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Who: Peggy Carter and YOU
Broadcast: Audio + Text
Action: Aboard the Starstruck.
When: Evening

[ it's been a long day. long week. long bloody month. and tonight, in the rebuilt space of a bedroom now properly shared, peggy carter is reading a book. not just any book, really. but that's a story for another time. for now, she's prepared to proceed publicly as though nothing is amiss.

in the handful of hours before bed, she takes to the network with a brief puzzle. ]

VHOILVKQHVV PXVW DOZDBV EH IRUJLYHQ, BRX NQRZ, EHFDXVH WKHUH LV QR KRSH RI D FXUH

[ and attached to the text is an audio messsage. ]

I know it's been a little while since the last one -- and some of you lot who most enjoyed them have gone and left. So we'll ease back into it with something simple. Simple, but no less fundamental. Solving it is all well and good but, as always, there are bragging rights up for grabs for anyone who names the source. Fair warning -- English is the native tongue.

And while I've got your attention, I suppose I ought to do my due diligence [ however reluctantly ] and ask whether anyone else has purchased the upgrade which merges two rooms together. It may be worthwhile to swap notes on how those changes came into effect.

[ and that's that. although she'll be awake for a little while yet -- answering messages and putting on a brave face. truth is, things have gone pear-shaped and she's only just realizing how much recovery yet required. those aboard or visiting the starstruck can find her at her desk, hatch left open, in her and steve's newly merged room. ]

( ooc: and because not everyone has the out-of-character time or inclination for codebreaking, here is the quotation peggy's posted using a caesar shift. )

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

don't. this isn't on you. no one who wants to understand these things.

[ he takes her hand between both of his, takes a step nearer. steve searches her eyes and worries for what he finds there. ]

I should have known they'd do this. they always do this. there's been a lot of things I wish I could keep you safe from that I couldn't.

[ he would never have let her see her funeral. he's only grateful that he could spare her the memories that came with that flower vase. even now, he's not that different from his shade. clutching trinkets in his hands to keep her safe. to spare her pain. ]

don't do this to yourself. this is my fault, you were right. Maybe in trying to protect you, I ended up doing the opposite.

-- I could have done with someone to lean on.

[ and it's not fair, perhaps, to blame him for being asleep. but if he'd told her under his own steam, and earlier, then perhaps they would have had the opportunity to grieve together.

she leans into him now. unhappy, but willing to stay near. she'd needed him. his support. she'll take it now. ]

Hey.

[ he knows what all of this means. a year ago, when steve only just arrived, she had defaulted to a stiff upper lip and a can-do attitude most of the times. the closest he's gotten to seeing her vulnerable was when he told her they will meet again in her future. now, she says it ( someone to lean on ) so very openly, just as it is and steve is both relieved at her honesty and heartbroken that he had failed her when she needed him.

she leans closer and his response is immediate; he wraps her in a quiet embrace, warm and solid and as unmovable as a house. for a moment or two he does just that, holds her without saying anything. ]

I'm sorry I didn't tell you.

[ and just as important: ]

I'm sorry about Howard, Peggy.

[ he was his friend, certainly. but he was one of her best. ]

[ it's exactly what she'd denied herself with jarvis -- he'd been crumbling, but hiding it well, and peggy had stuck to that can-do attitude in order to keep him centered. she'd brought out the whiskey; she'd pretended as though they could change the world. but when she'd crawled into steve's bed and cried out her sorrow next to his unconscious figure, peggy'd known better. short of a miracle -- short of remembering this place once she returns home.

peggy grounds her cheek against his chest. nor is it strictly just, she knows, to expect (or want) his apologies. but they do feel like a balm on her soul just now. doubly so when coupled with his steady heartbeat.

but it doesn't stop her shoulders from lifting in a truncated sob -- dry, maybe, but heartfelt. nothing she's learned (nothing) has ever hit her quite like this has. the pain lingers on. ]

-- Why did they do it?

[ they, not him.

hydra, not bucky. ]

When history didn't cooperate, it was changed. That's what Zola said. They wanted him out so they could get stronger. The plan was to make the world so dangerous that people would willingly prefer order over freedom.

[ he hates this. How much hydra had taken from them all. How it still manages to hurt them all. He tightens his hold of her, his chin resting at the crown of her hair. ]

They failed. But we've lost people back then, too.

[ it's not the answer she's after. what steve explains is the broad strokes -- the details she already know, although she's never let him be privy to that information either. so peggy shakes her head against his chest.

she argues even as she hugs him close. ]

No. Why'd they do it to him? [ what had howard gotten himself tangled into? why did they wait so long? why did they go after him, and not her? ]

I never got the full details of it, not entirely. Bucky doesn't remember it all but he said hydra had made ten more soldiers like him to take over the world with. They were held in a sort of coma in Siberia. I think he must have had something they needed for that.

[ always the serum, it would seem. ]

They were violent. Unstable. Whatever it was they took from him, it didn't work.

[ howard, you bastard. of course it would be about the serum. had he not already learned his lesson? stupid question; certainly, he hadn't. peggy offers up a dismayed snarl against the cotton of his shirt. it's a welcome change to the near-tears and almost-crying.

well. welcome to her.

she holds on all the tighter. ]

-- And all of this. [ she draws her head back and looks him dead in his eyes. ] This is the real reason for all that tension between you and Tony Stark.

[ the accords are one thing. but this is quite another. peggy knows so because she can feel it tumbling behind her ribs just now, threatening to make her angry with steve all over again. ]

Yeah.

[ and lord, steve would have been glad to have tony back. this would all be so different if he had stark here. but tony left without them being able to talk about any of it, maybe this is the biggest horrible irony of it all. ]

Tony has the Avengers now, that's how it should be. They'll make for a good team.

[ that's how it should be. and she could argue, yes, but she doesn't. it seems futile. instead, she anchors her arms around his waist and decides (quite sensibly) to stay tethered to him.

she's got questions. she wants to know whether she learns about it all. properly, in her old age, and with steve once again in her life. does he dare to tell her then? or does he hide it in her future (his past) as well? ]

I haven't spoken to Barnes since. [ since she learned. ] Perhaps it's unfair of me, Steve, but I don't know how to look him in the eye.

What they did to Bucky -

[ he doesn't know the full details of it. but he knows enough. enough to make him throw his title and his position and everything else for the man. ]

There's so much he didn't remember, even when he finally was able to get himself free. The time they sent him after me, it took me a while to realize I couldn't fight him, couldn't bring myself to. He was angry. I wouldn't fight him. I could see him trying to gain some sort of control but in his mind, I was the mission. I was willing to let him to through with it, I think that's what made him remember. I think somehow they kept making him forget.

[ he draws a breath. ]

HYDRA killed Howard. In a way I feel they've been killing Bucky for seventy years while they had him.

[ she knows he's right. just as she'd known him to be right back when the atroma took over bucky's programming. but knowing what's right doesn't change the twist in her heart when she thinks about her friend, her best friend, wrecked on some roadside.

and that twist is inevitably tethered to barnes. when steve leaps once again to his defense (predictably, she knows) but she's not prepared to listen to it all over again. so she shushes him with a censuring tsk and a shake of her head. ]

Now's not the time to play defense barrister, Steve. [ she's grieving, not arguing. ] I'm not Tony. Stand down.

[ -- have some heart. ]

-- well. you know. for years, he was the one defending me at every turn.

[ when he was still small and far too inclined to fight bigger man than himself and have his ass handed to him. ]

I guess now that I finally have the chance, I keep doing it. I don't think Tony's looking for him anymore. at home, I mean.

[ and he's...very grateful for that. ]

I mean, we're all wanted people at most countries but we can live with that.

[ -- he continues. something rises in her (annoyed, impatient) and it's enough to prompt her to shrug out of his arms and retreat by a step or two. within reach, still, but decidedly separate all the same.

she has a hard time believing that steve isn't purposefully missing the mark. he blows the problem wide. he argues the wider scale, and neglects the personal. it's an argument she's made in the past.

hell, it's an argument she'd made to jarvis. ]

Yes. [ she puts up her walls -- a twitch in her nose the last residing evidence that she'd been about to cry mere moments before. ] Well. Good for you and yours.

That's hardly funny.

[ he warns, he warns. far too used to this flaw, to the mindset of the soldier even after abandoning the title of captain america and the leader of the avengers. it's the group that matters, its fragile stability. if he's purposely missing the mark ( and he does ), it's out of a terrible habit.

none of the avengers ever done personal. in that matter, steve is even worse than peggy in knowing how to handle any of this. that part of him has been muted time and time again. he sees her walls come up, he doesn't even sees his own where they stand. ]

that's all we could do. you know that. we have no choice.

[ him and his. ]

This isn't about them.

[ him and his. their fugitive state, however unfortunate, is not on the menu at this moment. and they can talk for hours, if he likes, about the tricky ins and outs of the position he's put his team into over the accords and over bucky. hell, they had talked for hours after he'd woken the last time and remembered it all. she'd held him on that very bed -- the one a few feet behind him -- and she'd tended him through his own grief.

and now, faced with hers, he seems to stumble. somehow, peggy hadn't anticipated that failure. not on his part. she ought to be sympathetic but it only gets under her skin.

her best friend is dead. and all steve can do, it seems, is make it about his. it hadn't been easy to admit to her discomfort surrounding barnes, but steve had trampled over that confession in his rush to feed her the same line she's already accepted. she's on his side -- bucky's side -- but she nevertheless needs an opportunity to process what she's learned and how it chills her blood.

peggy cuffs at her cheek and walks past him. she feels a fierce desire to leave -- to flee -- but she tamps it down. ]

It's about Howard.

[ it takes him a moment, a long, silent one to understand what she means at all. it's a sort of an emotional process he feels entirely foreign to. they had moved past so much the last few years. steve never really faced his grief over the body of pietro, over the fact he was the one who instructed them to walk it off, if they get killed.

he never mourned the men he knew at the war or the men he lost at the war or bucky or - or her. there was always something. another mission, another war.

he finally sees it, the truth behind ultron's words, pretending you could live without a war. here he is, far from one as one can get and yet when the time is right to say something about a friend who died -

steve doesn't know how to. he frowns, sits down and considers. ]

Howard.

[ he says. tries to look past the next step, the next mission, the operatives of a soldier. he had abandoned captain america to try and find out who steve rogers is. steve rogers should be able to be the sort of person who helps her instead of adding more burdens onto her shoulders. ]

you know, I never learned much about who he was after the war. Tony would only say that he made him want to punch me in the teeth.

[ he's quiet for another moment. ]

and there weren't many people to ask.

[ so he's asking her, now. it would seem. ]

[ her chest is tight. peggy doesn't know where sadness ends and anger begins -- they dovetail and spiral into one another. they make her breath short and her eyes misty. steve's silence is almost unbearable and she's about to walk straight out the door, indeed, when he brings her up short with a name.

howard.

her head tilts; her lip trembles. ]

He is -- was -- insufferable. Selfish. He lied, he philandered, he used. [ and maybe that's half the problem; it's so difficult to reconcile the man with the wellspring of affection she feels for him. peggy scrubs at her arms. she walks back by a few steps, raising her attention back to steve's blue eyes. ]

Oh my God, Steve, did you know he keeps a portrait of himself in every bloody room? Try sleeping under that.

[ but that's not the point. peggy takes in a great shuddering breath. ]

You heard it. You heard me say it. [ she draws his attention back to the calibrations and to the radio conversation he'd overheard at the very end -- peggy giving way to tears as she tried, desperately, to talk howard down from fenhoff's hypnosis. steve had witnessed in that moment (maybe) how much panic she'd felt at the prospect of losing him. ] He was the only one who believed in me. After the war. The only one left for a long long while.

[ and it seems she can forgive a great many sins for that blessing alone. ]

Sounds like he was very human.

[ flaws and outstanding qualities, all mixed into a person. he sounds so much like tony. for all their disagreements, steve's faults and tony's, steve knew, in the end, tony would have made a fine leader to the avengers. even more so than him. he dared look his mistakes in the eye. much like his father, it turns out. ]

Like he had his heart in the right place.

[ seeing the value of a friend. sticking by them. ]

I wish -

[ he lets his shoulder slumps. there are so many things he had wished for in the life that he lost but - ]

I wish I had more time to spend with him. we never got that much.

[ ... ]

he gave me a lot of advice about women, though.

-- And every word of it would be rubbish. I assure you.

[ but oh, her heart stays constricted. as much as she could malign the man's character, howard is still the person who'd dropped everything to help her on the isodyne case. he opened his doors to her on more than one occasion. he owed her a dozen favours, each one bigger than the last, but she didn't mind the score going unsettled a little longer.

and steve begins to feel it: the loss of him. cruel as it is, she's relieved to feel it alongside someone other than jarvis. she feels too drawn to play the protector, in jarvis's case.

peggy cards her fingers through her curls. she shakes her head. ]

He wanted more time to spend with you too, you know. [ ... ] And he was just about the only one with whom I could stomach talking about you.

[ -- no one else understood. none except the howling commandos. and she saw them so infrequently, these days. ]

Not all of it.

[ surely not all of it ]

--- he did say never to assume I knew what a woman is thinking. I find it true to both genders, though.

[ but still! solid advice, right there. he watches her for a moment and sighs. ]

well, he's your friend. I'm glad you have each other. sounds like you balance one another just fine.

[ he makes certain to use present tense. the man is dead in her future, he's alive and vivid back at her end of the timeline. ]

[ they're platitudes. all the same, she appreciates the attempt. it's clumsy -- it doesn't quite plug the hole in her heart -- but that would only ever be a patch job, anyway. and she loves him so dearly when he tries.

peggy sits heavily on the bed's edge. anger subsides into weariness. she's raw -- having argued with everyone, it seems, and made peace with so few. ]

I'm not certain that 'balance' is ever the right word for -- for what we've got. [ friendship. a partnership, in its own right. ] He's made himself indispensable back home. [ -- him and jason wilkes. ] I'm not the most popular agent at the SSR just now. Without their resources, I've had to lean on Howard's.

[ a steadier voice. talking about the present helps. ]

[ steve may have spent a stupid amount of time back at the war being jealous of howard stark but thankfully, that was nothing a few glares and bullets couldn't fix. fondue's just cheese and bread, my friend, he had said back then, making steve feel like the idiot he was. ]

I'm sorry about them.

[ the SSR. ]

I guess Howard really is a genius, seeing things as they are.

[ being able to recognize people's worth had always meant more to steve than science, anyway. ]

Don't be. [ sorry. ] It's not a problem with the SSR -- not exactly, at least. There's something more insidious at play. A cabal, of sorts, masquerading as a private club.

[ -- she hasn't told him much about what's happening back home. ] Whoever they are, they've got the agency in something of a choke-hold.

[ and howard's doing what he can to help her win it back. including, it seems, flying to peru at a moment's notice. ]

Howard, Mister Jarvis, a -- a rogue physicist, [ she avoids his name, ] and a few good agents are all that's left who can be trusted.

Well, if you have to take some - all powerful council of corruption.

[ what. that's what it sounds like in a very...literal way. ]

that doesn't sound like a bad team to have.

[ he nudges her with an elbow. ]

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