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In another time, not the one we know, she was a super soldier too. Bucky, Steve, and Peggy. They were all super soldiers, and the project, that was called Liberty – a shot in the dark, in terms of both science and religion. When Peggy Carter opened her eyes in that dimly lit basement, she felt every pulse, nerve, atom, and molecule of her body sing with power. She remembered she looked down at her hand, saw the cords of muscle embolden and extend beneath her golden skin. It looked like marble, rather than flesh, as if Michelangelo had chiseled and sculpted her out of clay.
The three of them were unstoppable; a team made for the ages. Steve was, well, you know, Steve. Big, bulky, strong enough to pull a plane out of the sky – you get the picture. Likewise, Peggy was quick, ungodly fast, and aerodynamic. She leaped off buildings thirty feet in the air without a scratch. And if Steve was the muscle and Peggy was the grace, Bucky was the force. Relentless, unforgiving in a fight, and cut-nails, broken-teeth tough, Bucky Barnes had a case of bruised knuckles every other day of the week. They were a hodgepodge, but they made for a good team.
It made sense, however, that Bucky and Peggy were a secret. Only Steve had the spotlight. After all, Steve was the golden boy, the soft-faced cartoonist turned Achillean Adonis. Bucky and Peggy were more than happy to sit out on the touring, handshaking, and menial publicity that came with the “super solider gig.” Bucky liked to call the two of them the “Demolition Duo” – Steve did all the sweet talking, while they were the ones who broke bones and left bruises.
Even so – the three of them, the disaster, the golden boy, and the angry British crumpet, were a family. In fact, to Peggy, Bucky and Steve, were the only family she had at the end of the day really. With dead parents and a dead brother and a dying family dynasty, she really didn’t have much. Not that she needed much. But the War – that ugly, growling beast of hate, blood, and gore – for all that it took from her, it also brought her a wealth of good. Steve and Bucky, yes, but also the Howlies: that group of charming morons who drank too much, sang songs like they were the bloody Seven Dwarves of Snow White, and never seemed to gain a lick of sense, even when faced with the jaws of death.
Alright, well, it doesn’t seem that appealing when she put it that way, but they were a family. In a time when everything seemed dire with atomic bombs being crafted and Nazis were trying to make spaceships to reach the gods, they found a little peace in between all that carnage. It was good, wholesome, and more often than not, as is the case with one woman living around eight men, unforgettable.
But even after two years of being Agent 13, the super soldier, Steve’s all-too British sidekick, she still felt…empty? Was that the word? No. Peggy Carter did not feel empty like a deflated balloon fresh out air, but rather, she felt an empty feeling of listlessness. It was… It was the feeling when you see the most beautiful sunrise, all the incredible colors – bleeding gold, fuchsia, lavender, midnight blue, azul, crimson red – all of it fusing together, interweaving, kneading into one another like a sky full of a runny, still-drying watercolor portrait. The sky massive above you, leaves you breathless, as if you have to bend all the way backwards to look at it, in its whole, heaving, orgasmic beauty. And yet, while Peggy bent backwards to see the rising sun, she didn’t feel anything. The colors, as beautiful as they were, were simply colors. There wasn’t movement, joy, or music to them.
Better yet, it felt as if there was a papery, dry itch right behind the base of her skull. When she went to scratch it, digging her nails into her dark curls, she found that it was not an itch she could scratch. It was beneath her skin. Somewhere she couldn’t reach. It pounded into the bone as if her skin was too tight to hold that creeping, buzzing feeling inside of her. It made her want to rip her hair out in frustration – how do you scratch an itch you cannot feel?
That wasn’t to say that she didn’t appreciate her newfound family, or that she didn’t find happiness in those small, intimate moments before the crushing explosions and screams of war, but she felt half-apathetic, half-stagnant. Am I sociopathic?, she had asked Bucky. A bad idea, to be honest. Bucky was no better at offering advice than she was at being subtle. I want to reach for the supernovas, James – climb mountains, make great big things, and explore new vibrant lands, but more and more, I feel as if I’m simply going through the motions of it all… Bucky had looked at her, cocked his head, and gave her that frown that was both sympathetic and confused at the same time. I mean, at least, goin’ through the motions is some kind of movement, right?
Yes, it was. Bucky’s advice was not all that helpful, but he was right: she was moving. But it wasn’t a matter of moving – Peggy was at the top of her game: she was a physical beast, she was a super soldier, she punched Nazis for breakfast and Italian fascists for dessert. When she came home, she would surely be given a top spot in the SSR. No, it wasn’t a matter of moving, she was moving at a million miles per hour. Maybe, that’s what it was: all that movement, all that ambition, all that glory, and she still felt as if she was waiting on something. Wouldn’t that be a laugh? All this dread and worry over something as little as a lack of patience. Her blood was boiling, in the middle of winter, but for no reason other than simply existential impatience.
If I have to wait any longer, I’m going to right and properly murder you, she found herself thinking to no one in particular.
So, that’s where she was while she waited: a secret war hero, a combat expert extraordinaire, and a living bloody legend. How ragingly awful.
It was around that time, however, that Colonel Phillips gave the three super soldiers, and that loud group of rambunctious boys who followed them, the night off. For the first time in months, the night laid open and free to them. They were in France, in a small, run-down village off the coast of the southern tip. Rather on brand, the Howlies immediately found the nearest cabaret and decided to cash in on the free alcohol that was offered to them. Mind you, it was the middle of the War, in southern France, after months of Nazi occupation – there was very little alcohol available, and even less “drinkable” alcohol. Even so, there was enough to get drunk off, which their mortal, more human friends did.
Peggy had wanted to go dancing – nothing too formal, just a willingness to cut loose, to feel the twist of air move her skirts. Steve and Bucky, all too happy to finally have a night alone, gave her the “look.” The Brooklyn look, as she coined it. While the boys both had very different faces – Steve’s sweet and sunny eyes versus Bucky’s sharp and icy glare – they had a way of managing to produce a singular expression that basically said: No. Thank. You. Fine, don’t come. Don’t choke on each other’s tongues. Peggy gave them a version of her own “look,” and flounced out of the room, fairly irritated.
So, unfortunately, Peggy was on her own for the evening. Not that she cared. She usually was when it came to this sort of thing. She liked to be alone – freedom was rare for a woman in that day and age. Peggy made independence look like an evening gown that dazzled and shined in moonlight, but sometimes… Sometimes, she would have liked to have a partner. It would have at the very least made dancing easier. Besides, it was much more fun to dance with another person, than by yourself.
The itch at the base of her skull, the one that she feared would last into forever, flared up as she entered the crowded cabaret. Taking a gander at all the drunk and smiling faces, she felt her residual irritation catch aflame as she scratched at the dry itch, only to find that the only effect she had had was in mussing her extravagant curls.
She walked to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic, her sharp red heels allowed her to tower over most of the soldiers at the bar. She was a sight. An extraordinary, fiery sight. Perfect curls, blazing brown eyes, muscular arms that could both intimidate and rattle, and that’s not to mention the dress she wore… Well, to say in the least, it looked as if it was made for her. A group of British officers eyed her as she leaned against the glossy, wooden surface, swallowing most of the strong alcoholic drink in one gulp.
One of them, a very brave boy, and a very stupid one, came up behind Peggy. “Ms. Carter?” She knew from his accent, the resilient and wilting lisp of Brixton, that he was a native of London just like her. She turned her head to look over her shoulder. The dim lights of the pub darkened half of her face, while the other half seemed thinly lit by yellow, orange lights that unreliably blinked above her.
“My friend bet me five quid that I’d strike out in comin’ up to you all like. I was hopin’ you’d help me to prove ’im wrong.” The young man was pretty, she wouldn’t argue with that. He had nice dark eyes, dark hair, and a look that would’ve given anyone a prickly, sort of “wow” feeling. He was, obviously, and very nearly, tipsy. Not that Peggy cared – it was a war, it was a house of alcohol and sin, what else were boys like him supposed to do?
Ah, what the hell? He’d be a fun little treat.
Peggy turned in full, coming to face him. Her brown eyes blazed forth as if they had instantaneously decided to change color. “How about this, love?” She tugged on his collar, pulling him in close so her bright red lips glossed against his ear. “You show me a dance, and you can tell your friend whatever you want, hm?” She pulled away, offering him a sly, seductive little grin.
The English boy cleared his throat with a little shock. He was red in the face and glossy-eyed in her radiance, but he still managed to nod as he drew her out onto the half-empty floor. There were two other couples out on the low-lit floor, both of whom didn’t seem to be really “dancing,” more so just bobbing to the out of tuned melody the drunk pianist in the corner was playing.
The two Brits danced for a song, and partway through another one, before the young man decided to do the stupid thing and open his bloody mouth. Idiot. Sad timing, too, they were having such a good time.
“You know, I knew Fred, your ex-fiancé.”
Peggy met the boy’s eyes as the smile on her lips faded some. “Mmm, unfortunate. He had some lovely stories to share, I’m sure?”
“Not much. Fred’s probably more bothered than he lets on. ’E just said you were good shag, but not much of a thinker.”
The grip on the boy’s shoulders clinched sharply as Peggy’s super solider fingers sinched into the boy’s delicate bird bones. The young man winced. “Now, love, I want you to be very careful with what you say next because this could end very badly for you.”
“No, Ms. Carter, I didn’t think none of that.” He eased his shoulder out tenderly from her grip, backing up a little. “I just— I just saw you and I wanted to see…to see for myself. That’s— That’s it.” He breathed out a sigh of relief, rolling his shoulder out. Poor, pretty fool. Thought himself in the clear, didn’t he?
“That’s it, hm?” A sweet, endearing smile came across her lips. That smile – that smile was the scariest thing about Peggy Carter: it looked about as tantalizing as honey for tea, but it was far more terrifying than anything else about her. If you knew that smile, you knew it was a sign to run.
“Well, now I know, you’re perfectly lovely as a lady. And I’d love to—” The boy’s mouth dropped open into a round, shocked ‘O.’ As he dropped to his knees, gasping for breath, tears immediately glossed his vision. His face was perfectly red, and not from any alcoholic beverage. “Mother…” His breath shook as he fell over, slobbering into the floor, unable to move.
Because, you see, what had happened was, Peggy had shoved her knee, at full, unflinching, devastating power, right into the poor boy’s bollocks. There was no mercy in her action, not that she deemed it worthy – just her, as a super soldier, kneeing the boy so hard, he would need five stiches on his testicles. He’d have to be flown home to Brixton for recovery, and no, he didn’t have an honorable discharge.
Peggy stood over the boy, breathless and buzzing from such a powerful movement, her eyes glazed with a furious, magnificent ferocity. The itching on the back of her skull, aching and shifting and twitching, murderously scratched, while her blood boiled to nuclear temperatures. She felt as if her blood could have rivaled the sun’s heat. Her breathing, sticky and hoarse, felt unevenly chopped, as she shifted her eyes up into the chaos that had descended in the cabaret. The other British officers had come to their friend’s aid, while the Howlies, seated at a booth on the other side of the room, raised their glasses to Peggy’s graceless act of revenge. For once, she was not amused.
That wasn’t it, though. No. Something…. Something was…
Her eyes sought and sought and sought into the crowds. Where is…? She felt as if she was gasping for breath, dragging behind something very large and very heavy. Not to mention the fact that she was light-headed. Everything was blurring together – faces, sounds, and the undercutting drunken piano keying, all of it was a cacophony, a breathless mess she could not process – had she been bloody drugged?
She took a step backwards. Eyes searching for an exit. Instead, they found his.
He’d been staring at her the whole night. She just hadn’t noticed. Until now.
Earthshattering. That was the only way to describe it.
The ground did not feel stable underneath her feet. Logan has that effect on you. His eyes, blue, grey, and silver, a collection of watery, sharp, disastrous colors, strike into your guts like a very old, very rigid dagger cutting into flesh. There is no softness in Logan’s gaze, even when he’s joking. He’s too old. He’s forgotten what it’s like to have any kind of lightness. His whole life has been a series of hard, rocky things he’s had to swallow, shoving them down into his entrails, one-by-one. His face has been shaped by the things he’s had to swallow, and his eyes, angry as they are dark, sing with a rabid sense of betrayal. Life has been cruel to him, and he has not forgiven it.
Meeting his eyes, Peggy felt as if she had run into a wall at full calamitous force. The aftereffect was a shaky, unstilled sensation that was akin to pulling herself up and off of the ground after a hard fall. And it wasn’t as if the rest of him wasn’t striking; everything about Logan was striking. He was short, but massively built, broad-shouldered, and his face was ensnared in an eternally grumpy expression. Plus, that hair. Wild, tangled, and perpetually mussed.
The strange thing was Peggy felt a sense of stillness after the initial earthquake in looking at him. She felt her boiling blood, hotter than hell fire, cool against her skin. Her eyes softened when they met his, a natural unfolding of the hard shells of her irises. The sweat beading her brow cooled. Color flowed back into the world. Above his head, right beneath the ceiling of that cramped, smelly, and war-torn cabaret, she felt the sunrise open up above her. The sunrise she hadn’t seen before. Not like this. All of its expansive beauty, unreal and imagined, opened up above their heads. An empty hemisphere filled with color as if never before. A world born anew in the context of this place.
The itch on the back of her skull was gone.
She felt a sharp gasp suck in through her lips as a coil of her hair escaped down in front of her face. For the first time, her dark eyes met Logan’s as they would for centuries on into eternity. He was watching her with a hint of amusement, impressed.
She smiled at him. A small one, a ghost of something real and truly mesmerizing.
He smiled back.
Their gazes, lingering and mingling against one another, seemed to know something neither of them did: there was a magic in this moment. Not simply a magic, but a covenant. A rich, full, and fleshy promise of their future, drawn out in blood, tears, and hope. It was the moment they saw each other for the very first time.
Do you know how un-bloody-fucking-precedented that is? The two of them? With a story as long as theirs, it’s hard to imagine that there was ever a “first” of anything. Yet here it was – the first time their eyes met, the first time they knew the existence of the other was real.
Tucking her loose hair behind her ear, Peggy shifted her eyes from Logan’s as she turned to leave. That smile was still on her face as she left the cabaret.
It was a rainy autumnal evening – unsurprising for London. Peggy was standing beneath an awning of a closed and darkened dance hall, one she had often frequented as a young girl growing up in this grey, perennially soaked, ancient city. She leaned against a column, smoking a cigarette, as she watched the bookshop keeper, across the street, close-up for the night. He was sweeping the front threshold of his shop, while the distant, blue-streaked trumpeting of Louis Armstrong softly tumbled through the dark, rainy night. Saturnine-faced and a bit pensive, the young Brit looked up into the dark clouds, and blew a large puff of smoke into the sky.
In truth, it had been months since France. Peggy, split from her boys for a covert spy mission stationed in London. You gotta write us every day, Peg. Steve had told her with that half-dimpled grin of his, sweet and sugary like pancakes for dessert. She had kissed his soft, boyish cheek and wished him well. They’d see each other in the spring, or so she thought. They wouldn’t, of course. Bucky would fall off a train and into an icy ravine within the year, while Steve would go into the ice on Valentine’s Day, the day before Peggy was supposed to reunite with him. For a long time, before she’d find him again, years into the future, she would blame herself for his death. If only she had been there to protect him, he would have lived. But in that moment, when she wished her boys off, with that signature smile of hers and red-lipped kiss on the cheek, she had no idea that she would lose them both within the year.
Not that she was completely alone, of course. No, a few of the Howlies came with her, as did their newest member, James “Logan” Howlett. The boys called him Lucky Jim because for a man with a death wish, it seemed as if he couldn’t die. Peggy wasn’t one for nicknames – Never insult a perfectly fine name by superfluity, as she would say (not really understanding the irony in that she went by “Peggy”) – but the boys had a point: Logan did seem impervious to death. Bullets would skim his shirts, but no blood would mar the rip. Knives would pop out of his flesh like dandelion heads, leaving only a minor flesh wound (“It wasn’t in very deep,” Logan would gruffly deflect if asked).
“He’s indestructible,”sweet and ever-loyal-to-his-wife (unfortunately) Gabe Jones, had observed to Peggy one morning over breakfast, “he’s like a pocket-sized Superman.”
“Superman does not have the mouth that Logan does, Gabriel.” Peggy teased, taking a sip of her tea.
“Ya’ got a point there, Peg, he’s a swearin’, antithetical Superman.”
Gabe was mostly right – Logan was incredibly silent, except for his exceptionally unfiltered use of naughty five-pence words. More often than not, Peggy would hide her grin when he would describe things like the snowy, slushy weather of London as an “icy crock of shit.” She was the leader, after all, she couldn’t be seen condoning anything inappropriate. But for whatever the reason, she found Logan, and all his colorful ways of describing things, endearing.
The strange thing was, despite seeing each other in the cabaret months before and sharing such a…well, “moment,” neither had addressed it. Logan seemed to be avoiding Peggy. He would avert her eyes every time she looked at him, he’d make a point of leaving any time she came in a room. Perhaps she was simply being paranoid – Logan could have simply forgotten.
But it’s not as if she could blame him – it was easy to forget things in the Big One. Moments felt papery thin and real meaning could be quickly disseminated in a matter of instants. It wasn’t all brassy swing music, glory, Captain America, and sepia-toned Blues. It was a war. The War. Peggy had seen more dead in the past month than she had seen alive. As Bocaccio said in the ancient streets of Florence during the days of the Black Death: One could eat lunch with friends and have dinner with ancestors in paradise. Often, in war, that was truer than any of them could have imagined. You saw your friends – walking, breathing, alive – one day, and then the next, they were gone. A bloody speck in the outpouring excess of bloodshed. In all that blood, forgetting was easy, death was easy, but the battle itself, that never got any easier.
Peggy turned her head over her shoulder at the sound of footsteps behind her. Speak of the devil and the devil shall appear. Logan, dressed in the standard-issue SSR uniform, tied and polished, was holding a leather jacket over his arm as he appeared to be walking back to base. She raised an eyebrow at him but still managed a hint of a smile.
“And pray tell, what sunshiny temptress has dragged you out so late, soldier?” She breathed in an intoxicating cloud of nicotine through her nose. Her face was half-lit in the dim glow of the street torch. The oblong shape of her face was rounded by the bends and blooms of her cheek bones, which gracefully bowed out beneath her eyes.
Logan swallowed and seemed to debate something to himself. A hard crease shifted down his mid-forehead like a watery channel. Finally, as if making a decision (rather reluctantly, if she might add), he strolled over to her. Taking a stand beside her, he pulled out a cigar and lit it, sticking it in between his lips as he breathed in the fragrant, wood-scented smoke. “Do I need a reason to be out? Maybe I just wanted a walk.”
The Brit finished her cigarette and dropped it to the cobblestone walkway, before smashing it beneath the heel of her boot. Her eyes stayed fixated on Logan’s side profile as she watched him smoke. “In the pouring rain?”
“Maybe I just wanted out.” He tersely suggested, breathing out a long puff of smoke. “It gets so goddamn claustrophobic in these fuckin’ bases.”
“Are you always so poetic with your words?” Peggy teased.
Logan grunted – maybe a hint of a laugh. At the very least, she could tell there was a softening at the tips of his lips. Had she gotten a smile? No, not even she could be that pervasive. “Yeah, I’m a real fuckin’ Shakespeare.”
A rich, but candid laugh escaped Peggy as she tipped her head back. “I can tell. You’ve used the proper adverbially form of fuck twice now in the past three minutes. Absolutely stirring verse.” She went silent for a long moment, but the smile on her face from the effect of laughter remained.
The two of them watched the rain pour down into the street before them. The dark, heavy English rain flooded over the curb and into the drainage pipe just beneath it. Peggy could hear the groan of the ancient aqueducts beneath the city as it swallowed gallons of water at a time. In some parts of the city, the water would gather deep enough that standard issue vehicles would float right off the side of the road. Even for England, this was a lot of rain. Better yet, it was a wet rain. The air was moist from the heavy rainfall, and even Peggy, untouched and dry, could feel the dampness of the air around her.
“Logan, can I ask you a question?” Peggy shifted her weight against the pole she was leaning against.
“It sounds like you’re gonna, even if I say no.” Despite his deep sigh of reluctance, she could tell Logan was smiling, if only just a hint.
“Why are you here? Fighting in a war that you don’t seem in the least invested in?” She watched him from her side of the strip, cocking her head. “It’s not as if you’re particularly patriotic of Canada.” A hint of laughter wafted off her tongue.
Logan blew out a long, heavy breath as he watched the smoke travel out into the rainy night air before them. It didn’t seem like he would answer, until he did. “Fightin’s easy, compared to everything else. I guess.” The smile she had spied earlier was gone. It was an empty statement. A blank piece of paper handed off as a blanket answer for everything, but why would he give her an honest answer? It’s not as if he owed her anything more. Peggy wanted to see his eyes, but they were dark and frozen off into the distance as he smoked.
“Fighting’s easier compared to…what?” She knew she shouldn’t pry, but this was the first time she’d really gotten a chance to talk to Logan. Well, alone, that is.
There was another heavy sigh as Logan took his cigar out of his mouth reluctantly. He gave her a look. A bad one. Don’t ask, I don’t tell. His dark blue eyes flashed to a bright, pulsing silver. “Do you always ask a million questions?”
“When I have need of a million answers.” She winked, obviously unbothered by his attitude, which jostled a half-amused snort from Logan.
“I don’t know… I… I guess… Fighting’s easy in that all it is, is punchin’ some idiot in the nose, or killin’ a fuckin’ Nazi.” For a moment – and truly, it was a moment in time, it looked as if Logan felt a great wretched pain from deep within him. Peggy could tell something fresh and wounded bled inside of him, behind all those walls, guarded by the stabbing gaze and insufferable attitude. “I don’t have to…think about it – I just do it.”
“Is that why you’ve been pretending not to recognize me from the cabaret back in France? Fighting’s easier than saying hello to the pretty Brit from the pub?” Peggy raised an eyebrow. Her eyes shifted to his, intending to meet them directly.
However, Logan had obviously expected her to bring it up. He had been ready. His eyes steeled themselves ahead, but that didn’t stop him from groaning with a frustrated growl. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Heya, lady, nice job puttin’ that asshole in the hospital by crushin’ his ballsack – d’ya wanna get a drink sometime?’” He turned to her and met her eyes, giving her a sardonic ‘Really?’ look.
The joke was on Logan, though, as Peggy found his sardonic, over-the-top disgruntled looks to be rather hilarious. She laughed. Loudly. The sound, deep and brassy, carried itself through the sleeting rain, tangling up with the notes of the jazzy blues playing from across the street. The effect was rather endearing. She drew closer to him, placing a hand on his shoulder to either jokingly push him or scold him. Either way, she was laughing too hard to know what she had been planning.
Logan, seeing that his snide comment had made Peggy laugh harder than he’d been expecting, seemed to thaw out for the smallest of moments. A small, but teasing smile pulled on either side his lips.
After she calmed down, Peggy’s fingertips trailed down the arm of Logan’s uniform as she pulled away. Her touch may have lingered just a second too long. “As romantic as that would’ve been, you could’ve simply found me afterwards.”
Logan’s eyes shifted up to hers. They held each other’s gazes just as they did in the cabaret. Silvery blue knives striking into black opal stone. Peggy felt the world drop out from under her. Unsteady, unstable. He swallowed her up with that gaze. Is this how he looks at everyone?
“Who says I didn’t?” He answered.
A breathless smile began to form on Peggy’s lips as she felt her heart leap into a race against itself. Who says I didn’t? Does that mean…?
Across the street, the bookkeeper’s record switched to Armstrong’s cover of La vie en rose. It was undoubtedly Peggy’s favorite. The brassy heart-on-his-sleeve singing, the gentle swinging, but sultry melody, the grandiose clanging and trumpeting. There was such joy in the music, but such a riveting tragedy. And the end of the song, loose and strident, sounded like a kiss: the harmony and the melody wrapping themselves around one another in perfect, correspondent, chaotic mastery. One song, one trumpet, but a song full of love, heartbreak, and well-wishing into the night.
“Do you dance?” The young British super soldier asked him. Her heart was racing, daring each beat to go faster and faster as if it was in sharp competition with its own rhythm and pulse. She held out a hand to Logan, raising an eyebrow in welcome.
Logan eyed her hand with an adamant skepticism. “Carter…” He groaned in exhaustion as his eyes came back up to hers. “I don’t dance.”
“One dance. By ourselves, in the middle of the bloody night. Please.” She could tell he was bending into the decision. The tenseness of his brow had softened some as a small smile began to tug at one end of his lips. “I won’t tell the boys you have a heart, if that’ll seal the deal.”
With a long, exasperated breath, a heavy eye roll, and a hyperbolic groan of “You ask too much, Carter” – Logan took the girl’s hand and lightly pulled her into his arms.
Peggy wasn’t a trained dancer, nor did she have the expertise to know when someone was especially “talented.” At best, with the lessons her mother had put her through when she was a child, she was a little better than average. However, she immediately knew this wasn’t Logan’s first time. He was light on his feet, gently, yet gracefully easing her in dainty, rhythmic circles, and his hands softly slid up her back as they moved against the aching notes of Armstrong’s playing.
“You said you didn’t know how to dance.” Peggy raised an eyebrow with an accusing expression.
“I said that I don’t, not that I don’t know how.” He chuckled with a modest smile. It was one of the only times Logan ever reminded her of Steve. That quiet, but hesitating admission of his own skill – it was a shared trait with the ever-famous Captain America. Not that Logan would admit to being modest either.
Spinning her with a quick, but unexpected tug, Peggy giggled as she spun back into Logan’s arms. Her hands caught themselves against his chest, her breath hitching as she came to a sudden stop. Hesitantly, she shifted her gaze to his, but Logan was already looking at her.
“You know what I think?” She suggested, without much prompting.
Logan quietly laughed as he slid his hand down to the small of her back, easing them back into a comfortable, but casual pace. “Yeah? What do you think, Carter?”
“I don’t think you joined the war because you were looking for a fight.” She steadied her hands on his shoulders. Her dark, but richly elaborate eyes, chalk full of intimate, confusing, and loud designs, deeply cut into his. “I think you were looking for something to fight for.” She eased herself closer as she felt something sharp and distinct shift in the back of her throat. A little nervous trill twisted itself around her heart as Logan’s eyes froze on hers. The knob of his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.
“What do you know about it?” Suspicious and a bit too sharp, Logan’s words cut her ears.
She didn’t have any right, she knew that… But there was… There was something in that moment before she first found him in that cabaret, that desperate, screaming, dragging moment of heart wrenching dryness. She thought she was going to die, quite honestly. Her eyes had scattered themselves silly across that grubby, grungy place, only to land on him, and as if by magic, as if by some stupid deus ex machina, she knew immediately and fully well what he was to her. It was as if he had opened a door when he smiled at her that night because all the raving, loud color of the world flooded back into her life.
Breathless and pressed up against him, Peggy made a decision. In the middle of the song, halfway through, and just when Armstrong began to sing the iconic lyrics give your heart and soul to me, she placed her hand, warm and small, against his shaggy cheek. “You found me in the middle of a war, after I nearly a killed a poor sot – can you imagine a more ridiculous meeting?” That pretty, but resilient smile of hers skimmed across her nervous face.
“And yet, I realized, all that empty time, all that empty movement, all the blood and the delusion… I was holding my breath, Logan.” her breath dropped into a whisper, while her eyes seemed to expand and widen across her face.
“I was holding my breath…until I saw you. And suddenly, suddenly, everything was so goddamn worth it.” With eyes as bright as falling stars, she caught Logan’s eyes for the first time. Because for the first time, he couldn’t look away from her. Even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t.
Logan’s face, usually hidden behind a cosmically strong wall of prissiness and cigars, was undone. His royal blue eyes, flushed just the right amount of silver, were wide and surprised. He was, obviously, caught off guard. His mouth parted as he started to speak, but no words (or, at least, coherent ones) seemed to form. With a softened, unguarded face of unspeakable warm things, his hand came to rest on the base of her skull. The spot where a dry, old, and untouchable itch had once slept. Inadvertently, his shoulders untensed as he relaxed against her, involuntarily closing the small, stubborn gap between them.
“Peggy…” He breathed, his eyes still searching for an answer to this conundrum she had given him.
He had called her name, hadn’t he? Who was she not to answer? Dipping her head, her other hand sliding up and over his other cheek, she brought her lips up to his. Their lips met with colliding, raring energy. Peggy had accidentally bumped them out into the rain, but it didn’t matter. Neither of them noticed.
Across the street, the brassy, extraordinary kiss of Armstrong’s ending exploded into the rainy, night air. The drums striking one another, just as the trumpet began to wound down, only for it to surge into an explosive, romantic finale. Peggy and Logan had missed it, however, as they were kissing, in the pouring rain.
Years and years later, after the War and well into the next one, Peggy sat at a small, but cozy kitchen table somewhere in upstate New York. It was that fuzzy, pre-dawn darkness before the sunrise, just before the night ended and the day began. As usual for that time of day, Peggy was awake. She didn’t sleep much during that time. Her hands, cold and shaky, were wrapped around a steaming cup of tea, while her eyes were glazed over and lost in some distant thought. The kettle, a lavender-colored antique, was positioned beside her on the table, still squeaking and buzzing with just-boiled water.
The kitchen was small, but not small enough to be insufferable. Peggy liked it a bit smaller: “not as much distance to cover,” she had told Logan when they first moved in. The walls, pistachio green, and chipping in the corners, were covered with paintings of still-life landscapes. The particularly large one that hung over the kitchen table, perhaps much too large for a kitchen of this size, was a watercolor of a great stone mansion that was surrounded by green pastures as far as the eye could see. The painting, done by her great aunt, depicted her grandparents’ estate in Northern England.
When Peggy sold her family’s great house just after the War, she had wanted to sell everything. She had outgrown the old family home, after all. She was ready to start fresh. But that painting… As cliché and rustic as it seemed, had hung over the fireplace of her grandfather’s study for fifty years. It was a monument of time and the journey through it. And even after all that time, she couldn’t part with it. Keep it, her husband had ruggedly suggested with a grin, when can’t we use a giant fucking painting?
Peggy took a sip of her tea as she looked up at the aforementioned “giant fucking painting.” The dark-bodied, malty-flavored assam tea was almost strong enough to blot out the bitter taste of grief on her tongue. The large, unpainted streak that ran down the middle of the kitchen wall was still there. Neither of them had had the heart to cover it up.
Logan had been adamant: I’ll hang it, darlin’ – you go unpack in the bedroom. Peggy gave him a dubious look as he stood on the kitchen table fiddling with a tiny set of nails between his big fingers, but she reluctantly left the room. When she came back about five minutes later to get another box, there was a long, noticeable marking in the plaster where the painting had dragged down about five inches before it finally decided to stay put. The large wooden frame that housed the painting had been much too heavy for the feeble nail he’d struck into the wall.
Turning to look at her with an over-the-lips, secretive grin, Logan chuckled. It was like that when we got here. Peggy would’ve been mad if she wasn’t so busy laughing. At that point, they’d been married for nearly ten years, but he still found ways to make her laugh.
Tears glimmered in Peggy’s eyes as she looked down into her tea. Her face was strained with emotion; tight and taught with unswallowable worry. With a rumble of a soft, gaspy sob, she took a large swallow of her tea to stifle the sound.
In the other room, on the living room floor, nestled beside a tiny, dark-haired girl, a giant fluffy dog lifted her head to the soft, yet distinct emotive sounds that came from the kitchen. She laid beside the sleeping child who had possessively wrapped her arms around the dog’s giant neck, snoring sweetly into the ruff of her collar. Most nights, AJ slept beside the sleeping girl – whether on her all-too small twin-sized mattress or spread out on the living room rug with a mound of pillows and blankets. Protecting her humans’ baby was her job, a job AJ took all too seriously.
Atlas J, or more commonly, “AJ,” was a colossal beast of a dog, and an even more colossal beast to groom (as Peggy so regretfully learned with the amount of dog hair that coated her dresses and furniture). But she was the family dog – loyal to a fault and mercilessly protective of her pack.
Originally, AJ had been a gift. A big green box under the Christmas tree, to be exact. Peggy had set the massive box in front of her husband who gave her a deeply suspicious look – just like his girl to get him something ridiculously expensive as well as ridiculously thoughtful. At the time, he wasn’t sure what he expected to find: a handmade leather jacket from Italy? A handcrafted marble bust of Peggy’s face? Well, whatever he had been expecting – he was wrong. What he had not expected was to be greeted by a tiny wriggly puppy with a giant red bow wrapped around her neck. And yet, there she was, a teeny leonberger puppy with the sweetest face, and a tag that was marked by Peggy’s perfect loopy cursive: LOGAN.
As she grew up, AJ became a staple of Peggy and Logan’s family. She was their travel companion, floor cleaner (“She’s faster than a bloody vacuum!” Peggy liked to say), and the best cuddling partner around. And while AJ loved Peggy, she was Logan’s dog. AJ and Logan were inseparable. It was a known fact that if Logan was around, AJ was bound to be somewhere close behind. She followed him around the house constantly, sat in the passenger side of his pick-up truck, and slept on top of him when he fell asleep on the couch. Undoubtedly, Logan was her person.
For the past few months, however, Logan hadn’t been around. His scent in the house was growing old, stale, even. That was odd. It was like he left and forgot to come back. AJ often sat at the big front window in the living room, looking down the long, spindly driveway for any familiar sign of her dad’s grumpy, loud pick-up truck that had a distinctive growl that stung AJ’s ears. But there was no sign of him. She would eventually give up for the day when she could no longer see down the driveway. With a sad whine, she’d sit beside the human puppy, letting her pull on her ears until AJ grew tired of that too.
There was really only one other person who understood her anguish over her missing human.
Getting up from beside the sleeping child, AJ stretched unceremoniously, and padded out into the kitchen to see her mom sitting on her respective chair. Her nails clicked against the shiny gloss of the tiled floor as she sat down in front of Peggy, making sure that there could be no question that AJ had, indeed, arrived. Beside her, in the empty chair, was where her dad sat. AJ knew this because her dad would feed her leftovers. He was a good dad.
Peggy swallowed a soft sob as she looked down at AJ’s large, puffy face that had suddenly appeared in her lap. AJ’s wet nose nudged at Peggy’s hand as she looked up at her with adoring, intuitive eyes. Peggy smiled through her tears and bent down to press her wet face into the dog’s soft and comforting one.
“I miss him too, love.” She whispered into AJ’s ear. “I miss him so much.”
Another handful of years had passed. Not as many as the first time, but enough to be considerable, enough to grey hairs, enough to increase wrinkles on foreheads, enough to hurt.
The two of them were in a guest bedroom of a colossal mansion in Westchester, New York. In about ten years’ time, the estate would become one of the most famous mutant sanctuaries in the world. But for right now, it was only a massive house. A massively empty house. Sure, it had vintage furniture from the 19th Century, libraries stuffed with rare and fine books, and some of the world’s most innovative technology, but it didn’t change the fact that it was devoid of anyone else besides an eccentric British telepath. Don’t you get lonely in this big house, Charles? Peggy had once asked him. I didn’t used to, he offered with a typical Charles Xavier half-smile – half-sad, half-kind, half-understanding, half-heartbroken.
In one of those grand empty rooms, Peggy and Logan were positioned at opposite sides of the bedroom – he was sitting on the bed, and she was leaning against the wall, watching him from behind. Drying tear streaks marked the bends and molds of Peggy’s face, while Logan looked down at his hands. There was a finite, palpable tension in the room. The tight, anxious feeling that lingers after a fight. It was as if there was smoke clearing from the aftermath of a structural explosion – the damage was clear and devastating, even if the danger had passed.
Logan’s face was hidden from Peggy as he bent over to study the callouses on his palms. His expression was mired and marred with gnarled emotions. Marred and mired because he felt them, gnarled because he did not understand them. His whole body hurt. Every muscle was steeped in pain, while his bones felt as if they weighed a million pounds. He swallowed – the simplest of involuntary actions – and yet, his salvia felt thick, acidic, and metallic.
You’ll taste metal for the next twenty years. It’s a part of you now. You’re more machine than man. Stryker’s voice echoed in his head like he was trapped inside an echo chamber of his own making. Stryker was gone…but he still felt his voice haunting him into insanity.
Kill. Kill. Kill. His head pounded with blood and carnage. A metal skull that was not made to house the soft gelatin of the human brain beat against his flesh. He slipped his forehead against his palms. Movement felt next to impossible, even though his body had been programmed to move faster than any normal human.
Killing is the only thing that will make your pain worth living, Stryker remined him.
And it wasn’t just his body that had so obviously changed, but something much more intimate had changed in his face. Logan didn’t look older – he didn’t age, after all – but he looked different. It was as if the vital parts inside of him had been taken, but Logan, ever stubborn, had clung to the lost things inside of himself. Only to leave a confused sense of agonizing loss that glommed onto his face, morphing it into something unrecognizable from the man he had once been.
Everything was too loud – not just in the room, but in the air. He could hear the buzz of the oxygen around him, feel the movement of the tiny single-celled organisms on his skin – his skin was crawling – It’s too tight. It’s all too tight. He wanted to cut it OFF. His lungs felt full, unable to expand. He breathed metal. He tasted metal on his tongue. It made him sick to his stomach. He could smell the toxic adamantium in his own blood. You’d die if it weren’t for that miraculous blood that pulses through your veins. He could feel that “miraculous” blood squealing in agony as every single cell oxidated against the metal in his bones, only to be restitched back together again.
Everything was too much. He felt a gaping, open burn within himself that had swallowed up everything he had ever been. All his dreams, all his memories, all of him. It was gone.
Everything was gone. Everything…
Everything—
Peggy sniffed.
Logan tensed at the sound. He knew that sound. He knew he recognized it within that empty, lost space that had been burned out of him, but he couldn’t remember why… He couldn’t remember how he knew it, or why he knew it, or what was so fucking important about the fact that this woman was crying. God fucking dammit. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to kill everyone. He wanted to slit the vocal cords out of every fucking—
—but he…
He knew that sound.
The sound of her tears. He knew it as intimately as the beat of a heart, the whispered voice of a lover, or the cry of a child. Some instinctive part of him that was inborn and twisted deep within the soft recesses of his intestines, gutturally tightened at the sound of her crying. He turned, his chin coming to rest on his shoulder as he watched her, studied her. Why? What was so special about her tears?
Oh.
He remembered now.
That’s why. She didn’t cry. Not often, at least. How did he just know? How did he know that this woman didn’t shed tears unless it was worth the salt she was wasting? Why was she—
You’re the only person who can make me cry, Logan Howlett. He winced at the faded, crackled voice in the back of his head. British and careful. It breaks my heart to look at you sometimes. The headache worsened. Closing his eyes, he tried to push the voice out of his head. I’m not always prepared for those eyes of yours, and the burden you carry in them.
“Why…Why are you crying?” His voice was gruff, laced with the stinging rage of his headache. Speaking was an obvious burden for him – finding his own words, thinking of his own volition; that was all new. Terribly new and breathtakingly painful. It didn’t help that the sound of her tears confused him.
“Because you’re in pain.” Peggy answered simply. Her eyes delicately, and with great care, shifted themselves up to his. His silvery blue eyes looked back at her own, but they seemed simultaneously washed out as well as darker; lost in-between two realms of color.
Quiet. That’s what he felt when he looked at her. A silence, a softness in his mind. The raging ache in his head began to fade as Logan felt the tension of his shoulders begin to ease as he watched her. Her smell steadied him, tempered his suspicion. Vanilla and tea leaves. It was familiar. It was as if he had pressed it up against his nose a lifetime ago, crushing it into memory as he held it close. The woman, crying over his pain, was the only thing in this entire room that seemed to be real. And that, alone and in itself, terrified him.
Because you’re in pain.
Killing is the only thing that will make your pain worth living.
With a low growl, he turned away from her. His breath grew shaky, unconstrained, as he tried to reconcile the two statements. He couldn’t. They didn’t exist together. But he… He couldn’t understand why, why… Why…?
Because you’re in pain. Killing is the only thing that will make your pain worth living.
Peggy eased herself from up against the wall and slowly made her way over to the bed. Her footsteps were slow, but deliberate. Not cunning or calculated, but obvious, as if she wanted him to know she was coming to him. He flinched as she came close, moving away as she sat beside him. His eyes stayed wide and rooted to his feet. Don’t look at her. Don’t look at her. Don’t look at her.
Two directions tore at him, and they were both pulling him apart. Look at her. Don’t look at her. He gritted his teeth as his metal lungs refused to give him the air he needed.
“Logan, please look at me.” Her voice was gentle, but it did not sound like her. It wasn’t a question; it was a plea. The way in which she spoke pulled once more at something fleshy and living inside of that burned space within himself. A reminder. She was reminding him of something again. Her voice didn’t sound like that. Her voice never sounded like that. No, something was missing from her voice, something subtle yet filling. That was it. Her voice was broken.
That’s why he couldn’t look at her. If he looked, it would all be over. If he looked, the world would change. She wouldn’t just be the crying woman in the corner. Nothing would be sure, nothing would be known, and he would be in freefall as he tried to remember.
Because you’re in pain.
No, he couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t look at her crying face and ever hope to move on. Whatever lay on her face, whatever was nestled in that broken voice, would destroy any fight he had, and nothing else would matter.
Peggy watched how he fought to look at her. Every muscle in his bicep was strained as it was tightened. His hand, which gripped the side of the bed, was white knuckled. Tears lined her eyes as she watched him. She was afraid, in all honesty. Not afraid for herself, but afraid for him. Heartbroken for him. How could she protect him now? How could she help him when the worst had already happened?
A shaky whimper escaped her as she brought her hand up to the side of Logan’s profile, intending to shift his face to meet her eyes. His entire body tightened as her fingertips brushed against his skin. “Logan,” she begged, with both eyes rooted to his face, “please, my darling, look at me.”
There was a breathy little sound she made when he pulled away. A breathy little sound like glass whistling through the air before it inevitably shattered onto the ground. A breathy little sound like an arrow being set free from a bow. A breathy little sound that he knew was her heart breaking. Logan’s eyes shifted. His hand, without thought, without intention, reached for hers. His fingers brushed against her skin. Peggy’s eyes moved.
Their eyes met.
Their eyes stayed.
The heartbreaking soft brown of Peggy’s rested against Logan’s striking blues. An ancient, primordial dream; the sky kissing the earth once more. In another life, a waking dream, a quieter world, he had known her. But now he was seeing her for the first time. All over again and again and again. And that was the moment when they met again.
For a moment, the world stopped screaming. All he could hear was the beat of her heart as she looked at him. Thump thump THUMP thump thump. Her pupils dilated. The smell of her… The sweet balmy vanilla mingled with the pungent odor of black tea, but something else wafted within her scent. Dopamine. The love chemical. It smelled like cinnamon on her skin….and he could smell it all over her. Thump thump THUMP thump thump. The beat of her heart, the tears on her cheeks, the parting of her lips… She-she… How could she possibly…?
It was the only thing that made sense: She loved him.
Because you’re in pain.
“I don’t even know my own name.” He growled at her, tears welled in his eyes, but he was unable to look away.
“That’s alright,” she said with the smallest of smiles, “I know it. I know your name.”
Slipping her other hand around his own, she scooted closer to him. Their legs were touching one another. The movements of her, the way she shifted against him, the way she touched him – it was both familiar and distant, an old friend and an old kiss up against a newer, colder world.
“I know your name.” She whispered once more, spreading his hand between her own. “It’s Logan.” She breathed. “It’s James Logan Howlett.” Fresh, unfallen tears glittered in her eyes against the light of the bedside table lamp. His name was heavy as it slipped from her tongue. To her, his spoken name was a necessity; it meant as much to say it as it did to know.
James Logan Howlett.
The full of it, the long of it. She knew it. She knew his name. Most likely, she knew more than he ever would… And the real tragedy, the real choker of truth to swallow, was that he couldn’t even remember who she was. There were flashes of memories, glances and expressions that appeared and went like the moving pages of a flipbook, but nothing solid, nothing to hold onto.
God, he wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe that if she knew his name, she would know his heart. She would know him. But the pain… The pain… “I want to remember, but I can’t… I can’t…” He stuttered through gritted teeth as he felt the toxic agony of his adamantium body begin to seep back in like a choking, murderous hand closing around his neck.
With a wounded groan, his whole body stiffened as he turned to look at her. They were so close. So close he could see the way the blood oozed through the skin of her jugular. Her neck, her soft face, her fleshy hips, the quick of her thighs. All the parts he had once loved the best about her, and now… Now, he could only see how to cut into her, how he could rip her open, tear her apart limb-from-limb. Logan only saw the parts of her as pieces. The smell of her blood curled through his nostrils, cozying up in his senses. Killing her would be easy. He’d make it quick. Through the heart.
Killing is the only thing that will make your pain worth living.
There was no warning for what came next. Grabbing Peggy by the throat, Logan shoved her up against the wall with wild, untamed eyes. The great, magnificent blue of his eyes was drowned out by the faded feral silver that flashed over his glazed eyes. Mania, madness, and murder. It was all there. Through gritted teeth, Logan didn’t hear Peggy’s gaspy sob as she pleaded with him to stop.
With a second wave of anger, he rammed her head against the wall, as the thick of her skull slammed against the plaster with a pained grunt. A nearby painting slid down from the wall at the impact of her head crushing against the structure of the great house.
SNIKT. Three adamantium claws were suddenly resting up against the skin over her heart. A wave of pleasure ran through his veins as he felt her pulse quicken. ThumpthumpTHUMP. Peggy’s heart dropped into her stomach. A massacre glimmered on the edge of his gaze.
Peggy’s eyes widened as sudden tears emphasized all the color of her eyes and all the terror in her gaze. Color had all but drained out of her lovely face, while a deep cut on her temple oozed brilliant red blood down the side of her cheek.
Kill. Kill. Kill. The chorus of voice in his head, the screaming of the world around him, the pain of his metallic existence. It was killing him. Now, he was going to kill her. The blood that would run down his hands… Killing is the only thing that will make your pain worth living. He was going to—
“It’s okay,” she whispered to him. “It’s okay that you can’t remember, Logan.”
His entire body was shaking. He was fighting against a hotwired instinct, fighting with everything he had not to kill her. And even still, through all the carnage, his eyes met hers. They always would.
“When I first met you, I… I was living a half-life, Logan. I was moving without going anywhere. My family was dead. My world was colourless…or maybe it was just that I didn’t see colour how you were supposed to. But the truth of it is, my love, from the moment I saw you— Just when I saw you, my world was changed, and all of a sudden, there was color, movement, purpose.” Through tears and a shaky voice, Peggy smiled at him with a little shake of her head.
“Our story’s a bit of a cliché, isn’t it?” A sad smile teased her lips as she gently eased his coiled fingers from her throat. He had long forgotten he was trying to kill her. “Love at first sight and all that. Unfortunately for you, my darling, I loved you long before I ever, ever knew your name, and I’ll love you forever, even if you never remember mine.”
Logan’s knuckles, bare and unclawed, were pressed up against Peggy’s chest. A small tear ran down his cheek. He was practically leaning against her as all the murderous, programmed anger drained out of him. Deflated, he haggardly met her eyes.
A flash of memories. Moments that were not quite real, but not quite a dream either. Peggy turning to smile at him with a long lacy vail over her hair. A little girl peaking up at him from in-between his legs. A tiny puppy in a giant green box. A kiss in the rain.
“Peggy.” Out of the ashes, her name came from his tongue.
And she caught his. “Logan.” Her hands gathered his cheeks as his heavy head fell against hers. The act of remembrance, even if it was something so small – the tip of the iceberg of his life with her, the woman that he loved – it exhausted him. There was a soft, shaky exhale from Logan’s body as he collapsed against her, folding into her strength.
Peggy caught him. Her arms enclosed around his thick, bulky body as she held him close. Using the wall behind her for support, Peggy eased the two of them to the floor of the bedroom. Logan’s head rested on Peggy’s chest, while her arms tightly held him fixed against her. He was cradled between her thighs, with his cheek slumped against her chest. She pressed her lips into Logan’s hair, kissing the hard, hot top of his skull.
They didn’t talk after that, but they didn’t have to. They would talk later. Talking would be difficult for Logan, but Peggy would be there. That was her name. Peggy. He looked up at her from his place on her chest, letting his eyes rest on her face as she watched his. Peggy. Her name. He knew her name.
That fact alone brought him a sense of peace he hadn’t felt in years. With a heaving breath, one that sounded as if it had been held for centuries, Logan felt the great, agonizing tension shake loose of his body as he relaxed against Peggy. Exhaustion unpeeled itself from inside his unbound muscles. His eyes stayed fixed on her face, but he could feel the heaviness of his eyelids pressing down against gravity.
“Peggy…” He whispered her name once more to make sure it was right, it was real. Those great blue eyes closed. Finally, they could rest. All that wandering, it was over.
“I’m here, my love.” Her arms tightened around him. He felt her lips on his forehead. A soft kiss…like a kiss in the rain…
For the first time in five years, Logan slept.
Logan awoke when he felt the gentle drop of his hand slipping over the side of the glider. A water glass that had been resting on the floor, bumped over as his hand had dropped against it. Water pooled across the wooden floor and around his fingers. Great. Another fucking mess he had to clean up.
He groaned as he sat up, blinking and became aware of his surroundings. His prodigious blue eyes were a little cloudier than they had once been. He had a cataract in his left eye, but it was more of a pain in the ass than anything else. Peggy wanted him to see someone about it. You know, my darling, they have doctors for that sort of thing. He wouldn’t hear it. That wife of his, she was always worrying about something.
With a tired sigh, he grumbled and slipped on his frameless cheaters. That was a little better. At least now he could see. Well, out of one eye anyway. Outside the screened-in porch, he could smell the great storm that was beginning to settle above the canopy of the vast Canadian forest. A summer storm. In Cold Lake, those could be deadly. Summer storms whipped up cold fronts coming down from the northern, artic lands above, and met the warm fronts that drifted from just above the U.S. border. When the two fronts met, in this wild and in-between land, storms became an event as if God had decided to pour the oceans out onto that dense and woven forest.
Logan could feel the lightening and metallic buzzing of the earth on his tongue, while his metal joints groaned with the coming premonition of the storm. He had to close the upstairs windows. That rain would come straight through the screen now that he’d taken the storm windows off.
“Ah, fuck.” He groaned as he got up off the glider, feeling every painful protest of his 400-year-old body. “Shut up, would ya’?” He grunted as he made his way through the living room.
Moving had been difficult for Logan since his days in Weapon X, but now, it was a different kind of “difficult.” Back then, movement had been difficult because his body, still upheld and protected by his healing factor, rejected the adamantium skeleton he was encased in. You know what’s worse than that? Being 400 years old, with arthritis, and a metal skeleton that has never gotten easier to lug around. Coming to the top of the stairs, he paused, a hand resting on the side of the railing. He felt inordinately out of breath as he ran a hand through his spiky, graying hair.
Just a little further, you idiot, c’mon. With a grumble of effort, Logan pulled himself up into the dark rooms of the upstairs. There wasn’t much left in the upper recesses of the big house he’d built long ago. Well, not much besides junk. With a centuries-long marriage and a few 150-year-old kids floatin’ around – yeah, you’d have a lot of junk. Old, useless junk. The upstairs served as a final resting place for the crowded and left-behind things that came with the growing of children, the moving around of time and spaces.
Glancing around at the piles of stuff, he couldn’t help but sigh at the sheer exhaustion of the task. When he was younger, he could have done something about all the ever-mounting junk of their lives, but now all he could do was stare at it and marvel. How the hell did they have this much shit? To her benefit, Peggy had wanted to clean this up. She had wanted to tear the upstairs apart and build something out of this mess.
We could put in a proper observatory in that front room. This was, of course, one of those things that Peggy would say that would only serve to make Logan laugh. You could take the posh girl out of the pampered houses she’d long lived in, but you couldn’t quite take the “posh” out of the girl.
Darlin’, why the fuck would we need an observatory?
Because your homeland has the most beautiful night skies – we should take advantage of that, Logan.
She did have a point. Logan could remember the stars that hung above Cold Lake, even when he was a kid. The land of his father had been dipped and strung with stars. On most nights, if you laid straight on your back, in the soft grasses outside the house, you could see the dazzling, sparkling movement of the Milky Way. The dizzying heard of stars that roamed high above in the celestial heavens, grazing along planets, and drifting into the dark river of the universe.
In his younger years, when he was only a kid, Logan thought he used to hear the stars. Singing, almost. Dancing to a song of their own making. When he grew up, he chalked it up to childish imaginings of a sick, scared kid. Now, in his ancient age…when he looked up at those self-same stars, he felt like he could hear the singing once more. It wasn’t loud. After all, the stars didn’t sing to disturb, and they didn’t sing for just anybody. Only a select few. Only to those who would listen.
Anyway – he blinked out of his reverie, looking around at the dusty piles of junk and memories – to say in the least, Peggy hadn’t had the chance to build her observatory. There wasn’t any time. Not anymore. He turned to his left and walked into Laura’s old bedroom, where the open window was blowing the cool, rainy-scented winds through the white curtains.
The storm was really coming now. He could feel it. The dangerous, trembling rawness of its energy. He felt the metal in his lungs burn as he painfully groaned. His forehead tightened in a mass of burdened wrinkles. Not now. Now now. “Fuck.” The muscles on his neck strained and, just above his shirt, the grey, patchy veins of adamantium poison, shimmied as he swallowed.
“Peg.” He breathed through his nostrils, trying to stay calm. She wouldn’t hear him. Louder. “PEGGY.” He shouted as he dropped over on his side, feeling the toxic metal sink into his skin. Wheezing in absolute respiratory distress, he closed his eyes as he tried to concentrate on something other than the pain.
“Logan?!” He heard Peggy’s muffled, yet startled cry from downstairs. He wanted to answer her, but he didn’t have the strength. Would she know that he was upstairs? Would she know that he was struggling to breathe? Air was as painful to inhale as it was exhale. How the fuck was he supposed to breathe when it felt like a thousand knives being shoved into his lungs?
“Peggy…” He crackled like static, knowing she wouldn’t hear him. His head came to rest on the dusty carpet of his daughter’s room. Half the crap in here could have been auctioned at an antique sale. Including him. Was this all he had left? Piles of dusty shit in an old house? “Peg…” Dark spots swirled in his vision as his fingers gripped into the carpeting, trying to remain conscious.
There was a sound of the door breaking open and the blurry vision of Peggy appeared at the threshold. She was lit from behind, the light of the hallway glowing around her head in soft, fuzzy shapes. In his blurry vision, she looked like a guardian angel, as if manifesting from the thick darkness of the storm outside. No, he had had it all wrong. A pained, dying smile came to his lips. How could he ever think that was all he had left? “Hiya, honey.” He groaned.
“Logan?” The fear in Peggy’s voice was visceral, guttural. Her terror was tangible as it clung to every fragment of her voice, echoing down into how she spoke his name. Her eyes found Logan wheezing and gasping on the floor, behind an island of old toys from nearly a century ago. “LOGAN.” She dropped to her knees beside him, pulling his head into her lap as she reached into her back pocket. A syringe appeared in her hand as she injected it into the particularly bulged, darkened vein on the side of Logan’s neck. Biting her lip, she pressed her hand down onto Logan’s chest, rubbing into his lungs to help him breathe. It took a moment, but the miracle substance worked, the inky matter in his veins detracted and faded.
At the same time, Peggy and Logan both let out a collective exhale as the pain relinquished its hold on his old, old body. They sat there for a long time. Peggy gently rubbed Logan’s chest, while he watched her try to keep her emotions in check across that pretty face of hers. She was getting better at it the longer this went on, but he knew her better than that: The heartbreak was just beneath the surface. She was good at keeping it in check when it came to herself, when it came to the kids, when it came to the little things – the normal things, the irritations and the frustrations, but when it came to him… Well, they both knew how much trouble he had caused her over the years.
God, and even after all that fuckin’ heartbreak, worry, and time, she was still so beautiful. An arrow straight through the guts. That’s what he felt every time his eyes found her face. Her dark hair was still in full color, despite the long streaks of grey that had been woven into that crowning French braid of hers. Her face had aged but aged in a way that suited her. Some people, they didn’t age well – not in any physical way (aging sucked regardless of the way it happened), but in the way their expressions changed. Some people grew mean in the face, wrinkles and lines would become grimaces, and laugh lines could just as easily be signs of a perennial frown. Not Peg. Sure, she had wrinkles and lines – who didn’t when you were their age? – but her lines grew distinct, refined like dark inky line art in a sketch. Her cheekbones had become more pronounced while some of the softer places of her face sunk, making her look regal, dignified.
“We really should clean up here.” Logan said as he looked around Laura’s room, his head still resting in between Peggy’s thighs.
“God damn you, Logan.” Peggy’s voice was exhausted, heartbroken.
“What? I noticed how fuckin’ messy it was up here when I was laying facedown in the 50-year-old carpet. Might as well do somethin’ productive while I’m dyin’.” He was teasing, but his dark humor was not hitting the mark. Immediately, he felt the guilt of his words. Peggy didn’t find it funny. Not tonight.
“Logan.” She pleaded with him.
Knowing he had reached a line, he stopped. There had never once been a topic the two of them couldn’t talk about, but this was the one thing he couldn’t mention. This was it. The unspeakable topic that was not open for discussion. Under any circumstances. And the funny thing was, it was happening to him.
Later that night, while Peggy was brushing her teeth in the bathroom, Logan lay in their bed, looking up at the ceiling from the mountain of pillows his wife had insisted on propping up for him. The large bay window of their bedroom, the one that looked over the so-called Cold Lake, was open to the soft sounds of the fading storm. The distant thunder still clapped out in the dark, but it was miles away at that point, and the danger had passed. He could still smell the rain.
Closing his eyes, he found himself standing beneath an awning in front of a darkened dance hall. It was raining sheets out into the cobblestone street. In the distance, he heard the toll of Big Ben as it rose up over the towering dark buildings of London. The massive clockface stared down at him through the pouring rain as if to remind him there was only so much time. He turned to his right to see that Peggy was there, beside him, smiling a little. Do you dance?
He opened his eyes. The bedroom was dark, but he could feel Peggy just beginning to settle in beside him. She was still awake; he could hear her heartbeat. He knew when she was awake, he knew when she was asleep, he knew when she was afraid, he knew when she was sad, he knew when she was happy. All just from the sounds of her ridiculously loud heart. After centuries together, he knew all the strange, internal sounds of her heart better than the sounds of his own.
That night, the sound of her heart was loud, angry, and swollen with grief. She was crying. Softly. Into her pillow. Gagging herself onto the downy fabric of the sheet so as to not wake him. Since when did she hide from him? Part of him wanted to turn immediately and take her into his arms, just as he had always done…just as he was meant to, but another part of him… Did she want him to comfort her? He was the reason she was crying. Would his presence just serve to make things worse?
Maybe. Maybe, he’d only make it worse, but he couldn’t listen to her cry… It… It strained something inside of his stomach, twisted something out of place. Peggy didn’t cry. Except over him. Turning on his side, he reached over and placed his hand on her shoulder, giving it a warm, comforting squeeze.
“Peg.” His hushed tone tickled her ear. In her younger years, she probably would have giggled at his attempt to be soft-spoken, but that was a long, long time ago.
“Darling, you should sleep.” Peggy whispered into her pillow. Her eyes squeezed shut so she wouldn’t have to look at him. Looking at him had only ever made it worse. “You’ve had a long day.”
“I feel like that’s all I do now a days.” Logan admitted. “Sleep, eat, and shit, I guess.”
With a thick, phlegmy sigh, an aftereffect of crying, Peggy opened her eyes to meet his. Logan’s stared back at her. Even in the darkness of their bedroom, she could still see the majestic, gentle blues of his eyes. They looked like a silver ocean, still and mercurous, as it lay open beneath a shiny, pale moon. He took her hand and pressed the palm of it against his lips, pressing a kiss against her calloused skin.
The action made her feel like throwing up. He was comforting her. He was the one consoling her. She was failing him. She was failing to protect him, failing to comfort him, failing to keep him safe. More grandly, and perhaps all the more precise, she was failing him as a wife. Her stomach clenched as she softly gasped, tears welling up in her eyes, bright and artificially shiny. Gut-wrenching. It was as if someone had grabbed hold of the most precious parts of her organs and yanked on them hard.
“You—You just can’t do the things you used to do.” She pleaded with him through her tears, shaking her head helplessly against the pillow.
Logan simply watched her with those big, incandescent eyes. He was listening. Her husband’s eyes listened just as much as his ears.
“You… You’ll get hurt, or fall, or—or break something…and I won’t be there. I won’t be able to catch you.” Peggy suddenly sat up, pulling her hand away from him. She clung to it, holding it against her chest, and far away from him, as if the mere touch of her skin was too dangerous for him.
Dramatic, she knew. But it was true – sometimes, she did feel like that. She was still a super soldier, after all. The serum’s magical qualities had kept mostly everything in its rightful place, but her strength was still in full, terrifying force. Logan wasn’t as strong as he used to be…and if she held him too tight, or if she squeezed in the wrong place… She even had nightmares. Nightmares over so much as sneezing on him the wrong way. It was ridiculous, sure, but it was also terrifying.
Putting her head in her hands, she leaned against her knees, half-hoping Logan would just go back to sleep. But he wouldn’t. That’s not the man she married. Suddenly, he was there, arms around her, pulling her against him, making her feel small. Just like the old days. He’d hold her in between those massive arms of his, scarred and burned by battles and adventures and wars, and she would feel safe. She turned her head, her face hiding into Logan’s collarbone as he held her close. They fell back against the pillows, tucked and tied together.
“Honey, you gotta… You can’t… You can’t change anything here. You can’t stop this, baby. Not even Peggy Carter can stop death.” His words sunk into her skin like acid dropping onto her raw, uncovered flesh. She tensed completely, entirely, and with a full body in his arms. He only tightened his embrace and pulled her closer. His fingers, rubbing patters into her back, designed full cities onto her bare skin, feeling the goosebumps arise on the small of her back.
There was silence after his admission, but he knew it wasn’t because she had decided not to say anything. No, when she went this quiet, it wasn’t because she didn’t react. It was because she was sucking her sadness into herself, dissolving it all up into her heart like a sponge. He shook her, pulling away only to meet her eyes. They were wet and wide-eyed as if she couldn’t decide whether to cry or scream. She’d probably do both.
“Logan, please…” She began, as she always did. “Please, I don’t… I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We gotta talk about it at some point, darlin’, we can’t just keep pretending it’s not happening.”
Peggy’s expression grew into a heartbroken frown as a visible line like an upside down “U” morphed across her face. “It’s… It’s… My life, without you… It’s unfathomable.” She sobbed, unable to meet his eyes. She pulled the quilt up to her mouth to muffle the sound of her cries. “I’ve had you my whole life, Logan. My whole life… What is it, if not with you?” As if realizing the seriousness of her confession, she turned to meet his eyes, expecting some kind of penance or perhaps more elusively, an answer for this pain.
For Peggy, while she had lived a short 25 years without Logan, that much was true. From the time she was a young woman, just getting a taste of the violence and disillusionment of war, to now, at a staggering 230 years old, she had had Logan. To rely on. To love. To protect. She had had him, all to herself, and in many years, for long periods of uninterrupted time. Naively, she thought it would never end. Their time together had seemed endless – with their immortal bodies, healing factors, and unbreakable bones, how could it ever feasibly end?
But it was ending, right here, in this room, with every beat of her husband’s dying heart, with every breath of his body. Death lingered in his kisses on her cheek, it hung on his smile, it shivered and moved while he slept. She would watch him in the dead of night, praying that each breath he took would not be his last.
Logan had been getting older, which wasn’t surprising. They were both aging, but neither of them seemed to have the same effects of the aging process: the breaking down of muscle, loss of hearing or vision, or a similar loss of balance. Sure, Peggy knew it had been getting harder for Logan to get around, but that was expected. He was centuries old, encased with a metal skeleton – why wouldn’t it be hard? But she hadn’t been looking close enough. At least, that’s what she told herself when she wanted to blame someone. It was her fault. She hadn’t noticed the signs. They’d been married for nearly two centuries – an unbelievable, unyielding, merciless length of time to know someone – and yet, she hadn’t seen what was happening to him.
Until one day, when Gabby had been visiting, everything changed. The two of them, Gabby and Logan, were out in the garage. Logan had apparently been fiddling around with some kind of project, while their youngest recounted her adventures across Tokyo alongside her oldest brother, Daken. Peggy had been working in the yard, weeding and viciously attending to her garden, when she heard Gabby yell for her.
By the time she got there, Logan was gasping and convulsing with sweat, his veins had darkened and turned ash gray. Hank McCoy, their old friend, had prophetically foreseen this coming long before either Peggy or Logan had, for that matter. Just in case, he had said, twenty years or so before Charles practically wiped every mutant off the face of the Earth. Just in case something happens…and I can’t fix him, maybe you can. A concoction of Peggy’s super soldier blood and an anti-toxin was mixed. It was the only thing that slowed the poison that ran through her husband’s veins.
At the time, she couldn’t believe it was happening. She couldn’t believe that Logan, a man who had survived nuclear explosions, had his skeleton burned down to a crisp, dunked in acid of some kind or another, and lived with bullets through the skull, was dying. That didn’t make any sense. That was like saying that stars rained down from the skies like summer rain showers, and people could walk on water for their commute. It was improbable. More to the point, it was impossible. How could…? How could he just die?
It’s what happens to everyone, Margaret, her mother had told her long, long ago. We all live, and we all die, no matter if you’re the magician or the rabbit in the hat.
But… But Logan wasn’t supposed to die. Not him.
Not him.
For so long, she had lived her life with him. The two had spent more time in their life being married to one another, than they had being apart. Their lives had grown around one another like ivy over an old house, weaving and mingling and filling in the spaces that they left in each other’s lives. The yarn of their lives had been tangled together in a million different projects, stitched into a thousand different tapestries. If Logan was just gone…if he just wasn’t there, then what would be left? Dangling strings, ripped fabrics, unfinished art, nothing left to weave, nothing left to tangle. It would just be finished. Their impossible life together – unending, immortal, and timeless – would impossibly end.
How do you move on when you no longer know what the picture looks like?
Logan listened to Peggy with soft eyes, unhardened and unshuttered. What is my life, if not with you? “You’ll get up in the mornings, just like you do every day – at the goddamn buttcrack of dawn – you’ll garden, make your tea, call Daken – probably yell at em’ to get that weird skunk-smelling’ tea from Japan you always liked – wash the floors, go for a walk, keep the girls in line…and you’ll keep moving forward.” He brushed his thumbs against her backside. This time, Peggy didn’t flinch, she crumpled. She turned to him, desperate and hungry for his affection, to which he spared no time giving her.
Wrapping her up in his arms once more, his hand slipped beneath her shirt, rubbing the folds of her tummy as he spoke. “And one morning, one morning, years and years into the future, you’ll wake up, and I’ll be there.”
At that, Peggy shifted just a little in his arms to meet his eyes. Her own were shiny with enormous, glowing tears. Even in the dark, with his pointlessly cloudy vision, he could see the quivering of her lip. Her head buried itself against his chest as she wrapped her other arm around him, tightening her hold onto everything she loved about him, onto everything he possessed.
Peggy cursed at her old, stubborn oven as she opened the door to find her perfectly wrapped turkey had burn markings all along the aluminum foil. “Cunt.” She yipped as she pulled the large baking pan out of the oven with a hefty grunt. “Don’t you dare disappoint me, or I’ll have to kill you again,” she whispered to the cooked bird as she rolled back the foil.
Ah, but there had been nothing to be worried about. Despite the burnt foil, the hazy, glowing bronze skin of the great bird steamed dreamily up into the vents of the large kitchen. Peggy waved her oven mitt over the turkey, wafting the smell of delicious, creamy turkey meat into the living room where everyone was sitting.
A whistle came from the threshold as Logan’s oldest son, Daken, entered the room. “Mum, that turkey smells amazing.” He smiled, his handsome cheekbones of his father reflecting in his grin. Daken wasn’t her son, but they had known each other for a long, long time – too long to be unfamiliar, too long to not be family. At this point, he practically was her son.
With a little bow, Peggy offered her stepson a grateful smile and nodded towards the spread on the table. “Thank you, my love – you can tell your sisters that dinner’s ready, if you’d like. Or, if you’re feeling a bit naughty,” she winked at him, “you can have the first serving.” She held out a spoon for the potatoes.
Daken grinned, a rogue and mischievous smile. “I’ll tell them after I’ve gotten the best slice of turkey.” He returned her wink with a chuckle as he went to work helping himself.
Peggy leaned over and placed a maternal kiss on his cheek, squeezing his shoulder, as she padded out into the living room. Their daughters, sitting on miscellaneous couches, with a miscellaneous number of Peggy and Logan’s grandchildren, were arguing about something.
“I thought she was ‘the one,’ according to you – uhm, like, two days ago.” Gabby pointed a deliberate finger at Laura, raising a sharp brow.
“I didn’t like her. What else is there to say?” Laura scowled.
Colby, ever the pacifist, tried to mediate between her two younger sisters. Her voice was significantly squeakier, softer, and even a bit high-pitched, as she talked quickly, leaving no room to breathe in her voice. “Laura, it’s just, you have a tendency to call us, and say things like, ‘Wow! This girl, she’s really special,’ and then you don’t explain why she’s special, so then Gabby and I think, ‘Oh, well that’s great, except’—”
“Except, you’ve done it 17 times in the past year alone.” Gabby finished for her older sister. Her dark eyes, bright, brown, and chocolatey, narrowed in on Laura’s. “How many girlfriends are gonna be ‘the one,’ Laura?”
“As many as I fucking want.” Laura rolled her eyes. She didn’t need Gabby’s judgmental, little opinions. Gabrielle was the baby of the family, how the hell did she come to think she knew more than her? “Maybe I’m aiming for a number.” Deliberately, and with a menacing look, Laura flipped her middle finger at Gabby.
Before Gabby could ready herself for another annihilating attack on her older sister, Colby cut-in once more: “Okay, let’s not do that in front of, you know, children.” She gestured to her children milling around the living room, playing with toys that Peggy had gotten out for them. “And, also, Gabrielle, we live, literally, forever. It’s Daddy’s DNA. We’ll keep living for another few centuries if we’re lucky. When you live that long, relationships don’t always last – Mom and Dad were the exception. Laura is allowed to—to do it with anyone, for as long as she likes.”
“Can we lay off the talk about any of you, you know, ‘doing it’?” A deep, rumbling voice from the corner of the room spoke up. With two grandkids sitting on his lap, Logan chuckled as he shook his head, reclining in the La-Z Boy rocking chair. The girls turned to offer their ancient father a collection of half-dimpled smiles they had all inherited from their mother.
Peggy grinned at the scene. Every holiday was like this. Chaotic, contentious, crowded, but it was one of the only times they were all together again. All of them. It was a miracle they were all still alive, when so many of their friends weren’t.
“Alright, you lot, dinner’s ready. Happy Thanksgiving – off with ya’, go on.” Peggy clapped her hands to get the room’s attention and hopefully, shoo them into the kitchen.
The girls chattered excitedly as they got up off the couches. Colby collected her ten (or so?) children and made them line up, before they all made their way out into the kitchen. When it was just the two of them, Peggy smiled at Logan with that all-too pretty smile of hers. She was wearing a rather aged apron that said, “Best Mum Ever.” So damn cute. He’d never get tired of looking at her.
“C’mere, kid.” He opened his arm out to her and Peggy walked over, plopping down into the chair beside him, with her legs coming to rest over his lap. Not being able to help himself, Logan planted a kiss on her cheek, causing Peggy to giggle as if she was a hundred years younger. “Mmmm. You got cranberry juice on your cheek.” Logan teased her as he rubbed the small sticky stain on her cheek with his thumb.
“I put it there just for you,” she whispered seductively into his ear. “Sexy, right?” She waggled her eyebrows with a wink.
Logan guffawed and shook his head, looking down at her with the best, goddamn loving smile in the world. When he said he would never get tired of looking at her, he meant it. He never did. Not once, not ever, not in the two centuries they’d been married. “Pretty sexy,” he admitted.
Closing the distance between them, he kissed her, softly, sweetly, slowly. A budding kiss, as if it was the first time. But it wasn’t the first time. The first time was moored out in the rivers and oceans of time, long ago and distantly in the past. And yet somehow, when he kissed her then, it was like he was kissing her, all over again, for the first time.
When he pulled away, there were tears in Peggy’s eyes as she looked up at him. That was not their first kiss, he was reminded then, but it was ever closer to their last. “Hey,” he whispered, brushing his lips down against her forehead, “I’m here, baby, I’m here.”
Peggy wanted to freeze that moment. She wanted to freeze every moment with him, but that moment…the last great moment with him… It was… It was so precious for the mere fact that it was so ordinary. Thanksgiving dinner, the kids bickering and talking in the kitchen, the music playing on the antique record player, the smell of turkey and green bean casserole and apple pie. The crackle of the fire in the grand fireplace in the center of the room. Logan’s breath against her ear, the smell of the pine forest behind their house on his shirt. A thousand memories woven into the threads of his existence. They had done it a million times, they had lived this moment a thousand different ways. The mundaneness of it, the replication of it, the repetitiveness of what had come, what had passed, and now would be gone…forever…was overwhelming. It was that moment that she wanted to freeze. Bottle it up, cast it out into the ocean, and maybe one day, one day long into the future, she would find it once more, open it up, and relive this moment forever and ever.
“I love you.” He began, a single tear flushing down his cheek.
“So much.” She finished.
After dinner, the evening wound down with the kids saying their goodbyes and their parents wishing them all safe flights, drives, and boat rides back to their respective homes. Their family was scattered once more, thrown out across large and long distances, waiting for the day when they would all come together again.
Peggy closed the door behind Daken, before she walked back out to the living room to find Logan bent over the record player. She tsk’d her tongue with an exaggerated eye roll. “Excuse me, sir, last call has already happened, you’ll have to be going on home.”
Logan turned to face her with a dangerously secretive smile played across his face. “How about one dance?”
Behind him, she heard the strident cords of Louis Armstrong’s La vie en rose roll out into the center of the room. She felt color break across her cheeks as she shook her head in astoundment. After all this time, she shouldn’t be surprised that the 400-year-old geriatric before her was still the sweetest man on the planet. With a roll of her eyes, she took her husband’s extended hand, allowing him to pull her into the center of the room.
“You’re an old sap, you know that?”
“I know.” He teased, beginning to slowly waltz in the middle of their living room.
Logan was with Peggy, in that moment, when their eyes met and he pulled her close, but simultaneously, he was meeting her eyes in a thousand other moments.
Their eyes met in the middle of a ballroom, when she was dressed in spun, magnificent, elaborate gold, glittering like a tiny sun that he could cup in his hands.
Their eyes met when he walked into their bedroom, looking for a shoe, and she was ironing. She smiled at him.
Their eyes met while she was braiding her hair, their eyes meeting in the mirror of their bathroom.
Their eyes met as she took a tiny baby in her arms. She was crying.
Their eyes met when she broke down the wall of his cell. She stood before him, strong and unbreakable, like a warrior forged out of hot, simmering iron.
Their eyes met when he fell to his knees in the middle of a jungle, when a mad Titan erased him out of existence. She was screaming his name.
Their eyes met while they were sitting beside one another on a bed. Her hand grasped onto his. He didn’t remember his life, but she did.
Their eyes met on a Christmas morning, with a wriggly puppy held in between his hands.
Their eyes met in a dance, in the middle of a rain shower, when she told him she had been holding her breath until the moment she saw him. They kissed.
Their eyes met in a French cabaret, two hundred years ago, when a little, angry British woman, split a poor bastard in half with her knee. She was a wreck of sweat, rage, and bated furious breath. He could hear her heartbeat racing from across the room. But he knew, when he saw her, when their eyes met, two hundred years ago, in that French cabaret, he would be wed to that woman for the rest of his life.
Their eyes met in the middle of their living room, in the house they’d built together, in the land of Logan’s boyhood. Their eyes met, after hundreds of years of fighting like hell, raising children, living in a million different places and landscapes, breathing the air of new lands, dying on fields in another world, separating from one another for years, and meeting all over again and again and again… And after hundreds of years, their eyes met for the first time.
Peggy awoke in the morning to the sounds of birds chirping and sunlight streaming in through the open bay window. The white curtains were gently brisking outwards, frisking at the touch of the spring breeze.
As she did every morning, she looked to the empty space beside her in the bed. A sad smile pulled at her lips. “One day soon, my love.” Without another moment of hesitation, she slipped out of bed and got ready for the day.
For years and years onwards, Peggy got up out of bed without her husband, and at the “goddamn buttcrack of dawn,” as he liked to say.
Keeping herself busy, she tended to her herbs, weeded in her flower beds, and at some point, planted a new tree behind the house. She’d have tea. Black and with only a little bit of cream. She’d call Daken, it was nearly time for bed in Tokyo, but Daken always stayed up to talk to her. “You’ll have to pick me up a box of that tea I like, my love.” She washed the floors until they shined with the reflection of her face. She called the girls, one-by-one, talked to each of her grandchildren. Colby, living the closest, would sometimes drop off a few of her little ones. At holidays, she would cook. They would laugh, reminisce, and then go home.
But what she mostly did was clean the upstairs. She shoved junk into boxes, threw musty clothes out, and polished the hardwood floor of the old upstairs study. She hung paintings, ones that had belonged in an older, grander house that she had grown up in. She bought a telescope and stargazed. She hung up her grandfather’s ancient map of England, a gift from his own father. She found old pictures of the kids, Logan in a strapping uniform from one of the wars (she couldn’t quite remember which), and found an old stuffed teddy bear that looked half-demented (she loudly shrieked and dropped it, before realizing what it was).
By the time she was finished, she had finally gotten her long-wanted observatory. Taking in the smells of whatever season was upon the great house, she would sit on the sun seat, beneath the massive window of the large upstairs study, and watch the earth move beneath her. Sometimes she would read, sometimes she would drink tea, sometimes she would talk to Logan.
When all was said and done, Peggy did keep moving forward.
When a long while had passed, Laura came to her mother and complained of how hard it was to find a place to live in the area. “It’s like the apocalypse took out the entire housing market.” She had teased – a dark hint of humor she had inherited from her father. Peggy fell silent, pondering her daughter’s words. “I’m sure you’ll find something, darling.”
A few months later, Laura came to her mother’s house for their weekly visit, and found an envelope addressed to her on the kitchen counter. The house was perfectly clean, sparkling, in fact. Inside was the deed to the house. In her mother’s perfect cursive at the top of the deed was written: Take good care of her, my love, and live well in these walls. All my love, forever and ever and ever…
Laura gasped a little at the note, she looked around the kitchen. “Mom?!” She called, a single, half-hearted attempt to a question she already knew the answer to. No one answered her. Her mother was not outside, her mother was not upstairs, her mother was not going to answer.
With a quick breath to ready herself, Laura squared her shoulders and walked into her parents’ bedroom. She found her old, silver-haired mother on the bed. She looked like she was sleeping, curled up around the empty space on the other side of the bed.
When Peggy opened her eyes, she realized she was standing beneath an awning, outside of a darkened dance hall in London. It was raining like mad outside of the awning’s protective shading. Even so, when she looked up, above the awning, she could still see the dazzling lights of London rising above the rain. Despite the Blitz, the sparkling and glow of London Town, never darkened.
Across the way, a bookkeeper was sweeping outside of his shop, closing up for the night, while the record of Louis Armstrong’s Greatest Hits played on into the rainy, autumnal night. Peggy couldn’t help but feel like she had been here before, that she had lived this moment.
“Bout time, darlin’.” Her skin broke into gooseflesh as she heard his voice. She spun in a circle to see Logan strolling up to her, dressed in his leather jacket. His hair was loose and curly at the ends just like the night they met. His grin lit up the rainy night like a million of the world’s brightest cities strung together like lightbulbs on a wire. “I thought I was gonna turn another century before you showed up.”
Peggy breath hitched, her heart launched itself into the sky. “Logan?!”
“C’mere, kid.” He gave her cheeky grin, already spreading his arms as she ran to him. Swinging her legs up and around his waist, he spun her out into the pouring rain of the night. They laughed, they cried, they danced, they kissed, and when the sun came up, they went home.