Agent Carter fic: Pistol Packin' Mama

[sholio]

Chocolate Box reveals are out! So, remember how I said there was a fic I'd written that was so obviously mine you could see it from space? This is that fic. If you recall my fic Black Water Rising, this one basically ended up as (in some ways) a slightly shippier retread of it, set in suburbia. Suburbia with catacombs. Yep.

Title: Pistol Packin' Mama
Word Count: 16,000
Pairing: Peggy/Daniel/Jack
Summary: "Due to your deplorable habit of showing up at all hours of the day and night, any useful Leviathan-related gossip from the neighbors has been replaced by speculation that 'Marge' is cheating on poor 'Dan' with a blond scoundrel -- Jack, if you don't stop laughing, I will hit you with my shoe." (Or: Peggy and Daniel go undercover as a married couple in the suburbs.)
Notes: Set between seasons one and two. Contains a few small spoilers for the first couple episodes of season two.
Cross-posted: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5996482





It was not a good sign, Peggy thought, that she'd barely had a chance to hang her hat and umbrella on the rack, let alone stop by the canteen for her morning cup of tea, when Jack leaned out of his office and called, "Carter! Sousa! Office! Now!"

"Did we do something to annoy him lately?" Daniel murmured.

"I couldn't say." As usual, Daniel seemed uncomfortable in her vicinity. By now it had gone well beyond the point when she could actually ask what was bothering him -- had she hurt his feelings somehow? Was he holding a grudge about being turned down for a drink? But she had been out with the SSR agents, including Daniel, for drinks after work on more than one occasion ...

"What are you two doing out there, having tea?" Jack called from his office door.

Peggy marched briskly to the office, letting Daniel follow in his own time. "I haven't had any. Someone bellowed before I had the chance."

"Somehow I think you'll survive." Jack resettled himself behind his desk as Daniel came in, closing the door behind him. Jack passed two file folders across his overcrowded desk. There was a brief and slightly awkward moment of jockeying for position as Daniel and Peggy reached for the same one, then both pulled their hands back, glanced at each other, and mutually reached for the other one. Jack looked exasperated.

"What is this, a high-profile case?" Peggy inquired, taking the bull by the horns and snatching the uppermost folder regardless of what Daniel planned to do about it.

"The very highest."

That sarcastic drawl suggested the opposite. Peggy, with a sigh, flipped through to see what he'd found for her to do now. She couldn't complain about not having fieldwork anymore; what she could (and did) complain about were a never-ending supply of undercover jobs as typists, receptionists, businessmen's mistresses, and so forth. At least Jack had come to understand the value of having a female undercover agent; now if she could only get some of the more prestigious cases. Though admittedly her hunt across the Eastern seaboard for the missing Dottie Underwood was taking a lot of time away from her ability to work on other cases.

"So the basic issue is that the intel boys think they've uncovered a small Leviathan cell in the U.S.," Jack said, talking fast. "You can see how much of a problem that could be --" but at that point both Peggy and Daniel had read through to the details of their cover.

"A housewife?" Peggy said in dismay, just as Daniel said, "Married?"

"It's a suburb in Jersey," Jack pointed out. "A single, male agent, showing up and setting up shop -- conspicuous, huh? Whereas a couple --"

Peggy leveled a look at him. "We are being punished for something, aren't we?"

"Yeah, what a hardship. It's a vacation. You two get to spend a week cooling your heels in the suburbs. Go to a garden party, or whatever people do out there, and figure out if any of the neighbors are commie spies. Heck, I wish I could go."

"You're in charge, Jack," Daniel said. "You could go if you wanted to."

"Busy. Meetings. Go get dressed in something suburban." He all but shoved them out the door of his office.

"What does that mean?" Daniel demanded of no one in particular.

"We are definitely being punished."


***


At least the SSR had found them a nice place, Peggy mused. It was a tidy little bungalow, a neat cog in a housing development identical to many others springing up all over the country in the wake of the war. It was so new she could still smell the paint as she wandered through the place, getting a feel for the exits and cover and other useful things to know about a house.

All the houses on the street were equally new, each painted in one of three different colors (beige, taupe, and gray) with a spindly little tree in its yard, trunk wrapped in burlap. As they'd driven into the subdivision, she'd been struck by how alike all the houses were, and how colorless. Perhaps it was only the rain making them seem so. It wasn't raining hard, just the same light drizzle that had been plaguing the East Coast for the last week, shortening tempers and washing the color out of the world.

Peggy came back from her initial exploration of the house to find Daniel leaning on a map of the subdivision spread out on the kitchen counter, crutch propped next to him, circling things with a fat carpenter's pencil. Both file folders were open to different pages next to it. "Okay," he said when she came in. "This is the suspected location of what may or may not be a Leviathan safehouse. Sightlines here and here -- possible entry and exit points are marked. Not that we're going to be entering or exiting --"

"Why not? It should be a simple in and out operation," Peggy remarked, poking into the cabinets. The house, she found, had been stocked with basic food items on their behalf. The SSR field-prep team was efficient, she would give them that. It was a very modern house with all the contemporary amenities, from a refrigerator in the kitchen to nice new plumbing in the bathroom.

"I think we're supposed to be observing and staying out of the way," Daniel said.

"Daniel," she said, turning to face him full on. "How long do you want to stay here in suburban hell?"

"Point," he muttered. "I hope you brought sneaking-around clothes."

"Don't be absurd, I never travel without them."

Someone tapped on the door.

Daniel slammed both folders shut and opened a kitchen drawer, which turned out to be where he'd stashed his gun, next to the salad tongs.

"I don't believe Leviathan is in the habit of knocking at the front door, Daniel." Peggy adjusted her hair and firmly pushed herself back into the skin of the Peggy from a decade ago, the one who used to enjoy helping her mother fold napkins and tie ribbons around the tableware for entertaining. She peeked through the frilly curtain covering the window in the door and then opened it with a bright smile.

"You must be the new neighbors!" the woman on the other side cried, over the top of the pie she was carrying. An umbrella was tucked through the crook of her arm and she was, for good measure, wearing a plastic rain bonnet with little ladybugs on it, to keep her hair dry.

"Why yes, we are," Peggy smiled back. "We're the Hendersons, Dan and ... Marge." Jack had given them their cover identities. She was still planning exactly how to make him pay. "But I go by Peggy," she added quickly. "It's short for Margaret. Thank you so much! This looks delicious!" The pie had a lattice on top, and was still warm. "Goodbye!" Peggy added brightly, and shut the door in her face.

"We're supposed to be getting to know the neighbors, not convincing them we're highly suspicious characters," Daniel said from the kitchen doorway.

"Is that a gun in your hand, Daniel?"

"No," Daniel said, trying to hide it behind him. "It was habit ... Look, at least one of these people might be a Leviathan spy."

Peggy peeked through the curtains. "Oh heavens, there's another one coming up the walk. One would think the rain would deter them somewhat."

"We just moved in this afternoon; how fast does news carry around here?"

"Do go put the gun back in the kitchen drawer, Daniel. And see if you can find the tea things while you're at it. I expect we should at least invite this one in and find out her name."

Over the next three hours, more neighbors stopped by to deliver a casserole, two more pies, and a shiny, translucent ring of something semi-solid and faintly quivering, that appeared to have fruit in it.

"Does one eat this, or dissect it?" Peggy wondered, poking it gently with the handle of a bread knife.

"It's Jell-O," Daniel said. "My ma used to make it for Sunday night dessert. Except ours never had bits of ..." He studied it closely. "Are those marshmallows?"

"And something that I sincerely hope is not tomato." Peggy shuddered and shoved the Jell-O mold to the back of the counter. "What is in the casserole?"

"Looks like salmon and some kind of vegetable. Are you sure they're not trying to chase us out?"

"If one of them is a Leviathan plant," Peggy said, "any of this could be poisoned."

They looked around at the rest of the offerings on display, both now slightly nervous.

"Well," Daniel said at last, pulling the lattice-topped pie towards him, "I don't intend to starve, and the pie looks decent, at least."

So they had cherry pie for dinner. Awkward cherry pie, eaten with a delicious topping of attempted eye-contact avoidance.


***


Evening was mainly a matter of waiting and making awkward attempts at small talk until the street quieted down and they could sneak out and investigate the alleged Leviathan safehouse in peace.

"Just for the record," Daniel said, while Peggy fiddled with the radio in the living room trying to avoid any and all hints of the Captain America Adventure Hour, "if we get caught doing this, I'm not at all sure the SSR will have our backs, since we really aren't supposed to be doing this."

"And if we find a basement filled with Russian toys and perhaps a kidnapped scientist or two, then we will most likely get a commendation, and you will be guaranteed the West Coast placement you've had your eye on."

Daniel looked away. Peggy shut her mouth. So much for small talk.

She gave up on the radio -- stations were starting to go off the air anyway for the night break -- and went to the window, pulling back the curtain to peek out at the wet, glistening street. "Most of the lights are out," she said quietly. "I think perhaps it's time to go."

She'd brought with her the same dark-colored ladies' pantsuit that she had used for exploring the Stark catacombs with Jarvis; she went, now, into her bedroom to change. The house had two bedrooms, and she and Daniel, without talking about it, had each selected one. While she stripped off her lilac-colored "suburban" dress and pulled on the suit, she listened to the creaks and soft crutch-taps of Daniel moving around the house.

How had things gone so wrong? Everything had spun off course with Daniel's invitation for drinks, which she hadn't even recognized at the time for what it was -- and then it was just a snowballing series of missed chances and increasingly awkward tension between them. And now he wanted to travel three thousand miles away ...

"Not that it isn't his prerogative, of course," she murmured, snugging her belt with perhaps a bit more force than was entirely necessary.

She opened the drawer in her vanity and took out a handful of the SSR lab's bag of tricks -- a miniaturized camera, a small torch, and some square transmitter bugs about half the size of a deck of cards, each with its own small antenna; she'd have to talk to Howard about perhaps designing a smaller version, because those were going to be quite conspicuous. Still, she tucked them into her pockets and went to meet Daniel in the living room.

He was sitting on the sofa, blacking his crutch with a can of shoe polish. The room's lights had been turned off -- there was only the soft glow of a lamp under a Tiffany shade -- and he wore a black sweater, looking quite unfairly good in it. "You know," he said without looking up, "sneaking around isn't really what I'm best at these days."

"Until recently my primary sneaking-around partner has been Mr. Jarvis, so I'm sure you will acquit yourself well."

Daniel laughed softly and shook his head. "You know, Peggy," he said, without looking up. "All this time ... I don't know if I ever really apologized for --"

"Shhh!" Peggy hissed, flinging out a hand.

Something rattled at the back door lock.

Daniel dropped the shoeblack and stood up quickly, reaching to his belt holster for his gun. "That's definitely not a neighbor bringing pie," he whispered.

"Not unless the neighbors are even more persistent than we thought." Rather than drawing her gun, Peggy crept into the dark kitchen and silently opened two of the drawers until she found a heavy rolling pin. Wielded with sufficient force, this ought to do, and it would make considerably less noise.

Daniel ghosted in after her, moving more quietly than she'd realized he was capable of. He had, she noted approvingly, muffled the tip of the crutch with a twist of fabric in the course of his preparations. He stepped behind the door, while Peggy crept around to the other side and raised her rolling pin.

The door opened.

Peggy realized who she was aiming at in mid-swing and changed trajectory with the rolling pin. It sped past Jack's ear and rebounded off the kitchen wallpaper with a terrific thud.

"Jesus!" Jack yelped, ducking belatedly. He was, like Daniel, wearing black, and also looking annoyingly good in it, especially set off with the blond hair. Water droplets glistened on his hair and eyelashes from the rain.

It was completely unfair. The least the SSR could do was make her work with terrible-looking men.

"Why is the door locked?" Jack demanded. "Nobody locks their doors out in the sticks!"

"I see you had no trouble opening it anyway," Daniel said dryly, holstering his gun as he came around the door.

"Dare I ask what you're doing here?" Peggy demanded, tapping the rolling pin in the gloved palm of her hand. Bits of plaster and wallpaper dribbled off the end.

"Well, I can't exactly be seen coming in the front door, can I?"

"No, sneaking in the back door at midnight is vastly less conspicuous."

Jack took in their attire. "Going somewhere?"

"You here to stop us?" Daniel challenged.

"Heck no," Jack said, and his smile was all little-boy mischief.


***


They went into the back yard, around the staked-out plots of a still-unplanted garden and past a spindly bush that Peggy idly identified as rhododendron from childhood botany lessons. The rain appeared to have stopped for the moment, but they had to avoid puddles. However, with the heavy cloud cover, the night was very dark and the only light in the subdivision was a light pole all the way up at the corner. All the better for sneaking, Peggy thought.

She led the way. Jack and Daniel were arguing in whispers behind her.

"-- going to stick us in suburbia to rot, Jack, the least you could do is actually trust us to do our jobs --"

"I'm simply making sure that you're settled into the house and don't need anything. Honestly, not every undercover agent gets this level of personal service. I'd think you'd be grateful."

"More like I'm wondering what the catch is."

Jack had, Peggy thought, driven quite a ways out of the city, after what was probably a long and tiring workday, just to ... what? Sit around in the dark living room if they were already in bed? Her lips curved in a smile. But of course he'd known they wouldn't be. He knew them, and what they were most likely up to on this moonless night.

The wooden back fence of the suspected Leviathan house was just in front of them. She held up a hand to halt her companions, then jumped and felt Jack's interlocked hands slide under her foot, catching and lifting her. She caught the edge of the fence and vaulted over onto the damp grass of the back lawn.

"That's gonna be tough for me," she heard Daniel whisper on the other side.

"Oh c'mon, like you can't climb a fence."

"Actually, Jack, I physically can't climb a fence."

"Will you two keep it down?" Peggy whispered through a gap in the fence boards. She cast a glance at the house, which remained dark.

And there was a part of her that felt intensely guilty for forgetting Daniel's limitations. She shouldn't have gone over the fence. She should have found a way around.

It appeared, however, that Jack wasn't taking no for an answer. He appeared at the top of the fence, framed against the sky and, from her perspective, looking very conspicuous. "Peggy," he whispered. "Give Sousa a hand over." Then he dropped out of sight again.

"I hate you," she heard Daniel mutter fiercely.

"I know. Get on my shoulders. Aargh, not like that --"

Peggy found a garden stool and used it to climb to the top of the fence. She caught Daniel's hands and helped pull him up, crutch and all. As the two of them tumbled to the backyard turf, Jack pulled himself over the fence with seeming effortlessness.

"I'm still not entirely convinced a mission like this is in my wheelhouse," Daniel muttered, as Peggy gave him a hand up. He tried to brush off his wet clothes, without much success.

"Shhh, we might need someone to, I don't know, defuse a bomb or figure something out for us." Jack clapped his shoulder. "C'mon."

Amazing how he'd showed up out of nowhere and taken charge, wasn't it? Peggy grit her teeth and let out the irritation on a sigh. This was, after all, an assignment she hadn't even wanted. If Jack wanted to run the show, why not. The sooner she got this over with and got back to looking for Dottie Underwood, the happier she'd be.

The three of them ended up crouched under the window of the house. "Less conspicuous if we don't all go in," Jack whispered. "I was thinking Sousa can stand lookout --"

"Excellent, I'll go."

"Peggy --"

Paying no heed, she whisked herself off to the backdoor and carefully inserted her penknife into the crack between the latch and frame. The latch slid back. Peggy let herself inside.

This house, from the look of things, was laid out according to the same plan as the one she and Daniel were using for their cover. Excellent. That should make things easier.

Jack and Daniel crowded in behind her. "Wipe your feet," she whispered sternly over her shoulder. "The least we can do is avoid leaving muddy tracks all over to let them know someone's been here."

They both meekly obeyed. "It's amazing," Jack whispered. In the dim light filtering in through the gauzy kitchen curtains, Peggy saw him glance back and forth between the two of them. "No one listens to me at all."

"You wouldn't know what to do with yourself if we did," Peggy whispered back, and ghosted to the doorway leading into the living room.

This, too, appeared deserted. Light coming through the half-open curtains illuminated a furnished room similar to theirs, with a set of what was probably standard Sears Roebuck furniture. Peggy glanced back into the kitchen, taking in what there wasn't: no personal touches, no pictures or decorations or items left out on countertops.

"Jack," she whispered, as he was the closest. "Open the refrigerator for a moment, would you?"

He raised his eyebrows, but cracked open the door. As she'd suspected, the appliance's shelves were empty. It wasn't even plugged in.

"No one's living here," Jack whispered, coming to the same conclusion.

"Don't want to get ahead of ourselves," Daniel countered. "Still gotta be careful."

"And it's furnished," Peggy whispered. "Even if no one is here yet, someone is planning to move in."

"Could just be some regular GI Joe and his gal," Daniel whispered back, and scowled in Jack's direction. "For all we know, our intel is bad and this is just some unlucky couple's new house."

"In which case, we shall know soon enough."

She made her stealthy way into the living room. In most respects it appeared similar to the one in the house she was sharing with Daniel, but an immediate difference caught her eye: a large storage cabinet against the wall with a set of dishes inside. Given that the entire house had nothing except basic furnishings, she found the presence of a full set of china suspicious in the extreme.

"Help me move this," she whispered.

Between the two of them, she and Jack tried to haul it out of the way. It wouldn't budge -- and then suddenly slid to the side as if greased. Peggy nearly fell on her face and Jack actually did.

"Looks like this light switch makes it move," Daniel reported from across the room.

"Thanks for the warning," Jack muttered, rubbing his chin where he'd cracked it on the floor.

Peggy found herself facing a panel inset in the wall, nearly as tall as she was. "Not suspicious at all," she murmured, and pressed on it until she discovered that it slid smoothly back into the wall. Thus revealed was a blank square of darkness, with a smell of mold and a set of stairs leading down into the dark.

"Most of these houses don't have basements," Jack whispered. "It's not part of the standard plan."

"Especially hidden behind china cabinets with secret levers," Peggy replied dryly.

"So what's down there, then?"

They all exchanged glances. Peggy took out her torch. There was little chance of the neighbors seeing the light in the basement, and she didn't want to descend into absolute blackness. She cupped her gloved hand around the light and tried shining it on the inside wall first, but could find no light switch, so she used it to light her way down the stairs.

The stairs were built along the wall, with a rather unsteady-feeling wooden railing. At the bottom, Peggy stepped onto a dirt floor. She played the light around the walls.

The basement was unfinished and drab, with scaffolding propping it up at one end -- a slightly ominous sign for the structural stability of the place, she thought. The basement appeared to have been constructed in haste and without a great deal of concern for proper architectural principles or, for that matter, straight lines. The cinderblocks reinforcing the walls were damp in places where water from the recent rains had seeped through. And a large opening, the size of a door, gaped in the uneven wall among the scaffolding.

Peggy shone her torch inside. Dirt walls. More scaffolding. Damp muddy patches on the floor and walls. There were some buckets of dirt sitting about, and a couple of shovels.

Her companions joined her. "Okay, where does that go?" Jack murmured, peering past her shoulder into the dirt-walled tunnel.

"Curious, isn't it?"

"And I think we can dispense with any and all ideas that Leviathan isn't behind the purchase of this house, hmmm?"

Peggy shared a commiserating glance with Daniel. "Hey, I'll go," he said, and snapped on a torch of his own, stepping forward with good foot and crutch into the passage.


***


It turned out to be long.

Peggy surreptitiously checked her watch. It was after midnight; they'd been walking for hours. Sometimes the tunnel met others, down here in the cold underground. They paused at sewer and storm-drain gratings, flashing their torches through at the sound of water running loudly beyond. In a couple of cases they had to actually splash through water on the floor -- not too foul-smelling or fast-moving, thankfully -- while Jack and Daniel nervously discussed the recent rains and the forecast of more rain tomorrow, and Peggy wished they'd stopped borrowing trouble. At one point their tunnel joined an old, brick-lined bootlegger's tunnel, very damp and musty, with an iron staircase leading upward. Peggy climbed it out of curiosity, but it led into a cellar that appeared to be abandoned, the door locked. She scrambled back down, brushing spiderwebs out of her hair, to rejoin the other two.

Jack stopped them sometime around two in the morning.

"We gotta go back. We're either walking out of Jersey into New York, or somewhere else, but either way, it's a maze down here. We need to map these proper-like, and we also need to sleep sometime before dawn."

It was Daniel, Peggy thought, who looked worn down the most, though he wouldn't have said anything. Walking tired him more than it did the other two. And Jack had noticed that. For all his flaws, he wasn't a bad leader; he had a way with it, as many people did not. It was just, as with so many other things, that he got in the way of himself sometimes.

Peggy brought up the rear, as they followed their own footprints back through the damp earth.

"It must have been one hell of a lot of work, putting this together," Daniel's tired voice came back to her. "They must've been working on this for years."

"They're going somewhere, for sure," Jack replied. "Ideas? Anyone? Carter?"

"They're tunneling into New York from Jersey," she said.

"Give the gal a cigar."

"Not necessarily New York," Daniel argued. He was hurting, she could tell, and that made him more argumentative than was his usual quiet way. "Could be some other target in the area."

"Anyone got one?" Jack asked. "Jersey's a plum pick, all right. If I were invading the U.S., this is sure where I'd want to start."

In Daniel's silence, Peggy read anger and hurt.

"They could be tunneling all the way down to your nation's capital," she said. "Unless someone brought a compass. We could be walking to Pennsylvania for all I know, it's so easy to get turned around down here. Unless you can point north right now?"

She'd scored a hit, and in the torchlight she read a flash of gratitude on Daniel's face, and Jack's quick scowl of irritation.

"We'll map this sucker in the morning," Jack muttered. "Commie bastards, they won't get away with this."

It was about five in the morning when they dragged their weary bodies into the basement. They were all tired, dirty, and nursing strains and bruises from clambering over things. Peggy decided not to bother with the back fence, and let them all out the front door instead. It was not yet light, so she thought it was worth the small risk that they'd be seen sneaking around the side to avoid having to deal with the fence again.


***


Around noon, there was a knock at the door. After sleeping the sleep of the weary dead, Peggy had been reading the paper in the kitchen in her robe, drinking tea. She went to answer without bothering to change, and blinked at the sight of Jack in a crisp blue suit, carrying a briefcase. His hair was slicked back with a handful of grease, changing its usual glossy blond to more of a dull dishwater color, and moisture from the steady light drizzle was beading up on it. She had last seen him outside their house the night before, heading off to the back where he'd parked his car.

"I thought you weren't coming round by daylight," she said.

"I'm a salesman. Perfectly normal visitor for a suburban household." He took in her robe. "Am I interrupting something?" He sounded almost hopeful.

"No. Do stop looking at me like that. Get inside before the neighbors see you."

She took him by the arm and dragged him through the door, closing it firmly behind him.

"Peggy, wha --" Daniel lurched into the living room in pajamas, with his gun. "Oh. You. I'm going back to bed."

"Seriously, you two were still asleep? What am I paying you for?" He sat down on the sofa and opened his briefcase.

"Clambering around Leviathan tunnels until the wee hours of the morning, apparently." Daniel yawned. His crutch was still spotted with bootblack, and he looked exhausted. The trek had taken more out of him, Peggy knew, then either of them.

Still, he sat in a chair across from the sofa and leaned the crutch beside it, sticking his gun in a pocket of his robe. "What'd you bring us, Jack?"

"Sewers and tunnels for the entire Jersey coast," Jack said triumphantly, spreading the onionskin layers of blueprints on the coffee table.

"Jack, this is excellent," Peggy said, delighted. He must have gone straight back to the SSR, dug into the archives, and then come back here, with no sleep in the meantime, to have brought them this.

Jack grinned at her. Thin lines of exhaustion bracketed his eyes; still, he looked more thrilled than tired, and perhaps a bit wired on coffee and lack of sleep. He was really throwing himself into this. Angling for another promotion, no doubt, she thought cynically. Still, she found that she was starting to enjoy herself. It had been awhile since they'd all been on the same page like this.

"The tunnels are going to need a thorough mapping, using compass and other instruments," Jack said. "Last night, all we determined was that they exist. Tonight we can get a read on where and why."

"Oh good. More fun." Daniel rubbed his eyes. "Peggy, is there coffee?"

"Just for you, I made some. Jack can even have some, if he behaves himself."

"It's pointless reminding both of you that I'm supposed to be in charge, isn't it?"

They drank coffee and examined the blueprints while a fresh burst of rain drummed on the roof. "Trouble is, the number of possible targets is just too huge," Jack said. He'd thrown his jacket over the arm of the sofa and loosened his tie; he was starting to look less like the energized agent who had knocked on the door earlier, and more like a very tired man who hadn't slept in two days. "They could be after damn near anything. A specific bank vault, the SSR itself, the FBI, Grand Central, that new United Nations thing they're working on or any one of a dozen other government agencies that has a New York office -- and that's just if their target is New York. If it's DC, every building in town is a potential target."

Peggy tapped her fingers on the edge of the blueprints. Her nails, she noted, were chipped from the previous night's activities, even protected by the gloves; she hadn't had an opportunity to repair them. "Perhaps we're looking at this from the wrong angle. We're assuming it's just one target, or at most a finite set of them. But what if the tunnels are, in fact, the point?"

Daniel leaned forward. "You mean infiltrate the country from below?"

"Exactly. What better way for spies to gain a toehold in a foreign land than to build a network of tunnels connected to houses and business they own? They can move about freely without fear of discovery. As they extend the network, utilizing existing tunnels wherever possible, they will have access to the entire Eastern seaboard, and with it, the country's government and most of its vital infrastructure. They can sabotage at their leisure, kidnap important figures, steal documents, or simply observe. There's very little limit to what they could do, in fact."

Jack whistled. "This might be just the tip of the iceberg. No telling how long they've been working on this."

Or how Dottie fits in, Peggy thought. Was it possible she might find the Leviathan agent somewhere in that man-made labyrinth? The idea excited her.

"I guess the first thing we need to do is map --" Daniel began. He broke off at a knock at the front door.

Jack drew his gun, and Daniel reached into his pocket.

"Am I the only person who doesn't consider the neighbors a threat worthy of lethal violence?" Peggy demanded. She got up, tightened the belt on her robe, and went to the door. "Jack, please stay out of sight."

The visitor was, of course, yet another neighbor, a woman with a plastic rain bonnet over her blond curls and a very obvious pregnancy swelling out her polka-dot dress. "Agnes Glenn," she announced, holding out her hand in a forthright manner. Peggy, bemused, shook it. "We're having cocktails at five, and we wanted to invite you and your husband."

Peggy would frankly rather face down a basement full of Leviathan assassins, but if she could cope with the German army, she supposed she could withstand an hour or two of cocktails and light conversation. "Certainly, thank you for the invitation."

Jack seemed to be busy with the map again, and Daniel had vanished, so Peggy went into the kitchen to refresh her tea. While she was contemplating the dismal selection of cheap tea bags stocked by the SSR prep team, Daniel came into the kitchen, now fully dressed.

"Are you going somewhere?"

"Yeah," he said, putting his half-empty coffee cup in the sink. "That couple down the street -- the Langstroms? Husband got his arm blown off in Normandy?"

Peggy nodded. The Langstroms were the ones who'd brought the casserole, she recalled. And the husband and Daniel had hit it off, or at least spent most of the visit comparing rehab stories.

"He's rebuilding the engine on a '35 Firebird. Wanted to know if I'd come by and give him a hand this afternoon, since it's a Saturday."

Peggy hadn't even realized it was a Saturday. "Do you know anything about cars?"

"Not so you'd notice, but checking in with the rumor mill is the main thing, right?"

"True." Both the Langstroms had seemed quite chatty. If Leviathan were operating openly in the area, they might have noticed something. "Have fun. Be back by four-thirty. Speaking of the rumor mill, apparently we've been invited out for cocktails by the neighborhood social set."

"Sure thing." Daniel hesitated as if he wanted to say something else, but he shook his head, and left.

Peggy studied the contents of the refrigerator. While she didn't consider herself entirely useless at the womanly arts (at least not all of them), it was a new experience for her to be confronted with raw materials that needed to be processed into food, as opposed to stopping by the corner diner or having Howard's cook produce something. However, she really did need to eat something other than pie, which had been breakfast as well as dinner, and the casserole looked even less appetizing on the second day. She could probably manage to boil an egg without destroying the kitchen.

"Jack --" she began, stepping into the living room, and stopped when she discovered that Jack was sprawled on the sofa, fast asleep.

"Oh, you were tired, weren't you?"

He didn't stir when she pulled off his shoes and rearranged him into a slightly less contorted-looking position, then brought a light blanket from her bedroom to cover him with. She snapped off the lamp, and was plunged into a brown-tinted dimness. The front curtains were drawn as a security measure, and a shaft of dusty gray light speared between them.

Peggy sat down on the overstuffed chair near the sofa. It was really very peaceful here. Outside, she heard the voices of children playing, apparently undaunted by the rain. There did not seem to be many children in the subdivision as yet -- most of the residents were young couples, former GIs and their wives -- but from the look of several of the women she'd talked to so far, including Agnes Glenn, there would be a bumper crop of children soon.

The war is over, Peggy thought. Of course she knew that ... and yet ... she wasn't sure if it had ever really sunk in. For a long time she'd been too busy just surviving, getting by from day to day, struggling to stay afloat in a hostile SSR while not drowning in her own grief over Steve.

Now, sitting in the dim living room, listening to Jack's soft snoring and the cries of children playing in a world of newfound peace, she found a new kind of tranquility enter her soul. Or perhaps she was only becoming aware that it had been there for a while now.

Maybe I'll make something to eat a bit later.

It is very pleasant just to sit here ... and not think for a while.

She wasn't entirely sure when she fell asleep.


***


"This is adorable," Daniel's voice said, and Peggy blinked her eyes open. It felt like her eyelids were full of sand. She'd forgotten how much she deplored the way she felt after a nap.

"I'm awake!" Jack said, sitting bolt upright. "Just resting my eyes!" He stared for a minute, then, at the blanket across his lap, his expression glazed.

Peggy yawned and stretched. "Did you find out anything interesting from the Langstroms?"

"No, although I did learn there are more kinds of spark plugs than I ever dreamed possible, and Ted Langstrom is a pretty good guy." He checked his watch. "You should probably get changed for the Glenns' cocktail party."

"It's that late already?" Peggy said, dismayed. With the rain, the quality of the light never really changed; afternoon was as dim and gray as morning.

"Yeah, slackers," Daniel said lightly. "Some of us have been working." He limped into the kitchen.

"This is probably my cue to head back to the city," Jack said. His hair had come undone from its slicked-back state, and some of it was sticking up. Adorable was not a word Peggy normally associated with Jack Thompson, or particularly wanted to associate with him, but ... possibly her sleepy state was making her suggestible.

"I suppose a chief's work waits for no one," Peggy said. The attempt at mild humor fell flat in the awkward gap between them, a long empty space mined with betrayal.

"Yeah, well. You two have fun at the cocktail party."

"We will unmask the local Leviathan agents and have them waiting, trussed up in the well-mapped tunnels, by the time you return."

"I'll settle for any one of those things," Jack murmured, and let himself out.

Peggy realized that she was starving, but there was no time to eat before they left, not if she planned to arrive in anything other than a robe. The promised cocktails were going to hit her like a ton of bricks. Hopefully there would be something to eat that did not contain Jell-O.

"I suppose it's too much to hope that Leviathan will attack and save us from this," she called, retrieving her makeup kit from her bedroom.

Daniel laughed, his voice echoing back from the other side of the house. "Hey, I spent the whole afternoon with the Langstroms. One evening with the Glenns is not going to kill you."

"I'm more concerned about me killing them." She reached the open door of the bathroom and stopped, her lips framing a soundless "Oh."

Daniel was in front of the mirror, shaving, and stripped to the waist. He looked up at her, startled, and for a moment they stared at each other before Peggy blushed and made a hasty retreat, pulling the door shut behind her.

"Daniel, I am so sorry," she said through the door, trying not to dwell on those ... shoulders ... It was using the crutch, of course, but she'd never really considered -- well, all right, yes she had, but still --

"Me too. Used to living alone. I didn't even think." He cleared his throat. "You need in here?"

"I was going to do my face, but -- I'll just do it in the vanity mirror, shall I?" And she beat a hasty retreat.

She'd managed to stop blushing, though she hadn't quite stopped thinking about Daniel's shoulders, when she came out of her room in a swishing summer dress. Daniel was sitting on the sofa. He'd changed into a nice shirt and slicked down his hair. It wasn't that much of a change. But there was something about the entire package -- she'd never seen him dressed up before, even to this extent, and the way he was looking at her caught her off guard, as well. Then he straightened a little and stood up, and gave a soft laugh, and the moment passed.

"Guess I had it coming, after the thing with the locker room, and Thompson. Now we're square."

"That wasn't your fault," Peggy said. She smiled. "And neither was this, really. With one bathroom to share, I suppose we should get in the habit of knocking. And also closing the door."

"Excellent plan, Mrs. Henderson." Daniel presented an arm. "Shall we?"

"I suppose we must," she sighed, tucking her arm into his. He was wearing cologne, a lightly spicy male scent. Be professional, she scolded herself. This is strictly work-related.

This evening was going to be torture, in more ways than one.


***


Actually, it wasn't too bad. The Glenns had a sort of covered pavilion in the backyard where they had set up patio furniture for entertaining, in obstinate defiance of the weather, but as it was also quite chilly, people shuffled back and forth between the outside buffet table, where they picked over Mrs. Glenn's carefully arranged trays of canapés, and the much warmer living room where the drinks were being served.

Peggy discovered that the little bacon-wrapped things with the toothpicks were unexpectedly good, and managed to eat a tray and a half of them in between drinks. She spent some time contemplating the many improvised weapons available in the Glenns' backyard, with particular attention to the very sharp-looking, pointy little forks on the canapé table. It was good to know that suburbia was not entirely without its methods of self-defense.

There was no talk about Leviathan, or any strange goings-on in the neighborhood. Also, she began to get the feeling as the evening wore on that everyone was being rather distant with her, but quite friendly with Daniel. Not a problem, really; it gave her more time to spend around the canapé table in the backyard. She did wonder about it, however. As she and Daniel made their way back to "their" house, with both of them slightly tipsy and Peggy carrying a covered plate of leftover canapés, she murmured, "Did I mortally offend the hostess by using the wrong fork, or some such thing?"

Daniel made a choking sound. "No," he managed. "Wait until we're inside and I'll tell you."

In the living room, he lost control of his laughter. Peggy waited, tapping her foot, while he leaned helplessly against the wall until it wound down. "Ah," he said, wiping his eyes. "I needed that. No, the problem is, they think you're having an affair with Thompson."

"What?"

"It's his own fault for showing up in broad daylight. And you were alone together all afternoon."

"We were sleeping!"

This set Daniel off again. "I could tell them you were sleeping together," he said, when he could speak again, "but somehow I don't think it would help."

"Very funny. Please remind me to strangle Jack the next time I see him."

"On the bright side," Daniel went on, "it means I have the sympathy of everybody in the neighborhood, especially the women. Which is going to give me an excellent opening for asking questions."

Peggy quashed an unexpected surge of jealousy at the idea of Daniel being fawned over by the local wives. Strictly business, of course. And it IS useful. Potentially.

"I'm not sure if there's anything to learn," she said. "All these people want to talk about is who is sleeping with whom. Should the Leviathan neighbors move in and start having affairs with the locals, then I suppose we'll hear about it."

"I did get one nibble on the hook," Daniel said. "Dorothy Bennett -- you know, red hair, the pregnant one --?"

"-- that doesn't narrow it down --"

"Anyway, she told me she's occasionally seen lights in there at night. She thought it was contractors working late, since they're still finishing up some of the houses in the subdivision."

"Hmmm. So Leviathan is using the safehouse occasionally."

Daniel snapped his fingers. "Oh, hey, listen to this. I also had a really great idea for mapping the tunnels. The main problem is trying to figure out how the tunnel geography relates to above-ground geography, right? We could use compasses and measure off distances, but that's going to take forever. Orrrrr ... we could come up to the surface every once in a while and place a short-range transmitter, then pinpoint the location of those."

"We'd need a lot of transmitters."

"We've got bugs, right? I was thinking we could use those."

Peggy shook her head. "They're extremely short-range, to reduce the chances of detection. We would have to be quite close to pick up the signal. And we have precious few. We're going to need more equipment."

"Back to Thompson, then."

"I suppose so. Do you want to call him, or shall I?"

"Flip a coin?"

Daniel lost the coin toss, so Peggy went into the kitchen to put the canapés away while Daniel called the SSR. Something he'd said earlier was nagging at her, but she couldn't put her finger on it.

The staccato rise and fall of Daniel's voice drifted in from the living room. She couldn't make out the words, but she recognized the tone of irritation laced with affection that he often had when talking to Jack.

There was something she was overlooking. Something obvious.

She opened the door and stepped out onto the back porch. Darkness was falling and the rain had begun to fall more heavily again. With all the wet weather, the unplanted garden was bursting out in a volunteer profusion of weeds. Peggy had to stifle an urge to pluck them and make the borders tidy again.

This could have been her life, she thought, had things gone only a little differently. Well, not here, of course. But she might have married Fred and settled in a house in Hampstead, or wherever they ended up living. A house like this, a backyard like this, might have been the boundaries of her world.

What an appalling thought.

Still, the idea did have its compensations. She imagined living in a place like this with Daniel instead of Fred. That was a more tolerable thought, and she allowed herself to temporarily bask in the fantasy. Daniel would not expect her to stay home and keep house. She imagined going out to work every day, and coming back to a little house with Daniel every evening. Living outside the city like this, she would probably go mad in short order, but there was something very pleasant about the thought nevertheless.

It still felt incomplete, though. As with her picture of Leviathan operations in the neighborhood, there was a fundamental puzzle piece missing, a vital building block that would make sense out of the whole thing --

"I talked to Jack," Daniel said from the doorway. Peggy tore herself away from her thoughts and looked over her shoulder. "He's going to drive out and bring us some radio transmitters."

"Tonight?"

"I got that impression."

"One could almost get the idea that he misses us," Peggy said.

"Actually, I kinda think he does." When she raised her eyebrows, Daniel shrugged. "Look, he's used to being one of the boys. Now suddenly he's the boss. It's not the same. We're the only people who still treat him the same as we used to."

Put that way, it did make a certain sense.


***


Jack arrived shortly after midnight, along with a small contingent of SSR agents. By this point Peggy and Daniel had eaten and spent some time poring over the blueprints and planning how best to set up the transmitters, and Peggy had changed into her sneaking-around clothes and was feeling a good deal more prepared. Still, this did not stop her from shooting Jack a sharp look when he came in the back door.

"What now, Carter?"

"Due to your deplorable habit of showing up at all hours of the day and night, any useful Leviathan-related gossip from the neighbors has been replaced by speculation that 'Marge' is cheating on poor 'Dan' with a blond scoundrel -- Jack, if you don't stop laughing, I will hit you with my shoe."

"Scoundrel? Really?"

"You look quite untrustworthy," she managed. Really, if he would not stand so very close, it would be a help at maintaining her composure in situations like this. He was also dressed in black again. Her life was so difficult.

"Here, as requested," he said, tossing her an object the size of an SSR radio. Actually, it looked quite a lot like --

"This is just one of our radios, isn't it?"

"Basically. I pitched Sousa's idea to the lab rats and they figured, the easiest thing is to use something we already have. Tape down the button, and it'll broadcast a signal 'til the batteries run down." Jack rattled a black duffel. "And we have a ton of 'em here."

They left a team of agents aboveground with a car, a radio receiver, and a map. The rest of them -- Peggy, Jack, Daniel, and Jack's remaining agents -- assembled in the darkness behind the Leviathan safehouse's back fence.

"Stupid fence," Daniel muttered.

Jack reached into the clanking duffel and, grinning, brought out a crowbar. "Not gonna be a problem for long."

"What else do you have in there?" Peggy inquired, relieving him of it so she could look inside.

"Rope, extra flashlights ... whatever I could throw together on short notice." Struggling with the crowbar and the fence boards, Jack looked up long enough to nod towards one of the other agents, who was carrying a bag of his own. "Sanders has a survival kit like this one, if we need to split up."

He pried up three of the boards, loosening them on the bottom and swinging them outward to make a gap. One by one they ducked and filed through. Jack brought up the rear and lowered the boards carefully to rest against the bottom crossbar of the fence. He laid the crowbar in the wet grass.

It was immediately obvious as soon as they were inside the house that someone had been there. Furniture had been moved, and there were muddy tracks on the floor that Peggy was quite sure they had not left the previous night.

"Heads up, guys," Jack whispered. Peggy placed her hand on her sidearm; rather than carrying it in her handbag as she often did, she was wearing it tonight in a man's holster at her waist.

Still, if there had been Leviathan agents in the house, they were not here now, and the basement was equally deserted. Peggy noticed a good many more tracks on the floor, as well as more dampness on the cinderblock walls and a spreading mud puddle expanding from under one of them. The new agents were looking around with what Peggy thought was probably justified nervousness.

"So, what are the odds this is gonna collapse on us while we're down here?" Sanders wanted to know.

"Virtually none," Jack retorted. "We were down here for hours yesterday and it was fine."

Peggy wished she could be as sure. The ground felt unpleasantly soft under her feet, as if the rain was loosening everything. "Keep your voices down," she whispered. "They may be close."

They left an agent behind to guard their backs, and started into the tunnel.

"Hey." Daniel nudged her, and pointed his torch upwards. "Was the ceiling sagging like that yesterday?"

"Possibly. I wasn't looking up." Not with as much attention as she was now, that was for certain.

"I've got a bad feeling about this. We might ought to wait for dry weather."

"Much as I hate to agree with Jack, I think we'll be all right," Peggy said. "We crawled around in some hair-raising places in our HYDRA hunt in Europe, so I've developed an eye for it, and I expect this is more stable than it looks." She put her hand on the wall. The packed earth was cool under her palm. "Sudden shocks are to be avoided, of course. It's a good thing the East Coast is not prone to earthquakes."

"Unlike the West Coast?"

"That's not what I meant."

"I know," Daniel sighed. They'd fallen behind; up ahead, Jack and the other agents had hit an intersection of tunnels and were arguing over the compass and map. "Peggy, look ... the L.A. thing ..."

"It is an excellent opportunity for you, Daniel; I'm very happy for you."

"I'm glad, but -- I don't want you to feel that I'm ..." He trailed off. Peggy gave him an expectant look. Daniel shook his head. "Never mind."

He headed off for the others at a brisk clip. Peggy followed slowly, feeling somewhat hollowed out.

"Nice of you to join us," Jack said dryly as Peggy and Daniel rejoined the group. "Okay, what we're doing is splitting up. Sanders, you take Olsen and Chan that way. I've got Carter, Sousa, and Dunn, and we're going this way. Plant a transmitter as soon as you can find a clear way to the surface, and rendezvous back at the Leviathan house by 4 a.m. if you don't receive other orders."

"Right, Chief," Sanders said, and he trekked off into the darkness. Or squelched was more like it. The floor was very damp in this area.

"Are you entirely sure splitting up is a good idea?" Peggy asked.

"Don't start, Carter."

"I am simply suggesting it would be very easy to get lost down here."

"They're not children," Jack said. "There are a number of places where it's possible to reach the surface. If they do get lost, they can come up somewhere and radio to the topside team to pick them up."

As it happened, they hit one of those access points within a few minutes of setting out again. Their tunnel intersected a storm drain. A rusty metal catwalk crossed the churning water, which was already up to the bottom of the makeshift bridge, sending showers of spray through the metal slats. Beside it, a ladder led upward to a grate in the ceiling.

"May I?" Peggy asked, holding out a hand for a transmitter.

Jack shrugged. "Be my guest."

She climbed the ladder and held the transmitter in her teeth while she struggled with the grate. It seemed to be cemented in place with years' accumulation of mud from past storms, although she could feel a fresh and welcome breeze blowing down through it. A muddy trickle of water was flowing in a steady stream through the edge of it, and kept getting down the back of her neck.

"Need help up there?" Jack called.

"No!" Peggy retorted around the transmitter clenched in her teeth. She finally broke the grate loose by heaving with her shoulder. After pushing it aside, she pulled herself out to her waist and looked around.

It looked like an ordinary street in another subdivision very similar to their own. Peggy pulled herself all the way up, and located a utility pole with a box on it. The box was unlatched, and she tucked the transmitter inside, next to an electric meter, and taped down the button before taking out her radio. Her first attempt to key the mike produced a squeal of static; she had to walk a few feet away to try again. "This is Agent Carter. Are you reading me?"

"Agent Bryant here. Loud and clear."

"I've planted the first transmitter. It appears that we're at the corner of ..." She walked closer to the street sign. "Elm and Maple."

There was some rustling in the background. "Looks like we're getting your signal. Once we have another, we can start triangulating."

"Excellent. We're all well here. I'm going back down."

A fresh wave of rain swept over her, and she ran for the storm drain and ducked inside, dragging the grate after her. "Mission accomplished," she called down to the anxious faces looking up. "I was able to check in with Bryant's team in the car, as well. I think they're close. The signal was very strong."

She dropped off the bottom of the ladder. Her feet splashed in shallow water, and she looked down at it as she wrung out her hair. "Er ... was it this high before?"

"No," Daniel said emphatically. "It's come up noticeably just while you were up there. This is a terrible idea."

"You keep saying that," Jack said.

"That's because it's still true."

They crossed the catwalk carefully. The water was running over the top of it now, making the footing slick and treacherous. Jack led the way; Peggy and Daniel went next; and Agent Dunn, carrying the bag of transmitters, brought up the rear. Peggy rested a steadying hand on Daniel's free arm, and he didn't try to shake her off. She breathed more easily once they were across.

"You know," Peggy said, looking back at it, "I'm starting to agree with Daniel. If the water rises much more, it will block our way back. I don't think we should go much farther."

Jack threw his hands in the air. "Fine. One more transmitter and we'll pack it in for tonight and head up top. This'll give us a start on figuring out their direction, anyway. Happy?"

"Yes," Daniel said.

"Who builds their top-secret access tunnels through a storm drain anyway?" Peggy complained as they got moving again. "Apparently Leviathan hires terrible contractors --" She stopped so suddenly that Daniel bumped into her. "Contractors! Jack!"

Jack sighed. "Now what?"

"Contractors! Daniel, you said the Basset woman --"

"Bennett."

"Bennett, Basset, whatever -- you said she thought any odd activity in the house was contractors finishing up the interior work, because they're still working in the neighborhood."

She didn't have to lay a too-obvious trail for both of them to follow her. "That'd be a pretty good cover for spies, wouldn't it?" Daniel said. "Nobody looks twice at a contractor van."

"We should buy a few for the SSR," Jack mused.

"And it would give them a chance to insert modifications into the local architecture," Peggy went on. "Who knows how many of those new houses have extra rooms or passages? Not ours, at least I don't think so, but it would be absurd to modify every house in the neighborhood; you would greatly increase your chances of discovery. Just one or two on each block would do."

"We need to find out which contracting companies are working on these subdivisions." Jack reached for his radio. "Hey, Sanders, can you still hear me?"

"Kinda, Chief." The answer came back through heavy static.

"Change of plans. I want your team to turn around and head back. Water's rising too fast. We're going back too, as soon as we plant one more transmitter so the team has more to work with. If you get topside before we do, tell Bryant to call Base and have someone start digging into the construction contracts for this subdivision. Find out who's building these houses. We think Leviathan might be involved."

"On it, boss."

"Hey," Daniel murmured, touching Peggy's arm. "Did you hear something?"

"Only Jack, and --" She stopped, and tipped her head to one side.

Down here, sounds echoed and carried. The gurgling of the storm sewer they'd left behind was still audible, reverberating and layered. There were other noises, distant clangs and clatters, sounds that might be night delivery trucks driving over manhole covers above them or distant sewer workers or ... who even knew.

But that clatter had been quite close.

"Jack," Peggy said. "I don't think we're alone down here."

"Oh good. Because that's exactly what this situation needed." Jack drew his gun; the others followed suit. Peggy already had hers in hand. "What kind of 'not alone'? Are we talking Leviathan, or sewer monsters, or what?"

"I ... am not sure. Daniel heard it before I did."

"People, I think," Daniel said, dropping his voice. "I think we were being paced by somebody. Couldn't hear them before because of the water, but now we're away from it ..."

Jack looked ahead, into the darkness, and then back over his shoulder. He was afraid, Peggy could tell, and unsure. She didn't blame him for either one, and it was not an easy decision to make. Risk their lives in the tunnels, or go back and try again another day? They were the SSR, and they were paid to go places other people didn't, and deal with things other people couldn't.

"I think --" she began, but didn't have a chance to finish. There was a sudden loud clang from behind them, echoing up and down the tunnel. That definitely wasn't a natural sound.

"They're behind us!" Agent Dunn cried, spinning around and pointing his gun down the passage.

"Agent!" Jack snapped. "Don't fire unless you know what you're shooting at! That's an order. Absolutely no discharge of firearms unless you know you aren't shooting at a friendly."

"We need to go back," Peggy said tightly. "We need to go back now. I think that might have been our bridge. If the water gets deeper, we'll be trapped." They might already be, but she didn't want to say so.

"Yeah, forget the transmitters," Jack said. "We'll deal with it another day, with more men. You heard the lady."

They retraced their steps at the fastest possible speed that wasn't an out-and-out retreat. Daniel fell into step with Peggy, just behind her, his gun down at his side. "Hey, Peggy, you know how you said any sudden shocks could bring these tunnels down? You think gunshots count?"

"I am afraid it's possible."

"Oh good. I was afraid of that."

They came out in the brick tunnel with the storm sewer. Peggy saw at a glance, in the probing beam of her torch, that her guess had been correct. The water surged freely now, leaping and frothing in the torchlight. There was nothing left of the catwalk they'd crossed except the rusty bolts where it had been secured to the concrete.

"Coulda pulled out on its own," Jack suggested, crouching to examine the damage. "Maybe something hit it -- a branch, say. It was pretty rusted."

"That didn't rust through on its own," Peggy said, pointing to the shiny gleam of the flat metal ends in her torchlight. "Someone meant to strand us here."

She shone the light across the water again, and flinched violently back when she realized they were not alone.

"Get to cover!" Peggy snapped at the other agents, raising her gun. "You! Hands in the --" She broke off, momentarily speechless when she realized who she was looking at.

Dottie Underwood was standing in the mouth of the tunnel on the opposite side. She wasn't carrying a torch, although she had a shotgun slung casually in the crook of her arm. She was wearing a black jumpsuit and looked absolutely unfazed by the sight of four SSR agents pointing weapons at her.

"Hands in the air and get down on the ground!" Jack shouted.

Dottie ignored him utterly; her attention was reserved for Peggy. She smiled and then turned away, vanishing into darkness.

Jack fired at her; the bullet chipped the side of the tunnel and did nothing else.

"Jeez," Daniel breathed. His gun hand was trembling. "She coulda shot all of us, right there, before we even saw her."

"Sanders!" Jack snapped into the radio. "Sanders, you read? You got Leviathan coming your way. Get out of the tunnels, I don't care where or how, just find an exit point and get out."

There was a static-blurred answer, but Peggy didn't hear it. She was busy climbing down into the cold, rushing water.

"Peggy!" Daniel snapped.

"We have to get across. We can't let her get away." She found that the water was not as deep as it looked; it was only up to her waist. It was bone-chilling cold, though, and the current was so strong it tried to snatch her off her feet.

"Peggy, be careful!"

"I'm all right, Daniel. This isn't so bad." Still, she had to force herself to pry her hand off the concrete and take slow, cautious steps out into the churning, muddy water. She tried not to think about what would happen if she lost her footing and was swept away into that dark tunnel.

"What's she doing?" Jack wanted to know. "Oh God. Peggy, get back here, that's an order."

"It's perfectly all right. You're going to have to do it, too, unless you want to stay over there until you drown --" She broke off as the current made her stagger, one ankle twisting under her on the unseen surface she was walking on. Off balance, Peggy plunged through the last few steps at a half-run and caught the lip of concrete on the far side. The concrete was slick, water lapping over the edge as the water spilled out of its channel, and it took her a couple of tries to pull herself out.

Standing on the edge, she looked back at the other three, all of whom were staring at her in various shades of disbelief and worry. "It really isn't that bad!" she said as soon as her voice was steady again. "Hold onto each other to stabilize yourselves." It was Daniel, mostly, that she was worried about. If she could do it, Jack and Dunn, who were both taller, could probably do it even more easily. "I'm going after Dottie."

"Not without backup, you aren't!" Jack snapped.

Peggy turned on her heel and dashed off into the darkness.

Dottie was playing with them. Daniel was right: if she was serious, she could have sniped them all, or at least one or two, before they had any idea she was there.

Are there more Leviathan agents here, or is she working alone?

"Dottie!" she shouted into the darkness. "I know it's me you want! Why don't we talk?"

There was no answer. She reached the split in the tunnels where Sanders and his team had taken a different route. Peggy shone her light at the floor, but she was no tracking expert; by now, the muddy floor of the tunnel was churned into a mess of footprints going in different directions. Would Dottie have gone deeper into the catacombs, or back to the safehouse? Peggy didn't know. If Sanders and his team were still down here, though, they were in mortal danger. She took the other fork, running as fast as she dared in the darkness.

Nothing. She passed other branching tunnels and then came to a place where water was flowing across the tunnel floor, coming in from a bricked-in sewer tunnel with a grate across the entrance. Peggy shone her light across. In the fresh mud, she saw no tracks. Damn it, she'd picked the wrong way.

She ran back the way she'd come. At the intersection of tunnels, she nearly ran into Jack, Daniel, and Dunn. "You find her?" Jack demanded, lowering his weapon when he recognized her.

"No, nor Sanders either. I hope they got out. I think she may have gone back towards the --"

A shotgun blast crashed, deafening in the tunnel. It hadn't been fired from more than ten feet away: Dottie had crept up on them in the darkness. Agent Dunn crumpled, obviously dead before he hit the ground.

Peggy fired in the direction of the muzzle flash -- twice, three times.

"Oh, you're going to have to try harder than that, Peggy," the mocking voice floated back down the tunnel.

"Dorothy Underwood!" Peggy shouted furiously, breaking into a run. "You're under arrest!"

She heard Jack shout her name, but didn't bother to answer. Dottie had fired from in front of them, and couldn't have gotten around them unseen in the close confines of the tunnel, which meant she was between them and the exit. There might be some way to close off the tunnel permanently. And even if not, Dottie could escape into the city, and they'd never see her again.

We're so damned close! It was the first time they'd even glimpsed her since she'd gone missing at Howard's hangar. If she got away this time, she'd probably go underground again; she might skip the country entirely. This could be their last chance to --

Peggy skidded to a halt.

Dottie was framed in the mouth of the tunnel. At her feet lay the still body of the agent who had been guarding the passage. Even from here, Peggy could see the twisted angle of his neck and the staring eyes. Dottie had her shotgun braced one-handed against her hip, cowboy style. Her other arm was stretched out, the hand somewhere out of sight behind the doorframe.

"I am not playing games!" Peggy shouted, leveling her weapon at Dottie's center mass. "If you resist arrest, I will kill you! Drop the weapon and put your hands up!"

"You know, you might actually be able to do it." Dottie's head tilted to the side. She was backlit and Peggy couldn't make out her expression. "All you have to do is choose, Agent Carter. Me -- or them?"

And her hand moved, out of sight: a lever-throwing motion.

Everything happened at once.

A bone-deep cracking sound tore through the walls of the tunnel. Dottie was already in motion, flinging herself to one side; Peggy squeezed the trigger but she knew her aim was bad, because she was spinning around in the same instant, no longer even looking at Dottie because she had no attention to spare for anything but the flash of Jack's torch, not so far behind her.

"Daniel! Jack!" she screamed. "Run!"

Beams ripped loose and the wall caved in, deluging the tunnel in a flood of earth and mud.

Peggy got a brief glimpse of Jack dropping the torch and whirling around to catch Daniel in a two-fisted grip and spinning him out of the way of a massive beam as it ripped out of the wall. It caught Jack a glancing blow on the side of the head -- and then she couldn't see anything, because her entire world filled up with mud and dirt.

The collapse wasn't instantaneous, however. It was probably designed to be, but fell victim to a combination of the rains turning the soil to sludge, and the same shoddy craftsmanship that had characterized the rest of the tunnel's construction. Peggy found herself buried up to her waist, plastered in mud but not actually drowning in it. She was not out of danger yet, however, because the tunnel was still in slow-motion collapse around her: beams coming loose and crashing down, muddy sections of ceiling caving in.

"Daniel!" she screamed, fighting her way forward, towards where she'd last seen them. "Jack!"

"Peggy!" she heard Daniel shout with equal desperation.

She plunged under a collapsing section of ceiling and slammed into something moving and alive, that clutched at her arm. Daniel's face was plastered with mud, all but unrecognizable.

She kissed him before she knew what she was doing, fast and hard, because she'd lost too many people and she was so tired of missed chances, lost opportunities. It was hardly even pleasant, a bruising impact of lips and teeth, and then she tore herself away, mouth tasting like mud, and felt her way down his arm to locate Jack, who was entirely limp. Daniel was struggling to keep Jack's head out of the mud while not getting swept off his feet.

"How is he?"

"I don't know," Daniel gasped. "Peggy, are you --"

"I'm all right." Peggy pressed her fingers against Jack's carotid and felt a reassuring flutter, though her hand came away covered with mud that was warm enough it had to be made up at least partly of blood. That beam had hit him hard -- but no, she couldn't stop to think about that yet. The tunnel was still coming down, and from a horrific rending crack behind her, she thought the house might be collapsing too.

There's no way the neighbors aren't going to notice something going on THIS time ...

She managed to clamber on top of a collapsed beam and reached back to drag Daniel after her, who was in turn dragging Jack. When she tipped her head back, a light spray of rain settled on her face, and she could see the night sky, low bellies of clouds lit orange with the streetlights' sulfur glow. We're ... out?

The mud had been their salvation. After a dry summer, they would have been buried beneath tons of earth. However, all the rain had turned the soil to a loose slurry of muck. When the walls began to collapse, it had filled up the tunnel, and now they were on top of it -- or, rather, at the bottom of a slope-sided muddy trench that used to be the backyard.

Peggy stood up on the beam and looked around in amazement. The backyard was an absolute disaster, the fence tilting into the sinkhole like a broken child's toy. The house was now leaning drunkenly at an ominous angle, having partially collapsed into the basement. A great crack zigzagged through the nearest wall.

We need to get out of here before that falls on us.

She wobbled along the beam like a tightrope walker to the side of the hole and tried to climb out, but she slid right back in. It was impossible. There was nothing to grab hold of.

"Mrs. Henderson?" a disbelieving voice said from above.

Peggy looked up. A small cluster of neighbors were huddled under umbrellas, peering down from behind the remains of the fence. She recognized among them the Langstroms and Agnes Glenn.

"Someone get a rope!" Peggy shouted. "And call an ambulance! There are people hurt down here."

When she'd met the residents of the neighborhood at the Glenns' cocktail party, Peggy would never in a million years have suspected that she'd end up with all of them reaching down for her, hauling her and her colleagues, all of them caked with mud, out of a pit in the earth. And yet ... here she was, clutching Agnes Glenn's and Mr. Langstrom's willing hands, feeling other hands gripping her arms and her clothing to help as she scrambled up to the unstable, tilting lawn.

Peggy turned around and reached down to help Daniel manhandle Jack's limp body out of the hole, and then pulled Daniel up. She collapsed on the lawn, catching herself on her hands. They were out. They'd made it.

She picked herself up shakily. The backyard was starting to fill up not only with concerned neighbors but also with SSR agents. She glimpsed Sanders trying to set up a cordon. So he had made it out. Someone had even managed to find Daniel's crutch in the mud.

One of the neighbors brought a blanket and Peggy spread it over Jack. "Is he breathing?" she asked Daniel.

"I think so." Daniel wiped mud off Jack's slack face.

Peggy looked down at them on the lawn, Daniel with Jack's head in his lap, touching his face with unexpected gentleness -- and it was the same feeling she got on a case sometimes, when she encountered a new piece of evidence or an unexpected insight, and suddenly all the puzzle pieces rearranged themselves and the picture popped out, clear as day.

Oh. That. THAT'S the missing piece.

She didn't really have time to think about it, not right now. Someone was trying to drape a blanket over her shoulders too. She started to shrug it off, then gave up and huddled into its warmth. Wishing she looked a little less like a mud-caked refugee, she went around to the front of the house, or what was left of it. "Dorothy Underwood," she said to the first SSR agent she saw. "She may be nearby. You need to get a dragnet together."

He gave her an aghast look. "You need to sit down, miss."

"Agent," Peggy snapped.

"Carter? Sorry, I didn't recognize you under all the mud."

She had variants of this conversation with several other people, but managed eventually to get the local agents mobilized on a Dottie hunt. More SSR agents were trickling in all the time, herding curious neighbors back to their houses and blocking off the street.

"Peggy! There you are."

Daniel came up to her, leaning on his mud-plastered crutch more heavily than usual.

"In the middle of things as always," he said with a crooked smile. "Peggy, come on. They've got this. You were just shot at and buried in a cave-in. Sit down and let a medic look at you."

Reluctantly, she endured being steered away from the action. Daniel got her to sit on the lawn near Jack, who seemed to be awake now, though groggy. An SSR medic was examining his head.

"Hey, Chief." Sanders came around the corner of the house. "Your idea about the contractors panned out. We found a business, McKellen Construction, that looks shady as hell and has its hand in all the local building projects. We're about to raid the place now."

"It was Carter's idea," Jack mumbled indistinctly.

Peggy gave him a look of surprise. He avoided her eyes, although maybe that was just because he was currently having difficulty focusing on anything.

"You won't catch Dottie Underwood in a raid," she said.

"Peggy, listen." Daniel squeezed her arm. "She's long gone and we're not going to catch her today. Let them handle the Leviathan cleanup."

Peggy sighed and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. Her hair was full of mud, and she was starting to feel the ache of her bruises whenever she moved. "How's Jack?"

"Concussion and a lot of bruising," the medic said. "Ought to have an X-ray, but right now there's not much else a hospital can do for him or for any of you. Get cleaned up, and take him to a doctor if any worse symptoms show up."

Peggy made Sanders promise to tell her if there was any word on Dottie, but Daniel was right: the SSR could handle things for now. Her teeth were chattering, and the itch of mud on her skin was driving her crazy. A shower was the top priority right now for all of them.

She and Daniel gathered Jack up and got him on his feet and moving. "How do you feel?" Peggy asked him.

"I'll live," he groaned, and nearly walked into the fence.

Peggy stopped them at the door. "Wait," she said, and did a quick sweep of the house, wishing her gun wasn't buried under a ton of mud. She did have a spare sidearm in her bedroom, and it was still there. No Russian assassins were lurking in hidden corners. "Safe," she called.

"So it's back to keeping an eye out for assassins out to kill us in our beds," Daniel said, helping Jack into the house. "Lovely."

"It goes with the job," Peggy pointed out.

"Somehow they forgot to mention that in the recruitment brochure."

He stopped at the bathroom door, and Peggy realized she hadn't quite taken into account the fact that the house had only one bathroom.

"Ladies first?" Daniel offered, Jack swaying drunkenly on his shoulder.

A few thoughts flickered through her mind. Kissing Daniel in the mud. The way Jack had flung himself over Daniel in the tunnel; the way Daniel had touched his face. The way Jack watched her and Daniel sometimes during these months when they'd been fighting and estranged, with a look that was a little hopeful and a little lost.

"No," Peggy decided, and opened the bathroom door to admit all of them.

They eased Jack down onto the edge of the bathtub, and there was an awkward moment when she and Daniel just looked at each other, while Jack leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. Then Peggy reached past Jack and turned on the water in the shower, adjusting it from cold to warm, from warm to hot. "I am filthy, itchy, and miserable, and I am too tired for nonsense," she announced, and began to undo the front of her sodden, mud-caked blazer.

Daniel hesitated, then sat on the toilet and started helping Jack peel out of his mud-covered shirt.

"I can do this," Jack muttered, batting his hands away. He fumbled with the buttons and then let his hands drop into his lap wearily.

Peggy stepped into the shower with most of her clothes still on. She took hold of Jack by the shoulders, got him up and under the water, and propped him against the wall while she began to briskly strip off his shirt and then undid his belt.

"Aren't you supposed to buy me dinner first?" Jack mumbled. His face was turned up to the water, his eyes still closed. Water mixed with blood and mud sluiced over his shoulders, soaking his undershirt. Peggy pulled his trousers down.

"Left leg," she ordered. He lifted it, listed, and caught himself on the wall.

Daniel had gotten as far as taking off his own shirt and jacket, and seemed to have stalled out at that point, sitting on the closed toilet lid as if he couldn't figure out where to go from there.

"Daniel," Peggy said, "it may be a tight fit, but we can share. I could use a hand here."

Embarrassment and a sort of helpless anger flashed across his face. "In order to shower, you know, I have to -- take my leg off."

"Nobody cares, Sousa." Jack spoke with his face turned against the wall, expression hidden, water running through his blond hair and dripping onto Peggy.

Daniel stood up slowly. Peggy looked away, giving him what privacy she could while she peeled out of her blouse and trousers.

She looked over to find that Daniel had leaned his leg against the wall. She'd never seen it before, except for glimpses of the ankle between his sock and trouser leg. It was as covered with mud as everything else. "Gonna need a good cleaning," Daniel said ruefully.

"Like all of us." She held out a hand to him. He shook his head and sat on the edge of the bathtub, then swung his leg and stump around. It was not unpleasant to the eye, Peggy found. It ended a little below the middle of his thigh. She'd expected a lot of scars, but while there were some, a latticework of purple and white, in the main his leg simply ended in a smooth knot of flesh. The places where the straps fit, to secure it, were dented and scored with red.

"Do you normally stand or sit?" Peggy asked. "In the shower, I mean."

"Sit. Don't take many showers. Baths, mostly."

"I think I need to sit," Jack mumbled. He gave a sudden laugh, which ended in a wince. "We're a gimpy bunch, aren't we?"

"Jack, come here." Peggy took him firmly and maneuvered him out from under the flow of water, helping him sit down. The bottom of the tub was swirled with mud. She tamped in the plug and left the shower running. There was a fresh cake of soap beside the tub, which she reached past Daniel to pick up. "Daniel," she said impatiently, "please hand me that cloth there, and then get under the water."

It was crowded and awkward with all three of them in the tub, but not impossibly so. Peggy knelt between them, with their legs tangled around her, and soaped Jack's head around the injury and scrubbed at it with the washcloth. Daniel kept bumping her and apologizing as he washed the mud out of his hair. After the fourth or fifth murmured, "Sorry," she twisted around and planted a firm kiss on his lips.

His eyes opened wide, under the spray. Maybe he'd written off the earlier one as stress. His lips tasted like water this time, instead of mud, and after the first startled moment, he kissed back enthusiastically -- cupped his hand behind her head and took the lead, even.

"Now stop apologizing," Peggy told him quietly, when they broke apart. "Let's trade places. I need to get Jack's hair rinsed out."

A lot of awkward shuffling and squirming ensued, with some stifled giggling too; a tangle of wet slippery limbs, trying to rearrange themselves and teetering on the edge of an intimacy none of them could quite accept yet. There was about eight inches of muddy water in the bottom of the tub. Daniel shuffled down to the end and sat on the edge, washing his legs and feet while Peggy combed her fingers through Jack's hair, trying to get the mud out, avoiding the bruised area as best she could. The side of his head was terrifically swollen (it wasn't just a goose egg, it was a whole goose nest) but the gash didn't seem to be deep, despite all the blood.

"How are you feeling?" she asked him. "And don't try to tell us you're fine or any macho foolishness of that sort."

"Absolutely miserable," he admitted wearily.

He looked pale and sick. Peggy hesitated; she didn't want to risk the idea of messing up what she and Daniel had just started to put back together. But ... they were all here, and no one had backed off yet. She kissed him lightly, just a brush of her lips on his, and then Daniel put an arm around her from behind and leaned his forehead against the back of her head. Jack's lips parted to let her in, and it was all right, it was going to be all right.

She sagged into Daniel, all the day's exhaustion and tension and strain finally catching up with her, and she kissed Jack and he kissed her back, raising a hand to cup her face with a light, hesitant touch as if he couldn't quite believe it.

"You smell like mud," Daniel told the back of her head. "Er, sorr --" He choked himself off, then laughed.

Jack was grinning against her mouth. He raised a hand and reached around behind her head and cupped Daniel's neck, pulling Daniel against her in some strange kind of three-way hug.

"You are both impossible," she told them, but her voice was muffled against Jack's mouth and then, as her head slipped down his cheek, by his neck. And they stayed that way for a little while, knotted together as the water around her legs and Jack's continued to rise. The shower beating down on the top of her head felt like heaven.

... for a little while, at least, until water soaked through her hair, dribbled off her cheek, and a runnel of it got into her mouth. It did taste like mud. "Ugh," she said, raising her head; she felt a quick movement as Daniel pulled back in time to avoid being bumped in the face. "I need a turn under the water. Jack, move."

"Ngghh." Jack allowed himself to be manhandled to the other end of the tub again.

Peggy pulled the plug to let out the cooling, filthy water, and then stood up under the shower, with the bar of soap in hand. She blinked open her eyes, with water on the lashes, and discovered both of them were watching her.

"Enjoying the show?" she inquired archly, soaping her shoulder. She was still wearing her underwear, though with the wet camisole plastered to her body, she might as well not be.

"I have no idea what's happening here," Daniel admitted.

"As if I do?" Peggy tipped her head back, letting hot water course through her hair and stream down her back. Ah, bliss. "I've made a career out of damning the torpedoes and forging ahead. Why stop now?"


***


They were clean, at last, after a few more iterations of soaping and rinsing. They'd finally dispensed with their underwear; it was muddy too, and that final barrier fell with little fanfare. Peggy stood beneath the water naked, and Daniel kissed her nipples lightly and Jack rested his head against her leg, and she combed her fingers through his wet hair and that ... that was all any of them had energy for, right now.

Maybe later there would be more.

Maybe this would evaporate by the light of day.

But it was already daylight when they emerged from the bathroom, Peggy found to her surprise: a wan gray daylight coming through the gap in the curtains. They were all still naked, though she had a towel thrown around her shoulders. Daniel hadn't put his leg back on, and he seemed to be using Jack for a crutch. Jack looked none too stable himself.

Peggy sighed, resigned herself to being the least unhealthy among them, and steered the two of them to Daniel's bedroom, it being the closest. "Sit," she told Jack, snapping on the bedside lamp, and checked his scalp wound. It was still bleeding sluggishly. "Wait here. I believe there's a first-aid kit. I'm going to bandage this."

She went naked through the house, pausing on her way to make sure both the front and back door were locked, and to pick up her backup gun from her bedroom. When she got back to the bedroom, Daniel was flopped on his side with his hand on Jack's hip and his eyes closed, looking mostly asleep if not all the way there.

"Here, take these." She gave Jack two aspirin with a glass of water, and knelt on the bed beside him, leg tucked under her bare hip, so she could part his hair and see what she was doing. "I'm not going to attempt to sew this up. Just a simple bandage to keep you from oozing on the bedcovers will do."

"I just want to lie down." He opened his eyes fully. It was the first time since the tunnel that he'd looked completely aware, instead of half out of it. "Peggy," he said. "What are we doing?"

"I don't know."

"I --" He couldn't seem to get the words out. "The promotion, you should have --"

"Stop." She touched her fingertip to his lips. He fell quiet. In the silence, she covered the swollen, bruised area with gauze and bound it around his head with a strip bandage to keep it from falling off.

Daniel opened his eyes. She'd thought he was asleep. "You're staying here, right?"

Peggy smiled as she snapped the first-aid case shut. "I'm not sure if the bed is big enough for three."

"I can go," Jack said, and started to get up. Peggy pushed him back down.

"No, I think you need to be where someone else can make sure you aren't going to stop breathing in the middle of the night -- er, day."

"Then we'll make room." Daniel reached for her. "Peggy, come on."

Daniel didn't normally push -- or pull. She liked it, the feeling of being actively drawn into his orbit, instead of passively settling there. "You'll have no one but yourself to blame if someone falls out of bed in the night."

"I think we all might be too deep asleep to notice."

When Peggy turned off the light, the room was not entirely dark -- it was, after all, daylight -- but it was dim and impossibly peaceful. Had it only been yesterday that she'd fallen asleep in the living room with Jack? Which reminded her that Jack hadn't actually slept in at least two days, and possibly a lot longer than that -- properly at least; he always seemed to be in the office before everyone else, and at work a good deal later.

She crawled after him into the bed. There was some scuffling around and rearranging of limbs; there did indeed seem to be too many elbows and knees in this bed by half. Eventually they managed to sort themselves into a sort of ... spooning was not quite the right word, not with this many outflung limbs.

It was more like they were puzzle pieces, and had found the slots where each piece clicked.

Which, Peggy thought, would probably last until someone rolled over, or had to get up to use the bathroom, or twitched in a sudden violent dream ... which she suspected was a possibility for all of them.

Something touched her head and made her jerk violently before she settled back. It was only a hand petting her hair. She was not even sure whose hand, any more than she was quite sure who had a hand resting in the crook of her waist, beneath the small ribs.

"I should get up and do something with my hair," she mumbled into the pillow.

"Don't," said two voices together, and then Jack added, "We'll never get everyone back into this bed. Don't go anywhere."

"You cannot even imagine what my hair will look like if I sleep on it wet, without even bothering to put it up in pin curls."

"Is that how you do it?" Daniel asked, in a vaguely wondering tone.

"I think we'll survive the shock somehow," Jack mumbled. Affectionate fingers toyed lightly with her hair, stroking across her scalp. She still couldn't tell which of them it was, although she was beginning to suspect Jack, and that Daniel's was the arm thrown across both their waists. "Go to sleep. Boss's orders."

She thought about telling him that he might be her Chief, but he was not her boss -- but she was too tired, and the pillow too compelling, and the draw of the other warm bodies in the bed was too much of an anchor, dragging her down.

It had been a very, very long time that she'd slept alone. So long.

Yet she couldn't quite seem to let go enough to fall asleep. There was still some part of her that was hanging on, holding out -- clinging to a tight edge of, of ... she didn't even know what; of the awareness that the people at her back had not always done a good job of watching her back, perhaps. There was hurt woven through their every interaction; there were a dozen small betrayals, or large ones, and a dozen things unsaid for every one of those. Even Daniel, for all that she liked and trusted him, had not believed her at the most critical of moments.

We could write our history in blood and pain, but it says nothing about our future.

It could all fall apart with the turn of the dawn. But then, so could everything. How well she'd come to know that, and how thoroughly she had learned that fairy tale romances could break and betray just like any other kind.

At nineteen, she'd thought it was worth trading her dreams as the coin to buy her future. At twenty-five, she'd believed in fairy tales. And now ...

The futures she believed in now were hewn from a tough and unforgiving landscape. She no longer believed in fairy tales, but she believed in sanctuary. She believed in snatching moments of victory and grace from a world that was sparing with either one.

The world might change tomorrow, but what she had here and now -- the warmth of a body against her back, the sleeping breath stirring her hair, the arm across her waist drawing her in ... these things were real. They might fade, they might be lost or broken, but here and now, they were hers.

She made a conscious effort to let go, give up, give in -- and let herself fall.