Had the pain been the slightest bit more mild, Peggy would have shot her a glower. I'm pushing, thank you very bloody much. Her grip on Edwin's hand tightened, those red manicured nails digging hard into his knuckles. She did not need to look at him to know that his eyes must've been bugging out of his head, but thankfully, the man had enough sense to keep his own suffering to himself.
Giving birth, pain aside, was quite boring. Most of the time Peggy was in pain, there was an air of urgency. War. Shootout. Impending foreign enemies. That sort of thing. All that awaited her after this bout of suffering was at least a month of mandatory leave from work, and the miserable reality of raising a baby without a father to help. "I see the head!" the nurse announced.
"Oh, Lord," Edwin muttered.
Peggy screwed her eyes shut tighter. Damn New York—if the whole city had to be blown off a map for her not to go through this ordeal on her own, so be it. She wanted Steve here, holding fast to her while that fresh red manicure drew super-soldier blood, because my God, that night in the rain had been wonderful but certainly not at all worth this. He'd left her with a baby—not on purpose, maybe, but she'd been the one to provide the birth control and he'd been the one to render it entirely ineffective. So she wished that Steve had let New York get blown to high heaven, she wished she had known about the baby before he'd crashed into the Arctic and killed himself, because as cruel as it was, Peggy knew that Steve wouldn't have played hero. Or he would've, but for her and their child, not for however many people lived in Manhattan.
"Oh, Christ!" she cried, gripping tighter to Edwin, who gave a little wince. Anna dabbed her forehead with a washcloth, and Peggy hissed at its coolness. "Steve, you fucking bastard!"
