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Peggy checks the bombed-out pub first. Not because she expects to find Steve hiding in the dark, but because she needs a chance to compose herself, and time spent doing something—even something futile—will calm her more than time spent staring at a wall and picturing Steve's reaction. The dogtags bite a sharp line across her palm, through her thin cotton glove, with how tightly she's clutching them.
He's in the pub. Sitting at the counter, tracing the rim of a glass with his finger, but he knocks over the stool in his hurry to rise when she enters. "Did they find him?"
That face, blossoming with hope, twists her heart into a solid knot. Steve must see it in her expression, because he clenches his fists. "I'm going out there," he declares. "Allocation of resources be damned, whatever Zola's intel turns out to be, it can wait until I've got my team back together. You don't need me cooling my heels here in the meantime. I'll join the search and—"
"You know Phillips has already sent more men out than we can spare." Peggy seizes the momentary reprieve, shamelessly. "You're a lot of remarkable things, Steve, but you can only be in one place at a time. They're sweeping that valley far better than you could alone." At least, they were.
God, how's she going to do this?
"Has Zola talked?" Steve asks, once the silence has stretched uncharacteristically long. "Is that why you're here?"
"No. I'm—I'm here about the search. They found something." She gets it out in a rush, words tripping over themselves, like that's the difficult part. Belatedly, she gestures to the nearest upright barstool. He should sit down for this. Steve furrows his brow and ignores the motion.
"They found traces, but not him," Steve guesses. "All right, so he must've moved, that's all. Do they have any leads? I could help. I could try to—I mean, I know how he thinks. He can't have gone too far from—"
"Steve, listen to me." Peggy puts the discipline back in her voice. She'll need to say it explicitly. Every other Commando on that mission agrees Barnes couldn't possibly have survived, but Steve had radioed back an ultimatum in the same breath he'd used to report having Zola in custody. Find Sergeant Barnes or I'll do it myself, however long it takes. Only Steve could be that stubbornly pig-headed, just as only Captain America could threaten Phillips into sending a search party out for one man who'd fallen off a mountain.
"I'm listening," Steve says, making it a challenge. Peggy swallows.
"They found a few things. Obvious human activity. Blood, in the snow." She fights down nausea as she recalls other details in the full report, which she won't relay to Steve if she can avoid it—the frozen bits of torn flesh and splintered bone. "Half a mile away they found a Russian scouting party."
"And all of this has what to do with Bucky, exactly?"
Breathe in. Don't choke. "The Russians had already found him. They said—God, I'm sorry, Steve—they said the wolves got there first. There was hardly anything left to bury."
Steve blanches, his jaw clenched tighter than ever. His fingertips press into the countertop beside him, a scant concession to the need for support. Peggy is halfway to reaching out, a pat on the shoulder perhaps—comforting the afflicted isn't exactly her strong suit, but she can do her best—when she's thrown by an abrupt hardening of Steve's expression.
"What were the Russians doing out so far?"
"Beg pardon?" It's a reasonable question, for someone who hasn't just been confronted with news of his best friend's death. The SSR is looking into it, and she'll tell him as much, but—
"It just seems kind of suspicious, doesn't it? That valley's practically inaccessible. It's got no strategic importance. It's like they knew something."
God, he's even more stubborn than she thought. "I'm sure you're not suggesting that our allies conspired with Hydra to separate Sergeant Barnes from your team and then lie about his death. Listen to yourself, Steve!"
Steve stretches his lips into a grimace and shakes his head. "No, I hear myself," he says with a little choked-off laugh. "But I hear what you're saying, too, and you don't understand, it can't be right. I would—no. What I'm hearing is that our men learned of the existence of an unidentified body in the general vicinity of where Sergeant Barnes went missing. But they never saw anything. They never proved it was him."
Bloody hell, there's stubborn and then there's stupid. Peggy thumps the dogtags onto the bar, harder than she means to. "What sort of proof are you looking for?" she demands. "This is a war, Steve. People die. They leave us behind. It's very sad, we all wish they wouldn't, but the ones who are left behind need to face facts! Do you want him to have died for nothing?"
Dammit, she didn't need to go that far.
Her next instinctive thought is that it didn't take, somehow, and maybe she'll get a do-over, because Steve doesn't move. His eyes fix on the dogtags and he stares, blinking, to all appearances uncomprehending. Just... frozen, locked in some inescapable stasis, ghost-white with trembling hands. Peggy realizes after perhaps half a minute that he doesn't appear to be breathing.
"Steve," she orders, "sit down before you fall down."
Steve glances quizzically at the debris-strewn floor as if assessing the risk, and remains standing.
"I'm sorry. I know how much he meant to you."
"No, you don't. You don't know. We never could—" He staggers, bringing a hand to the bar to catch himself. Peggy slides the barstool toward him. He gives the stool the same baffled look he gave the floor, then sits down heavily. That's good, that's progress, even it hurts more than it should to hear you don't know, like she's a stranger to Steve's life. Like she didn't watch him—help him—create Captain America out of spit and good intentions because Barnes needed a hero. Steve has no soulmate—it says so in his Project Rebirth file, and anyway he's always gloved (and anyway, he'd have told her, surely)—and such a friendship, reaching back into childhood, could easily be the most important relationship of his life so far. Peggy understands. People see her as fragile, but she's no stranger to loss.
But this isn't about her.
"Steve, tell me. Is there something you need?"
"I don't," Steve begins, and chokes. "I can't. It's not—"
"It's okay. Take your time."
"I don't feel anything." He exhales sharply; it almost sounds like a laugh.
"I suppose the fact that you nearly collapsed just now is just a front, then. No emotional cause for it." Brilliant, Peggy. Grieving people always respond well to sarcasm. Yet she's tried compassion and gotten nowhere. She's bungling this badly, for reasons she has yet to fully grasp, because the shell-shocked man beside her is not Steve Rogers, not as she knows him.
"That's not what I meant." Steve rubs his face with both leather-covered hands. Then he passes one hand over the crown of his head and rubs the base of his skull. "I f—I fouled it up, I already knew that. It hasn't been the same since Erskine's procedure, but we still had something, I should have felt something. Even if it wasn't right it was at least real. It had to be. There wasn't any other explanation—"
"Steve, you're making no sense," Peggy interjects, alarmed.
"None of it makes sense." He lets out a noise more bitter than any laughter. "All I know is I'm supposed to feel it. It's supposed to hurt, what does it mean that it doesn't hurt?"
Steve's file says he's unbonded. Steve lied on four separate enlistment forms before Erskine found him.
Peggy won't be proud of this, later: the way she surges forward, grabs his shoulder hard enough to bruise, propelled by a flash of—might as well be honest—betrayal. She'd thought—the way he looked at her—
"Steve Rogers. Were you bonded to Sergeant Barnes? Was he your soulmate?"
Startled, Steve looks her in the eye for what might be the first time since she walked in. Then he drops his gaze to the countertop, where Barnes' tags still lie in a heap; he winces and fixates on a knot in the wood farther to the left.
"I'm sorry," he whispers.
"You're sorry," Peggy repeats, disbelieving, scrabbling to prop up the part of her world that had just tilted precariously because she and Steve, they fit, they fit so well, and he got so adorably tongue-tied the first time they spoke...
"You had a right to know. I acted—I didn't mean to lead you on. But I liked you. You're—and I was—I couldn't tell you the truth and I didn't want to push you away without you knowing why, so I didn't, and I should have—"
"Stop right there." Peggy works in intelligence; she can parse this bloody mess. So Steve is—no, she won't use the word, he's Steve and he's only ever wanted to do what's right, it's not his fault and it's not about her and he doesn't need her moralizing right now, his soulmate just died for God's sake—
It's supposed to hurt.
Christ.
"We'll put you on leave," Peggy says, thinking quickly. "We don't have to call it a watch; I'll arrange things so you aren't left alone. Falsworth can command the—"
"You'll do no such thing."
"Given the circumstances, Captain, I think—"
"Given the circumstances, Agent, my feelings on the matter are irrelevant. So are yours. The SSR needs me, and we both know it. I'm capable of things your other agents aren't. Every day I'm kept on the sidelines gives Hydra breathing space we can't afford to allow."
"You're no good to anyone dead!"
"I'll make sure not to die, then!"
"Will you? Will you really?"
Steve's mouth opens and closes like a fish's. He makes an inarticulate noise in his throat, and then snaps "What do you take me for?"
"Bereaved," Peggy snaps back. "Which means you stay out of the field—"
"Have you listened to a word I've said? I don't feel bereaved. I don't feel anything. It's like he was never there. It hasn't been right for awhile but I went on like nothing happened, convinced him not to worry about it. Put him on that train and let him die for me, and for all we know it wasn't even real. Maybe it never was. Maybe we were just two sick, deluded schmucks the whole time."
Peggy's clenching her fists in her lap to avoid punching Steve outright, because idiot, did it occur to him that the SSR asked his bond status for a reason?
"Erskine had no idea what the serum would do to a soulmate bond. I specifically remember him telling Phillips he didn't want to risk it."
"He said the serum amplified everything inside. It didn't, obviously. Asthma's gone, and all my other health conditions. And Buck—" That bitter sound again. "He hung on a little longer, that's all. Till I got him killed."
Of all the bloody idiotic--no, Peggy, you're the reasonable one in this situation. Act like it.
"Did you love him?"
Steve looks at her like she's sprouted another head. "Yeah. I loved him."
"Enough to die for him?"
That baffled expression turns to a glare. "Nothing I do now will bring him back. You think I don't realize that? I do. I'm not stupid, and I'm not bereaved. I'm perfectly capable of rational thought, thanks for your concern. But if it had made a difference, yes. I would've died for him."
"And do you think he loved you any less?"
Steve seems to realize what she's getting at; he slowly buries his face in one hand and grinds his palm into the bridge of his nose. Peggy intended to wait for a verbal response, but after a few seconds, she takes pity on him.
"Then allow Barnes the dignity of his choice. He died because he believed you were worth it. And for God's sake, stop asking if what you had was real. If you both felt it, it was real enough."
Steve keeps his face buried a moment longer. Then he lowers his arms and raises his head a few degrees, though his shoulders remain slumped.
"I'm going to avenge him," he says. It's half-mumbled, a far cry from that trademark Steve Rogers this is incontrovertible fact voice and posture with which he normally declares his intentions. "I'm going after Schmidt. And I'm not gonna stop until all of Hydra is dead or captured." He's straightening his shoulders now, voice gaining strength and clarity. He looks at Peggy. "You want to worry about me, worry about what happens after I've razed every one of their bases to the ground. I'll bench myself as long as you want, once it's done. But I will do it, with or without SSR support."
"You'll have all the support you need," Peggy promises.
~*~
It's war, after all, and people get hurt, and the hurt isn't always visible on the outside. (If war has a purpose other than to hurt, Peggy's never divined it.) It's war, and sometimes you make the right call and sometimes the wrong one, and if men die in missions based in part on Peggy's intelligence—a CO told her once—she mustn't dwell on it; consider instead how many would die if they had no intelligence at all, and never took the risk.
And what she said to Steve was right, goddammit, it was good advice when she told him to allow Barnes the dignity of his choice. Good advice and she'll stand by it and take it for herself (it's not about her) and not dwell on what Steve might have thought or felt, in that cockpit with the water closing in. On what might have gone differently if she'd found different words, better words, on the radio or in the bar or any time between the two. On Steve, in his final moments, throwing her words back at her.
Peggy, this is my choice.