Peggy lets out a laugh, a deep, ugly sound she could swear she wasn't capable of until now. "Steve, you can't possibly be this stupid. I work in intelligence; I need to disclose personal engagements. If I took a husband who came out of nowhere, there would immediately be half a dozen agents dedicated to figuring out where you came from, and really, what's there to figure out? All they would need is to look at you to know what happened. The secret wouldn't last a week, not when there are entire wings of buildings dedicated to making sure there are no Soviet assets infiltrating us."
"Then we tell the truth," Steve says, stubborn to the last, but his composure is held together with cobwebs, she can see that now.
"What truth? Steve, don't you see? If I don't report your miraculous return, then someone will find out, and my career would be over! No one will trust me with any intel, if they suspect I'll keep things to myself. And if I do report your return, then we're dooming you – the other you – to die in the ice. You can't ask me to accept that."
He shakes his head, drags his hands through his hair, throws himself out of his chair almost too fast for her to follow, and stalks into the living room.
Breathe, she instructs, breathe. She stares at the remnants of the fat and cheese in the pan, listening to what little sound Steve makes in the other room. Finally, she stands and follows, one step at a time, as though she's going into battle.
"What is the truth, Steve?" she asks gently, stopping by the door, hip against the frame. "Why are you really here?"
"I came to be with you."
"Why?" she asks, and she can see – God almighty, she can see him stagger as though shot. "You said you came from the future, why weren't you with me then?"
"It's complicated, you had a family, you had a life—"
"What?" God help her, but her hands close and within a few heartbeats she finds she's sidled to the bureau, where she keeps a spare gun. There should be a clip alongside it; when was the last time she checked? She lets her hand drop from the wood and she takes a step towards the centre of the room, towards Steve. "I… have a family?"
"Not yet!"
"But in the future you came from, I had a family, and the family was not you."
Steve grits his teeth so her she can see the texture of the tendons in his jaw as he looks away. "That future cannot be altered. It's safe."
Safe, she thinks in a daze. I have a family, children? A husband, maybe. "Was I happy with them? Will I be happy with them?"
Steve's whole body spasms and for a moment she worries he will lie, but when he meets her eye she knows he would not be capable of a lie, not in the state he's in. "You said… you lived your life, and your one regret was that I didn't get to live mine."
It feels like the curtains are on fire, like all the lights have come on at once and she can barely breathe, because all the air she could draw would be filled with embers. Every little detail, every line on his face, the tired slope of his shoulders, the belaboured way he seems to breathe, everything, everything feels like it's burning through her skin.
"Then how dare you come here?!" she stalks across the room, fists clenched. "How dare you! How dare you meddle with my family! How dare you take them away from me!" She throws the first punch, yes, she will not apologise for that. He blocks it, as she knew he would, so she stomps on his foot with her heel.
It's a miscalculation. It hurts him: she can see the expression on his face, but his hand has closed around her wrist and it won't budge, not when she swings her other fist, not when he has to side-step the knee she's aimed at his groin: his had remains in the exact same position, locked around her wrist.
"Let go," she commands, and wrenches her hand away. She is back across the room before she knows it, wrenching the drawer of the bureau open. She's got the gun in her hand and the clip inserted faster than she can think about it. She doesn't lift the gun once it's loaded; the brightness has abated, the air no longer burns, but she doesn't put it away, either.
"Get the fuck out of my house," she grinds out.
"Me and you, Peggy," he says, softly. "Imagine it."
"I did. Then you died and it was over."
"It's not. Right now it is not. We have a chance now to make it right, to make everything right."
"What is there to make right, Steve? You chose to put the plane in the water over being with me. You don't get to take that back, and I swear if you tell me now that was the wrong choice, I will kill you. I swear to God, I will kill you, Steve."
"We could have had a life."
"All we ever had was a chance, Steve. Once upon a time we had a chance. We lost it, we gave it up, because it was either that, or let New York die. If us being together was the price of saving this city, then I am glad we paid it."
Steve is shaking his head, but she comes forward, and forces him to take a step back, until he sits heavily on the couch, so that she is leaning over him, his forehead against her hip. He's trembling, and she cards her fingers through his hair.
"No matter how much you may think that this will work now, it won't. It can't. You can't change the past," she tells him, but of course he is here, now, so she amends: "And if you can, then you mustn't. All you can do is move forward."
"No," Steve says. He tries to shake his head, but instead manages only to tremble all over. "No. I can't. I can't go back there."
"Back? Steve, this is going back! I'm sorry this happened to you, I'm sorry you didn't get to live through the years after the war, but it happened. You need put the past behind you, where it belongs." Something in her seizes as she says it, when she looks at his face, crumbled in distress. Now, more than before, she sees the age in him, the years he lived that he's barely mentioned. She would have loved this man, once upon a time, if they'd spent those years together, if there were mirror lines on her own skin. "You need to let me go."
"I hate the future. There's just… so much of it. Everything is different, everything changes."
This, this right there, is a punch to the solar plexus. Those three sentences dig into her skin and push the air out of her lungs, and they burn, burn like an electric current running through her body, and it's a whole new kind of fury.
She takes a step back, her grip on the gun suddenly the only thing keeping her centred. "And you came here to hide from change?" she grits out, spits out the words like they are poison. "You came here, because you know what's going to happen and you won't have to worry about the world changing?"
"No, that wasn't—"
"Don't you dare lie to me! You came here because my life is an open book to you, one that you can rewrite to your satisfaction? You come here and you tell me you know I had a family, you know I had children, and you decided that I don't need to know them? You come here to make sure they don't exist!?"
"They will exist! The timeline will branch, nothing will change in the other one!"
"What does that matter! What do I care about some other timeline! How dare you make that choice for me!"
"I wanted to be with you. I've always wanted that."
"I wanted that too. I wanted that more than anything."
"Then—"
"I spent some much time thinking what if, if only you didn't die, if only there was a way to bring you back. And now…" She hesitates, thinking hard about what it is that's coursing through her head. "But you didn't come back, not really. You lived so long, in such a different place, that I don't know you, I just know you are not my Steve."
"Who am I, then?"
"I don't know. I do know you don't get to hide in the past. You don't get to run from change."
"Why not?" he asks stubbornly, and her heart breaks all over again. What happened to you, she wonders but does not ask. What happens in the future that's worse than the trenches of the world war that would make you like this?
"You don't run, Steve. You never did," she says in the end, only to watch him scoff. "And… if that's what you do now, if that's who you are… then I don't think I want you anymore."
"Peggy—"
"Even if I did," she says, as the shape, the horror, crystalizes before her eyes, "Even if I did, it can't be you. Not this you. I can't have my every choice questioned, I can't have you acting like my future is written, like I don't get a choice."
"You do get a choice! That's why I'm here, I can tell you exactly what to do so that—"
"So that your perfect future comes true? No, Steve. No."
"There's so much we could fix…"
"There's so much we could break! No one can live knowing the future! What kind of life would that be?"
A sharp light illuminates the far side of the living room; the shadows pass across it, quickly, as a car moves down the street, too fast to be looking for a parking spot. Steve is staring at the floor, both his hands buried in his hair.
"Steve… why did you come here? Really?"
It takes him a whole minute to respond. "I… can't. I can't live there. I can't."
"I don't think you have a choice, Steve," she says.
"I can't. Peggy… I can't. It went wrong, all of it. We fixed it, as much as we could, but it's still… What if it happens again? What if I let them down again?" He looks up at her, begging for understanding, perhaps, for absolution, and God, she sees he is hurting, hurting as she'd only seen once before, in that London pub, but she also realizes there is nothing she can do.
There is no absolution here. There can be none. It's not her place to offer it.
Right now she's not even sure she would if she could.
"You need to leave," she says instead. "Whatever you need right now, you won't find it here."
"Peggy—"
"I need you to leave," she says, and stops trying to hold back the tears, the fury, the shaking of her hands. "Leave. Go. Don't you dare come back."
"You don't understand, your future—"
"My future is my business, Steve," she tells him. "I can't live like this, Steve. You know how it's all going to unfold, and I can't live knowing you have information which could shape the world and not use it."
"Then use it. I will tell you everything, it won't matter, the past can't be changed, the time I came from will be safe."
"I can't. No one can. You can't make choices for other people, Steve, you can't just show up from the future and decide what the world is going to look like." She shakes her head and feels her makeup dissolve in the tears that are running down her cheeks. "I can't take responsibility for the entire world, and neither can you."
He grits his teeth and she sees in his face a flash of the skinny, angry young man he used to be.
"What were you planning to do, Steve? With all this knowledge? Call the president, tell him to call Stalin? Tell him what? That they should all listen to you, because you know the future?"
"I can prove it."
Oh Steve. "Do you honestly think that would make them listen? Can you seriously tell me heads of state will listen to you, even if you show them incontrovertible proof of your words?"
"You could make them listen. We could. Together."
Peggy feels her nails against the meat of her palms as she imagines it. Steve and her, remaking the world as it should be, knowing what's coming at every turn, guiding the events so that they go just so. Making sure people make the right choice, guiding them towards the right choice so that they never know…
"No." It lands, heavy and final. "I will not. And I won't let you, either."
He startles, then, but he startles like a tectonic plate. First he blinks, then his mouth twists, and he then he raises to his feet, towering over her and yet somehow looking so much smaller.
"What?" he asks.
The gun left red and pink imprints on the skin of her palm. She ejects the clip, puts both back into the drawer and closes it forcefully. She leaves the room without a backwards glance, knowing that Steve will follow.
The door squeaks when she pulls it open, as it should. She stands aside and holds it, and only then does she meet his eye.
"Peggy, please…" he whispers, comes up to her and leans in, his face in her hair. "Please."
There is a scratch in the wood. It hasn't been painted over when the house was renovated, it was just there, a slash of pale honey brown bursting out the white. If she angles her finger just so, she can feel the woodgrain against her skin. She holds on to it, even as he reaches out to cup his cheek.
"Goodbye, my darling," she says, as she takes half a step back.
He crosses the threshold, looks back at her one last time. She holds his gaze, tears and all, and does not look away, even when he does. She watches him move his hand, she watches as his body is enveloped in a suit of white armour, something she could swear she's seen on the cover of a pulp once, with the words "Buck Rogers" plastered across the page.
It suits him, she thinks, and the thought catches her off-guard. It does suit him, this… magical armour that appears at a touch of a button.
She blinks and he is gone.
5.
Peggy grips the door and breathes, slams it shut and throws herself against it, fists pounding against the wood. She screams, and cries, and hurts, and lets herself bleed.
Then she stands. She goes to wash her face, wipes mascara off her lashes and her cheeks, lipstick from her mouth. She scrubs at her skin until it is raw and pink and matches her splotchy eyes. She washes her hands next, dabs rubbing alcohol onto the split skin of her knuckles.
The state of her kitchen, save for the remnants of their meal, is immaculate, in that it has barely been touched since she lived here, accustomed as she is to working late and eating at the office. This holds true for the contents of the cupboard under the sink: the woman she pays to come over twice a month is smart enough to give the unused kitchen only a cursory dusting, and uses She has a bucket and in the bucket there are soft, clean rags. She rinses one and carefully cleans her blood off the door, wincing when she finds she managed to put a dent in the wood. This door wouldn't stand up to a kicking, in the event of an invasion.
"I need a better door," she mutters, returns the rag to the kitchen, and rifles through her handbag for her calendar. She makes a note to start looking into a sturdier door, and then her gaze falls on the pile of papers she brought home with her.
On top of the pile there's the file containing Howard's personal projects, and right there, on the very top, there is Arctic exploration.
Peggy sits down. Howard put some serious work into the boring parts of it, as he'd termed it. There's materials research, technology this could aid, what this would mean for the monitoring of Russian submarines, but at the core she can see the shape of what she knows it's really about. Given enough funding, chances are good they could have the Arctic regions thoroughly mapped within the next few years, a decade at most.
Peggy sets the file down, reaches for the pen and, right at the very bottom, writes "denied – projected benefits to submarine monitoring systems do not justify expenditure". She signs her name and picks up the next file and immediately hits a hurdle in form of the name included in the first paragraph.
Arnim Zola.
Arnim Zola… well, wasn't the whole point of bringing him in to use his brain to do something right? If he's on one of Howard's projects, at least he'll be under close supervision.
She pages through the proposal: there are schematics there she does not fully understand, a sketch of a… brain? At least something Peggy assumes is a brain, with what she continues to assume is the nervous system with several points marked on it, within the outline of might be a shoulder.
She turns a page and there's a head, which: well, she was right about the brain. Dear Lord, let it not be about telepathy. But no: the descriptions are full of words such as "neural input" and "neuro-electric interface", which, she has an inkling, most scientists would say belongs in Jabberwocky rather than a serious scientific proposal, but there must be some merit there. Possible applications include storing data, artificial intelligence and advanced prosthetics, she learns, and immediately thinks of Daniel.
SSR wasn't conceived to research prosthetics, but Peggy's been around Howard enough to know that dividends are an inevitable result of giving him problems to solve. Funding anything Zola had his fingers in would be criminally insane, but… she needs Howard distracted right now, most of all, and this will do nicely.
The writers of Endgame apparently confirmed the stable timeloop theory (I am not surprised, this was clearly the intention), and indicated that Old Man Rogers attended Peggy’s funeral.
So. If Peggy, during her less lucid moment, looked at 2014!Steve and said “it’s been so long...” doesn’t it imply that he left her well before her Alzheimer set in?
