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[mucked]

PEGGY CARTER | MCU | ENTRANCEWAY ( action, video, voice, or text )

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[mucked]

[ there's a hardening in her heart the moment she begins to feel stonewalled. and it's not tony's fault, not expressly, but he's had a bad run of tripping all her peeves of late. all the little malicious actions that others take with purpose, he's taken by some quirk of character. or, perhaps, some malady of the heart.

so she takes a deep breath. she backspaces the rather rude reply she'd started to write. she searches for something kinder. for howard, she tells herself. ]

However you like, then. Lord knows I've got time on my hands.

[revokes]

[ it takes time. A half an hour passes when tony thinks of going over, of trying to explain before changing his mind yet again. He can't tell her, he can't explain, what was he thinking? He was better off with her angry with him then trying to bring her up to speed with his greatest fear and what one day may be his greatest failure.

But after half an hour there is a text, ]

outside your door.

[ not the man himself, he's hardly in any condition to see anyone byt his phone, the one from home. F.R.I.D
A.Y speaks as soon as the thing is touched, accessing files.

He has them on his phone, but of course he does. YouTube clips of news reports from the Battle of New York City, aliens, avengers, iron man flying a nuclear bomb into a hole in the sky.

He gives her twenty minutes. ]

nothing's been the same since.

[mucked]

[ if you give a stark a dram, he'll soon come after the whole bloody bottle -- or, in this case, an inch of charity turns into a mile when tony parlays peggy's patience into something else entirely. he knows how she feels about his puppeted suit, and yet she doesn't even bother to toggle the button -- only knocks her knuckles against its empty helmet before taking the phone and shutting the door on its face.

bloody robots.

peggy texts him a quick placeholder to inform the man that she's currently reading all of it. and then, taking a seat on her bed, she delves. into every detail of it -- horrible and dreadful although it is. every mention of steve makes her ache, and the culmination -- the near death, the flight, the fall...? she is confronted with the choice that tony stark had tried to make and...

and oh, she swears a blue streak out loud in the solitude of her room. every word of these reports are things she shouldn't know, future spoilers she shouldn't pry apart with such curiousity and appetite. but she needs to know what happens to the people she cares about. even if they break her heart. or, in tony's case, even if they aren't born yet back in '47.

he texts her after twenty. she doesn't respond again until another fifteen after that. ]

You mean you haven't been the same since.

[ say what you mean, tony stark. or peggy will go in afterwards with a red pen and correct every deflection and sneaky stretching of the truth. ]

[revokes]

[ none of them has been the same since. The Avengers were formed around this fiasco but individually, tony knows they have all been changed.

But she's not asking about the Avengers or about the world after the battle of New York City. She's asking about him.

He doesn't fight the truth behind her words, there's no point in making an attempt to not make it about him. ]

I haven't.

[mucked]

And you're concerned the mansion will pull from those memories. One day. Sooner or later.

[ there's no reason to be gentle about it -- to pussyfoot or hedge. ]

[revokes]

uh

Yeah.

That's one way of saying it.

[mucked]

Are there other ways you'd prefer to put it, Tony?

[revokes]

[ he comes dangerously close to being rude again, to being dismissive, to telling her she's beginning to sound like a therapist.

He bites his tongue, waits with his response a few minutes longer. ]

they're anxiety issues, that's all.

[mucked]

[ -- it's a good thing he doesn't. peggy wouldn't know how to handle being told she's sounding like a therapist. comfort and delicacy wasn't really her intention. although perhaps it should have been. ]

Shell shock. I've seen it before.

[ although she's never been good at handling it in others. ]

[revokes]

it's been a bitch lately.

I was still an asshole. I know.

1/2

[mucked]

I'm used to it.

2/2

[mucked]

...But not from you, I suppose.

[ and that had stung. ]

This isn't carte blanche. You get one freebie. Next time, I'm blacking your eye.

[ -- it's meant in good spirit. it might not come across as such. peggy equally doesn't know how to do this friendly stuff, sometimes. ]

[revokes]

right, ok.

I can live with it.

[ if only because it's still better then her being angry with him. Or worse, disappointed. ]

[mucked]

Tony.

It's been a damn long time since I've been around anything quite like family.

[ which is to say if she somehow hurt him with her neglect, that night -- well...she regrets it now. she'd been trying to follow his lead on that front: we're family. but hers has been a clumsy, odd attempt.

he worries about disappointing her. for once, in her life, she's worried about disappointing someone else. ]

[revokes]

it's been a while for me too.

[ everyone he's ever thought of as family is dead. She's outlived them all, even if, sometimes, in her later years she had mistaken him for his father. ]

I don't sleep. It just doesn't happen anymore. It's why I snapped.

[mucked]

[ she almost wants to say i know, i heard, agent romanoff told me about my death -- but she doesn't. she holds that like a little tragedy in the corner pocket. nothing he needs to think about, right now. ]

One reason why, perhaps. [ but an important one. ] I should warn you. I'm not terribly good at this sort of thing.

[ as if that much isn't already painfully obvious. ]

[revokes]

you're just fine.

Seriously, I mean it. This was on me. I dropped a mountain of issues on you lately.

[mucked]

[ she isn't, of course. just fine. but that's yet another point to abandon unsaid. ]

There is not a man or woman, no matter how fit he or she may be, who is capable of carrying the entire world on their shoulders. A wonderfully wise man told me so, once, and I suspect he would say the same thing applies to one's issues.

[ whether peggy could ever heed jarvis's advice, on the other hand... ]

[revokes]

I heard those words once. It's been a while for me.

But I spent so much of my life creating of legacy of death. They called me Merchant of Death.

I wanted to change that. That's how iron man started.

He would have told me that. I know.

[mucked]

[ oh, christ, of course. ]

It follows that you would have endured a lecture or two at the hands of one Edwin Jarvis.

[revokes]

I didn't mind.

I pretended to when I was a kid but. I never really minded. I think he knew all along.

[mucked]

I will never dare to tell him so but, God, he's a wonder when he's chiding.

[ maybe one of the few people who can properly cow and humble peggy carter without spoiling all their goodwill. ]

...It's rather nice to learn there's someone here who knows what I mean when I say so.

[ it makes her feel a little less lonely. she prays it does the same for him.

[revokes]

he's the one who raised me. He meant a lot.

I named my best program after him.Just A Rather Very Intelligent System.

[mucked]

[ -- it reminds her (just a little) of when she'd had the initials for 'shield' explained to her. ]

I'm damned happy you had him. At least.

[ she means it. ]

[revokes]

[ exhausted and hungover as he is, tony stark, against all odds, manages to smile. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes for a moment. ]

me too.

I'll try and come over soon. to take back my phone. Say hi.