I Loved You First | Not Easily Conquered ▸ [STUCKY]

Ch. 19

2006

Peggy, unable to meet his gaze, begins to talk.

"There were only the rumors. The man had been alive for far too long, you see. Howard and I assumed that it was several men over the years in the same costume, but then we received reliable intel, a file from as far back as '46, that corroborated with yours about the arm. We were forced to conclude that it was the same person. And then a few years after Leningrad, Stark's informant successfully infiltrated the Winter Soldier Project. They called him -" Peggy's voice catches. "I'm sorry, Steve. They called him the American.

"Stark's informant gathered as much information as he could. The Soldier healed fast; too fast. We believed they were experimenting on him. But that's as much as I know, because soon after, Stark's informant was discovered, and he was executed. They - the Red Room, that is - they sent photographs, to warn us. And in one of them - Steve, please believe me; it was only the side of his face. The photograph was blurred and grainy. We couldn't know for sure. We never knew for sure. His hair was a little longer but he wasn't wearing a mask, and it - Steve, I'm so sorry. It looked like him."

Steve realizes he is shaking, his breath caught in his chest. He's unable to breathe, feeling like his lungs are closing up, like his asthma is back again. Like Pearl Harbor, like 9/11, his limbs have gone cold and heavy, an unspeakable dread clawing at his throat the way the ice claws at Bucky's in his nightmares.

"Like who, Peggy," he says.

Peggy wraps her hands tighter around his and says, urgently, "We didn't have the technology for facial recognition. It was 1962. And it was impossible, Steve. It all seemed so impossible."

Steve has never begged, not once in all his years; not when Peggy asked him to leave, not even for his ma's life, not even for Bucky's. He's begging now. His voice is filled with a need so raw and base that he can hardly recognize it.

"Peggy, please tell me. Please."

"It was James Barnes," Peggy confesses in a whisper. There are tears in her eyes. "Oh, Steve. It was him."

Steve's heart pounds in his limbs and around him the world seems to slow. Dimly he tries to reconcile it. Steve left him - he left him - but only because there couldn't have been a body. There wasn't time to look. No one could have survived -

Zola's lab. The gunshot wound behind enemy lines that healed in two days. How Buck would drink with the other guys, drink a lot, but never quite pass tipsy. In the letters, how Buck said - they shot him up with cocktails upon cocktails of chemicals. Realization comes like a punch, like the hard fist in Leningrad that knocked the air completely out of him.

He was there. He was right there. And his arm - the arm - Buck -

Terribly, miserably, Peggy continues. "We were convinced we couldn't tell you. It would have compromised us. The balance was too delicate; we were facing a nuclear war. If you had known, Steve, if you had known that there was even the slightest possibility... I knew that you'd tear the world apart, and all for him. You would tear the world apart to find him, and you wouldn't give a damn about anything else." She's right. God help him, she's right. "You would have destroyed everything we had worked for. You would have tipped the nation into a world war, and the stakes were too high, and I knew, I knew that I couldn't let you do that." She's crying, now, the tears falling slowly. "God forgive me, Steve, I am so sorry." 

"He didn't know me in Leningrad," Steve realizes. And maybe it makes Steve selfish, but this is worse than the arm; this is worse than anything. Scared and childlike, he asks, "Pegs, he didn't -?"