Time For Saying Goodbye

by JalendaviLady

Summary: After Director Fury arrives at Stark Tower late one night with the news Peggy Carter is still alive, Tony accompanies Steve on the midnight rush to her home. Character death warning.

Characters: Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter, Tony Stark, Nick Fury, Sharon Carter

Pairing: Steve/Peggy

Disclaimer: I own no part of the Marvel movie universe.

Chapter 1

Tony sat beside Steve in the Quinjet, briefcase suit tied down in a cargo securing net at his feet. He was trying desperately to forget the urgency in Fury's eye when he'd gone to consult with the flight crew.

It was the same urgency he'd had on arrival at Stark Tower just an hour ago, when he'd announced one Margaret Carter was still alive, and it wasn't fading.

Phil had stayed behind in Stark Tower. Phil was going to be needed to explain to everyone else just why Tony and Steve had skipped town together in the middle of the night.

And Tony knew that the foundation of Steve's relationship with Phil was fundamentally different than the one he had with Tony and always would be.

Phil had looked up to him as a hero. Tony had viewed him as an older deceased almost-brother, mostly from the way his father had spoken of him, and had always doubted he was who the legends claimed he was.

Steve had nothing to lose by falling apart in front of Tony.

And Tony thought he might need to.

Tony was the Avenger - other than Steve himself - most intimately aware of Steve's life during World War II, if for no other reason than because for a great deal of time it had been Howard Stark's life as well and that meant Tony had access to information - whether through old Stark Industries records or Howard's stories of the war - that SHIELD had either never known or never written down, things even Phil's exhaustive knowledge had never been able to include from simple lack of access.

Tony knew how old Peggy was, and judging by how 'young' most of his father's unclassified wartime friends had died, being in her mid-nineties was more than a ripe old age.

The classified ones, too. Steve was the one exception there, and that was possibly only because he hadn't biologically reached thirty yet. No one had any idea what Erskine's serum did to physical aging yet.

Tony seriously doubted Steve had anyone else left, and an hour ago he hadn't thought he had even Peggy left. Just the new family he'd found in the Avengers.

'Next of Kin: None', he thought. You and me both, Capsicle.

Landing at an airport. Tony didn't care where, but the flight had been short.

Then again, nearly any flight on a Quinjet was short.

A car, instead of another helicopter. Unmarked, discrete.

Urgent but not immediately so, he thought.

It was a good sign, meant they would have time, meant it was unlikely they were in a minute by minute race against Too Late.

Fury sat in front giving directions to the driver. Tony kept Steve company in the back, thinking.

He was unused to this. His parents had died so suddenly that even being in the first ambulance to respond would have been Too Late. Yinsen had been able to talk for a moment before he passed, but Tony hadn't even expected him to be in the fight so much as fifteen minutes before it happened, much less injured and even less fatally so.

This was age, and all of Tony's experience said that those close to him died from accident and anyone not close to him was likely to fade out of his life long before they faded from life.

The buildings of a military base got less and less dense. They passed beyond a checkpoint gate with little delay.

Fields, the occasional house. If there were more trees, it would have felt like the property he'd purchased upstate for the Avengers.

Denser houses, now. Tony couldn't tell if it was the outlying area of a small town or simply the edge of a sprawling suburbia, at least not until he saw the tell-tale boxy skyline a few blocks away.

A small town, then. There were plenty all across the country that subsisted partly on agriculture and partly on the steady flow of base paychecks into the local economy.

The kind of place that tended to be quiet, peaceful, and not a bad place to slip through the last few years of a long life well-lived.

They pulled to a stop in front of a small two-story home with a front porch and all the lights on.

All the lights on at what the little LED clock on the dashboard claimed was not far from being 3 o'clock in the morning, in a neighborhood where most of the others had likely been turned off at maybe an hour off of sunset.

The happy two hours of laughing at The Wizard Of Oz together seemed so far away, the unhappy revelations of Steve's past before it even further away.

He reached over and squeezed Steve's hand before they climbed out of the vehicle.

Bad day, about to get even worse, he thought. Even the change in age alone was going to be a shock.

He almost wished he knew how long it was going to be until local dawn.

Steve and the family member waiting at the door obviously knew each other.

"I'm sorry," she told him. "I'm Sharon. Her niece's daughter. That's why we look so much alike - or, at least, I look like old pictures of her. I knew who you were. They didn't..."

"... want me to know which year it was," Steve finished.

She nodded. "And then she couldn't decide whether she wanted you to know or not, if she even wanted to remind SHIELD she was still alive, but then she..." Sharon stopped, closed her eyes, and took a calming breath. "She decided she needed to see you again. Had to, absolutely had to, if there were a way."

"He's here now," Tony told her helpfully.

"Right. And I'd know you anywhere - hard to forget that viral video. She'll be glad to see you, too, Mr. Stark."

Glad to see me? Tony thought. Most of his father's acquaintances outside of Stark Industries itself hadn't had much interest in him at all after the dirt was covering the old scientist's coffin, and to be perfectly honest of them had lost interest before then, too. Howard Stark's connection with Margaret Carter, at least any official one, would have been severed with the end of the war, quite possibly with Steve's presumed death.

"Aunt Peg's just down this hall, follow me."

It was like a Jericho missile array had just gone off in Tony's brain.

Aunt Peg. The name he'd been instructed to use for one of his father's friends, back in the days before he'd entered full-day schooling and wasn't in the house for lunchtime anymore.

She'd always insisted on hugs and told the most interesting stories about other places. Usually England, sometimes Europe. Small towns, places the Stark family had no reason to travel to.

Margaret Carter was born and raised in England. She's British. Of course she'd tell a little American kid, the son of a friend, about places she'd been at the same age.

And for all his father's tales of the war when she wasn't there always circled back around to mentioning something Captain America had done - never mentioning his own involvement, of course - they never did when she was there, nor did she mention him.

She had never married. He knew that. And now, it all made a dreadful kind of sense, knowing exactly what hidden competition any suitor would have been up against in her mind.

The widow who wasn't, living in plain sight. All that time.

I knew her.

Damn.