Chapter Text
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The ‘special job’ was, as Peggy had foreseen, a way to get rid of her. She supposed she’d been spectacularly in the way on the front lines, helping settle Europe, and this was what she got as an award: lunch orders, a desk with a phone that never rang, and an office full of misogynistic coworkers.
Propping her heels on her desk, Peggy smoothed her skirt over her knees so the Polish agent across the room lost the view he was so unsubtly trying to get. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so unsurprised by all of this, but the world had never made things easy for a woman in her position.
Thompson called her ‘Mogs’ one day—the nickname only Barnes had ever dared use.
Peggy liberally salted his coffee for a week and a half.
He went with ‘Madge’ after that, and she considered it a conditional victory and gave up trying.
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Steve’s things came in one day in a shipment of other odds and ends from Europe. At the sight of the unassuming footlocker, Peggy lost her breath entirely—and for a moment it was as if he was standing by her, all blond hair and bashful smile and timidly bold eyes.
“Put those things in storage downstairs,” the chief ordered, waving his pen at the heap of things.
Peggy pressed her palm over the pain in her side and volunteered, but the other men figured it was too big a job for her. Quite honestly, it was the first time they’d been too chivalrous to assign her the grunt labor—and the reason for that was entirely due to the name on the label dangling from the lock.
“We should go through them,” Thompson urged, rolling up his sleeves with a gleam in his eye not unlike the one he got when he saw a club sandwich with double bacon.
Sousa protested, of course. He was the quietest of the lot, and the one least likely to grate on Peggy’s nerves. Part of that was the fact that he was often lumped in with her in the minds of the others—the woman and the cripple. “It’s not like there’ll be anything dangerous in there,” he argued. “Agents in Europe will already have gone through it, and we ought to respect a dead man’s things.”
Jack shrugged, already opening the lid. “Like you said, people have already gone through it. We ain’t doing anything they haven’t already done—and besides, I want to see what kind of dirty pin-ups Captain America kept.”
The men crowded around, joking and laughing. Peggy stood at the back, frozen in place, watching helplessly as Steve’s meagre belongings were dragged out for show. She recognized everything—the books, the ridiculous striped socks that the youngest Barnes girl had made for him and which he wore faithfully, the battered sketchbook and the stubby pencils.
“Never woulda figured Cap as a bookworm,” Thompson shrugged, flipping through a few of the books before tossing them aside. Peggy jerked forward, but it was Sousa who caught them, setting them down more carefully, a scolding already on his lips.
Jack seemed a little downcast that the only pictures he’d been able to find were ones of the Commandos, of Bucky’s family, and one of Steve’s mother. Peggy bit her lips, forcing the emotion back. They wouldn’t find the one of her—that one had gone to the bottom of the ocean.
Then Thompson paused his careless flipping, and she saw he held Steve’s sketchbook. With a long whistle he held up a page, grinning triumphantly—and Peggy’s heart skipped a beat as she saw her own face looking out of the paper.
The room fell silent. Every eye in the room went from the sketchbook to Peggy and back again. Then Sousa leaned forward, moving faster than anybody had given him credit for, snatching the book away and flipping it shut.
“Right, enough already,” he announced, chin squared in annoyance. “We got to get this stuff downstairs.”
He apologized to her later that night, as they put on their hats and coats. “I’m sorry, Carter.”
Peggy buttoned her jacket with crisp determination. “You couldn’t have known,” she assured him, not looking around.
She felt, rather than saw, him nod and leave, crutch punctuating the uneven sound of his gait. When she turned to go, she found the sketchbook propped against the boot scraper.
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Peggy kept the sketchbook for three days, unopened beneath her pillow. Then she set her teeth, made herself a very strong cup of tea, and went through it, page by page.
Steve wasn’t exactly a Michelangelo, but his sketches had a life and whimsy to them that she thought might have made her smile in other circumstances. He drew snippets—Dugan hunched enormously over a tiny stream washing socks, somebody’s muddy boots propped up on a stump, Falsworth sipping tea elegantly out of his dented tin cup.
And then there were the sketches of her.
Some of them were faint misty things, undefined, wistful. Then there were the ones drawn with strong lines—the shape of her hands, her eyes, the way her uniform fit across her shoulders. There were very few complete portraits of her, actually. Thompson had flipped to one of the only ones in the entire book—Peggy Carter standing strong, decisive, vibrant. But it was the one near the back, the one drawn with the tenderest of touches, that made Peggy swallow hard and then tip back the rest of her drink with a gulp, blinking desperately.
He had loved her. Steve Rogers had loved her with a rare, sweet, wholehearted love—and he had given her up for the sake of the rest of the world.
The next morning, Peggy walked briskly down the street in Brooklyn, looking for the girl with Barnes’ eyebrows.
“This is for your mother,” she said quietly, holding the sketchbook out. The girl’s eyes widened—it was plain she recognized the battered cover.
“You’re Miss Carter, ain’tcha?” she inquired, and Peggy nodded.
“Give it to your mother,” she repeated, waiting until the girl had tucked it safely in her pinafore and run up the front steps. Then she turned on her heel and hurried away, unwilling to be seen or thanked.
She had wanted to keep it for herself—but in the end she knew better. A life in the SSR meant danger, and she couldn’t bear a snooper going through her things and finding it.
It would be safe in the hands of the family who had loved him.
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