From the SSR Archives

“And you tried to pilot us through the asteroid field why?” Daniel asked.

“Command wasn’t going to fund the repairs we needed—but they always pony up for damage from ‘space debris,’” Jack said.

There but for God’s Grace

Fandom: Agent Carter (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Daniel Sousa/Original Female Character(s), Peggy Carter/Daniel Sousa, Past Steggy Characters: Daniel Sousa, Peggy Carter, Jack Thompson, Original Characters, Original Child Character(s) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Dark, Early defrosting of Steve Rogers, POV Daniel Sousa, Angst, Endgame Peggysous, Full Blown Spykink, content by weight is 68 percent angst 30 percent salt and 2 percent other added flavors

What life might have been like if Daniel hadn’t lost his leg.

when peggy and jarvis are fighting the dc agents, there’s upbeat jazz music playing and peggy is kicking dc’s ass. it’s SUCH a fun, “good-for-her” moment. and she wins! as she should! hooray! and then she runs into jack, and it suddenly starts getting personal, especially as they only JUST became allies. but she still makes it out. it’s still fine. she’s still winning. and then, daniel. and she still makes it out. and suddenly, it doesn’t feel like a win anymore at all.

as for the line itself… oh, daniel. daniel sousa, you stubborn, loyal little son of a bitch. daniel has single-handedly unearthed what ivchenko puts next episode as a massive wall of evidence against peggy. he’s got witness confirmation and everything. but when he makes mcphee id her, he implores him to look again at the photograph before making a positive id, because he so doesn’t want to believe it. 

and then mcphee confirms it, and daniel does his job and tells dooley, but when he finally confronts peggy, who is standing over jack’s unconscious body, and for all daniel knows at this point she’s actually killed jack like she may or may not have killed krzeminski, he still begs her to tell him he’s wrong. he has this mountain of evidence, but there has to be some other explanation. there has to be, because otherwise, he’s going to have to fight his best friend. if she even is his best friend anymore, because he’s now realizing he might not actually know her at all.

and peggy apologizes, and means it, and runs anyway.

A dozen DC agents are dispatched handily, easily and the real dilemma is what it does to her relationships with both these men.  Ultimately Peggy chooses her own actions because those relationships are so lopsided.  She can’t trust that they will believe her quick enough to catch Dottie and she runs off to do it herself, with zero resources.  If their relationships had been less one-sided - if Daniel had come to her sooner, if Jack had given her any real credit, she very well might have made a different decision.   (That’s not to say it’s completely one-sided, Daniel is quite open with her about his injury, how he feels about their coworkers, and his struggle with Ray K’s death.  Jack shares his deep private shame about Iwo Jima… but while emotionally they trust her, they’ve given her little trust in the work/intelligence realm specifically.)

Ultimately, post-interrogation she does open up just enough for the men to trust her in return enough to investigate her claims.  She hands over Steve Roger’s blood and that one act is enough to sway Daniel and to cause Jack to doubt her guilt enough to convince Dooley they need to investigate Ivchenko.  It’s commentary both on how important trust is AND how much further women have to expose themselves to earn trust from men. 

I don’t think Dottie ever addresses Daniel, either directly or in a snarky comment. Does anyone else recall an instance I’m missing?

She doesn’t say a word when they have their fight in the hall in 1x07.

She addresses him in 2x06 when he gets her with the net launcher: “You thought this would stop me?”

How fascinating. Is it because she knows he’s something of a match for her in a fight or something else? I seem to remember she was warier of him just before their fight too, when she didn’t seem too worried about the rest of the SSR agents.

And @eienvine​ adds:

I suspect that Dottie approaches everyone given on her reading of their status.  Jack and Daniel are both white men and then they are chiefs.  She generally ignores them because she thinks it’s the best way to irritate them–and angry people are easier to manipulated.  This is supported when alone with him, she treats Jack completely disrespectfully and constantly brings up Peggy.  It’s not just her obsession with Peggy, it’s the best way to get under his skin.

The sass everyone gets in Life of the Party is probably directed at Peggy even when it’s Jarvis, Sousa or Thompson receiving it.  Dottie knows that Peggy is listening, is frustrated by her injury and would rather be doing this her own damn self, or at least holding Dottie’s leash more directly.  Needling them is not only her personality but it’s a great way to destabilize the group as a whole.  (Also its how I wrote Dottie in My Favorite Kind of Trouble because her comments about Daniel are really about needling Peggy.)

Jason is an interesting case because she down right flirts with him.  This is probably both because as a black man, she sees him as more open to that type of manipulation, and because she knows it will annoy Peggy.  I think its also a better way for her to gather intelligence.  Dottie had clearly done recon on the SSR team back in Season 1: otherwise she wouldn’t know to become Peggy’s neighbor.  We can assume she knows some things about both Jack and Daniel from recon.  Jason is a new, unknown quantity. 

She’s a better spy than Peggy too:  eventually, Peggy gives Jason’s full name, involvement on this case and even tells Dottie the ultimate purpose behind the mission is to save Jason, when she’s trying to keep Jarvis focused on the task at hand. There was no reason for any of this.  Jason didn’t need to be in the lab when Peggy gave her the doodad for collecting zero matter, and she could have reminded Jarvis of what was at stake without mentioning Jason by name.

It’s this casual disregard for important information that gets Jason kidnapped, because then Dottie has it to give to Whitney Frost.  If Peggy had been more careful, Whitney may have just killed Dottie for being useless.  Peggy’s mistake her is not just getting Dottie involved, but being too distracted by her injury pain (I assume), her worry for Jason and Dottie’s needling to properly keep important information to herself.

Honestly, Peggy is kinda terrible at that anyway.  She’s too brash, even when she goes undercover to meet Chadwick or goes into Isodyne she tells them who she is.  This doesn’t line up with her becoming Director of SHIELD, so I guess at some point she learns how to be properly sneaky?

Such torture to revisit this AU … crack …. thing. :D (Even if it did take me … longer than intended to get to this prompt. Say, a couple of months. Ahem.)

Previous installments -

The original:

https://forest-of-stories.tumblr.com/post/142946943493/missbuster-peonymoss-laylainalaska

Follow-up in the tunnels under the school:

https://sholiofic.tumblr.com/post/154402464253/oh-my-gosh-i-just-realised-right-now-that-youre

—

Now that Daniel was free of the silver chains, his pained breathing had eased somewhat. Still, he looked in bad shape. Peggy knelt beside him, examining him by the glow of her phone’s screen; she wished all the fur wasn’t in the way so she could see if he was wounded. When she put her hand on his shoulder, he flinched as if it hurt him. “Can you change back?” she asked, but only got a faint whine in return.

“We have to get out of here,” Jack said softly. “Before his captors come back.”

Peggy looked up at him. By the phone’s dim glow, he looked paler than usual – and nervous. Not scared, exactly, but more ruffled than she was used to seeing him. He kept looking around.

“Yes,” she said, “and what do you know about that, anyway? You never did tell me why you’re helping me.”

“We can talk about that, just – somewhere else?” Jack glanced over his shoulder again. “Just see if you can get the Dog-Faced Boy there up and moving –”

Daniel jerked under Peggy’s hand, and suddenly the shaggy wolf’s body melted into a – oh no – very unclothed Daniel. Blushing, she tried to keep her eyes oriented appropriately and ignore all the naked Daniel that had suddenly appeared in her lap.

This got harder when Daniel whispered her name gratefully and reached up for her. Peggy hugged him, feeling him shivering against her.

“You came,” he whispered. “You came.”

“I’ll always come.” She pressed her hands to his back and he gave a sudden hiss of pain, making her pull away to look at him.

“Oh, Daniel,” she murmured. The chains had left red welts on his skin, crisscrossing on his back and wound around his arms. “How do you feel?”

She could see him start a dismissive answer, but it faded into a tired, rueful smile. “Terrible,” he groaned, and sat up shakily. Peggy helped him with a careful arm around his shoulders.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

“Can he ever?” Jack said.

Daniel looked up, seeming to become aware of Jack’s presence for the first time. “Peggy, I appreciate the rescue and all, but did you have to bring that jerk?”

“He was very helpful in finding you,” Peggy said, as she tried not to lean too much against Daniel (still not any less naked) and Jack smirked at them in his most annoying possible way. “Come on, let’s get you up. Can you walk more easily as a wolf?”

“I can,” Daniel said, wincing as she got his arm over her shoulders, “but the silver’s worse when I’m a wolf. I’m already starting to feel a little better. If I shift back, I might not be able to walk at all.”

It was hard to tell if his talk of feeling better was all bravado; he was still shivering against her. With a quick rustle and the flutter of a few dislodged cobwebs, Jack shed his expensive gray jacket and impatiently held it out. Daniel stared at it, looking baffled.

“For cryin’ out loud, Sousa, put this on and quit distracting Peggy. Let’s make sure she has at least a few working brain cells by the time we get out of here.”

Peggy wondered, as she frequently did around Jack, how it was possible for a person to evoke so many simultaneous, conflicting emotions (in this case, gratitude blended with the urge to shove his face into the nearest cobweb). She helped Daniel get the slightly too-large jacket on, and gave Jack a beseeching stare. Looking put upon, he moved forward and wrapped Daniel’s other arm around his shoulders.

For the first few steps they nearly pulled each other down, but they eventually found the rhythm of it and made decent progress – at least until Jack said, “Stop.”

Peggy halted, with Daniel weaving against her. His curly head rested against her shoulder. The walk seemed to be depleting what little strength he had left. “What?”

Jack was looking around again. “I don’t think this is the way back.”

“But we’re going exactly the way we came,” Peggy protested. She aimed her phone at their feet. “Look, that’s even our tracks there.”

“I know, but …” Jack frowned at the walls. “It doesn’t feel right. I thought so earlier, and now I’m sure of it. Vampires never get lost.”

This prompted Daniel to raise his head from Peggy’s shoulder. “Really? Those sound like famous last words to me.”

“What about your famous werewolf sense of smell?” Jack shot back. “Take a sniff and tell me what you think.”

Daniel looked like he was gearing up for a rebuttal, but then he frowned. “Huh. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think he might be right. There’s magic here; I can smell it.”

“You can smell magic?” Peggy asked.

“Sometimes I can.” Daniel sniffed the air again. “And right now I think there’s some kind of spell mixing us up, making it hard for us to find our way back.”

“Wonderful,” Jack snapped. “Remind me to stay home on the next poorly conceived rescue mission.”

After a moment, Peggy said, “Looking on the bright side, it will save me from having to ask Ms. Fry for an extension on the Latin assignment I should have started a week ago.”

Chief? Chief, what do we do?

Endless list of favourite characters → Peggy Carter, Marvel’s Agent Carter

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