sixthiterationlogs | doomed to repeat the past

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doomed to repeat the past

WHO: Peggy Carter
WHERE: Inn
WHEN: Open - July 6th / Closed - July 7th
OPEN TO: All / Quill
WARNINGS: TBD

Bad Moods A-Risin'

It's not that Peggy often uses the technology that's on her wrist. She comes from a time before that became commonplace, and she's seen one too many of Howard's experiments go awry. The notion of strapping something onto herself that hadn't been tested is terrifying, but she doesn't have much of a choice in this matter, which is why she's resigned herself to staring at the thing on her wrist and intending to use it only in emergencies.

This is the trouble, though. She'd awoken to a great and frantic outpour of activity, including questions about whether she's okay. Soon after, when she sends a message to Stella to ask what's happening, she quickly sees why there might be some concern. Her bloody username stares back at her and all of a sudden, there's a rushing in her ears and she swears the only sound is the actress who plays Betty Carver, swooning and sighing over Cap.

It's all she was ever seen as, outside of a select few people. Even in the SSR, she knows to this day if she were to go back, it's still all they ever saw of her. In fact, some days, she had to wonder if Daniel even still thought of her as Cap's Girl. She thinks of how the Commandos held that in their minds, how she worked to prove her worth, but no matter how much she knew her own value, she kept coming up against this wall. Peggy decides that today is a day worth nicking one of the bottles of liquor she's been storing quietly from her loot, taking it to the inn where she can get rip-roaring drunk and not worry that she's going to put all of this on Stella.

Hidden in a teacup (but likely the smell of whiskey is clear as day), Peggy decides that she's not going to be anyone this afternoon. She's not Captain America's Gal, she's not Peggy Carter, she's going to be Drunken Village Woman, and that had better be fine with anyone she comes into contact with.

Closed to Quill - Ignorance is Bliss

The next day, she's not feeling much better. She can't escape the fact that someone here knows of her history or knows Steve (or worse, is Steve). She doesn't want sympathy or understanding or someone to look at her and be reminded of what they once thought of her as. It's why she makes a decision when she wakes, recalling when she'd first met Quill and how he hadn't the slightest idea who Steve was.

That's what she needs right now. She needs someone who she can prove herself to as something more than Steve's girl, because she was never only that, and the implication still stings as hard as it ever did, watching her skills and intelligence cast aside. She manages to put herself together and even finds her old snuggie to bring as a joking host's gift, heading to his home.

On the way, though, she's caught off guard by yet another bloody storm, forcing her to run the remainder of the distance (and making her eternally grateful she'd been too hungover to do much more than braid her hair back). By the time she gets to Quill's porch, the snuggie is soaked and so is she, but she's here now and the storm only seems to be getting worse, so she knocks on the door, eager to get inside. She's even more eager, given that it appears that there are lights on in there which brings the prospect of warmth.

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Owen approaches the village technology from the other side: the world devolved from the era of internet and cell phones to one of tripwires and radios. The Fireflies would slink around a zone, spraying graffiti, hand-drawing leaflets. Even the military didn't maintain any mobile network, and struggled to communicate between zones. He always assumed they might have a few satellites they could ping information off of, but even that couldn't last.

It seems lucky, in their current lodgings, to even have lights at the inn. They need them today; early evening only deepens the darkness behind the rain, and it's the storm that finds him indoors at all.

Too many lighting strikes, of late. Too many falling trees.

Peggy is just familiar enough to bear slipping in with, when he returns from emptying a pot and replacing it under a leak in one of the unclaimed rooms. Being alone in the wilds is easy: he's never really alone, with Kero on his trail, and he has purpose. Activity. Being alone right now is just the drum of rain and rattling branches on the roof. "You look like you've found a way to settle in," he says, mild at first, then with brows lifting as he catches the scent of whiskey, strong enough to leave her cup.

Peggy's been drinking long enough that there's a warm haze in her head and her stomach, making the world just dizzy enough that she can let herself drift into her own self-pity, feeling maudlin, but also not wanting to inflict that on anyone. When Owen approaches her, she's had enough that she won't insist he leave her be, mainly because she's also reaching a point where she doesn't want to be alone.

The storm is starting to get to the point where she can't just go home to Stella, either. "I'm not sure that you can consider this settling, so much as enduring yet another onslaught of torture," she deadpans, seeing as between the names and the storms, it seems like their limits are being tested.

Owen can't say much of their limits, if all it takes to drive the village toward them is a rude name on a watch and some rain. The world seems theirs to learn limitation anew against--if they don't, after all, the powers that be might simply teleport them out into the unknown.

Or rain them in with it, give them leaks and self-pity to deal with.

"A woman on the brink," he agrees, sitting back and slinging one arm over the back of his seat. "God help us if they take away the tea." Owen considers her anew, with a tilt of his head.

"You could help me patch a leak upstairs," he says, assuming from Peggy that a large part of the torture is their current down-time. "But then I wouldn't have a bucket to tend the rest of the night."

"At this point in the day, I'm not sure how much help I'd be with a leak, but if you're only looking for a pair of hands to help, I'm sure I could manage," she says, drinking up the last of her little cup of whiskey with the ease of someone who might think it to be tea.

She sniffs, sharply, and gives Owen a bleary look, already on her way to standing, even if it's not the smoothest transition in the world. "Let's go," she says, nodding as she sets her feet in the ground to stabilize herself.

Getting a second, extended look of her, he might only want her much closer to one of the beds upstairs when she inevitably needs it. Prince Charming is much less fun to play with a full set of stairs.

And in another place where aspirin is better saved for fevers and fractures.

"If all you do is give the bucket a new purpose when I'm done, that's my night sorted." Dropping his head as he lifts a hand, he urges Peggy ahead of him, ready to lend her his own pair of hands if the stairs already pose too great an obstacle.

"This is a weird reversal," he adds, making sure she's lined up with the rail. "At least we're indoors, with nothing more dire to get to than a leak."

"I'll have you know, I've never been that sick in my life," she notes with affront, seeing as she's halfway insulted by the prospect that Peggy can't hold her liquor. It's utterly untrue and she wanders after Owen in order to try and fix whatever is happening, grasping the railing and trudging upstairs.

She's drank with Dugan, for god's sake, and come out alive. This is nothing. "You say that now, but just watch, some strange creature will pop out of the woodwork and make us regret thinking that we're safe."

The leak is inconsequential; just something to focus on instead of whatever she's been wallowing in. Barring the predicted disaster, whiskey and rain should be some of the best sleep she's likely to find.

"Saving your whiskey vomit for the next attack, clever." She's making it up the stairs, at least. He keeps a couple of steps behind, ready to catch her at any sign of trouble.

Safety, Owen knows, is a matter of degrees. Rain suppresses a lot of things, for all it creates its own problems. He used to prefer travelling under it; he still had to take his time, and he had to find ways to deal with the chill, but it kept the spores down and made it all the harder for the infected to sense their prey. "It's across from the store room with all the tools," he directs. "They made it convenient for us."

"For never," she clarifies, giving Owen a proud look as she raises her chin. "I don't throw up when I drink, I have a far stronger constitution than that, I can assure you." She sways a little, but eventually makes it to the top of the stairs, no head spinning, no nausea, which clearly means she can drink more. "Even if we are attacked, I'll be sooner to swat them with the bottle."

Unfortunately, she left that back downstairs. "I don't think they make anything convenient," she replies seeing as 'they' are a sore point for her at this moment. "It's all just a game, and when they're bored, they change something to make it ore fun for themselves."

He'd heard those sorts of claim all his life--and she has the same grit of old truth to it that salted smugglers claimed. Old truth, old lives, when the stores and bars were open and it was relatively safe to be anywhere with a few shots in you.

Having grown up in the version of that world where it was all scrabbling for leftovers or making it in bathtubs, that shit always put Owen out on his ass.

So he'll excuse Peggy if she isn't as sharp as she first seemed, only adjacent to emergency and who knew how many teacups into the only bottle he's seen since the big feast. "I'm sure watching you drunkenly swat things is very entertaining for them." Perhaps she'd found the bottle in a box with her name on it, or it had suddenly appeared behind the bar. "The bucket is more of a pot; go check it isn't full while I get some tools."

Peggy steadies herself once she reaches solid ground, taking the time to go look at the pot, deciding that it may not be overflowing, but it's still full enough to the brim that she wants to quickly change it out, pouring out the water into a toilet before settling it back where it first began.

Then, behind it, she crouches down into a kneel behind it to sprawl on the floor, waiting for Owen to return. "Have you ever fixed a leak before?" she calls over to him. "I'm assuming yes. You seem the handy type, after all."

"As much as a man with one and a half hands can be considered," he confirms, hammer tucked in the loop of his pants and a potted plant balanced on the shelf he plans to repurpose.

It's costing him a few nails from his cans of shrapnel at home, but if it keeps a room open here--he barely uses the house as it is.

"Where I'm from, if you read enough books and know how to fire a gun you're basically a renaissance man." Finding books had been half the struggle, in abandoned or blasted areas. Paper doesn't hold up, and it was strange to think--whole libraries of information locked on dead servers, no internet to retrieve them with. What a waste.

Of all the things the Fireflies could have focused on, could have died over.

"Figure I'll get some of the sap from this," he says, setting the plant beside the pot, an old cut on the trunk sealed translucent white. "Plug it up and add a plank, hope for the best."

"Well, then, call me a renaissance man," she jokes, seeing as she's plenty good with a gun, not to mention with reading books. She peers into the pot for the plant, wondering when it became necessary to go out there and start experimenting with the natural plants that surrounded them. It's not that she minds the idea, it's just that it's so new.

"Does this mean that after we had our misadventure, you kept on out there to discover more?" She's actually rather respectful of such a thing, because the bats had soured her from going out for at least a week and she's overly stubborn at times (often, she knows).

"After, before." It takes a moment to realize the question relates to the plant, which had been collecting dust in the general lay of a window. "Days you don't see me, I'm out there somewhere, learning what I can."

With this, he just hopes it seals up the cracks the same way it's sealed up the bark.

"This one isn't me, though." He leaves it where she can entertain herself on the floor with it if she so chooses, and starts examining the line along which the water flows before dropping into the pan. "It's been sitting in the storeroom, might be one of those rubber plants."

Peggy's still not entirely sure what they have in the storeroom, but she knows that she tries to make do with the supplies at her place. That said, she's also left a home because it leaked, so she doesn't know if she's really someone who can be trusted to repair things.

"Well, whatever it is, let's see how well you can fix it." She laments not having brought her bottle up with her, but at least she doesn't have to think about the communication devices while she's watching Owen work. "How have you been feeling since our little expedition? Are there any side effects?"

It's a lot of Snuggies and a lot of Dickens, so far as Owen could tell; digging can yield some decent supplies, or decent items to recycle for something else. With the rains in mind, he's altered more than one tarp into a poncho.

And he doesn't want to wear it indoors, so: he runs his finger along the water, until the grain of wood becomes the crack. At least the beam gives him something to nail the plank into.

"Well," he says, looking over at her as he turns to his tools, wondering if she'd be more comfortable on one of the beds. Directing her, sober or now, does not seem a good use of his time. "I'm a lot more cautious of weird rocky outcroppings. But just as often I try to close my eyes and just listen while I'm out there. It wasn't as bad as the initial panic made it out--helped us find that tree, after all. It wouldn't even have occurred to him, otherwise, to start knocking on trunks to see if anything had rotted or hollowed out.

"Physically though, I'm fine. I keep waiting for your scientists to take volunteers for a round two."

She's glad they found the tree, too, because she didn't want to have to be the cause for someone else to be hurt or potentially lose their lives. She's not about to go running out to find the bats, but still, she's happy to hear they didn't have long-term adverse effects.

"Well, I'm a soldier, not a scientist," she says firmly. "I can go out there and deal with them, but I'm not planning to bring any of them back for study." She watches him as he works, keeping the bucket in place for now, though she's tempted to start sliding it away soon.

"I didn't know the village had a standing army." His voice quiets for distance and distraction, but he's still close enough to be heard over the rain drumming overhead. There's no faulting Peggy for using the word, or retaining something of the past--but in his head, it feels like calling himself a Firefly after Marlene's death. It feels like calling himself a smuggler, here, with no laws and no destination.

"We're renaissance men, remember?" The crack is more concerning for its length than its width, not enough to start stuffing strips of the sheets into. For now he can only think to seal it, board it up, and seal that too; they'll need better weather to go out and check for rot.

Joining Peggy on the floor, he pulls the knife from his boot and cuts into the sealed over slice on the potted plant, an almost acrid smell coming from the white sap that leaks over the blade. "Is that what's got you drinking," he asks, just as mildly. "Ideas about what you are or aren't."

"I'm never going to stop being a soldier, no matter what," she admits, because it's engrained in her at this point. It's simply who she is and Peggy doesn't want to change. She stares at the bucket, not even revolting back from the smell, feeling a touch bleak as she stares at Owen out of the corner of her eye.

"It's not so much about ideas about me that I'm doubting, it's the ones the entire world were so quick to put on me. Fighting against that avalanche, it was exhausting. Here, I didn't have to. At least, until now." Because now Steve is back and the bloody display is blathering on about something she'd been reduced to.

It's fair enough; maybe he shouldn't compare it to being a Firefly, or a smuggler in the years after. He's still as far-ranging as he was, even with no objective handed to him. He is still, at times, the boy who wants to hide in the cellar when anyone is arguing, or the man who needs the cellar door left open so he knows he isn't trapped.

The rest of it doesn't make near as much sense. He can't expect all of it to, Peggy in her teacups and his own rejection of most social pressures. He sleeps in a tree as often as he doesn't, somewhere between the plains and his shrapnel-wired house.

He only cares what people think inasmuch as he wants them to, at whatever point, not decide to kill him. A friend like Peggy might help with that, so he stays crouched at the plant as he waits for the sap to pool along the blade. "What changed," he asks, settling his elbows at his knees. "I don't really keep a finger to the pulse of village gossip, so maybe I'm just ignorant in thinking there isn't much of it to worry about."

Peggy reaches forward and taps on his wrist, on the little device, just so that he'll be paying attention to it. Drifting back, she works to start typing out a message, nothing more than a 'you'll see' before sending it so that Owen can see 'Captain America's Gal' in all its offensive glory.

Hadn't it been enough to endure radio plays and movies and her coworkers derision? Now, she can't even escape it here. "There's no threat, apart from the one to my dignity."

Reading the display on his wrist, listening to her speak, Owen just sighs. What a better world he's come to, where dignity is a concern that can drive competent people to drink. But she has been drinking; but she is concerned. Looking up from his wrist, he considers her. He--tries.

He has no idea what the fuck to say, honestly.

"Peggy," he starts, gently enough. Any followup blusters from his mouth, cheek popping before an exhale. "I have no idea who Captain America is."

Edited 2018-07-17 18:32 (UTC)

"No, that's not the problem," she admits, because as she rubs at her eyes, she can feel the exhaustion. "There are far too many people here who understand exactly what that means and I've worked much too hard for them to be reminded that it's all I am."

She's not, and even if she was, that wouldn't be all that she'd be. "He died, as far as I knew," she says, staring at the bucket. "I came back from the war and instead of having a purpose and respect, this is all they saw me as. They thought I slept my way to where I was, that I kept on doing that."

Owen gives the message a second look, in part just to look down at his wrist while she explains. He still isn't sure what to say: there is no infrastructure here, for anyone to sleep their way to the top of. There are people too concerned with leaking buildings and wild badgers to who anyone sleeps with any mind.

And that shit didn't really happen, in the Fireflies. You were either competent at the job, or you died. A lot of the time, you were competent and died anyway.

"Sorry for your loss," is the first thing that comes to mind. Kind of thing you had to say a lot, back home. "But do you really think people here don't respect you? This name bullshit, it's getting to you--that's fine. You're drunk, you'll sleep it off. But do you really think the rest of us care what these watches say?"

She's never worried about people doubting her value, but the ones she knows here are friends. They're more than people. She'll be the first to admit that she does care what they think and if somehow they now equate her more with Steve, then it means her value has sunk, if only a little.

"I think to some, even subconsciously, it does," she admits, thinking of how Clint or Frank might look at her, perhaps with more sympathy, perhaps with something new, but it won't be for her. It will just be because of what happened.

"I don't know dick about people's subconscious. I don't try to guess that kind of thing." Generally, he doesn't stay in any one place long enough for anyone's deeper machinations to matter--just the surface. What they're threatened by and what they aren't. If he sniffs out someone with a problem, especially with him, he just moves on.

Not as much an option here; not really what Peggy seems concerned about. "Sounds like you're projecting, if you're going to sit on the floor in the range of my opinion." Only two things to do with that: realize that's all it is, or get away from the problem.

Or patch it over, seal it up, and deal with it later. Alcohol doesn't seem like the way to do that, but maybe it was some of the intent. Owen picks himself up and turns his judgment to the beam, scraping the sap over the wet line with his knife. "Do you just want them to care, so you assume they do?"

She probably is projecting, but she also thinks that's thanks to what she lived back home. She ought to know better, though, though under the help of the alcohol, she really isn't sensible at all. That is an unfortunate side-effect of the stuff.

"Assume, mainly because of back home," she admits. "Perhaps a touch because they were Steve's friends before they were ever mine. I don't want to give them another reason to look at me as an appendage and not myself."

If she's sensible enough to admit it, even drunk and sitting on the floor, she hasn't lost what respect Owen had for her previously. He's used to agreeing to disagree, especially on the ways people feel. Especially the ways they feel about their relationships.

It isn't like he can't understand the sentiment, even if the context is rather different. He hadn't given his last name in years, even as far east as Appalachia. He didn't want anything to do with his father, and he'd gotten into whatever substances they could cook up in the military dorms to forget about it at the time.

Point is: there are people from home, and there are complete fucking strangers. No one here knows Caradog's name, no one questioned what the Observers wrote on the blackboard. He's just the guy who hikes out to the plains. He's just the guy fixing a leaky roof. "I promise if you ever point him out to me, I'll think of him as one of your appendages. Something useless, like an eleventh toe."

Peggy still loves Steve, of course she does. And yet, with Owen's offer, she can't help the vindictive pleasure as she looks at him and thinks that yes, this is exactly what she wants. "I'm going to do that, you know," she says, with a nod, because it would be rather nice to have someone here like Mr. Jarvis, who sees her as her first and not as someone tangentially related to Steve's life.

"I knew I was right, helping you to avoid those bats eating you up," she teases, because she never would have left him, not for a moment.

"It would have taken them a very long time, so thank you again," he says, removing the blade and inspecting the seal. Not yet dry, but not dripping away with fresh water. One more layer and then the board, he thinks.

And time to divert, to get Peggy off the floor. Owen holds down his good hand, his knife hanging from the curl of his other two fingers. "Come on, at least sit on the bed."

Peggy works to pry herself up from the floor, because he's right. She ought to have more dignity than that. She reaches out to take hold of his hand, leveraging herself up with only a touch of wobble, feeling at least a little better.

Well, that, or more sober.

"And what would your name say, if you were to text me?" She doesn't mean to poke at any wounds, she simply wants to know.

"Not being anyone's appendage," he says, sitting on the bed as he leads and steadies her to do the same, "They just went with the time that badger put me through a roof from the three-point line. He turns his hand out of her grip and taps the band with his two other fingers, the text box opening below a teal bar saying Badger Dunks.

"Handyman might have been better." Tossing the knife back to the planter, he might as well let the first layer dry a bit. After she's had her peek, he leans back on his hands, listening the rain drum on the roof.

"They're all pretty stupid."

"Or astute in boiling us down to what we are to a stranger," she points out, seeing as if you were going to tell someone about the people in the village, why not have a handy little name for each of them. Grimacing, she knows that she hates it, but she has to hope it will go away.

Settling on the bed, she watches him work, thinking of how many handymen she could have used. "I needed you around when my first house flooded. It might have saved me all the house hopping."

"Guess that's why it doesn't work; we aren't really strangers anymore." Fewer of them are by the day. When they dragged him to that research basement in Montana, he'd hardly spent more than a week in one place, given the freedom to choose. Just enough time to see a thing go wrong, see how people reacted to it. And if nothing did, well--better to leave it as an option to come back to, see how it handled a winter instead of a spring.

He has nowhere else to go, and no one's tried to eat or infect him yet.

With a bit of a groan, he pushes up from the bed an starts getting another layer of sap on his knife. "I'm around now," he says. "If you can get over the names, just send a message when you need something fixed."

"I will," Peggy says, especially now that she knows Owen doesn't care about it. The liquor is starting to burn its way to a weary end, and Peggy is more than happy to think about all the good she's done. She knows her own value, but that doesn't mean she still doesn't hurt when someone tries to strip it away from her.

It's easier to be ignored than to be denigrated, it seems.

"I'm rooming with Stella Gibson now," she says. "I think between the two of us, we'll be able to give you a shout from time to time, if you're willing."

It's storming and while Peter has electricity in his little house, it's barely holding on considering the strength of the wind and the crash of the lightning. He almost misses the knock on his door for all the sound and when he finally gets it, he's surprised to see Peggy Carter standing on his porch.

She's bedraggled and soaked so Peter ushers her in, not wanting her to freeze. Maybe he's not from England and didn't grow up on Earth but he still has some manners.

"Get in here," he says, standing aside so she can come in. "You don't want to be out there."

Peggy's shivering something awful as she hurries inside, not even bothering to pretend politeness in order to try and offer manners. The only thing she cares about is being warm again (and if she can make it work, being drunk, though she doesn't have any alcohol left). "Thank you," she says, only keeping from chattering because the weather is actually decent, yet.

She holds up the soaked material in navy blue, thinking her gift is rather poor now. "I come bearing gifts," she tells him. "It might be a little snug, but I thought after our first meeting that you'd appreciate it."

"I'm starting a collection," Peter says, taking the soaked Snuggie and laying it out over a chair across from the fireplace. It'll dry out eventually, he guesses, and right now he's a little more focused on drying Peggy out than the fleece. Priorities, after all.

"Why did you walk over here in that storm anyway? You could have sent me...a string of text messages." Peter has noticed the wristband doesn't really take a lot of input.

"I'm not going to let a little rain trap me indoors," she says past the chattering, now that she's indoors and doesn't have to worry about anything other than warming herself. At the mention of the texting, her face darkens, and she thinks that it won't be long before she gets to the real purpose, then. "I'd like to avoid texting anyone for the foreseeable future, thank you very much."

"Besides, can't I go out and talk to one of my newer acquaintances? I could go back out there, find someone else..." He doesn't even know why she's here yet, but she's still dangling that in front of him.

"Nah, I want you here." That's easy enough to say and Peter doesn't think he's conceding any ground with it. Everything with Peggy feels like tug of war and he wants to keep his concessions minimal.

"I don't have any tea," he admits. "But I can try to warm you up if you don't think the fire will be enough?"

"I'm much more in the mood for alcohol," she admits over her shoulder as she wanders further inside, glancing over in order to look at Peter a little better, giving him an expectant look, like she wants him to have it on hand despite the fact that he's not been here that long.

Still, she'll take a little warmth, something to tide her over until she builds the courage to push after what she is here to do.

"I don't know if I have any of that but you have a shoulder to complain on if you need it?" Peter offers.

He doesn't know what could rattle someone like Peggy, who had seemed unrattled when he showed up in a fountain, so this sounds like a story.

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