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Oh, bloody hell. Her smallish joy evaporated -- but not into sudden defensiveness. Captain Rogers didn't need her protection. Nor did he need a character witness. Instead, Peggy seemed rightfully concerned for Rogue.

"-- What'd he do?"

How smoothly love could lead into exasperation.

Rogue's eyes widened in surprise. "Nothin'!"

Oh Gawd, she hadn't meant that at all. Or -- any of this. She ran her free hand through her hair. In for a penny, in for a pound. "Just... he seems a bit different from when I knew him. Older. An' I know it's not my business, but I think... well, it looks like maybe he's been through some things. That's all."

She wasn't looking for defense, or an ally, though honestly -- Rogue was warmed that Peggy would even think to offer. And that was why she offered her own observation, because... well, Rogue knew all too well that it was possible to love someone and have them come back different. And it was possible to still love them, but... it was bumpy. And if she was going to bring this up at all, which hadn't been her intention, then Peggy might as well be warned, and she might as well offer to listen.

Her edges soften. Sadness crept in, elongating her expression. Putting weight upon her shoulders.

"Ah, well. Your business or not, I can't help but agree with you."

Peggy hadn't needed to speak to Steve at all to understand how much older, harder, and tried he might be. She only had to look at Jim, and she the stark difference on his face, to extrapolate onto her Captain.

...ah. Sadness. Shoot.

Rogue offered Peggy a small smile, "Some advice?"

Wryly amused, she tilted her head towards Rogue.

"Offering or requesting?"

"Offerin'." Rogue shrugged a little. "Just... from a concerned party who recognizes it ain't really any of her business."

Her arms crossed, but not in any combative manner. If anything, Peggy seemed to relax. Oh, there ticked away a pedal note of concern over Steve's behaviour -- how tightly, she supposed, he might be wound. But withdrawing and isolating herself over such a problem wasn't particularly graceful comportment, and Rogue was being awfully polite about it all.

"Contrary to what might be called 'popular' belief, I don't mind a spot of helpful advice. On occasion." She nodded her head. "What's on your mind?"

She spread gloved hands for a moment. "Talk ta him. Tell him what ya feel, how ya think. Ask him what's goin' on and listen. Really listen an' try not ta judge. I don't know diddly 'bout what brought you two together, but I do know a bit 'bout... tryin' ta make up for lost time. So make sure ya don't assume, an' make sure ya don't hide."

Rogue ran a gloved hand through her hair and said, "I'm sorry, I know it's not my call an' it's not my business." She felt. So awkward right now. But she still met Peggy's gaze, "But you've been more'n fair ta me, an' kind," she tapped the book, "an' so if ya do want someone ta listen, or ta talk, I'm here.

"I'm rather afraid there's too much he won't want to tell me -- no matter how bad it is, or how difficult he finds it. It's..."

She trailed off. There was no use in condescending to Rogue by explaining her hang-ups away as mere complications. Peggy capitulated to the moment, grabbed hold of a chair's back, and took a seat. Rogue was right: it wasn't any of her business. But perhaps that was what made her uniquely capable of being just the right sort of listener.

"Whatever has wound him up so tightly, Rogue, seems to be inextricably linked with a great many...revelations about an era far beyond mine. An era shaped by decisions not yet made."

Sensing this was going to be one of those talks, one of those times, Rogue moved to set water to boil before taking the seat across from Peggy. "Let me guess - doesn't wanna break the space-time continuum?"

Someone is a closet Trekkie.

It was all of it worthy of a headache -- though Peggy had gone over the problem enough times, now, to smooth away most of her bewilderment. She wasn't prepared to share as much with Rogue as Jim had shared with her, but the sentiment remained the same: Peggy was a piece of the past, and Steve's position was now far-flung into her future. They were of two different worlds, now. And hers must lead into his.

"Does not want to break it, or jeopardize it, or influence how I live my life...I -- it's a noble cause, certainly. But it does make one feel altogether...left out in the cold, if you catch my drift."

Outside the loop.

Men were idiots. Rogue could understand the logic behind the whole 'hush hush' nonsense, but if Carter wanted to know, then was it really any of their business to not tell her? Rogue rather thought not. It was obvious that things had already changed, whether or not Peggy remembered there was no crying over spilled milk that would put it back in the jar.

But... expounding her rather settled (and rather influenced by living with Loki, to be honest) opinion on multiple timelines and universes, or even her opinion on the idiocy of men would not be particularly helpful, she thought. Better to listen.

So Rogue nodded, her expression one of quiet attention. "I can see how it would, yeah."

Rogue's tactics did not go unnoticed, and Peggy considered her a generous listener. Validation wasn't an easy thing to find in conversations such as these, and she knew that a line so simple as I can see how it would could pry so much more information out of otherwise zipped lips. But no suspicion accompanied her diagnosis of the reaction -- if Rogue had been after sensitive information for some nefarious purpose, the whole line of inquiry would have been different indeed.

"Jim's a bit more accommodating on this front. He's a good man, but -- far less bogged down by the right and wrong of it all. He'll tell me what he thinks I ought to know, but that's only a half-step better than not telling me anything at all."

The information remained controlled. Natasha, she thought, was paradoxically her best avenue to get the honest truth...but Peggy wasn't certain she wanted to have those sorts of conversations with the other spy.

Rogue nodded. Then she tilted her head, considering, "Do you think ya knowin' has anythin' ta do with right an' wrong?"

Tricky, that. And it showed in her eyes as she contemplated her answer -- contemplated carefully. Peggy's fingers uncurled, then curled again. A small tic of nerves or anticipation or something else altogether different.

"Yes. No. That is, on a personal scale I rather think it hardly matters. But I'm not certain that specification applies, any longer. It's at least been let slip that -- bewilderingly -- my career becomes instrumental to the occurring of a great many other things. It's one thing to be told who you outlive and how you spend your golden years. Quite another to question your every professional choice long before you've been allowed to make any of them."

Like Zola. According to Jim, she would eventually sway beneath the influence of those who would have him set free. Why? And how? She could be a decade away from that decision, but it kept her sleepless now.

"So... spilled milk already." She frowned a little. "An' they told ya just enough ta get your head spinnin', but not enough ta help ya understand what's actually goin' on with them?"

The tea kettle started to whistle and Rogue stood up, shaking her head. "Men are idiots."

Sorry, but. Not sorry.

"Darling, you don't know the half of it."

A drawl. A long-suffering sigh. Peggy, although nominally well removed from the dating game ever since she'd left her A-levels behind, had dipped her toes back in for one Captain Rogers. Principled and good-hearted, she'd taken to him with such quickness -- even if he had been hopeless with women, as she was soon to learn. And as for James Barnes! Well. Much of that was best left unsaid, even if he had been a dear friend of hers.

Still, Peggy reconsidered Rogue: her distance; her careful mannerisms; her pre-existing relationship with a megalomaniac man-child. Quickly, she corrected herself: "Or else you know more far more than your fair share. Who am I to presume, hm?"

Rogue shrugged, moving to pour the hot water into two mugs. She wasn't much of a tea person, herself, but it was growing on her. "I reckon we've all got our stories."

She returned to the table with the two cups steeping. There was no milk, and very little sugar, but it was better than nothing.

"So I guess it comes down ta what you want ta know. Do ya think it's important that they catch ya up ta speed?"

Important was a loaded word. In the wider scheme of life -- back home, in 1946 and in 2015, it wouldn't be such a sin to stay in the dark. Time could march on as it ought to, and there was no armageddon so dire that Peggy's intervention was needed. There was, of course, the matter of Zola -- but even then she wasn't precisely certain of those specifics, either.

There was one way in which it was all important, however. "Your advice is sound: to talk to Captain Rogers, and to listen to him. Likely, you're right about him needing to unwind it all from his thoughts and worries, as well. It's important he catches me up to speed if doing so helps ease all that tension he's brought with him to the fleet."

But was that worth the security and certainty of the future? And why, after all, should that be her decision? She hasn't founded SHIELD yet. It's not yet her responsibility. But oh, one day, it would be.

Rogue nodded. She could definitely agree with that. Plus, she found herself, liking Carter. They'd had a fantastic bar fight together, after all, and if that wasn't enough to feel vaguely responsible for someone else's love life, what was? Plus, she'd liked Steve, back in Luceti, and she didn't like the changes she'd seen in him here.

So she gave herself permission to be as free with her opinion outside as she was inside. "I think what you're sayin' makes sense. But also..." glancing down at the table for a moment. It wasn't normal for her to speak of such private things, and she knew that it was more than likely that Peggy was disapproving of the relationship anyway, but well... Rogue wasn't. She knew that she and Loki worked, despite how improbably it was, and she knew why. Rogue looked back up at Carter, "...I've learned how important honest is between people ya care about. How can ya be comin' into anythin' - real - an' have everythin' so imbalanced?"

Oh, it was almost laughable. Not Rogue's words -- not them, for they were sweet and raw and precisely what Peggy Carter needed to hear. But the sheer validity of that advice could have drawn a smile had it not pierced her heart so deeply.

Carefully, she answered: "Honesty isn't my strongest suit, I'm afraid," as though she was the problem -- and not the men and their half-confessions. As blunt a woman as she could be, she was ever-guarded and still secretive.

"Wherever you were before, however you might have known...another version of me -- did I or she or we ever tell you how I make my living?"

The question was clear and unambiguous because Peggy felt certain that if Rogue did not know, she would trade fairly with her in turn. And not press for details Peggy did not want to share.

Edited 2015-12-23 01:43 (UTC)

Rogue shook her head. She gaze her an honest answer for an honest question, despite knowing how it would sound. "We weren't that close. I..." a glance down at her gloves, a deliberate glance, trusting that Peggy would follow it before looking back up at him, "...I wasn't exactly the kinda person who reached out or was real open at the time."

She gave her a quick, flicker of an amused smile, "You were closer ta Loki, actually."

-- Bloody hell. Her surprise (and, perhaps, her dismay) was writ large on her face. Loki? Her association with the self-professed god must remain a mystery for another day, because she could not bring herself to put it under too dramatic a microscope. Rude, at best.

"Nor, I imagine, was I." She frowned. "Comes with the professional territory, I'm afraid -- but what changed?" The conversation rotated none-too-gently back into Rogue's court. "You say you weren't that sort of person at the time. What changed?"

"...well, I reckon I still ain't," she said honestly. This whole thing was highly uncomfortable for her, but, she determined, worth it. "I'm not really good at this. But I am..."

A pause, her gaze drifting up and to the side as she tried to find the right words, "...I am tryin' not ta let fear or hate take anymore of my life away."

A nod and then she looked back at Peggy, "So there's a lot of little things an' big things that built up ta that, but I've had a couple of real harsh wake-up calls ta things, an' I'm tryin' ta walk out who I am in their light. That's all."

Admirable. Challenging. And, Peggy admitted (silently), a sort of pain she'd never had to contend with. She wouldn't try and fool herself and claim to have always tread in the light -- her work was shadowed, and often on the murky side of legal. But fear and hate had so rarely been a part of it, except to rear its ugly face in the HYDRA operatives she met with her right hook.

But in the end, she still understood that there was virtue in second (and sometimes third and fourth) chances.

"Whatever those wake-up calls have been, they've turned out a fine young woman. From what I can see."

From what she'd been allowed to see.

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