she's a real peach!

[womanofvalue]

WHO: Peggy Carter
WHERE: Peach Trees - 7I
WHEN: August 31st
OPEN TO: Bucky Barnes
WARNINGS: n/a

---

It's almost exciting to have so many new things to explore, to the point that Peggy has stopped looking past the why. Well, that's hardly true. She's never going to stop wondering why these things are here, but she can at least enjoy the fruits of their spoils. Literally, in this case, given that she's dragged Bucky out to the grove of peach trees in the name of exploration. That ocean or lake or whatever it had been has yielded nothing, along with the strange room they can't breach (but that weighs on her mind), and it's left her wanting more answers and receiving none.

She's using the peach trees as an excuse both to get out of her house, but also to drag Bucky with her, because perhaps, if there's anyone, he might understand what's been troubling her lately. Unfortunately, that does require Peggy to inevitably talk about the vials of blood and how they've put her in such a place in the past, not to mention the other emotional icebergs that Steve Rogers presents.

"Here," she says, already half-climbed atop a tree and fishing around for some of the peaches to drop down, craning back as she uses a branch to support her as she winces, seeing that she'd just narrowly missed striking Barnes in the head. "Duck?" she offers, belatedly, perching on a little spot halfway up the tree with a peach in hand.

They're quite good, actually. They must be something else, given that she'd heard rumours of people healing after eating them, but as far as she's concerned, all she really wants is the fresh fruit.

Comments

[lefthandfree]

“Peggy,” he calls after her, somewhat tiredly but otherwise more pleading with her patience. He understands her view of things, especially with the mention of how she tries to implicate her own doings as having changed any of her worth. But he doesn’t need to know whatever details she thinks are so important. He already knows how the story ends, and nothing can erase the good she has done, all of it amounting to far more than he’d ever managed himself.

He tosses the leftover pit of his devoured peach aside, hurriedly adding a few more peaches to his satchel before rising to trot after her.

“Peggy, c’mon. You think I don't know what it's like? Knowing a guy like Steve? Growing up with him? Then seeing how once the world noticed him they put him high up above everyone else and treated him like some paragon?” A few paces back and hardly pressed to keep up, Bucky shakes his head, sorrow and that bittersweet longing for simpler times filling him.

“You think he liked that? Likes that? He’s just a guy, for Chrissakes. He knows he ain’t perfect, so don’t you start acting like he has to be too. Don't act like him crashing that plane was all selflessness. You know that's not it at all.”

[womanofvalue]

"I don't think he's perfect, but I think he tries to be better. In doing so, he makes himself a better man and that's what I was holding myself up to," she admits, still trying to rid this ridiculous idea that somehow she's better than Steve and could deserve more than him. While she knows there are men every bit as good as Steve (Jason and Daniel having proven her that), it's also difficult to presume that she could somehow be settling for Steve Rogers.

"I noticed him before the rest of the world did," she snaps, because she knows that Barnes can associate with this, understands. "I liked him before he became Captain America, I liked skinny Steve Rogers with all the courage and heart and determination to be his very best." It's why Erskine had picked him, it's why Peggy had such fondness for him.

"He only kept trying to do the right thing and I got left to pick up my own broken pieces," she says, feeling like she has more to say, but she can't bear to think about this much more, so she quiets and closes her eyes tightly before she resolutely takes the next step to keep walking.