workaholic lawyer peggy carter has just done the unthinkable: she walked out of her London office, got on a train, and ended up in the middle of nowhere.
she finds herself employed as a housekeeper in a house in the costwolds, and bantering with the cute gardener who helps her find her footing (because she knows nothing about being a domestic housekeeper).
steve’s kindness is more than welcome, and he does more than help her adapt to countryside living. soon, peggy’s softer and more relaxed, and happier with steve than she had ever been in london.
but secrets can only be kept for so long. when jack thompson and the ssr find her in the countryside, she must choose between living her past life or choosing to start anew with steve.
My Steggy Secret Santa gift for @lavellenchanted for the @steggyfanevents exchange. Happy happy and merry merry—I hope you enjoy the story AND have a wonderful 2019!
**
And these are the gifts we keep
And this is the morning that we breathe
And then we see
These moments are the only gifts we need
— In the Morning, Jack Johnson
**
“A penguin costume?” Peggy frowned down at the note Lillian handed her. “Whatever for?”
“Christmas pageant, Mummy!” Lillian replied, turning back to her after school snack.
“I’m quite certain there were no penguins present for the birth of Jesus, darling.” Peggy chewed on the inside of her bottom lip, thinking. “Still, your father should be able to sort you out something suitable.”
Later that evening, as Peggy worked through her backlog of emails from the Thanksgiving break, she overheard their precocious daughter in conversation with Steve.
“I’m gonna be a penguin, Dad.”
“Is that so?” Steve’s reply seemed a little distant. There was a splash and a gurgle in the background. Bathtime for Hal, then. “Why do you want to be a penguin?”
A beat. Peggy could imagine the look on Lily’s face as she thought through her response; their daughter was a little copy of Steve. “Well actually, the roles were assigned by Ms. Beckman and Mr. Lewis.” Another pause. “And penguin is better than a reindeer’s bottom.”
Splash. “Oh, sorry, buddy.” Steve apologized as the baby gave a shocked cry at the water Steve had no doubt surprised him with. “Lily, could you start again? Why did your teachers assign you the role of penguin?”
Lily’s long-suffering sigh was a scarily accurate copy of Peggy’s. “For the Christmas pageant, Daddy,” she explained, patience wearing thin, judging by her tone of voice.
“Christmas pageant?” Steve repeated, his own voice sharpening in that way Peggy knew foretold an oncoming rant.
“Yes, Dad, the Christmas pageant. There are reindeer and penguins and elves and we sing Silent Night and Jingle Bells and Come Y’All Faith-fool—”
“Come All Ye Faithful?”
“—and at the end Mr. Lewis comes out dressed like Santa.”
“Do you sing any other songs?”
“The big kids are singing.”
“What are they singing?”
“I don’t know, big kids songs.”
“Are they all about Christmas?”
“Yep.”
“Nothing about other holidays? Maybe Hanukkah?”
“What’s that?”
Steve, it turned out, was getting pretty good at that patented sigh as well. Peggy tuned him out as he explained the holiday to Lillian while finishing Hal’s bath. These emails weren’t going to reply to themselves, and she would need to nurse Hal soon.
Much later, after Lillian’s bedtime routine and another round of quieting fussy baby Hal back to sleep, Peggy’s eyelids were closed before she’d even crawled fully under the covers.
Steve cleared his throat as he tossed his balled-up socks into the hamper.
“If you put them through the wash and dryer that way, you’ll end up with damp sock balls in the fresh laundry.” She still hadn’t opened her eyes.
Peggy heard Steve move over to the hamper and pick out his socks. “Did you know about this?”
“I’ve been dealing with your socks for seven years, yes.”
That sigh again, as he sat heavily on his side of the bed. The mattress dipped and heaved, signs that Steve was arranging a mountain of pillows to sit up against. They were going to have a chat before she could sleep, it seemed. “Did you know about the Christmas pageant at Lily’s school?”
Peggy rolled over and looked at him, his handsome face so grave despite the subject matter. “She handed me a note about needing a penguin costume this afternoon.”
“And you’re okay with this?”
She blinked. What there was to not be okay with, she wasn’t sure.
He went on. “I know for a fact that several of Lily’s classmates practice faiths that don’t celebrate Christmas. This sounds exclusionary. All the songs they’re singing are Christmas songs. Some of them are hymns!”
“I’m not following, darling. Christmas seems like the dominant holiday this time of year.” Steve had been off on a mission just before Halloween, and by the time Peggy had realized she needed to get Lily a costume, half the stores had already switched to Christmas gear. Lilian had stoutly refused to go as one of Santa’s elves, resulting in a rather madcap dash across several neighborhood Duane Reades in search of the desired princess dress. Initially she’d wanted to go as Black Widow, but Peggy drew a line at catsuits on six year-olds.
“We send our child to a public school.”
“...I’m aware.” If he kept her up much later, Peggy would need to dig up some of those luxe under-eye masks Pepper had gifted her just to feel presentable in the morning.
Steve’s voice reached new levels of incredulous. “Separation of church and state?!”
Oh. “How very American,” she replied, a bit frosty.
*
But Steve was like a dog with a bone. Now that he had an inkling of how Christmas had taken over the entire month of December, he kept uncovering new traditions to be upset over.
One night he bolted up from his laptop, eyes wide. “This is madness!”
Peggy was nursing Hal (Peggy was always nursing Hal.) “Hmm?” She glanced up from the tablet perched precariously on her knee so she could skim a mission report.
“Did Lily tell you about the Elf on a Shelf?” Steve was using his Captain America voice already, and whenever he put that voice on at home, Peggy almost wished for another ten repeats of Baby Shark with their daughter belting along off-key.
“No, darling,” she said, deftly juggling baby and technology so Hal was at her other breast. “Is it a new television program?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “I thought we agreed we’d limit her screen time.”
“So we did. What’s this Elf business, then?” Peggy tried to smile but then the baby made use of the tooth that had broken through just the other day.
Steve ignored her gasp of pain, building up a head of steam. “It seems most of her classmates wake up each morning to find this doll in a different spot, getting into some kind of trouble, as a reminder from Santa to be good.”
Peggy frowned. “That doesn’t sound right.” Hal was dozing off, so she motioned for Steve to swap with her. Her heart swelled briefly as she watched him cradle their son in his big hands. His spoiling-for-a-fight face softened as he looked down into Hal’s milk-drunk eyes, a shade lighter than Peggy’s, cinnamon rather than chocolate.
She took the proffered laptop and scanned the site Steve had been reading. “These are so elaborate!” She looked back at Steve. “Who has time to do all this?”
Steve tore his gaze from Hal’s face. “Peggy, this is just priming children to accept living in a surveillance state!”
Peggy shook her head, scrolling through the list of ideas, with photos illustrating the scenarios. “Those are teeny-tiny flapjacks. I can barely feed myself and our children, now I’ll have to feed an elf?”
An angry gurgle made Hal sound as though he was agreeing with one or both of his parents. But then he spit up all down Steve’s shirt, so the conversation was shelved.
*
On a video conference call at headquarters one afternoon, Peggy’s assistant interrupted her with something akin to semaphore or interpretive dance from the doorway of her office.
“Pardon me, Secretary General Guterres, it seems I’m needed urgently. I trust we can continue this conversation before the next assembly?” Peggy smiled and thanked the former prime minister before signing off.
Quinn stood there, wringing their hands. “Ms. Carter, I’m sorry to intrude—”
Peggy could feel her blood pressure rising. “And yet you have, so it better be life and death.” She heard their gulp from across the room.
“Well, ma’am, it’s your husband.”
She shot out of her chair. “Steve’s not on assignment, he took the month off.” She jabbed blindly at her phone, pressing the receiver to her ear with a shaky hand.
“No, ma’am, he’s not…” Quinn’s response faded from her hearing as the call connected and Peggy heard Steve’s cell ringing.
Peggy’s annoyance overtook her relief like a lion bringing down a sick gazelle. “If he took on something at the last minute without bloody clearing it with me, I swear to Christ—” There were any number of situations the organization had been monitoring over the last few weeks that could have blown up spectacularly, or certainly would, if Captain America chose to insert himself.
“Peggy?” Steve’s greeting sounded especially guilty, which only enraged her further.
“What have you done, you great impulsive pratt, what ridiculous endeavor has your god-complex led you to now?”
There was a moment of strained silence on the other end of the line, but Peggy didn’t hear gunfire or explosions or Clint Barton’s voice in the background, so that was slightly reassuring. Still, the utter gall of Steve to go running headlong into danger, with no thought to his wife or children at home.
Eventually, Steve found his voice. “God-complex?”
“Um, Director Carter?” Quinn had crept into the room and stood at her elbow, whispering.
“Out with it,” Peggy snapped, unclear whether she was speaking to her husband or her employee.
Quinn shrank back but managed to squeak out an answer. “Your daughter’s teachers wanted to speak with you about the emails Mr. Rogers keeps sending them about the holiday pageant.”
Peggy felt her eyes roll back into her head of their own accord. The Carter-Rogers family’s trademark sigh exploded from her lungs. “Steve.”
“Yes, love of my life?” She could picture the too-innocent look on his face just from his tone of voice.
Peggy counted to three, for all the good it did. “Have you left the tri-state area?”
“I am at our home in Brooklyn, with our children.” A faint “hello, Mummy!” sounded down the line. “Lily says hello.”
“Love and kisses,” she replied automatically.
“Did someone tell you I was somewhere else?”
Peggy raised an eyebrow at Quinn, who still stood there, pale-faced and sweating. “Not exactly. Now, what’s this about you emailing Lillian’s teachers?”
Another wary pause. “How much do you know?”
“I know we’ll need to come up with an extravagant offering, if they’re calling me to get you to back off.” Peggy leaned back in her chair and adjusted the waistband cutting into her stomach. “Honestly, Steve, you can’t dictate every aspect of our child’s education.”
Steve sniffed. “But I got them to add a Hanukkah song.”
“Well then, let’s say that’s the end of it, shall we? Give those poor young people a rest. Between you and Lillian, how are they to have any energy to deal with the rest of the class?”
“Okay,” Steve agreed, contrite. “I’ll drop it. For this year.”
That would have to do. “Excellent. Now if you’ll excuse me, Quinn and I need to review when it’s appropriate to interrupt calls with high-ranking members of international governing bodies.”
“Well, have a good afternoon. The kids and I can’t wait to have you home. Love you.”
“Likewise, darling,” Peggy replied. Then she hung up and turned the full force of her disappointed face on her assistant.
*
“Did you know that Immaculate Heart around the corner celebrates midnight Mass at ten pm?” Steve asked Peggy one afternoon as they folded the laundry side by side.
“I certainly did not,” she replied, focused on pairing Hal’s tiny socks. He’d soon grow out of them, and no part of him would ever be as small as he was now. Her baby was already so much bigger than when he’d been born. Soon enough, Hal wouldn’t be her baby any more. She closed her eyes against a sudden rush of tears.
Steve shook out a fitted sheet and handed two corners to Peggy without looking at her. They both stepped back and quickly tucked their corners, paired sides and folded in half, then quarters, then eighths. Steve smoothed out the wrinkles on the top fold, shaking his head. “I knew everything was going to be different from the moment I first came back.”
He put the sheet onto the linens pile. “But the thing of it is, the differences never stop. Every time I think I’ve gotten the hang of living now, something comes up to put me right back at square one.” He took up one of Lily’s tees, running his fingers over the puffy letters on the front that proclaimed her a “future engineer/princess” whenever she wore it. “I know we don’t go to church.” He folded the shirt, turning it into a tiny square of glittery fabric in his hands. “But going to Mass with Ma was one of our few Christmas traditions.”
Peggy stopped folding to look at Steve. “Darling,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “We can go, of course we can go.”
His eyes were shining when he looked up at her, the corner of his mouth quirked up in what might have been a smile. “Nah.” He scratched his nose. “If I can’t put Lily through three hours of mind-numbingly unintelligible Latin, what’s the point? And if Hal’s there, we run the risk of a dirty diaper smell combining with the incense into some kind of chemical weapon.”
Peggy laughed with him, but noted the way the corners of his eyes stayed tight. “Well, I could go with you, anyhow. It’s been a few years, but I bet I can still follow along all right.”
That earned her a real smile, at least.
*
Peggy contemplated, not for the first time, whether Natasha might be giving their daughter spy lessons. The cache of presents in the crawl space above the master closet seemed untouched, but as Lily had found every other hiding spot, Peggy wasn’t so sure that the little girl had just gotten better as covering her tracks. Her back twinged as she reached in to pull them down and she groaned.
“Peg? Everything okay?” Steve asked from the doorway, just back from his run.
She stepped gingerly down the ladder. “Could you please fetch the gifts at the back up there?” Peggy pressed her hands into the small of her back and stretched, feeling some of the tension release as she did. “Perhaps I’ll need to ask Santa for a massage,” she murmured to herself.
Steve handed down the packages to her while she admired the view of his back muscles in the too-tight workout gear he favored. As he came down with Lily’s final present in his hands, he puzzled over the tag. “From Santa?”
“Jolly old fellow, spreads Christmas cheer to good little girls and boys?” Peggy sorted through the other presents, checking the tape at the seams for signs of tampering.
He turned the box over in his hands. “Santa did stockings, at most, back in my day.”
Squinting at a tiny rip in the paper, Peggy didn’t catch the note in his voice. “Perhaps he has better funding these days, dear.” No, not a tear, a cut made by the associate at the store who’d wrapped the thing.
“Hold on, Peggy, is this the big castle she’s been begging us for?”
“That’s what we agreed on for her big gift, yes.”
“But you labelled it from Santa?”
Peggy concluded her inventory, satisfied that either Lily hadn’t sussed out this hiding spot, or that she was, in fact, exceptionally good at six year-old espionage. Either way, she could be proud. “I’m not following the thread, here, Steve. What is the problem?”
Steve’s eyebrows were drawn together on his forehead, his hands on his slim hips. “Peggy, we really shouldn’t be teaching our daughter that the most expensive gifts come from some man she doesn’t know. The big gift should be from us.”
She sat on the bed, suddenly very tired. “Well then you can write a new tag for the present, I don’t care.”
“I just want us to be mindful about the messages we’re sending.”
“Yes, and while you’re being mindful, and harassing the teachers, and raging against the commercialization of the season, I’m just trying to get through a bloody holiday without an international incident sidelining our plans!” Finally, it was Peggy’s turn to let loose. “You do so much for our family, Steve, but there’s even more you don’t know needs to be done! The teachers’ gifts and the scheduling and the gift wrapping that has to happen before the presents even come home, because our daughter is a super spy, plus trying to keep the mood festive even though you’ve been shitting over every aspect of the holiday this year.”
She threw up her hands, too angry to even look at him. “Oh, not to mention the fact that I’m pregnant, Steve. Again. Hal isn’t even a year old, so well done, us. I’m tired all the time and hormonal and weepy and at this point, on Christmas Eve, I don’t even feel like celebrating. I hope you’re happy.” She marched into the ensuite bathroom and slammed the door behind her. She went to run a bath, but remembered she wasn’t supposed to soak in hot water, so she turned on the shower instead and sat down, breathing hard, as steam started to fill the room.
Steve knocked on the door. “Peggy?”
She didn’t respond, only picked up a brush and began running it through her hair.
“Peggy, I deserved that.” No Captain America voice now, just Steve, abashed and remorseful. “I’m sorry. I’m going to give you some time to cool down, but then I hope you’ll let me make it up to you.”
Peggy bit her lip, her resolve softening already.
“And Peggy?” She pictured him leaning against the jamb, the way he did many nights while she went through her toilette. “That’s great news about the baby. The best damn present you could have given me.”
Crying now, Peggy opened the door. “You have been an absolute shit, Rogers.”
He took her in his arms. “I have,” he agreed. She twined her arms around his neck. “I’ve been a real Grinch.” He held her close, and she rested her head on his shoulder, tears dripping on his shirt.
“I’m not sentimental over these sorts of things,“ she sniffed. “And I’ve come through hundred of high pressure situations before, I don’t know why this one got to me.”
Steve pulled back to meet her eyes. “Maybe because I’m supposed to be supporting you, not adding to your stress?”
“You usually do support me!” Peggy protested, the tears passing as quickly as they had come on. “And I can see how hard this Christmas has been for you.”
He nodded. “That’s no excuse for my behavior, though. I should have dealt with it better.”
She sniffled again. “Well, do better now.”
Steve squeezed her tight. “You got it. How about you hop in that shower and I’ll deal with the presents, okay?”
Peggy looked up at him from under her lashes. “You can deal with the presents, but I think you need a shower, too.” She plucked at his sweaty tee. “You can scrub my back as your first act of penance.”
Steve laughed and let her lead him into the bathroom.
*
On Christmas morning, Peggy woke with a start. Steve’s side of the bed was cold, and it was past ten, judging by the stark winter sunlight streaming into the room. The scent of bacon wafted under her nose before she was fully awake. As she lay in bed wondering if she could realistically sneak in a few more minutes of rest, Lily galloped into the room.
“Mummy!” She zoomed around the bed. “Dad wouldn’t let me come in until breakfast was ready but it’s ready now and then we have to open presents and so it’s time to get up, get up, get up!”
Peggy laughed and sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Thank you for letting me sleep in, dearest.”
“Daddy said you two were up late watching for Santa.”
As if on cue, Steve appeared in the doorway, Hal strapped to his chest and a tray in his hands. Peggy raised an eyebrow at him. “Daddy said we were up late, did he?”
Steve blushed. “I was trying to explain why you were so tired.”
“Well, Lily, your Dad and I were just so caught up in the holiday spirit, we didn’t realize how late it had gotten.”
Lillian clambered up into bed beside Peggy. “I tried to stay up, too, but I was too knackered.”
“Well, we still weren’t up late enough to help Santa with his packages.” Peggy cuddled her close. “Did he leave you anything?”
“Yes, there are presents under the tree I haven’t seen!”
Steve raised both eyebrows. “I guess I’ll have to give Nat a call later.” Peggy shrugged. “I made you an apology breakfast.” He gestured with the tray.
“I can smell it from here!” Peggy said approvingly. “A lie-in, plus bacon. You are well on your way to being back on my nice list, Steve.” He grinned at that.
“Can we eat it in bed?” Lily asked.
“I suppose it is a special occasion,” Peggy replied. “Come sit with us, darling.” She motioned for Steve to join them. He handed off the tray and unwrapped Hal from his carrier, settling him in his lap.
“Tea, bacon, sausage, eggs, tomatoes and the last of that banana bread Sharon sent over,” Steve said, indicating the plates practically overflowing from the tray. “Merry Christmas, Peggy.”
Peggy looked up into Steve’s clear blue eyes to see the love shining there. “Thank you, Steve. Merry Christmas.”
