Chapter Text
2941 on Fordway was a house not out of place among its neighbours. A huge chestnut tree, the oldest on the street, shadowed the front porch, and the south facing backyard was neatly maintained, the patio bleached by the sun and a swing set ageing near the fence.
Henry Matthews and his wife moved into 2941 in January 1951, and there they had lived ever since. Their three children grew up happy, and loved. The eldest and youngest still lived close enough to enjoy Sunday dinner regularly, and the middle one - Jane on all her official documents, Trouble to everybody who knew her better than a handshake and a smile - visited twice a year at most, but she made up for it with magazines and postcards from all across the globe on her travels. It was a good house, with strong walls and thick licks of paint.
In January 1991, exactly forty years after they first moved in, Henry finally retired for the second time at the respectable age of seventy-two. He had tried once before, to little success. He celebrated by giving his son and three grandsons all his ties, and what few went unclaimed, he burned in the firepit himself in a ritual that earned him the title Oldest Hoodlum in Washington DC from his wife.
“Just you wait until you retire, you'll be burning your lipsticks right here,” Henry retorted, and his wife laughed over the plumes of smoke cutting the frosty air between them.
It was a funny joke for many reasons, but most of all, because Henry knew his wife was not going to retire for some time yet. Peggy Carter Matthews was going to die with her boots on, or so everybody who knew her said, and that was that.
Standing with her arms folded in the scant snow, still wearing her nylons, with a fluffy bathrobe over her work dress, Peggy smiled proudly at him, and Henry felt the swell of youthful affection and awe he first felt when they met, almost fifty years ago.
“I'm going inside to get us some tea,” Peggy said, and scampered over the grass and patio like a young pup. She'd pulled her hair back into a plait, the way Jane kept her hair as a teenager, and it made Henry smile. He missed their troublemaker daughter, too. She'd missed Christmas for the first time in a while, and her letters had been less frequent of late, but longer and longer every time. It reminded Henry all too much of Peggy, over the years, when her work would weigh her down, and in her absence she would leave longer and longer notes, on the fridge and tucked into his briefcase and hidden in the folds of books for him to find. Full of love and apologies cloaked in everyday musings to conceal her longing.
Henry watched the fire chomp on his old ties, and held his hands over the flames. They were old man’s hands, now. He hadn't really noticed, but the fuzzy hairs and rubbery creases were very prominent. His skin was looser around his knuckles, and his nails looked different. He couldn't say how. It felt, suddenly, as if he could no longer make bold claims about knowing anything like the back of his hand anymore; he wasn't certain he could pick these hands out of a line up. They were an old man’s hands and he was - seventy-two, he thought, with a long sigh. He was seventy-two. It didn't matter that burning his ties was making him feel like a rebellious teenager tossing his schoolbooks at the end of the year, or that one laugh from Peggy was enough to make the years fall away from his worries and his joints. He was an old man.
The shadows of the garden were tucked very close, despite the firepit and the light from the backdoor spilling out. Henry glanced around, wondering what was taking Peggy so long. The chill was winning out against the fire, and now she'd mentioned tea, the thought was tugging at him. Perhaps he could convince her to sneak a nip of brandy into their mugs, like they'd do on a stolen Saturday night when the kids were young, and could entertain themselves happily, and they could pretend to be the only two people in the universe for a while.
Henry marched back inside, stamping the snow and damp from his shoes onto the entry mat that led straight into the kitchen. The kettle was whistling on the cooker, and Henry swore loudly, hurrying to pull it off the gas heat. The water sloshed inside, and he poured it into the mugs laying out ready, without teabags in them.
“Peg! Damnit,” he shouted, and then muttered. She could be so easily distracted sometimes. He would tease her about it sometimes, was this what she was like at work? He dropped two strainers into their cups, using the nice tea leaves Peggy had pulled out but not measured. They were on the last of the box Jane brought from India, last year. The aromatic sting of the scent filled the room, and Henry ached for missing his daughter, and shouted for Peggy again.
No answer.
Frowning, Henry trudged to the living room
It was empty, but he could hear Peggy out in the hallway, speaking in a low, soothing voice. Henry paused in the middle of the room, listening intently, as she murmured gently:
“-do about it, my darling. I know. I know. Look. Do you want to come here and - no, that's not what I said at all, Tony. You know it isn't.”
Henry huffed, and returned to the kitchen with an itch of anger under his skin. It was with increasing fervour that Tony Stark had been calling, lately, and while Peggy had been admirable in her patience and glad to offer her well of wisdom, Henry was growing tired of it. The boy was a reckless, selfish little twerp, and Peggy was too forgiving by half.
He swirled his tea strainer in his cup, and Peggy’s, and watched the firepit flicker outside through the window, casting dancing stretches of light across the lawn, the shadows of the trees twisting in the dark. There was a time he felt for the boy, but after the last time he came knocking on their door, Henry wasn’t so sure he wanted him so comfortable coming around anymore. He had been loud, and abrasive, and downright mean even as Peggy made up a fresh bed in their son's old room. She’d locked herself in her office afterwards, for almost two hours while the little asshole slept off his binge, and no amount of coaxing could get her to fess up what it was he’d said that upset her so much.
To hell with it, Henry thought, and he grabbed the brandy from the liquor shelf himself. He dropped a splash into each mug, stirring it in, and took a test sip, before adding a bit more. As he put the bottle back, clinking it between the long-lasting gin and the rapidly depleted whisky, his eyes caught on the photograph on the mantelpiece end. It was from Bethan’s thirtieth, a few years ago. God, three kids over thirty, he really was old.
Bethan was holding up her cake just high enough to show off her pregnant belly, with her big brother and sister on either side kissing her cheeks as she laughed. Henry picked it up to look closer, remembering the raucous chaos that soon followed that photograph being taken. Her water breaking early, Jane on the phone for the ambulance and Christopher holding his littlest sister’s hand. He’d been so proud of them all that day, how brave Bethan was, how focused Jane was, how gentle Christopher had been in the face of his sister and brother-in-law’s panic.
“That’s my favourite.”
Henry jumped a little, surprised to hear Peggy’s voice so close behind him. He turned, photo still in hand, to look at her. She was smiling at his hands.
“Mine, too,” Henry replied. He looked down again at his three children’s faces. Christopher already had speckles of grey in his beard and at his temples, and Jane had borrowed her mother’s lipstick because she’d forgotten to pack any of her own. He didn’t want to ask about the phone call - and he didn’t have to. Peggy always volunteered the information, no matter how much he didn’t want it.
“Tony and Howard have had another fight.”
“Uh-hum,” Henry replied, as noncommittal as he could make it sound. He returned the photo to its place of pride on the mantelpiece, and led the way to the kitchen. He handed Peg her tea, and she took a sip, narrowing her eyes at the taste of brandy but saying nothing.
“He’s so much like his father, and he can’t see it. All the things that he thinks make him so different from Howard are actually just-”
“It’s not up to you to fix whatever’s broken between them, Peggy,” Henry interrupted shortly. He couldn’t quite keep his voice level as he said it - the repetition of well-worn sentences left his words frayed and thorny at the edges.
“I’m not trying to fix anything, but he’s my godson, I can’t just-”
“What did he want this time, hmm?” Henry asked. Peggy breathed heavily through her nose, and leaned back against the worktop, cradling her steaming tea. “To stay over? For you to call Howard? To call Maria? You’ve done more than enough, Peggy, but he is taking advantage-”
“He’s hurting, Henry.”
“And?” Henry scoffed. He put his tea down too hard, and it splashed a bit over the worktop. They both looked at it, waiting for it to clean itself up. Henry tried to level his breathing, but he was so sick of this roundabout. “He’s passing on his hurt to everybody around him. He needs to get himself together, stop pushing everyone else underwater to keep himself up. You are his godmother, Peg, but you can’t be his crutch.”
Peggy pursed her lips and drank her tea. Henry looked at her hands around her mug. They were old hands, too. He thought maybe not quite so old as his own, but they looked different to the hands he held as he got down on one knee, to kiss her knuckles, and offer her a lifetime to share. He wondered if Peggy ever got surprised at the sight of her own hands, too. He watched the light glint off her wedding band and engagement ring.
“I don’t want to be his crutch,” Peggy said, eventually. She sounded abruptly choked, and there was a shine in her eyes that made Henry’s gut twist. “I don’t…” she looked around for the words that eluded her. “But I can’t give up on him. I can’t do it, Henry. He - he deserves to have somebody believe in him. I believe in him.”
About two months before their wedding, Henry stepped out for a cigarette one night, to get some solitude from a party, and found himself in the unexpected presence of Howard Stark. He had met Howard many times by then, but they had not shared many conversations, and even fewer one on one. Howard was a boisterous, oxygen-consuming flame at the centre of whatever room he was in, and Henry thought he was likeable enough, but he never really understood what a lot of the rest of the world seemed to see in the man.
Howard held open his cigarette case, and shared his matches, and for a moment they smoked together in silence, looking up at the night sky.
“You’re lucky, you know,” Howard said, after a while. “You’re about to marry the most loyal person I’ve ever met.” He grinned, a little sly at first, but then the showmanship slipped away like rainwater sliding down a window. What was left was incredibly sincere, and almost shy. “It surprises people, because they think Peggy Carter’s a hardass, but her love’s an infinite resource. If I could bottle it, I think I could power New York. Maybe all of America.”
And she loves you, was the unspoken ending that Howard smothered with his cigarette smoke. Henry had been surprised, in a way, because there hadn’t been any kind of jealousy in his tone, though it had occurred to him more than once that maybe Howard had a thing for Peggy. Howard had just been honest, and maybe a little bit sad.
Henry knew then it was true, and he knew it now. Forty-two years of marriage, and Peggy’s love was still a well that didn’t run dry. Not for Henry, not for their children, not for her work. And not for the Stark family, either. Infinite love, it sounded ever so romantic, but Henry knew better nowadays it was a taxing thing to bear. To keep on loving, sometimes. Taxing for Peggy to carry it, taxing for Henry to watch it.
“Believe in him to do what, Peggy?” he asked, as he picked up a towel and dropped it into the pool of his spilled tea to soak. He rubbed his mug dry and then took a sip of the leftovers.
Peggy gritted her teeth, and folded her lips around her first few replies.
“To be better than everybody else thinks he is,” she said, eventually.
Henry sighed. He didn’t want to have this fight. It wasn’t going to matter what he said, just like it didn’t matter that it seemed all too clear to him that not even Tony Stark thought he was better than the world’s expectations. Twenty years old, he was already a cynical thing, resigned to his lowest bar.
“OK,” he said. “OK. But he’s not going to thank you for it, Peggy.”
“If I did anything with the expectation I’d be thanked for it, I would never have left Bletchley.”
Henry smiled, and waved her off as she grinned at him, and neither the wrinkles around her eyes nor the silver in her hair could stop her from looking positively girlish then. Henry loved her, and he told her as much, wrapping his arms around her to kiss her, the taste of brandy and tea strong on her lips.
“Happy retirement, darling,” Peggy whispered when they broke apart, lifting her tea up between them to drink. “Promise you won’t try remodelling the house again, like last time.”
Henry knocked her forehead with his at her teasing.
“I will swear no such oath,” he warned her. “Christopher’s stopping by next weekend to help me look at the bathroom tiles.”
Peggy rolled her eyes, but it was fond, full of that infinite love.
“Couldn’t you get into reading, or golf or something?”
Henry stifled her suggestions with another kiss, and her laugh broke out over his teeth, making him laugh, too. The troubled lines of her brow were smoothing out, the anxieties that came with every phone call from Tony lessening over time, as they always did.
“Let's burn some of my old shirts, too,” he suggested.
“Miles and Olivia will complain again,” Peggy insisted, and glanced to the left side of the house, as if they might see their neighbours through the walls, scowling at them.
“Pssh, let ‘em,” Henry shrugged. “They've been old since they were twenty-five. Live a little. You make fresh tea, I'll go get that ugly green one that's been sitting in my closet for thirty years.”
“My mother gave you that shirt,” Peggy said knowingly, but her impression of being scandalised was ruined slightly by her smile. She'd hated that shirt for years, too. Despite her words she began to refill the kettle, and Henry watched her for a moment, feeling dazzled. Forty years in this house, two all-over remodels, three kids, one small fire that got candles banned from the kids’ rooms for a decade. Two dogs, one rabbit, six fish. They'd lived a full life here already, and the end wasn't in sight.
“Hey.”
Henry blinked, and saw Peggy standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking at him. She smiled her familiar crimson smile. “I love you.”
“I love you,” Henry replied. He headed upstairs, to fetch the green shirt Peg’s mother gave him thirty years ago, and he hasn't worn since; full of her love, and his own.