sixthiterationlogs | (no subject)

WHO: Peggy Carter
WHERE: The Barnes-Carter Residence
WHEN: September 28th
OPEN TO: Bucky Barnes
WARNINGS: n/a
STATUS: Closed

Despite Peggy's stubbornness in many areas, there are things that even she knows better than to challenge and Mother Earth generally falls into that category. So when the rain doesn't abate, Peggy abandons her plans of heading out to the canyon and spends her time carefully navigating her hair into the complicated waves that can take hours. When that's done, the rain is still going on.

It continues through the morning and suddenly, it's been nearly a full day without any indication that it's going to go anywhere and Peggy starts to go stir-crazy. What it also does is throws into stark contrast all the things she's been ignoring since Steve had shown up in a tree, telling her why and how he's alive. The guilt has been sitting at the back of her mind since then, but now that she's stuck inside with nothing to do, it starts to eat at her.

It begins with little thoughts about her trying harder, her pushing Howard to spend more resources, and devolves into these thoughts more often and blaming herself for her failure to get some sort of coordinates. By dinner, she has to do something, but the rain hasn't stopped and she's not in the mood to get drenched.

Dinner, then, seems the best option. Clanging and a touch more forceful with the pots and pans than usual, Peggy finds the fish she'd caught herself using Hook's technique and sets it to begin frying to go along with some greens, using the knife in hand to try and truly excise past demons from her mind, though she suspects it won't be quite that easy.

With one solid whack, taking the fish's head off, she thinks that at least she'll work herself into feeling a little better.

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Bucky still isn't sure about any of this. Coming to this strange place, finding Peggy, having people know him without any knowledge of a meeting on his own part, and Earthquakes of all things. It's weird. This is all weird, and he isn't sure he likes it yet.

It's better than the war though. At least that's what he keeps telling himself. If he were back home he would still be following Steve around with a gun strapped to his back and sleeping on a cold ground. He's got a bed here, a roof over his head, and he doesn't have to kill anyone anymore. He's happy for that. Now if only his friends would start acting right around him.

He starts to doze off on the couch in the living room when suddenly he's jolted awake by the sound of Peggy cutting the head of a fish. He peers over couch and watches her for a moment. "Easy there, you're acting like it owes you money."

Startled, Peggy tightens her grip on the knife before she loosens it when she recognises the voice, thinking it would be quite rude to attack James like that. Calming a little, she eases back and regards him with a sheepish expression, grateful for something apart from her own thoughts to swarm her mind. "It's not even the fish's fault," she confesses, working to very carefully and very slowly take the guts out.

"It's, unfortunately, the only way that I can start to work out the chaos in my mind when the rain has forced me indoors." She frowns as she stares at the fish and the meagre greens. "Salad and fish is all right for supper, I hope?"

Bucky sighs. He understands the feeling she is getting to get now. He feels cooped up, if not for the odd earth shaking events he wouldn't mind the rain. He didn't want to risk that happening again in a storm though.

He starts to move, his knees cracking as he stands up and starts to walk towards the kitchen. He leans in the door way to watch her work. It's odd for Peggy to be here, living with him and not Steve. He couldn't have left her alone after her house was destroyed though. It didn't help the feeling subside when Steve finally appeared.

"Yeah, yeah that's perfect." He smiles. He isn't going to complain if she wanted to cook for him.

Peggy's still not sure what to think about their domestic situation. If she ignores that it's another man, it's perfectly normal for her to be sharing space. In fact, she did with Jarvis for a time, but Ana had been there as well. Perhaps it's also that there's a great deal of overlapping issues that they have and share.

Which brings her to why she's applying such vigour to the task of gutting the fish. "You have seen him, haven't you?" she asks, not wanting to jump into the topic lest James be in the dark somehow.

Bucky watches her work carefully. He's lost in thoughthe about a certain someone and his less than ideal reaction to him. And speak of the devil, Peggy brings him up.

"Yeah....I saw him." He isn't sure how to feel about it still. "You did too right?"

She nods, not sure how to explain how it had felt to see him after being told by everyone that he was dead and she had to move on. No matter what she tried to do, some part of her had always clung to the memory of Steve, fighting to protect him in any way she could, even two years down the road.

"He's alive," is what she says. "All that time, all those years we just ignored him, he was alive."

It's the last comment that makes his eyes squint. He bounces off of the wall and stands up straighter now as his head tilts. He's confused. He hasn't exactly been told about what happens in the future...he doesn't even know exactly what happens to himself.

"Whats do you mean?" All those years?

Peggy hadn't told James this yet, thinking that perhaps it might lead to an uncomfortable line of questions, but given Steve's arrival, she thinks that there's no better time than to discuss it. "It's 1947, where I'm from," she says, trying to be compassionate even though she feels on edge already with her emotions. "The war's over. It's been over for some time."

And she hadn't seen either Steve or James for years before this place had thrown them back into her life. "As far as I was aware, before here, Steve was dead."

He freezes when he hears that. He isn't sure if he can even believe that, he can't imagine that happening; a world without Steve Rogers. His head gives a tiny shake.

"That can't be right." There is no way. Steve is fine. He has friends that Bucky doesn't know, which he is still confused about. He thought he knew everything about Steve. "I wouldn't have let that happen."

This is hardly the conversation that Peggy thought she'd be having over dinner, though she knows that it would have needed to happen sometime. That said, she direly wishes for something stronger to drink while she tells James the news. "No, you wouldn't have," she agrees, staring down at her feet as she gently rests the knife on the counter, stepping away in order to smooth her palms over her scrubs, looking up as she summons the courage to say the next words.

"We lost you, too," she says, her words steady if a bit heavy with grief. "Steve lost you." Peggy has to wonder if perhaps his suicide mission in the plane hadn't been some form of exhaustion after losing James, though she'd like to believe that he'd fought as hard as he could to stay with her.

We lost you, too.

His heart drops into his stomach when he hears that. He suspected something happens to him in the future, but he didn't want to think that he died. It makes sense though, Peggy's first reaction wasn't the best, nor was Steve's. They both looked like they had seen the dead.

"I don't- how?" Did he really want to know? Probably not, he shouldn't at least, but it's a morbid kind of curiosity he has now.

This is a long story and there are chapters within it that Peggy isn't privy to. After all, only Steve can talk about what happened during the rescue and that fateful mission, but Peggy knows the details because they've been written up and handed in with every other mission report. It feels clinical, though. Picking up the knife again and turning back to the fish as something to keep her fingers at work, she keeps her eye contact away from him.

"You fell from a train," she says. "On a mission with Steve. You were making sure that he would stay alive," she says, because James is right. There's no world in which he would let Steve come to harm, the same as Peggy. She wonders, though, if he had come back from that mission, would Steve still be okay?

Steve is okay, though. It's her that's awash with guilt.