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It was after dark when Steve returned from his run. He came into his room panting and sweating, mopping at his face with his shirt. That was the one thing about Wakanda that he just couldn't get used to; the humidity was dreadful, and that was why he'd taken to running after dark or in the morning before the sun rose.
He stripped off his gross shirt, planning to head for the shower, and stopped when he saw the box on his bed. His first instinct was to think that it was dangerous, but that was silly. This was the palace, and from what Steve had seen it was very heavily guarded. The Dora Milaje did not like the fact that the ex-Avengers were here. But he found it difficult to believe that they would do anything that would put their king into danger.
So he approached the bed to take a closer look at the box, realizing that it was more like a chest or a miniature trunk. The wood was polished smooth, though it looked old. Gingerly, Steve reached out and pushed the top off. His breathing stuttered and his knees went weak when he was immediately faced with the picture of Peggy that was right on top.
He sat down hard, staring at the picture. He'd never seen it before. Peggy was wearing her old uniform, though she looked at least two to three years older than Steve remembered. She was smiling, her hair down around her shoulders, leaning comfortably into the side of a man that Steve didn't recognize. Her husband, maybe?
Just beside the picture was a note. Steve, once he could move, read it quickly. All it said was that Peggy's will had been executed and that she'd left this chest and its contents to Steve. He looked back at the chest. They'd been in Wakanda for five months now. How long had this chest been sitting in the U.S. waiting for him? Who had finally sent it here? Who even knew they were here?
Distantly, it crossed his mind that he should probably alert the team to the fact that they might have a potential security leak. But Steve dismissed the thought in favor of picking up the photo album. A quick glance through it made his eyes go hot. There was a whole lifetime here. A whole lifetime that he had missed.
He set the album aside for now and found, underneath, a couple posters from when he'd gone on the Captain America tour. Steve groaned at the sight of them, though he had to admit that he was glad Peggy had saved them. It was concrete proof that she'd thought about him, missed him, after he'd crashed.
Beneath the posters, he found an envelope. He opened it and found several sheets of paper inside. Expecting another note, he picked them up and unfolded them.
Dearest Steve
Shit. Steve stopped reading. He didn't have a choice. He recognized that handwriting. The first note had been printed from a computer, but this one was penned in cursive blue ink. And even if he didn’t know the handwriting, there was only one person in the world who would start a note to him with the word 'dearest'.
This was a letter from Peggy.
He took a deep, trembling breath to compose himself and glanced back at the letter.
Dearest Steve,
If you're reading this, that means I'm dead. Either that, or the strict instructions I've left have been ignored and I need to get up out of this bed and kick someone's arse.
In spite of himself, Steve smiled.
The reason I'm writing you this letter is... Well, frankly I have something to tell you that I wasn't brave enough to tell you in person. I wasn't sure how you would react. Seeing you again was such a shock. I couldn't bear the thought of you disappearing from my life all over again.
"Peg... I would never," Steve breathed, shaken. What on earth could be so terrible that it would cause Peggy to have this reaction? His gaze dropped automatically to the next sentence.
I have a son.
Wait. What? He already knew that Peggy had two children. He'd never met them; one lived in Japan, and the other lived in England. If they'd ever come to visit while Steve was alive, Peggy hadn't mentioned it. He’d expressed interest in meeting them to Peggy, but she hadn’t followed up and it seemed rude to press the issue. He’d thought about reaching out to them after her funeral, but now that he was a fugitive he doubted they would want to.
Why would Peggy…?
I know what face you're making right now. You think an old, doddering woman has lost count of how many children she has. What I mean is, I have three children.
Oh. Okay, that Steve didn't know.
It wasn't a mistake, Steve. I refuse to call my child a mistake. I will admit that I have some regrets about that night. It was a moment of weakness that nearly destroyed my marriage. I could make all sorts of excuses about the time of year and a mid-life crisis, but the truth of it is that I made the decision to sleep with a man who wasn't my husband and I got pregnant.
"Holy shit," Steve muttered, stunned. This was not what he'd been expecting when he opened up the letter. He'd thought maybe Peggy wanted to talk about the brief time they'd spent together before the war, or express regret that they hadn’t had more time to spend together now. This was... this was making his head hurt.
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and pressed a hand to his eyes, trying to wrap his brain around the idea that Peggy had had an affair. It just didn't sound like something she would do. Peggy was such a good person, strong and loyal. What could have driven her to that point?
And what man had she had an affair with? Why was she telling Steve now? Though he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answers to those two questions, curiosity drove him back to reading.
I didn't know what to do. I knew my husband wouldn't accept the child. And I was afraid, Steve. So I took the coward's way out. I went to the father of the baby and asked him to raise the child. He wasn't fond of the idea. Said it would be a disaster. But I refused to give up. I didn't want my child to be raised in an orphanage. I wanted him to be loved and cared for, even if it wasn’t by me.
That sounded like the Peggy that Steve knew. The father hadn’t had a chance.
Eventually, the father came around. His wife wasn't able to conceive children and he desperately wanted an heir. The fact that I was having a boy made the situation even more appealing for him. His wife and I went on vacation together so that we would be out of the public eye. I told my husband I was being sent on a mission. He was none the wiser. And there the two of us stayed for six weeks until I gave birth.
He tried to imagine that. Tried to imagine Peggy and this mystery woman hiding out somewhere away from the rest of the world. Waiting until the baby was born before they returned to civilization. Peggy was the kind of woman who hated waiting around, so that must have just about killed her.
As hard as it was to lose you, Steve, giving my son away was a thousand times harder. Especially when I realized what kind of life he was being given. Maria tried, bless her, but his father... Had I known then what I know now, I would've kept my child. My baby didn't deserve that.
Deserve what? Steve sighed, running a hand through his sweaty hair. This was exactly like having a conversation with Peggy. Even on the days when her mind was sharp, having a conversation with her could be taxing at best. She would tell a story and leave half the details out, yet think that Steve should've been capable of following her story perfectly.
There was nothing I could do by then, though. I tried, but Howard had so much money and influence and I’d given up all my parental rights.
Howard. Maria.
Steve stared at Peggy's letter in growing horror.
No.
All I could do was try and be the cool aunt, but by that point my duties with SHIELD kept me away a lot. I'm grateful to Jarvis and everything that he was able to do, but it just wasn't enough. The war changed Howard in ways I can't describe. He wasn't the man you remember. I won't call him a monster, but I also won't deny the word entered my head a few times.
I didn't tell my son the truth until long after Howard died. Not until I was entering the home. I don't know what kept me from telling him. He should have known, needed to know, after his parents died. But I didn't. I told myself there was just never a proper moment. But the truth is, it was the other moment in my life when I can only call myself a coward.
"No," Steve said out loud, as though that could stop the inevitable. He wanted to throw the letter aside and burn it rather than read the awful truth, but he couldn't stop himself. His eyes kept sliding across the page.
When he found out, Tony just held my hand and smiled at me for the longest time. At first, I thought he hadn't heard me. Then he started to cry. It was the first time I'd seen him cry in years. I hugged him and apologized, but I don't think it made a difference. I failed him, Steve. Maria, Howard and I failed him so badly.
Here, the letter was stained with a few watermarks. Tears, Steve realized numbly.
We never spoke of it again. He forgave me that easily, and loved me so much, that it was like my cowardice didn't matter to him. The size of his heart is unfathomable to me. When I'm alone, I think about how my life would've turned out if I'd kept my child. Divorced my husband. Raised Tony alone.
Those days make me cry.
Abruptly, he was reminded of the days he would arrive at the home and find Peggy sobbing. He'd always assumed that those were just bad days. But maybe they weren't. His chest tightened with guilt, because he couldn't ever remember having asked why she was crying.
You're probably wondering why I'm telling you this now. I know you don't like Tony. You've complained about him often enough. I never said a word to you about my relationship with him. I never even let on to you that I knew him, and Tony made sure that you never saw him visiting me. I was willing to give you a safe space because I knew that modern life was hard for you, and hard on you, and that Tony, for all of his good qualities, can be very trying.
But he is my son, Steve, and I love him with all of my old, dying heart. He has so few people to depend on. I need to know that you will look after him.
I need to know that you will keep him safe.
It's a lot to ask. I understand that. But in another life, Tony could have been your son. I just need to know that someone will care for him when I'm gone. I can't bear the thought that he'll be alone. I know he's got the Avengers and that you're a family, but you're the important one. You're the one that Tony looked up to as a child. It's your approval he craves. If there's anyone that he might listen to instead of destroying himself to protect the world, it's you.
Steve couldn't read anymore. There was another two pages, but he was at his limit. He only just stopped himself from balling up the papers; these were Peggy's dying words, the last message he would ever receive from him, and they deserved to be treated with respect. Instead, he shoved the papers back into their envelope and dropped everything back into the trunk.
He would tell no one, and forget this had ever happened. It didn't matter.
Yet even as he went into the bathroom to take a shower, Peggy's letter nagged at him. He was remembering, with a hot flush that might have been more guilt, the text he'd received from the home about Peggy passing, and how he'd blithely announced it out loud to the room without any care of who heard. Had Tony been in the room? Was that how Tony had found out about his mother dying? It bothered Steve that he couldn't remember.
He tried not to think about it over the next three weeks, but the information remained at the back of his mind. It would crop up at the oddest of times. Like when he was eating an apple and he would remember how much Peggy enjoyed apples, and suddenly the question of whether Tony liked apples would slide into his brain. Or he'd see the exact color of red that matched the lipstick Peggy used to wear, and he'd remember it was also the color of the Iron Man armor. Stupid, insignificant things that haunted Steve exactly because they shouldn't have mattered.
He did eventually read the rest of the letter, though he tried to skim over the parts that talked about Tony and Howard. It made his chest hurt to read about how Peggy had returned to the mansion one day to find a teary-eyed five-year-old with a black eye. He told himself that Peggy had to have misinterpreted the situation, and that things couldn't have been as bad as she wrote. Howard wasn't that kind of man.
Then again, he'd never thought Peggy was the kind of woman to cheat, either.
Still. In spite of all that, he thought he would've been fine had there not been a press conference on television. Steve watched, as he always did, though he would've preferred not to; people would have asked too many questions otherwise, and those were questions he didn't have an answer to. Or at least, not an answer he was comfortable sharing.
Seeing Tony again, even if it was just on television, was physically painful. He couldn't stop himself from seeing the curve of Peggy's jaw when Tony tilted his head back, or Peggy's smile when Tony smiled after a child asked a question. Steve had always thought that Tony was a dead ringer for Howard and had very little of his mother in him. He knew now that that was a lie: it was just that Tony had none of Maria in him, but there was plenty of Peggy. He just hadn't known what to look for before.
When the conference was over, and Clint, Sam, Scott and Wanda had wandered off, Steve was sitting alone in the room with only Natasha for company. And that's when he found himself saying, "I need to see Tony."
"What?" Natasha looked up from where she was knitting, both eyebrows raised.
"I need to see Tony."
"Might I remind you that you're a fugitive?" she said. "You enter the U.S., you're going to be arrested. And Tony certainly isn't going to come see you here."
"Peggy was Tony's mother." He didn't plan to say it. The words just spilled out.
"What?" Natasha exclaimed, dropping her knitting.
"She left me a letter," Steve said. Even though he hadn't intended to tell anyone, it felt good to share the secret with someone else. "She had an affair with Howard and gave the baby to him to raise."
"Holy shit," Natasha said softly, but with great feeling. "Does Tony know?"
"Peggy said he does." They both looked back at the television. The press conference had ended, but Tony hadn't left yet. He was standing in the middle of a crowd surrounded by a bunch of little kids. Kids always did adore Tony, Steve remembered with a pang. They were fascinated by the armor, and Tony had been unfailingly gentle and sweet with a child no matter how badly a battle had gone.
Natasha whistled. "Wow. That... actually makes a scary amount of sense, knowing what I know about Peggy Carter. But why does that translate into you wanting to see him?"
"I need to talk to him," Steve said.
"Why?"
He frowned at her. "Can't I just want to talk to him?"
"Considering you haven't wanted to talk to him before, no."
"Peggy asked me to look after him," Steve admitted begrudgingly.
"You can't be serious," Natasha said. He refused to look at her. She sat up. "Steve!"
"It was Peggy's last request to me!"
"Yeah, a request she made because she didn't know that you beat her child half to death."
Steve flinched. He hadn't allowed himself to put it together quite like that. Hadn't wanted to equate the nightmares he had where he smashed an arc reactor that was powering Tony's heart like he'd smashed the one in the armor with the knowledge that Tony was Peggy's child. In retrospect, he was fortunate that Peggy was dead. Had she known, there was no doubt in his mind that she would've hunted him down and shot him on the spot.
"That was different," he argued, knowing that it sounded weak. "I didn't know then."
"Would it have mattered?" Natasha asked.
"Maybe." He could feel the heat of her glare, and, when she spoke, her voice was cold.
"It shouldn't matter. You either agreed with Tony or you didn't. Since you didn't, that's what got you here." She indicated the room with a wave of her hand. "Who Tony's mother is doesn't matter."
"I still need to talk to him," Steve said, refusing to be dissuaded.
She sighed at him: that little sigh that meant she thought he was being stupid. "Then call him."
"He won't pick up."
"Have you tried?"
"... No," he muttered. He'd been waiting, hoping, that Tony would make the first move. He carried the phone with him at all times hoping that it would ring. He took it out of his pocket now and looked down at it. Compared to a sleek Starkphone, it was ancient. He had to wonder what Tony's reaction had been. Outrage, probably.
"Call him," Natasha ordered.
It was easier to obey. He flipped the phone open and accessed the contact list for the sole number. The call button was strangely hard to push. Putting the phone to his ear was even harder. He listened to the phone ring. There was no voicemail. It just rang.
And rang.
He was entirely unprepared for someone to pick up.
"Hello?"
Steve's throat locked up. He squeaked out, "Tony?"
"Rogers," Tony said. That one word, clipped and as cold as Natasha at her frostiest, made Steve wince.
"Tony," he said again.
"What do you want? I'm busy."
Suddenly, Steve thought to look back at the television. Tony was gone now. The screen had flipped back to the news agent. "I saw you on TV," he said. "I thought - I got this box..."
"Yeah, I know. I'm the one who sent it to you."
"What?" Steve said, stunned.
"I was the executor of her estate. Who did you think it would be?" Tony said. And right then and there, Steve knew that Tony knew that he knew. It was all in the way that Tony was speaking. He swallowed hard, uncertain as to what this meant. Tony had probably gone through a lot of trouble to get him that box...
"Thank you," he said finally. "I... I looked through it."
"Good for you. Is that all? Cause I have a lot to do."
"Tony, please. Talk to me."
"Oh, now you want to talk?" Tony said. "When I asked you to talk before, you didn't even entertain the thought."
"That was then," Steve said.
"Nothing's changed."
"It has for me. You're Peggy's..." He couldn't finish the sentence. Natasha stood up and walked over to him. She sat down beside him, putting a hand on his knee.
"That doesn't change anything," Tony snapped.
"I didn't know!"
"You didn't want to know. You never even asked if I knew her."
Steve had no answer for that. Tony was right. That had been stupid on his part. Peggy and Howard were never more than casual friends while he knew them, but they were still friends. Why hadn't he stopped to think that they might have remained in touch after the war? Why hadn't he asked Tony if he knew Peggy?
He knew why. It was easier to keep Peggy to himself. He could hear the pain and anger in Tony's voice now that he knew what to listen for, and knew he'd been wrong.
"I figured you would've said something if you did," he said.
"Whatever. I'm hanging up now."
"Tony! Wait."
There was a pause. Tony's breathing. Steve's heart raced. He thought about what Natasha had said, about how the identity of Tony's mother didn't matter.
"Is it okay now?" he heard himself asking. "I mean, since Peggy was your mom and not Maria -"
Natasha reared back as though she'd been slapped.
"Fuck you, Rogers," Tony snarled down the line.
The sound of the dial tone coincided with Natasha punching Steve in the stomach.
"Ow! Natasha, what the fuck?" He dropped the phone, doubling over.
"I should be asking you that! What the hell, Steve!" She grabbed the phone away from him and stormed out of the room.
Steve watched her go, still clutching at his stomach, knowing better than to try and follow. If he pushed her far enough, she'd break out the knives. He was lucky all she'd done was punch him. He closed his eyes, feeling sick. And not just because of the punch. He had the feeling he'd just broken things between him and Tony for good, even though he hadn't meant to.
Why couldn't things just go back to how they were before?