Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 9

A change of tone here. Back to the real world. The one without super-ego's exploding all over the place.  :-)

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Chapter 9

"It wasn't your fault, Steve," Peggy said, her voice tired and thin.

"No," Steve said. "I know. It's just…"

"You never asked for this," Peggy said. "You never asked for any of this." Peggy reached out with one frail hand, her skin parchment thin and cool, and took his hand in hers. "Stark always feared you'd balk after Doctor Erskine died."

Steve thought back to his early days, gate-crashing every enlistment station in New York trying to get somebody to overlook his poor athletic abilities and asthma.

"Actually," he said, giving the first hint of a smile he'd had in days. "I distinctly remember I did ask for this. The gods must be laughing about giving me my wish."

Peggy laughed, a mere echo of the brassy laugh she'd possessed back in 1945, but it was still Peggy's laugh. She coughed and lifted her oxygen mask to her blue-tinted lips, snorting as she both gasped for breath and laughed all at the same time. Her exuberance in the face of her own mortality caused Steve to see his insecurities for what they really were. Insignificant. Peggy laughed at him, and it caused him to laugh at himself along with her. She'd always had that effect on him. Perspective. Steve plugged away at whatever idealistic goal he'd set his mind to achieving and never gave up, while Peggy viewed everything with a pragmatic eye. Together … they'd been stronger.

"You okay?" Steve asked, concerned when she clutched the mask to her face a bit longer than the previous time he'd visited. He waited while she calmed her coughing before answering him.

"Of course I'm not okay," Peggy snapped. "I'm 94 years old and dying. But I'll manage."

Her voice was filled with humor, but in her eyes was a mixture of weariness and longing. Peggy was tired of this world and anxious to cross into the next one, to be reunited with a husband and siblings who'd long since passed before her. Steve thought back to the young Lieutenant who'd died, who'd claimed to see a woman beckoning him to a place where soldiers got to go when they died. If such a place really existed, he knew Peggy would receive a hero's welcome. He was certain of it.

His thoughts turned back once more to the Chitauri ambush. He'd come to visit Peggy, not pick her brains, but she was the only other person still alive who'd seen first-hand what happened when the Schutzstaffel, the German SS, took over a village. Only this time, instead of using blonde-haired, blue-eyed white supremacists for hosts, puppets, whatever the Chitauri were doing to their victims, they were using blonde-haired Aboriginal men.

"How's your friend?" Peggy asked, tapping his hand to bring his mind back into the same room as her.

"Natasha?" Steve said. His mind travelled back to the last time he'd seen her. "Nothing's changed. Banner isn't sure if she's really brain dead, or if they injected something into her brain to sedate her higher brain functions that isn't showing up on the PET scan. He said her bodily functions are moving too smoothly for it to be brain death, but they're reading no electrical activity at all. Not even enough to generate the reflexes she still has left."

Peggy sat quietly, as though turning over something in her mind.

"You should tell your friend Stark to do a little archeological dig in his father's basement," Peggy said. "I think he'll find things that might be useful."

"Stark!" Steve snorted. "Like father, like son. Although personally, I think the father was a better man."

Peggy's faded brown eyes crinkled around the edges, her expression clouded with some emotion Steve hadn't quite been able to nail down whenever he mentioned the elder Stark's name. Not for the first time, he wondered why Peggy had left Stark's employ after the war and deliberately made herself scarce.