Chapter Text
April 3, 2012
I’m pretty sure I’m dying.
Tony, on the other hand, doesn’t seem convinced yet.
“Look, they’re already starting the next trial,” Tony says. He swivels his chair and crushes the small foam ball in his hand. “This is just the science.”
As far as I know, the science is a lot of mice. There are probably new ones now, crawling around in plastic cages in a vault-like lab on the fourteenth floor. And there’s probably a pile of old ones somewhere — shrunken mice or mice that have mutated into monstrous shapes. Maybe they’ve already been autopsied and thrown in the incinerator. Another failure, another promising number crossed off a list of possibilities that only goes up to 14. I think this was caspase number nine.
Tony leaps to his feet and slams the ball to the floor, bouncing it back into his hand. “Okay, my turn.” He motions for me. ”Bring her over.”
I’m not sure why he decided that it’s a “her,” like a battleship or a classic car. I asked him once and he only tilted his head and said he didn’t know, that she was just beautiful is all. That was five arms ago, circa 1994. It was a pretty decent first try, but the torque was garbage, it was too heavy, and it was a full second slower than my brain. It was a mildly terrifying and completely humiliating time for both of us.
I follow Tony over to a bench tucked into a corner of the room, a nook with a door that can be locked down, far from the window, far from the room’s entrance. I strip off my jacket as I walk.
“You need the shirt, too?”
“Please no. JARVIS, initiate AUSTIN. Full protocol.”
“Oh God,” I grumble.
I never really know where the speakers are, but from them comes a series of muffled ‘70s beeps, gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology, yada yada yada. I never saw the Six Million Dollar Man, but Tony lived on a steady diet of the reruns, to nobody’s surprise. He lets the whole thing play, throwing himself into another chair, throwing the ball in the air, while all my specs load onto the sizable monitor under the heading of the program’s backronym.
I take my seat and lay my arm on the table, palm up.
“How’s the new suit coming?”
He lets out a puff of breath through pursed lips. “What’s Russian for ‘unmitigated disaster’?”
I shrug. It’s one language I never developed an enduring hunger for, also probably to nobody’s surprise.
He tsks. “And you even have a super hot language partner. How is Miss Rushman?”
I don’t know why he keeps asking me about her. He knows Romanoff and I barely speak, outside of the technicalities of mission planning, debriefings, and logistics. We can’t seem to quite get un-stuck from our game of distant watching.
“She’s busy,” I say.
Tony opens the access panel on my arm and clicks a cable into the single port.
“AUSTIN, authenticate.”
Tony’s Stark Industries employee photo pops up on the monitor, and the small LED light next to the port glows. His picture is replaced by a stream of output, lines of raw code that he squints at before slipping on an oversized pair of glasses. They magnify the dark circles under his eyes.
“You look tired.”
Tony doesn’t take his eyes off the monitor. He types on a keyboard layout I have never been able to understand. “Yeah, well, your body is keeping me up all night.”
I smirk. I’m glad it’s only that. I hope it’s only that. I spent so many years striving toward Tony’s normalcy, his humanity, but I never expected that he would be forced into the horrors of my life. Combat. Torture. A prisoner of war. A foreign, inorganic thing embedded in him now. I was so scared for him, maybe more scared than I’d ever been since leaving Hydra. Finding him alive was impossible. And yet, there he was. Here he is. An impossible man.
“Pepper is starting to get jealous,” he says.
“Jealous of what?”
I swivel toward the door to Tony’s protest of “watch the cord, Jesus.” Pepper is in the doorway, her hands folded in front of her. She looks typically sharp in a tailored jacket and a long, painted-on pencil skirt.
“How’d you get in here?” Tony asks.
“I’m the boss, Tony. Remember?” She smiles at me. “Oh, I like the haircut.”
I’ve been dragging my hand over my head for days, ever since my hair stylist took a number 2 to the sides. He left the top, blow dried the floppy mess of it into a quiff, and proclaimed me fashionable. Very Williamsburg. I have no idea when that became a good thing. He defines the quality of my haircuts by neighborhoods. Do you want it to look more UWS or more SoHo? Ooh, maybe a little East Village! I tell him to just not make me look too Staten Island, and he laughs and says oh honey you could never look Staten Island. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the only way he thinks I understand style, through a language of gentrified neighborhoods in a city neither of us even live in.
“Thanks.”
Her mouth flattens. She talks to Tony. “Remember you have a meeting at—”
“Nope.”
“Yes. This is your second reschedule.”
“I’m okay with that.”
“I know this is difficult for you to understand, but a company needs money to keep going and I am not—”
“C’mon, you can easily—”
“I am not going to singlehandedly brief the entire CME Group on nuclear fusion energy futures.” She pronounces this decisively. “They want you there.”
Tony groans. It’s a theatrical thing, head thrown back, eyes rolling. Pepper turns her attention back to me.
“How are you?”
I nod to my arm. “Just getting a software update.”
“Firmware update,” Tony corrects. “And seriously, you’re not supposed to be able to get in here.”
Pepper is skilled in the art of benignly neglecting Tony’s comments, but I can tell from his voice that he’s not pleased. He talks to AUSTIN in a low voice. Open up security settings.
“The tower looks good,” I say.
Every time I come to the city, the skyline is a little different. Stark Tower a spire of progress in Midtown, the new World Trade Center climbing out of the former ruins of downtown. I can’t remember the last time it felt like my home.
Pepper’s smile starts big, with teeth, before she clamps it down. “Yeah, it’s all coming together. We should be going live next month.”
“Will be going live next month,” Tony says.
They make eye contact in the intense way couples do when they slam up against a recurrent argument in mixed company.
“Do you need anything?” she asks me. “Something to drink? Did you have lunch yet?”
“l did not have lunch yet,” Tony interjects.
I think I’m finally hungry. I hitched an early ride on a cargo transport into Teterboro, and poor Happy had to drive us into the city at rush hour. I forced a bag of trail mix into my mouth in the back seat but couldn’t stomach anything more substantive.
“It’s not your job to order us lunch,” I say.
“It’s not my job to order his lunch but you’re our guest, so I’m happy to get yours.”
I shrug a shoulder. “I guess a… meat, chicken something. Whatever. I’m not picky.”
“A meat chicken something whatever. Okay.”
“And I’ll have a lettuce chicken something whatever,” Tony says. The corner of his lips quirks up. He mouths the words ‘thank you,’ as if it would be too embarrassing for all of us to hear his gratitude. Maybe it would be.
I thank her aloud.
“Let me know when you’re done.” She points to me as she disappears out the door. “I want an update.”
“Sure.”
An update on what, I don’t know. My life is on the same steady track it’s been on for years. Training, missions, program development, meetings, my days at the Triskelion intensely full, my nights at home short. I’m pretty sure Tony hasn’t told her about this, given how squirrelly he’s being. He’s probably buried the project in the biomedical department, labeled it ‘cancer research’ or something that belies the singular focus on my degrading body.
The door to Tony’s shop slides closed. He eyes me as he types.
“You need to eat more. You’re down four kilos.”
“I’m eating enough. It’s just not sticking.”
His jaw ticks. “I’ll figure this out.”
I have no doubt that he will try.
—
Peggy raises a silver eyebrow at me. It’s not a tell. I haven’t yet discovered any actual tells that she has. It’s one of her many feints out of a rolodex she has tried on me over the past twenty years.
She pushes a green chip to the small pile already resting at the center of the table.
I call with one of my own.
“Are you sure? You’re getting a little light.”
I eye the dwindled pile of chips by my left wrist. I lost well over half of it two hands ago during a fantastic botch of a bluff. I swear I used to be better at this.
“It’s not like we don’t know how this already ends,” I say.
“Well, there’s always a first time for everything.”
Peggy flips over the fifth card, and I suddenly have two weak pairs. I don’t flinch a muscle. Neither does she, until her hand flirts over her pile of chips, her skin nearly translucent and dusted with light brown spots, her veins high and blue. But I see the shadow of her younger self there in her painted fingernails, in a kind of stubborn grace that still governs so many of her movements.
She pushes forward a hundred. I shove the rest of my chips into the pot.
We lay down our hands.
“God damn it,” I mutter.
A little chuckle rolls out of her, and she pulls our fake money toward her. “Maybe next time, darling.”
It’s now my turn for a laugh.
“Oh come now, it’s not all that bad,” she tells me.
“Well, you’re the only one who seems to think so.”
We already ran around the Maypole about the probability of Tony figuring this all out. Maybe he will, maybe he could, he’s done so much already, he has the best teams on it, there’s still time, et cetera. But for as much idealism as a founder of SHIELD requires, Peggy has also become a fierce realist after clawing herself through the decades, fighting for every inch along the way. She knows deeply, like I do, the inevitable course of this. She seems to be the only one wise enough, brave enough, to have an honest conversation about it.
“That’s because I live with it every day,” she said earlier. She paused there, folding her hands on the Afghan heaped on her lap. “I know what’s coming, always.”
I hate what’s coming for her. I hate that this will take her incredible mind before it takes her body.
“How’s your sister, by the way?” she asks as she begins to sort chips and lay them in a handsome wooden box.
“Fine.”
I will never tell Peggy how Rebecca is. I will never tell her that she thinks I’m a scary per diem nurse named Tom, that sometimes she thinks she’s a child, that she knows me only in brief stretches that make her weep inconsolably. I will never tell her that I despise our visits and that I’m thinking about stopping them entirely. I wonder if I will ever get the chance to start feeling that way about Peggy.
I want to tell her that I also wonder if I’ve lived a decent life. If I’ve done enough. If I’ve weighted the scales enough to create a crude sort of balance somewhere. But I’m too afraid to ask, because I know she will be truthful.
“How do you live with it? How do you decide what to do?” I ask instead.
She looks out over her garden, freshly erupting with the colors of early spring. It’s more lush every time I drag myself over the water to visit her, pulling a few days from an engorged pile of accumulated vacation hours that never seems to go down.
“I imagine every day as my last and go from there.”
Peggy calls her children. She watches her grandchildren play here, scattering their toys on the grass. She sits in the sun when it peeks out from behind overcast English skies. She drinks tea. She plays poker with an old friend. She fills her days with life.
But she will die alone. As she must. As we all must, returned to our truest nature, like every other animal on this earth.
My pocket vibrates. I don’t want to reach inside, but I always do.
Get back here now. Deep shadow. Transport at Barton Ashes Airfield in 15 mins
I can’t suppress a sigh. I’m not ready to leave.
“Duty calling?”
“Fury calling. Deep shadow conditions,” I mock.
She smiles. “Well, you’re not very good at deep shadow, are you?”
I snort. “You know I am.”
Peggy laughs now, and this is why I love her. Because nobody else would dare. “Yes. Of course you are.”
I rise and circle the table. She looks up at me with a wavering smile. She is still so beautiful, brilliantly and fantastically alive. I need to remember this. I need to carve it into the walls of my mind and bathe it in light.
I bend down and kiss her on the cheek.
“See you next time, Peg.”
I feel her hand then, cold but strong, wrapping around my own. She gives it a squeeze.
“It’s going to be all right. Whatever happens, it will be all right.”
I blink a little as I walk the cobblestones to my rental. The path blurs and clears in front of me. Mortality feels strange. I’ve been rattling around with the idea for months now, ever since my days started to feel exhausting and my sleep started feeling necessary. Ever since my shirts stopped fitting quite as well and eating started feeling like a chore. Ever since Tony took his first concerned blood sample and started talking without that spark of fond irreverence that almost always colored his words to me.
Part of me imagined that I might live forever, that I might keep going as everyone around me withered and disappeared. As I lost Tony and Peggy and Rebecca and Harding to the tireless progression of time, as I’ve lost so many already. But knowing my own death, seeing it creep along my horizon, has been less terrifying than I ever imagined it might be. Some days I find myself staring it down. Some days I even reach a hand out for it.
Because I am tired. My body is tired. If the soul is a real thing, it is tired, too. On that horizon, I am beginning to see relief. I wake up in the morning, and it is there. It is there when I go to sleep. Watching me. Waiting. And I don’t think I’m afraid.
I do believe Peggy. It will be what it is. What it has to be, finally.
Finally.