Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

"Come in!"

The voice which warbled through the door was a wispy ghost of its former self, but it still gave Steve goose bumps just to hear it. Peggy's voice. The last memory he had of her, her voice, as she'd told him 'yes' over the radio just before his plane had gone down in the artic. Yes. She had told him yes. Had she understood he was asking her for more than a dance?

Steve pushed through the door, one hand in his pocket as he fingered the small box Howard Stark had put in with his personal effects when they'd packed up the tiny locker which had been all he'd owned in the world. Howard and Peggy had been close ... or about as close as any two colleagues could be with Peggy forever fending off Howard's brazen advances. It was eerie, how much Tony Stark's relationship with Pepper Potts mirrored the father's relationship with Peggy Carter, although Peggy had married someone else. Steve hadn't dared ask if Howard's advances on Peggy had finally succeeded. Perhaps that was the reason she'd been cast aside and forgotten as soon as the war was over?

"Peggy?" he asked, his voice choking up as he entered the room and noted the walls were painted the same ubiquitous yellow as the rest of the facility. Two hospital beds sat side-by-side, a curtain between them that was pulled halfway shut so someone could nap and not see the face of the person sleeping next to them, but still see their feet. He stepped further into the room to see the ancient woman seated next to the window.

"Steve," said the old woman who bore no resemblance to the Peggy he had once known. Her face was a wrinkled old prune, dotted with liver-spots from too much time in the sun back before they'd known about things like skin cancer and solar radiation. The old woman adjusted coke-bottle glasses and peered at him, gesturing for him to come closer. "Please. Sit."

A radio played softly in the background, modern versions of the big band tunes they had both listened to back when they'd walked in the same period of history. Steve searched her face, desperate to find some familiarity with the wizened woman seated in a reclining chair before the window, her snow white hair neatly curled into the 'set' so many women from her generation preferred. He found nothing familiar in the face that stared back at him. Nothing at all. Even her distinctive heart-shaped jaw had disappeared under 94 years of wrinkles.

"Peggy," he said again, not knowing what else to say. His hands left his pocket, the tiny box abandoned along with the last hope he'd nurtured that somehow he'd be able to resurrect the Peggy he'd once known, just as he'd been resurrected from a 67-year sleep. While Steve had slumbered beneath the ice, Peggy had gone on to live her life, evidence of her adventures proudly displayed on every wall, bureau, and windowsill in the form of pictures of her family. A family she'd gone on to create after he had failed to come back and ask the question he'd been too cowardly to ask while he'd still had the chance.

"I was afraid you wouldn't come," Peggy said, her voice a whisper. That, at least, was familiar to him, although age had weakened it. Made it wispy and thin, not the brassy, self-assured bugle call it had been back when they'd moved together in time. She inhaled, pulling a clear oxygen-mask to her face to take a breath before self-consciously hiding it next to her legs, ashamed to have him see her weakness. She reached up, waiting for him to give her his hand. He sat down in the still-warm chair recently vacated by her grand-daughter and obliged. Her hands were trembling.

"You look..." Steve said, not sure what to say. What could he say to the woman he had meant to marry, but who had been left behind for time to ravage while he had remained young and strong?

"Old," Peggy finished. Her lips curved up into a smile that was familiar, although thinner and more pale than the lips he remembered. He could see a bluish cast where her lipstick ended and her face began, evidence of a body that no longer had the energy to breath completely on its own. He stared at the faint, pear-shaped red mark around her lips and nose and compared it to oxygen mask clutched in her wrinkled claw.