(no subject)

[paragon]

WHO: Steve Rogers
WHERE: The Fountain
WHEN: September 17th
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: Will add if necessary.
STATUS: Closed

---

Even if Wakanda weren't as historically reclusive as it's been until more immediately recent memory, Steve wouldn't pretend he knows enough about it to say whether the fountain belongs there. He's hardly even been outdoors, for all that he's had quite a view from inside; as a guy who draws things in a notebook on occasion he doesn't really think it comes from the same school as the giant panther carved out of the side of a mountain, but what does he know? He and Bucky arrived bloody and exhausted, in no mood for sightseeing, no matter how much the hospitality of Wakanda might be considered a rare privilege. Hard to see it that way, after sleeping it off for a day or so only to wake up to Bucky having already made up his mind.

He's had a lot on his own mind.

Still, the fountain seems out of place with what he's managed to glimpse of a ferocious sort of beauty, in the midst of buildings that Tony would be more comfortable calling home. This is— well, this looks more like something from his time. And he'll just as surely end up calling the bottom of this fountain his home, if he can't get out of here, since he apparently has enough clothes to get him through a cold winter. At least mulling over architecture is as good a way as any to keep from thinking too hard on how much trouble it's giving him.

He hadn't made the first jump. He puts the sides at about fifteen feet, too high for a straight jump for the edge, but manageable with the help of one of the more horizontal cracks in the wall and a running start. He'd taken a few steps backward, used the momentum to jam the toe of one of his new boots into the crevice and launch himself upward. It'd been no good, the tips of his fingers reaching far below the edge. He'd felt it in his body before that, though, the unexpected effort of the maneuver, when it ought to be so much going through the motions. The second try hadn't gone any better, after trying it from farther back, and he'd looked around at the scattered debris in here with him, determining that the leaves and sticks and dirt weren't exactly enough to make anything of. Gives him an idea though.

Climbing up the centerpiece is easier, even if he can still feel the strain in his calves, his arms and shoulders. Steve ignores it as best he can for now, figures he'll get the answer to why his heart's beating harder in his chest to keep up with his exertion when he finds whoever brought him here. Pretty effective, whatever they gave him, to keep him unconscious long enough to move him, and to weaken him even longer — though he can't help but wonder why, then, he doesn't feel the least bit groggy. He reaches the top of the centerpiece and braces himself there, somewhat unsteadily — which he also ignores — and grabs for a branch hanging from the tree overhead. He's just able to reach the nearest one, though it's by no means the strongest, and it bows toward him. He sighs, mutters, "This part would've been a lot easier seventy years ago," and takes a look at his surroundings.

Comments

[paragon]

It isn't the sound of her voice that makes him look down. He'd spent a while, when he'd finally gotten brave enough to go visit Peggy, trying to hear the voice of the woman he'd known in her familiar but scratchy, lived-in cadences, until he'd realized he wasn't doing either of them any favors. He's only been able to hear her voice as he remembers it as a recording, as an archive piece in a museum, and for one absurd moment before thought kicks in thinks that's what it is, and doesn't even bother to turn toward it, fingers instead digging painfully into the bark under his grip.

But then he sees her in his peripheral. Just like that — catching sight of a person. He thinks later that it was a loose curl of hair that did it, but wonders if it's just his mind playing tricks on him. He couldn't have seen anything about her in that much detail until he really looked at her, but it's gonna stick there anyway as the first thing, the way it frames her face, looser than she ever let her hair out during the war. He guesses it's just the detail that makes it real. He meets her eyes, and only wishes it made him question his sanity rather than fill him with a grief both worn and raw.

"Peggy."

Whatever's wrong with him catches up to him then. He's not paying too much attention to how he's holding his body, but apparently that's something he needs to do now, because his foot slips. He tries to compensate for it but he's— too slow, too affected by the adrenaline in his body, too hurt. Something. His foot slips and it takes his eyes off of her and he falls, landing with a thud that he only somewhat manages to roll into so his side doesn't take the entire brunt of the impact. It takes his breath away, if only for a second or two, in a way it shouldn't. His chest is nearly pressed to the ground, and after a second or two he braces the arm he didn't just land on against it to try to push himself up.

It would probably be funny, if he weren't already looking for her again as he gets his knees back underneath him, like she might have disappeared while he was falling out of a tree in front of her. It might still be funny; he wouldn't exactly blame her if she laughed.

[womanofvalue]

"Steve!" Alarmed, Peggy is already moving, sprinting to where he's fallen, trying to brace his fall. She's not quick enough for that, but she does get there in time to slide her hand over his shoulder to find the firm warmth of a shoulder. Absently, without realising, her fingers drift to his temple, like she's going to brush back a lock of his hair, but she pulls away. His physical presence (and near-injury) have done more to convince her of his realness than simply seeing him and hearing him say her name.

She never thought she'd get to hear that again. Her vision is growing cloudy and she can feel the shaky lump in her throat as she leans back on her haunches, sitting in front of him. "What on earth are you doing up a tree?" she demands, her voice warring between fondness and absolutely breaking apart.

He's supposed to be dead, but thanks to Sam, she knows that he hadn't been. She knows that she'd failed him by not locating him. Her and Howard and all those months of searching to no avail, but Steve had still been out there and now he's here. Alive. Alive, and having fallen out of a tree. "You could have broken your neck," she accuses, head swimming with disbelief as she stares at him and drinks up the sight of him when she thought she'd never see him again.

[paragon]

Hearing Peggy chastise him is— he hasn't really had a chance to wrap his head around never hearing it again. Hasn't wanted to. It's dulcet and welcomed, as always, even if his heart hurts so badly as he finally sits up straight, one palm still pressed to the same fine grit of the dirt around the fountain that's smeared across her knee a few scant inches from his fingers, that he'd attribute it to this sudden weakness if he didn't already know what it felt like. Mourning her. Some part of him is aware that maybe he ought to be more wary, that this is an impossible situation, but he's been in plenty of those and isn't in the habit of doubting his own mind. He's not in the habit of doubting her. This is Peggy, somehow. He knows it like truth, in his bones.

Belatedly he realizes that he's only been staring back at her, that she'd asked him a question, and he tries to smooth out the anguished furrow in his brow. He's not sure how successful he is. It's another habit, maybe, from trying not to lay his grief on her every time she'd forgotten he was already in the room with her a second ago, that he hadn't died seventy years ago. Maybe. Steve's not exactly prone to laying his burdens on anyone in the first place, but Peggy had always had a way of drawing them out of him, in her practical way he found very hard to refuse.

"Um." He gives a quiet huff of laughter when he finally processes her words, though his eyes stay fixed on her. "But I didn't." The wryness falls quickly from his expression, difficult to hold on to. He shakes his head slightly, as though trying to clear it. "What—" He makes himself look away from her, back toward the fountain. Remembers his reflection that it seemed more like something from his time, and turns back to her. "What year is it?"

[womanofvalue]

She understands why she's staring at him with such grief and loss, but it hits her hard as to why he's looking at her the same. While she's never doubted how Steve felt about her, it's something else entirely to be able to look at him and see your own regrets reflected back at you -- years between seeing each other without the hope of a return from the war. His quick retort that he's fine earns him a cock of her head to the side, a silent question of disbelief as to whether he truly thinks that's the most intelligent answer to go with.

"I don't actually know," is her gentle response to his question. It's one of the things that she's still getting used to. She might be able to explore the physical surroundings, but it seems that time is an elusive enemy that keeps evading her. "For me, it was 1947," she says, still drinking in the sight of his face as if he'll be taken from her any moment now. "But there are others here from the future. 2015, I believe?" she says, thinking of what Sam had told her.

She reaches out her palm and lets it hesitate a moment before Steve before she pushes in and splays it over his chest. There, beneath her fingers, is the steady beating of a heartbeat. This is no hallucination and certainly not her fragmented mind taunting her with nightmares again. "You're really here," she says, shifting a little as the position she's sitting in causes a touch of strain against the rebar wound that still aches in the humidity here.

[paragon]

Maybe not the best answer, but it's his story and he's sticking to it, at least until he's figured out what's wrong with him; normally it would take more than a short fall from a tree to break his neck, so she may have a point, but he's also telling the truth: he's fine, in body, at least. His heart is steady, more or less, though the adrenaline is affecting it more than it ought to be, making it beat harder. It doesn't help much when she touches him.

"Sixteen," he corrects, for once letting himself feel the enormity and absurdity of it, since for once he doesn't have to be alone in it. Two years for her, four for him. He thinks the difference is negligible. He hesitates too before he reaches up to put his hand over hers, and he only pulls her palm away for the space it takes to wrap his fingers around it, holding tighter than he's ever let himself since getting out of the ice.

It doesn't make him miss the way she moves, his eyes going to the side she'd just favored and back to her face again. "You're hurt?"

[womanofvalue]

For a very long moment, anything he says is white noise to her as she feels a touch she hadn't thought she'd ever get to again. She bites back the relief and is grateful when a happy bubble of a sound doesn't trickle over her lips, but it's a very near thing. She rubs her thumb in circles against the warmth of his palm, hardly able to believe he's here when he has to go and be stupidly observant. Peggy doesn't relish having to explain exactly what happened, but knows there's no avoiding it.

There is a moment, just one, in which she debates hauling out the 'Classified' defense, but Steve's got as much clearance with the SSR as she does, unfortunately, so even that won't work. "I was in Los Angeles prior to here," she says, sifting through a longer story for what actually matters. "Isodyne had something on their hands that was immensely powerful and in the course of events, it wound up in the hands of Whitney Frost," she says, giving a wry laugh as she thinks of the films of hers that Steve might have seen.

"She absorbed the zero matter and became a dangerously powerful woman, intent on recreating her experiments, which required nuclear devices," she says, finding it odd to be pressed in like this, holding hands, and giving an official briefing. "In the process of stopping her, I had an incident," she says, sliding her free palm to cover the area. "I fell from a height and landed on a rebar that punctured my torso."

pretend my math isn't terrible and that i said 5 years instead of 4

[paragon]

Her thumb pressed to his palm certainly has the power to distract him from the observation, but he's always been . . . good, you could say, at keeping his own feelings separate from the matter at hand, so to speak. There have been exceptions, the incident in Lagos being one of them, so they're the kinds of exceptions that prove the rule: when Steve gets distracted, people die. He's been brought to an unfamiliar place, and something has been done to him to put him at a disadvantage here. It's not the time to lose his wits.

It helps — only somewhat, but it helps — that this isn't the first time he's touched her or held her hand in recent memory. They'd even shared a chaste kiss or two (or, like he doesn't know the exact number of times he's kissed Peggy Carter in his lifetime), so he hadn't been lying when he'd told Natasha she wasn't his first kiss since 1945.

He doesn't know how to tell her any of that, though. He doesn't particularly want to. It belongs to those moments, whatever side of them they're standing on now. And none of it means this doesn't hurt like hell, so he lets her talk, letting her voice wash over him. He does raise his eyebrow a little at Whitney Frost's name; it's public knowledge that she'd lost her mind toward the end of her career, Steve just never gave it much thought. But Whitney Frost had more than likely seen some of his films, too, such as they are, and the story's just absurd enough that Steve can believe it.

"You never told me about that," he says, a little wryly, gaze following her hand to her side. He's perfectly aware she's only telling him now because he noticed the hitch in her movement, so it's a little wistful, too. There are a lot of things that fall into that category. Chalk it up to the lives they've lead without each other.

[womanofvalue]

She's beginning to feel like she's missing some crucial piece of information, because Steve is speaking like she should have told him about all her encounters despite the fact that they've only been speaking for the last few moments. She moves her palm away from the aching scar and studies his face carefully, trying to understand how much she's missed. She doesn't recall Sam or Natasha or anyone talking about her in the future, so perhaps she left Steve some sort of message? Letters or recordings for him to listen to.

She wonders what else he knows about her life that even she doesn't know, yet. "I never thought I'd get to see your face again," she says quietly, thinking of all the times she'd stared at that picture of him from his training at Camp Lehigh, before Erskine's serum. She thinks of the hard-won battle to gain back the vial of his blood and how she had given even that up for the greater good. "Apart from my memories and my dreams," she goes on wistfully. "But from what I've heard, you've found yourself a good life," she says, her heart breaking to say the words and to smile as she does it.

"You found friends and connections and purpose. You found all the things that I had been hoping to have with ..." With you, she doesn't say. She draws her hand from his and clears her throat as Peggy stares at the ground beneath them, aware that she never cries so much as she does when Steve Rogers is involved. "And I'm so glad," she promises, drawing in a sharp inhalation. "I'm also sorry that it's been taken from you," she says, feeling the track of the tear down her cheek that she wills to dry before she looks back at him. "I'm sorry to tell you, my darling, but you're stuck here."

[paragon]

She doesn't seem to be the only one missing something on that count; she's talking like she already knows he was alive down there in the ice. He's had to explain it to her himself so many times that, briefly, he doesn't know what to do with himself, what he's supposed to say to her next, if it ought to go before or after Not when my best girl still owes me a dance. He'd never quite learned how to school his expression, though he'd tried like hell every time for her sake and does so now without a second thought when she starts to cry. He swallows it down in his own throat and tries to offer her some semblance of a smile instead of what he really feels at her calling his life a good one. It's a far cry from her admonishment that he didn't have one at all, and while since then he's put everything he has into making it good, he thinks the former observation is still closer to the truth.

She's still looking at him from the other side of her own life, though. He's not unaware of that, or how that sentence ends. He lets her pull her hand away, and tries to ignore the sudden, tight fear in his gut. He doesn't want to contradict her, because it would only be cruel to say when it would mean having her back, too, her claim to be glad for him notwithstanding. But he can't lose it all again, not when he's had to work so damn hard to hold on to what he's found. Besides, she's heard about him from someone, and a man less intelligent than him could figure out what that means — hers is the first, the only face he's seen so far, but that clearly isn't the case for her.

So he ends up saying very little to any of it — even as he misses the weight of her palm on his chest — except to ask of her, "Tell me what I'm missing, Peggy."

[womanofvalue]

Peggy doesn't know where to begin. She could start with everything that he's missed back home, but she's not sure she has the heart or the energy to devote to briefing Steve on two missed years in which she still wondered how she was going to make it to the next day. Or did she start with this place, which made little to no sense to her, and only sought to confound her more with every passing day. Her mind is racing so quickly that it makes a stupid decision before she can stop it, leaning in to brush a ghost of a kiss to his cheek before taking both of his hands to coax him to his feet.

"On your feet, soldier," she insists, tone the likes of which he'd have heard at Camp Lehigh. "Better to show you rather than tell you." And maybe if she keeps him at her side, she'll be able to convince herself that Steve is actually there and truly real. "And I'll answer any question you ask of me, and I'll do it honestly. You have to promise to accept that I don't know the answer to everything, contrary to what I may make people believe."