#sagesiren

His mother’s follow-up scans come back clear. She tells him that in one breath, and tells him in the next that she’s so looking forward to meeting Peggy this upcoming Saturday.

“I don’t want to put this off until the next time I have a health scare,” she says. “And I could tell she’s important to you just by the way you said her name.”

So in his relief at her news, and to his later horror, instead of saying that he and Peggy have broken up, instead of saying that she has an emergency, instead of saying that she’s gone back to England indefinitely and they’ll just have to do it some other time, he says, “We’re looking forward to it to.”

When Steve confesses his predicament, Bucky laughs so hard that he slips off of his stool at Finnegan’s and almost knocks himself out on the bar.

“Could you at least help while you’re doing that?” Steve asks, torn between impatience and desperation, but his best friend just collapses into laughter again.

His mother already knows most of his friends. He supposes he could hire someone, but that seems like it might be taking it a step too far. And anyway, he’s overwhelmingly thankful that his mother is still healthy; it seems ungrateful, a temptation of fate, to give more weight and trickery to the lie.

Which means that there’s really only one thing left to do.

It doesn’t mean he’s relishing the prospect under the circumstances.

(Though he wouldn’t exactly be opposed to it under others.)

He asks Peggy Carter out for what’s probably the strangest date of her life and certainly the strangest of his on Monday, just as they’re finishing their lunch break. The rest of the crew, coolers over their shoulders, is already heading back over to the job site - Morita knocking his knuckles against that hideous brown hard hat of Dugan’s, Jacques explaining something as Gabe leans in - but Steve always does a quick sweep for trash just to make sure they’ve left the area clear. Peggy is heading in the other direction to track down Phillips. The boss is still legendarily prickly, but he doesn’t trust any architect but her these days.

“Peggy,” Steve forces himself to call before she’s disappeared. He wishes that this were just another one of those times that he had called her back for those innocuous, desperate five extra minutes of chatting. “I need to—Would you—Can I ask you a question? A favor, I guess?”

She tilts her head in invitation and he spills the story as quickly as he can, the rip-off-the-bandaid method.

“—and if you aren’t busy on Saturday, I was wondering if you could come over to say hi to her. It wouldn’t have to be for long, but it would make her really happy and I would—I’d really appreciate it. I can’t tell you how much.”

He stuffs his twisting hands into his pockets as he finishes, and pushes back his shoulders, hoping that he’ll still have a bit of dignity even once she’s rejected him. He doesn’t think she’ll be mean about it - he knows who Peggy is, the type of person to hand back hammers to the apprentices who’ve dropped them with a wordless wink, the type who lets someone else pick the takeout place if they’re having a bad day even when it’s her turn - but still, she’s Peggy Carter, and he’s Steve Rogers, the random guy who she knows from job sites and now the time he’d lied to his mother about dating her and then asked her to help him keep up the ruse.

“That certainly is a predicament,” she says instead of any of the gentle letdowns he was imagining. “But I must ask: why did you pick me?” It’s chilly today but bright, and the noon sun glints off her hair. He catches a smile, there and gone again, at the corners of her mouth.

“I said the first name that came into my head,” he tells her honestly, and then, just as honestly, “And I knew that my mother would like you, if you ever happened to meet each other.”

“Hmm,” says Peggy, smile all the way gone now, as if he’s disappointed her somehow. Her eyes are still soft, though. “Well, I suppose it’s quite lucky I am free on Saturday, then.”

“Lucky,” Steve echoes, and tries to figure out whether it’s true.

“You absolutely will not go out in this weather,” his mother admonishes, her arms set in a way that Steve is extremely familiar with.

“I’m certain that the subway—” Peggy starts.

“Of course the subway will be running,” Sarah says with the confidence of a born New Yorker. “Late and jam-packed, announcing that they’re going express any damn time, and there’s no reason for you to be on it.”

Peggy looks over to Steve as if he might step in, but even as he gives her a wide-eyed, helpless shrug, his mother is already leaving the living room and heading down the hall, calling, “I’ll get fresh sheets for you two, Steve, but please find Peggy something to wear.” (Sarah Rogers is surprisingly strong, but she’s also rail thin and an extremely charitable five foot two, and Peggy is...not. Something Steve has absolutely no complaints about, to be frank.)

They’ve told his mother that they’ve been seeing each other for nearly six months - Steve mostly left that part of the storytelling up to Peggy, who managed to spin something that had enough details to seem plausible but wasn’t so elaborate that Steve had felt bad about misleading his mother with a fairy tale. But even if their relationship was real, there’s no reason to assume that they would have spent the night with each other, that they would be comfortable sharing a bedroom.

“I’ll sleep out here,” Steve says immediately and with vehemence.

Peggy casts her eye over the couch, more of a loveseat really; the living room is too small for much else. “Will you be removing your head or your feet to fit, then?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

Voice low to avoid his mother’s uncanny hearing, he says, “This whole day has already been more than you agreed to. I don’t want to force you into a situation that would make you uncomfortable.”

“I would say the same as it regards you,” she responds. “And if I was uncomfortable with the situation, I believe I would be the first to know. Now, I think I was promised something to sleep in?”

The collection of clothes he keeps at his mother’s is small, but he manages to dig up a large T-shirt and a pair of flannel pants for Peggy and the same for himself. She smiles at him, leaving to change, and he takes the opportunity to do the same before turning to put the sheets his mother had found on the beds, faced head-on with the reminder of the close quarters of his bedroom.

There isn’t much to see: his bed, the tiny closet, a dresser. He used to do his homework at the kitchen table because there wasn’t room for a desk. His bed frame had been a gift representing several birthdays and a Christmas as well, back in elementary school. Every other weekend, he would slide the trundle bed out, gleeful to finally have a chance to have sleepovers with Bucky somewhere other than in sleeping bags on the living room rug. The pull-out had used up all the extra floor space and he’d had to crawl off the end of the bed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, but when he and Buck were telling each other scary stories quietly enough that his mother wouldn’t hear or reading comics under the covers, taking turns holding the shared flashlight, what had it mattered?

It definitely seems to matter now.

He stares at the two beds, tucked compactly side by side, and realizes that soon he and Peggy are going to be lying in them. Even if he pushes them as far apart as possible, it would be barely two inches before the dresser got in the way. No matter what, their hands could touch across that gap. If she’s a mobile sleeper, they could end up practically curled around one another…

He scrubs a hand vigorously over his face, mussing his hair and probably leaving him red-cheeked, but gathering himself. He makes both beds with care, returning to the linen closet to add top sheets, comforters, and light blankets too; he has no idea how Peggy likes to sleep.

The thought leaves him wide-eyed once again, but it’s too late to force his thoughts elsewhere. Peggy knocks just then, and he tells her to come in, hoping that his voice sounds normal as he does.

“I should have gotten you a toothbrush,” he says immediately upon seeing her, ready to scramble over and take care of it, but she waves a hand.

“Your mother gave me one. She also added my clothing to a basket of laundry she was taking downstairs so I would have ‘something fresh to wear in the morning.’ She wouldn’t hear any protests.”

As if she couldn’t have already figured it out from everything else today, Steve says, “She’s like that.”

“Yes,” Peggy says, thankfully amused. “I assumed.” She turns to the beds and asks, “Now, which would you like?”

Which one he’d like? He can’t think of anything that could matter less. He lists for her the pros and cons of each bed with the care usually reserved for life-changing decisions. She follows along seriously, though he recognizes the touch of humor around her mouth.

Ten minutes later, he is lying on the trundle, and she has her back to him as she examines the spines of the books on the small shelf mounted beside his bed.

She has washed her makeup off and her hair is in a single, simple braid. He’s heard the guys on the crew refer to certain women as “unbelievably beautiful.” Peggy isn’t that. She looks exactly as pretty right now as he had imagined she would, exactly as pretty as she does in her jeans and sensible blouse and Day-Glo vest on the construction site, or the time he had seen her dressed up in a gown for some awards gala, or when he had picked her up that morning and saw her wearing that red sweater with a black pencil skirt and felt lucky just to be walking next to her.

Still, he does find looking at her just now a bit hard. Difficult, he amends quickly, shoving the word hard away. She’s somewhat difficult to look at like this, unraveled and lovely.

“How fantastically minded you were,” she comments, smiling over her shoulder before flipping over to face him. “Is this still the sort of thing you like to read?”

“I usually end up with a bit of everything,” he admits. “But yeah, there’s some great sci-fi and fantasy being written these days.”

“It can be nice,” she says, “visiting other worlds.”

“It can be,” he agrees, not telling her that that’s what today has felt like: however awkwardly, unconventionally attained, it’s been like a brief, wonderful visit to another world.

They were only meant to stay for brunch.

“Don’t cook anything,” he had begged his mother. She was always covering shifts for other people, running errands for neighbors when she wasn’t working, on her feet all day regardless. Having a day off where she hadn’t already scheduled sixteen things was something of a miracle, and he was going to force her to take advantage of it. “I’ll cook.”

Voice somewhat insultingly skeptical down the phone, she’d said, “So, do you already know that this woman has a cast-iron stomach, or are you looking to poison a guest in my home, Steven Rogers?”

In the end, they’d agreed that he would take care of picking up fresh bagels from their favorite place. Of course, when Steve and Peggy arrived, his mother had already set out lox, cut fruit and vegetables, hard boiled eggs, and about six different types of cream cheese.

“You promised not to make anything,” Steve said irritably, giving his mother a hug.

“I promised not to cook,” she corrected. “Boiling a few eggs isn’t cooking. Even you can do that, after all.” And Peggy laughed from beside Steve and stepped forward to introduce herself.

Steve had promised Peggy that they wouldn’t stay longer than a couple of hours, and so at exactly 1:30 he glanced noticeably at his watch and asked if she needed to go to “that other thing you had scheduled.”

“Thankfully not,” she smiled, finishing her piece of crumb cake (his mother swore she just happened to have it left over). “I postponed it, and I’m certainly happy that I did.”

And despite the situation, Steve was happy too - happy that she’d come, happy that she stayed. She and his mother traded stories about their respective jobs, lamenting that even though they were of different generations and worked in completely different fields, one with women as the majority and one with them in the minority, they had so many of the same experiences: dealing with stressed or snappish or condescending people, having their knowledge and authority questioned, and managing to get enormous, important work done skillfully anyway.

“I still love it,” Peggy had said as they moved from the kitchen table to the living room. (Steve barely thought about taking the seat beside Peggy, and then started overthinking why he hadn’t considered more.) “Despite everything, I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Sarah, voice already fond, as if she’s known Peggy more than a few hours. “I wouldn’t either.”

They’d talked about how Steve had taken shop class in high school - a few knickknacks he’d made were even still scattered around the apartment for his mother to show off; when she’d passed one over to him, even though he recognized its amateurishness, he felt a tenderness fill him, as if he was holding the hand of a younger version of himself. When he passed it to Peggy, he felt the gentleness of her hand on it too.

Later, he would realize that it was a bit suspicious for him to talk about how he’d gone from an A- in Shop to a carpentry apprenticeship to starting to work with Phillips’s general contracting company: surely if they had truly been dating, they would have talked about it all at some point before. But in the moment all he saw was the flicker in her eye as she told him that, oh, she certainly remembered his first day working with the crew.

It wasn’t that they didn’t notice the weather turning - the first flakes fell as the light began dimming low and gray toward evening - it was only that they were a bit busy making hot drinks and setting up the Trivial Pursuit board. This was probably how Steve would have been spending his afternoon regardless, but he watched Peggy carefully for signs that she was eager for an escape and simply too polite to say so. He even leaned over when his mother excused herself briefly and asked whether she was sure she still wanted to stay, to which she had responded, “I’ll almost certainly have my sports and leisure wedge after my next turn. Why in the world would I leave?”

When Steve went downstairs to retrieve the Thai takeout they had ordered, he did see that it was getting pretty messy outside. The wind had a bite to it, too, so he gave his order of miso soup to the man who’d delivered the food alongside the tip, and decided to see if there was an extra pair of boots around for Peggy to use later.

But after they’d finished with their dinner and watching The Sound of Music, which had been just starting as they’d flipped through TV channels, his mother had turned to the nine o’clock news, saw how hard the snow was coming down, and refused to be persuaded that a change in footwear would be enough. Truthfully, Steve would probably have stayed without question if he had been by himself, but the fact is that he came with Peggy. Peggy, who had stayed long past the anticipated two hours. Peggy, who he was not actually dating. Peggy, who he was now meant to sleep beside.

“I’m sorry for the early night,” he apologizes again as they lie together in the darkness with the radiator hissing slightly. Not realizing how things would turn out today, he had scheduled a 9 A.M. consult with a couple who were looking to have some built-in bookshelves added and he has be up early enough to bring Peggy home and get back to his apartment to change before heading into Manhattan.

“It’s no trouble,” she assures him again. “There’s nothing at all the matter with getting a good night’s rest.”

“And I’m sorry again about everything. About how today turned out, and for getting you into it into the first place.”

“Oh Steve,” she sighs. “Will you shut up about that, please?” and even though her tone lacks sharpness, the words are enough for him to flip over toward her in surprise. “I truly enjoyed myself today. And I would have come even if you had simply asked me without any sort of exceptional circumstances.”

“What do you—?”

“I liked meeting your mother. She’s nothing at all like mine, which perhaps is why I appreciate her so much. I liked sitting around and talking, playing games and eating good food and singing along with Julie Andrews, and I liked spending time with you.” Her voice dips even softer. “I liked it all, and I would have come anyway, if you had only asked.”

With the cloud cover and the snow still coming down, the window lets in little light. He can’t make out her expression, can’t see if she’s just saying things out of tiredness, or reminiscing about a pleasant afternoon, or if she might just be hinting at something which would justify the elevated beating of his heart.

He nearly thanks her for being a good friend, but somehow, the way that she’s turned onto her side to face him as well, an invitation, makes him breathe in and say, “But you’re Peggy Carter. I don’t know why you would have bothered.”

“Is that what you think of me?” she asks. He’s never heard her voice with that twisting edge to it and it takes a moment for him to recognize it: hurt. “That I’m some high and mighty miss, and I would never deign to even look at the likes of you?”

“No!” he says, not frantic, hard and simple and factual, trying to make her see. “It’s just that you’re Peggy Carter,” he repeats. “There are probably a dozen awards on your shelves. I’ve seen you skewer guys with a half dozen words for propositioning you, then get right back to work. Phillips doesn’t like anyone except his dog, but he turns down projects if you aren’t going to be working on them. You wanted to design buildings and you made that happen for yourself. You’ve worked on dozens of projects and they’re all different but I’ve wanted to stay in each one, even the offices.” His voice doesn’t drop as he continues, even as he half hopes that his words will be lost in the pillow beneath his head. “You’re creative and determined and gorgeous and fascinating and funny. Just talking to you should be any thinking person’s favorite thing. And I’m only a guy.”

She inhales deeply through her nose, as if she is trying to keep her temper somehow, but when she speaks, her voice is calm. “When there are novices on a job, you’re the one who helps them through their nerves and shows them the right way to do things. Other women have told me that they like to work on the same site as you because they know you would never make them uncomfortable and you’ve fought anyone who tried. After an evening out, you give your share of the tip and then stay behind and add a bit extra. You do it every time, Steve. I’ve watched you.”

“Anyone could—”

“The first day I met you,” she interrupts, “you introduced yourself to Mr. Jarvis. Most people don’t, you know. They’re too busy noticing Howard to even pay attention. The day after, you brought soup for Ana because you had heard she was ill. I don’t know anyone else who would have done that, bring soup for someone who he’d never met, the wife of the electrician’s admin he’d only known for a day.” Even with the hiss and clank of the heating, he thinks he can make out every dimension of the breath she takes in before she adds, low and direct, “You’re loyal and sharp and kind, you make wonderful art and adore your mother, and you’re so upstandingly moral I half expect you to ride into work one day on a white steed. Had you not kept moving away every time I tried to get near, I would have asked you out long ago. And if you had asked me all the way back then, before I knew anything else, I would have said yes too, just because of the soup.”

It’s been three years since he started working with Phillips, three years of watching from across construction zones as she cut stubborn men down to size with a sharp word (or her fist if necessary), of lingering at lunch for the chance to see her smile or hear her opinion on current affairs or some article that they had both read. All that time of thinking that she would never possibly consider him more than a friend, and she already had.

“Can I—” he starts, his hand moving tentatively into the tiny space between their beds. She catches his fingers with hers and lifts them to her mouth, placing a delicate kiss on the backs of his knuckles. His breath comes sharply into his lungs.

He has, a time or two thousand, pictured some imaginary world where she might kiss him one day. This isn’t at all how he envisioned it in any of those dreams - they were never in side-by-side twin beds at his mother’s house, for one thing.

Nothing in him cares.

When she says goodbye to him the next morning, his mother gives him an innocent smile and a reminder to drop by a Duane Reade for chapstick and...anything else they might need. He almost tells her that they were only kissing, but doesn’t think it will help. Besides, he was trying to avoid embarrassing details by stripping the beds before she woke up so she wouldn’t notice that the sheets had only been truly mussed on one.

(He wouldn’t have been expecting that sleeping in a narrow bed with Peggy half sprawled on top of him would be wonderful, but he’ll be the first to admit that he isn’t right about everything.)

Exactly fifty-one weeks later, his mother asks him how he and Peggy are celebrating their anniversary. He’s halfway through telling her before he realizes that she’s not supposed to know that it’s their anniversary at all, that she’s still meant to think they’ve been together a year and a half already.

“As if you’ve been able to lie to me once in your life, Steven Rogers,” she says with a laugh. “You said her name and I knew that you weren’t telling me the whole truth the same moment I knew that she meant something to you anyway. Now tell me about the ring.”

“How did you—?”

He has the feeling she’s waving a dismissive hand on her end of the phone. “Nothing in the world easier than reading you, sweetheart.” Her tone turns a bit thoughtful. “Peggy, on the other hand, she’s a bit harder. But even that first time you brought her here, I could tell. When the time comes for you to ask, she’ll say yes.”

There had been a bit of extortion involved in the whole business. Six months ago, Peggy had agreed to allow Angie to start setting her up. But after multiple mediocre dates (and one which ended in a well-deserved black eye for the man in question) she had begged off and refused to be convinced otherwise, even when Angie complained that this would ruin her credibility as a romance columnist and swore over and over that she had actually found the absolute perfect guy this time, the one Peggy would truly regret not meeting.

It isn’t that Peggy doesn’t want a relationship. She isn’t being too picky, and she hasn’t decided that her career should be her focus just now. But planning, the precise thing which has served her well her entire life in so many areas, seems to have failed her now. Online dating, singles mixers, allowing herself to be set up by friends, all the tried and tested strategies - nothing has led her to anyone she would even consider as a lifetime companion, and just this once, she has decided that she will leave things up to chance.

Standing firm on the dating question, however, apparently meant that Peggy was required to join Angie whenever requested and to do whatever favors she required in exchange for reneging on their original agreement.

In the end, though, spending a Saturday with her best friend is always enjoyable, even if they’re sorting the belongings of a recently deceased ninety-eight year old woman who Angie refers to as “the old bat.” They try to one up each other for the oddest item found in their cleaning, and eat their way through altogether too many pastries. As they trade off picking playlists, Angie even provokes Peggy’s competitive spirit enough that they both end up showing off their dance moves.

After eight hours of work, Angie decides that they have done enough for one day, even though they’re nowhere close to finished.

“Sixty years of crap isn’t going to shift itself in one try,” she shrugs cheerfully, searching within one of the scattered “keep” boxes for her other glove. “And I was forced to do all this out of oldest granddaughter sexism. I’ll come back next week and make my cousins help.”

Peggy laughs, retrieving the missing glove from beneath the once-fancy living room settee. The two of them gather the rest of their belongings, making certain the lights are turned out before they weave around the boxes to get to the front door.

On the threshold, Angie digs for the keys to lock up the brownstone, a beautiful Brooklyn property which her family couldn’t have bought with the help of a fairy godmother if they had wanted to try today. Peggy breathes in the sharp cold of the night air, turns to comment on it to her friend, then spins immediately back around as a snowball whizzes past her ear and explodes on the façade of the house just beside her.

A man’s voice from somewhere out on the darkened street shouts, “Bucky, what the—” Cutting himself off before actually verbalizing whatever curse he clearly wants to, the man changes tone, calling, “Peppermint hot chocolate for anyone who hits Bucky in the next five minutes.”

In the next second, the street comes so alive with childish chatter that Peggy can’t believe she didn’t notice the apparent army of little ones nearby. Over their whoops and cries, another man yells, “Not my fault that your shot went out of bounds. I just ducked - self preservation instincts, Rogers, if you’ve ever heard of them.”

Squinting into the dim streetlight, Peggy pinpoints where the second man’s voice is coming from, just as the thickly swaddled shape of him is tackled by several smaller forms and pelted with snow from all sides. Another shadow breaks away from the place on the street where last night’s half foot of snow has turned into haphazard forts on either side of a snowy battlefield, jogging toward where Peggy and Angie still stand on the steps.

“I’m sorry about the snowball attack there,” he apologizes as soon as he’s close enough. “We don’t usually drag strangers into our fights, or at least not before we’ve learned their names.”

Peggy hasn't been in a snowball fight since she was twelve - well, fourteen, if she’s being honest - declaring war on her brother Michael back at their house in Hampstead when they were both home from school for the term holiday. Perhaps she's been a bit infected by the lively afternoon or the stress of the past several weeks is finally catching up to her, but she finds herself turning and saying to a man she has never before met, "My name is Peggy Carter, and I'd be delighted to be recruited if there's room for one more, considering that hostilities have already been accidentally declared."

Apparently he didn’t expect a response like this, a strange woman deciding to take a chance. His eyes widen, but only for a moment before he says, "Well, sure, there's plenty of snow."

Glancing back at Angie, Peggy tells her, "There's no need to wait for me while I indulge myself in a bit of winter warfare, of course. Go off home and put your feet up."

But Angie instead looks delighted in a way that's almost outsized for her best friend taking her recommendation to relax a bit. "Oh, I'd never miss this," she says. "I'll just watch our things and spectate from over here." And she unhooks Peggy's purse from her shoulder and shoos her off toward the battlefield.

"Steve," the man says as they set off up the street together. "I'm Steve. Steve Rogers. By the way."

"Lovely to meet you," she says politely.

She isn't particularly prepared for this sort of activity - her boots are fairly practical for walking from apartment to subway stop to office though clearly are not meant to do much heavier lifting - but she ventures that it can be forgiven considering how spur of the moment the entire thing has been. However, Steve is not, Peggy notices, exactly dressed for the weather either. It’s a bit too cold for a waist length peacoat, thin gloves, and a loosely hanging scarf, and he seems to have half soaked through everything. When they pass under a streetlight, she looks up toward him and observes that his cheeks are flushed red, though it actually suits him quite well, making the blue of his eyes shine.

"Were you pulled into this under similar circumstances?" she asks.

He laughs a little shyly. "No, Bucky—My friend, Bucky - you'll meet him in a minute—Anyway, his mother invited a bunch of their family over for the afternoon, and between all the cousins there are a dozen kids running around these days. We just volunteered to keep them occupied."

She wants to ask exactly where he fits into the structure of his friend’s family, but they are nearing the place where the children are still shouting and pelting Steve's friend.

"I've brought someone else to even out the teams," Steve calls, and the kids leave off, coming to surround the newcomer instead.

After introductions have been made - Steve's friend Bucky gives Peggy a look which is strangely appraising but completely without objectification - Peggy is informed of the rules (no faces, no sand or rocks mixed with your projectiles, ten seconds of reprieve after you've ducked behind the walls of your team's fort) and assigned a team (Steve's, which sends a thrill running through her which she doesn't care to examine, settling for a decisive head nod and a small smile in his direction).

She had forgotten, in the years since she had last participated in a snowball fight, exactly how exhilarating it could be. Her careful plans for methodical stockpiling and adherence to ideal technique are soon thrown out the window in her haste to simply get the next missile prepared and launched at the opposition. As she and a small girl named Iris fling nearly loose snow at the other side of the street, she finds herself laughing more freely than she has in ages. At one point, she and Steve end up huddled against the wall of the fort next to each other.

"Your hands must be freezing," he comments, and when she looks down in surprise at her red fingers, she realizes that he is right. He strips off his sodden gloves and wraps his hands around hers, trying to press some heat back into them. It’s futile, considering that his hands, while larger, aren’t any warmer, but she doesn’t stop him. When he tries to pass his gloves over to her, however, she declines with a smile.

"Oh, I could never allow anything to interfere with my process."

"Right." He unwraps his scarf instead, offering it to her. "Maybe this way at least some of you will be warm, and you won’t lose your edge either."

She won't swear that it's feeling the wool still toasty from his neck which allows her to jump back into the fray with renewed vigor, but she certainly wouldn't swear otherwise.

Her watch and phone are buried within her coat, but it cannot be much later when the door to what Peggy guesses is Bucky's mother's house opens and a group of people starts to stream out, each member gravitating over to collect particular children. Peggy stands at the sidelines as Steve and Bucky are kissed on the cheeks and thanked for their babysitting efforts. Angie ambles over just as the last of the kids, little Iris, is taken off with a wave of her cheerfully red mitten.

“Enjoy yourself, English?” she calls, grinning as she picks her way down the sidewalk around the disarranged clumps of snow. “Haven’t seen you have this much fun in ages, although it’s also reminding me why I’m never playing laser tag with you again.”

“My skill doesn’t only apply to snow. I’m a bit of a laser markswoman,” Peggy tells Steve who has returned to her side, apparently having finished being showered with familial affection by Bucky’s relatives.

“Laser sharpshooter,” Angie corrects. “Laser sniper. Laser no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners—”

“Angie?”

Bucky has joined them, looking at Angie with surprise which turns quickly into a smile and a hug.

“Bucky Barnes!” Angie says after they’ve broken away. She’s still framing him with a hand on each arm but she lets go to give him a friendly whack on the shoulder. “I should have known there couldn’t be that many Buckys in Brooklyn.” Stepping back so she can face Steve and Peggy fully, she says, “Bucky and I are...I mean, Bucky’s mom and my mom are...Well, we’re...We must be—” She glances up, clearly trying to mentally map out a family tree.

“We’re cousins, somehow,” Bucky fills in smoothly. “Just like me and half the neighborhood.”

It occurs to Peggy that the situation might be awkward - they had just seen a number of Bucky’s relations leaving a gathering to which Angie clearly hasn’t been invited - but Bucky says, without apparent unease, “I guess you’re in the area to clean out your grandma’s place?” and then adds as an afterthought, “God rest her.”

Angie rolls her eyes, though not, Peggy suspects, at Bucky’s insincere tone. “My mother kept making noises that Jersey was too far to come for just the day and couldn’t I just take care of it, so I finally gave in.” She loops her arm through Peggy’s. “Carter here has been the perfect assistant - without her, I’d have either tried to keep everything or just backed the garbage truck up to the front door and set up a funnel.”

“You’d never - you might miss out on some heirloom to hold over everyone’s heads,” Peggy says with an affectionate elbow to Angie’s side. “And I certainly had my fill of fun sorting through objects from decades gone by, along with that snowball battling which capped things off perfectly. But I think it might be time that I started making my way home.” She truly has had a wonderful afternoon, the sort which will live fondly in her memory (including the feeling of Steve’s hands wrapped with such gentle and precise strength around hers), but the idea of a steaming bath and freshly laundered pajamas sounds absolutely heavenly at the moment.

“Oh,” Steve says softly. He extends a hand. “Well, it was nice to—”

“No,” says Bucky, shaking his head, and “No!” Angie adds with hasty vehemence.

“I’m sorry?” Peggy angles herself to try to see Angie’s face, but it’s Bucky who answers.

“You’re soaking wet, and I’m guessing that you don’t live on the next block. My mother would kill me if she found out I didn’t at least give you something dry to get home in.”

“It’s a lovely offer—” Peggy starts to demur, although she is now noticing that she’s quite chilly and it is going to be a bit of a slog home. Before she can get any farther, however, the door to Bucky’s family home opens up and a woman stands silhouetted in the spilling light.

“James Buchanan Barnes, I hope that you weren’t thinking of leaving these two young ladies out here in the cold without inviting them in to warm up.” She walks carefully down the steps, arms crossed over her chest, but she throws them open as she spots who is standing there. “Angie Martinelli, is that you? Wonderful to see you, sweetheart, come here!”

Angie releases Peggy to submit to a hug and a rapid-fire back and forth of greeting. Peggy suspects that their chances of making a smooth escape have just decreased rather dramatically.

“I’ve known Mrs. Barnes all my life,” Steve says quietly from over Peggy’s shoulder. “She’s never going to let you get away with leaving before you at least have on dry socks. And anyway, I promised hot chocolate to whoever managed to hit Bucky, and I definitely saw you paste him at least once.”

She smiles despite herself. “I believe it was peppermint hot chocolate which was promised.”

He laughs as their eyes meet, though his flick downward just after, a new flush filtering through his cheeks that she suspects has nothing to do with the cold.

“And who do we have here?” Mrs. Barnes asks, clearly finished cooing over Angie.

Peggy turns, smile still on her face. “Lovely to meet you, Mrs. Barnes. I’m Peggy Carter.”

“Get out of here while you can,” Bucky whispers fifteen minutes later, and Angie nods, telling Peggy, “If I ever need you to take a bullet for me, I expect you to remember this moment.”

“Why on earth would we be standing beside each other with bullets flying?” Peggy asks, eyebrow gracefully arched.

Before either of the others can reply, however, Steve takes Peggy’s hand from behind and tugs her away, whispering, “They’re not wrong,” as Mrs. Barnes returns with arms stacked with twenty-year-old photo albums.

“I promised Peggy something hot to drink,” he tells Mrs. Barnes more loudly. She waves them off, probably half from good hostess instincts and half eagerness to force the remaining two into a walk down memory lane.

It doesn’t escape Peggy’s notice that Steve doesn’t relinquish her hand until they’re safely in the kitchen, although it’s quite apparent where it is. She can’t say that she minds, however. With neither of them wet and frozen any longer, it’s much easier to appreciate the gentle solidity of his fingers, the press of their palms against each other.

Too soon for her to have cataloged the sensation entirely, Steve lets her go and starts moving around to the pantry and cupboards. Peggy stands watching him, curling her toes against the floor in the borrowed socks she is now wearing along with an absolutely divinely plush gray cardigan loaned to her by Mrs. Barnes. The lady of the house had insisted on adding the wettest items to the dryer - “As if I would let you back out into the street like that to freeze. My mother would come back and haunt me!” - which had included Peggy’s blouse and coat, though luckily not her singlet or her jeans (damp, but dark enough to have avoided scrutiny, so Peggy hadn’t needed to strategize a polite objection to wearing someone else’s trousers).

“I hesitate to offer considering my skills in this area, but can I do anything to help?” she finally asks.

Steve shakes his head as he sets a saucepan on the stove. “This is about the only thing I can make, but I can do it with my eyes closed.” He gestures her over to a seat, which she takes.

“Why was peppermint hot chocolate the one recipe you ever learned?” she wonders as he lights a burner and adds together milk, cocoa powder, chocolate chips, and a bit of sugar.

“I learned plenty,” he says, angling himself to see her and stir at the same time. “This was just the only one that stuck. My mom worked a lot, and plenty of night shifts. It was just the two of us, so I wanted to make sure she would come home to something warm and good after all of that. She passed a while back, but I still make it for Bucky’s family when I’m around - they’ve always been great to me.”

“Ah,” Peggy says, trying to sound normal and satisfied with his answer instead of a bit overcome by his factual sweetness, the way he seems completely unresentful of the multitude of Barnes relatives while he apparently has no family left. She clears her throat. “And what is it you do, other than distribute homemade hot beverages?”

He flashes a bit of a smile at her, tucking his hands into the pocket of the sweatshirt he had borrowed from Bucky’s old bedroom upstairs. His hair is adorably mussed from pulling it over his head, and Peggy can’t quite tear her eyes away.

“I run the art program over at the community center,” he says, turning to add a few drops of something to the chocolate mixture. From the scent which suffuses the air, Peggy guesses that it’s peppermint flavoring. “Afternoon classes, activities with the schools, workshops. My under-twelve group just put up a display at the local library if you want to go visit.” He sounds absurdly proud.

“How wonderful.” The words come out even more softly than she had thought they would. She tries to pull herself together with the crispness of tapping straight a stack of papers, but doesn’t quite manage it. The soft smile won’t leave her face and she wonders if it might be a permanent fixture now. Oh, they’ll certainly go their separate ways shortly, but she feels that there was some amount of luck involved in her having had the chance to meet him in the first place.

Blinking a little, he turns away and unwraps a few of the peppermint candies Mrs. Barnes has set out in a dish on the counter. “What do you do?” he asks, crushing the candies with the handle of a knife.

Feeling her smile fade a bit into something more businesslike, less touched by gentle joy, Peggy says, “I’m the policy director for a non-profit.” It’s her standard response, the beginning of a slow wade into the more detailed answer. It is also, she has to admit, the beginning of a test, one which nearly all the potential partners Angie had tried to set her up with ended up failing.

“Which one?” Steve asks, gliding unknowingly through the first level of scrutiny as he scrapes the crushed peppermints into a palm and deposits them into the pot, beginning to stir again. (Peggy still sometimes finds herself surprised at how many people are so eager to turn the topic back to themselves that they accept the most simplistic answer and move along.)

“The INRJ,” Peggy says. It seems that she’s holding her breath just a bit as she gives her usual pause. She finds that she does not want Steve to make a misstep in this. She thinks she might forgive him if he did.

“The International Network for Reproductive Justice, right?” The way he gives her a look, double checking, deferring to her knowledge: if there were truly points, he would have earned himself a bonus just then. “Back when it was the International Pro-Choice Network, my mom used to bring me along to play under the table while she was stuffing envelopes or phone banking.” He tilts his head to the side and adds, “Bucky actually reminded me of that a few weeks ago - he saw an ad for the symposium you were holding and thought I should check it out.”

“Oh, yes,” she says, using the reminder of work to shore herself up a bit from melting. “I was meant to speak about the effects of the global gag rule, but I ended up sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow instead.”

He makes a commiserating face. “They did say that the talk about adoption and foster care in eastern European countries was a last minute replacement, although the speaker was really good. I hadn’t realized that was supposed to be your spot. I’m sorry you didn’t get a chance to speak; I would have liked to hear what you had to say.”

“Yes,” she says, slightly dazedly, the word nearly lost in the sound as he snaps off the burner. “Natasha is quite talented. She always gives a good presentation.”

“The community health initiatives to reduce parent and child mortality in Sierra Leone sounded like amazing stuff too.” He’s still talking as he reaches into a cabinet for a pair of mugs, apparently not noticing her reaction. “I ended up donating to the hospital building fund after I got home.”

She’s told dozens of men over the years what she does for her job, and the responses have run the gamut from indifference to confusion to polite questions, from furious rants about the sanctity of life to pompous assurances of allyship. This is the first time she’s heard one of them discuss her organization’s projects with true interest, the first time everything seems to have been said genuinely and unprompted and without the aim of impressing her.

Which is why it does all the more.

“I was glad Bucky suggested it,” Steve tells her, setting her mug in front of her. He takes a seat across from her, his own mug in hand. “He’s been trying to get me to go to all of these random places lately, and the symposium was one of the more interesting.”

“I’ve actually been experiencing the same thing with Angie,” Peggy says, seizing on the topic as a way to keep her equilibrium. “In the last month she’s taken me to a wine and cheese tasting, a Broadway play, and an art showing at the Sage Gallery, which I actually think I would have enjoyed if I hadn’t needed to spend most of it in the stairwell on a conference call.”

Steve, who had been about to take a sip from his mug, lowers it back to the table. With care, he says, “Bucky tried to get me to go to a wine and cheese night but I had to fill in running a watercolors class at the senior center. We went to a Broadway play but ended up switching seats with mom and little kid so they could be on the aisle.” Voice dropping a bit, he adds, “And I had a showing of some paintings at the Sage Gallery three weeks ago.”

They glance in unison toward the living room, as if they might establish some facts by merely turning in the direction of their friends, but all they hear is the low sound of chatter and laughter.

“Angie has arranged so many dreadful dates for me in the past,” Peggy says, leaning over the table to speak to him quietly. “I told her she wasn’t allowed anymore.”

Steve nods. “When Buck sets me up, they always think I’m going to be just like him, and it’s awful to see their faces when they realize I’m not. I just wanted a break from having to sit through dinner with someone who was disappointed that it was me there.”

The mug is hot against her palms, and she finds herself taking in deep breaths of peppermint-scented steam. “One of these days, he’s certain to find you someone who isn’t an utter bloody fool, then,” she says, and though she truly means the words, they come out soft instead of sharp, an outstretched hand.

“I sort of think,” Steve says, tipping his chin up so his eyes catch the light even as they lock with hers. “I sort of think that he’s been trying.”

Later that night, once she’s tucked away in bed, she thinks about fate and design, the overlap between them, and decides that it doesn’t matter how the moment comes to be if she doesn’t do anything with it. She takes a deep breath and texts him: Your hot chocolate was quite good. Perhaps we could meet sometime so you can show me how to properly prepare it?

Not even a minute later, he responds: I think we can come to an arrangement.