open » youth is wasted on the young

[mucked]

Who: Peggy Carter + OPEN
Where: Various spots
When: From July 3rd to mid-month.
Rating: PG, most likely.
Summary: Peggy digests some unexpected developments, fires away her disappointments, and throws herself into more productive endeavours. Hopefully. Fingers crossed.
The Story:

FIRING RANGE (backdated to july 4th)--

[ steve's confession, of sorts, scatters her emotions and sends peggy's fledgling optimism deep underground. perhaps it'd been the sort of thing she should never have nurtured: hope; expectation; excitement for the few decent possibilities wonderland might have offered to offset so much horror and disappointment. but she'd made a mistake when she'd allowed herself to put the cart in front of the horse. to put it mildly. it's a mistake she won't make again. of all those involved, she blames herself most -- for courting distraction when she ought to be focused on survival. just as it had been during the war, she should brook no time for love nor distractions. it only gets people hurt.

so the day after her conversation with steve sees her at the firing range. she's got one of those modern firearms, given to her by sharon, and she decides she'd better grow comfortable with it. and quick. now that her wound is feeling much better, there's no excuse to hang back and wait out disasters when she could wade into them instead. it's a cold comfort to squeeze out a few whole clips on a muggy 'independence day,' knowing that others might yet be celebrating elsewhere on the grounds.

afterwards, while field-stripping the gun and giving it a good cleaning, she sits well-back of the range itself. her expression is stony, and when she fumbles with the unfamiliar barrel and utters a sharp curse. it's said with far more vehemence than the error merits. ]

THE VENDORS (july 9th)--

[ curiousity (paired with an appetite for diversion) eventually gets the better of her and she ventures into the orchards. she'd like to tell herself she'd only been walking, without intention, and meandered in their direction. truth is, she wants to see these wares with her own eyes. touch them, perhaps, with her own fingertips. peggy goes from stall to stall with her notebook tucked protectively under one arm.

she'd heard about the prices the vendors might place on their goods. the concept intrigues her a little more than it ought to, especially considering she'd arrived with very little currency of her own, but she manages to resist the urge to make a purchase. after all, she'd never been one for ownership; it'd never meshed well with her chosen career.

but she does try to snag the attention of another resident as he or she walks by, asking: ] Pardon, but...have you bought anything from these fellows?

[ is it worth it? ]

AROUND THE GROUNDS (all month)--

[ the mansion was already beginning to feel oppressive. but now, understanding the true cost of opportunity the building might represent, peggy feels driven to spend as little time under its roof as possible. she begs a thermos from her bedroom closet and fills it to the brim with hot black tea -- making do with ordering cup after cup in the dining hall and pouring each one in succession into the vessel. this becomes a mid-morning ritual, with a square of toast smeared in jam taken for a quick breakfast. on any given day, she might be found sitting with her back against an outer wall at the stables, or on the edge of the fountain, or perhaps on a blanket by the lakeshore.

although the place changes, the scene is otherwise always the same: peggy, her gone-lukewarm thermos sitting open beside her, and a notebook canted against her knees while she writes slowly and deliberately. either because this is a new undertaking, or because she herself is so recently arrived, only a handful of pages have thus far been filled. some of the sentences appear legible (intended in english) but others, should anyone peer over her shoulder, are gibberish. coded, most likely.

when strangers or rare familiar faces walk by, she'll at least do the decent thing and give a cordial nod. despite her sour mood, it doesn't register all that much differently from her customary distance and chill. ]

Comments

[mucked]

[ too often, she's had to distill the more jargon-heavy bits and bobs that float through the ssr and try and make sense of them. all the more often, lately, while tussling with isodyne energy, with whitney frost, and with the troubling question of zero matter. two of the most brilliant physicists she's ever met haven't quite been able to contend with that particular phenomenon.

and doctor palmer! well -- his enthusiasm, now, makes her wish most devoutly that she had either one of them here at her side now. stark, certainly, although she wouldn't say no to the charming doctor wilkes, either... ]

Projected normalcy. [ peggy leans forward where she sits. she has her suspicions (her hunches!) but she's too careful to put an assumption on the line and risk being caught ignorant. ] And what, precisely, do you mean by that?

[shrinkage]

[ ray points up at the sky. more specifically, at the sun. ]

Did you know that we can determine the properties of bodies in space from earth using the color of the light they reflect or emit? And when I apply that exercise to the sun, I can say that it's a sun.

[ astoundingly reductive, but ray prefers the teaching in these moments to the accuracy, surprisingly. ]

I can take a closer look at the light particles emitted by the sun and determine that they behave typically. Except they shouldn't behave typically.

[ ray please stop sounding so excited about the breakdown of physics ]

[mucked]

[ and her nostalgia (is it appropriately called nostalgia?) ebbs and flows again. there is a sweet kind of familiar frustration found in being the layman while a scientist chatters. talking circles, maybe, and laying foundation rather than thrusting to a point. for all her impatience in other matters, peggy takes this in remarkable stride.

comfortable enough, indeed, to go reaching for a third cupcake while she listens. ]

How should they behave? [ besides, well, atypically. that would be the simplest answer, albeit also an unhelpful one. peggy approaches the conversation just now with a shred more humility than she'd betrayed in either of their earlier conversations.

the reasoning is easy: information is strength, and part of her job is to glean that information from other sources. doctor palmer just turned himself into a source. a proper one, at that. god bless the physicists. ]

[shrinkage]

Honestly, any deviation from normal behavior would've been helpful.

[ an answer which is in itself not very helpful, probably. he takes a different tactic-- shifting his posture against the stiffness in his muscles as he shifts subjects. ]

The first few months of my time in Wonderland I spent all my time building a machine I needed. Everything was perfect, down to the micrometer. I ran test after test after test-- everything was fine. It should have performed exactly as designed, but it didn't. [ he sighs, the memory of other scientists chastising him for it grinding his nerves again. ] And then I realized, it never required tweaking. That was the anomaly.

[mucked]

[ he'd called himself an 'okay' listener. but peggy carter is a wonderful one -- not with sympathy, nor necessarily with compassion, but she sits and listens as though she's absorbing every word. each one is committed to memory; each one, she hopes, capable of being repeated by rote should someone like stark or wilkes arrive and it falls to her to play telephone with what's she's learned thus far.

but that doesn't stop her from trying to understand: ]

The sum of your machine was never greater than its perfected parts. Is that what you're trying to say? The pieces, however ideal and carefully assembled, never added up to what they should have been.

[ if so, and if she isn't misunderstanding him, then the paradox makes her a little nauseous. shifting hallways and optical illusions and yet fundamental building blocks that belie those abnormalities? ]

[shrinkage]

Or Wonderland really is a place of opposites, and fundamentally works to make us see normalcy where it doesn't actually exist.

[ which one is more concerning is up to every person to decide for themselves. ray struggles in the realm of finding it fascinating and bad. were stein here, he'd at least have someone else with the same outlook (then again they'd probably cause more trouble together that way, too).

ray offers a little more clarity to his embarrassing mishap: ]

The machine was operational. It just didn't do what it should have.

[mucked]

And what should it have done?

[ the question comes quickly. perhaps she's curious to learn what the man had prioritized in those early days. heaven knows, she wishes she could harness at least half of what she's seen order to try something (anything) to break out of this prison.

and that's just one reason why she finds herself sympathetic to agent fitz's earlier misdeed, so freshly committed upon her arrival in wonderland. ]

[shrinkage]

I was trying to fix my suit. Not all of its capabilities were operational at the time.

[ and he was sick of all the currant cake jokes... ]

[mucked]

[ and, oh, look how neatly one question leads into another: ]

Your suit?

[ something tells her he's not talking about a single breasted three button with good tailoring. ]

[shrinkage]

[ OH RIGHT oh gosh ray's grin is officially the brightest peggy will ever see it unless she wants to hear all about his girlfriend. ]

Oh, my exo-suit!

[ he reaches into his pocket to pull out a hard black case and holds it out for her to open and see it for herself. ]

[mucked]

[ as endearing as it is to see anyone show any sort of passion for anything -- and it certainly is that -- peggy can't help but betray a note of wariness as she lifts the proffered case (but not before abandoning one half of a cupcake and dusting crumbs off her palms). ]

I can't say I've ever heard of an exo-suit. [ she mutters, eyes shifting downward to watch the case as she springs its latches and pushes it open with her thumbs. at which point... ] You built a -- a toy, Doctor Palmer?

[ and a hard shunt back to formalities. she doesn't mean to offend, really, but this looks like some bizarre attempt at a sweet little tin soldier. her brother had owned a slew of little napoleonic era chaps when they were children.

she always loved watching him use the toys to 're-enact' the battle of talavera. ]

[shrinkage]

[ far from an insult, ray takes it and runs, smirking almost conspiratorially. ]

Sometimes I am the toy.

[ he means to get her to extrapolate from there but never let it be said ray doesn't realize he might be implying weird shit when he talks... ]

[mucked]

[ what? is he proposing he engages in some sort of play-pretend -- just like michael, imagining himself as a member of the 29th foot as he toddled the little tin toys through the grass in the back garden?

with a mild scoff, she shakes her head and misunderstands. ] I didn't take you for the make-believing sort.

[ which just goes to show how perilously wrong her read on the man might have been, really. ]

[shrinkage]

Well, it's Wonderland.

[ the smirk comes back as he gently plucks the toy out of the foam, leaving the case in peggy's hand. ray gets up and takes a few steps away before he places the atom on the ground and gently presses a finger to its chest.

it sprouts to full size in a matter of milliseconds, and ray stands back up with a pretty darned smug look on his face about the whole thing. ta da! ]

There's a lot to believe in here.

[mucked]

[ and perhaps his smugness is well-earned because, as the 'toy' grows into what she assumes to be its proper size, peggy is left suffering in a rare moment of complete surprise. this goes beyond closets. beyond, too, the magic she'd seen wielded by one billy kaplan. because those phenomena can be categorized as something so very far beyond her ken that she doesn't need to feel surprised.

but this? this is meant to be science, by all accounts. and, with a softly uttered bloody hell, peggy rises quickly to her feet and circles both the man and the suit. not once, but twice. her heels click hard on the flagstones until she's standing in front of the suit itself -- eyeing its lines and parts as though it's something wholly alien to her. in effect, it is. ]

Making things faster, you'd said. [ she proves herself a great listener, then, when she aptly regurgitates his own words. ] Which meant making them smaller.

[ and although she never goes about intending to stroke anyone's ego, in this moment she can't help but be awed. oh, if howard were here... ]

How does it work?

[ peggy wastes no time. ]

[shrinkage]

[ his ego has always been wrapped up in the reactions of others. ray's arrogance is where his trust in himself lies, and maybe that's why it never fully takes him over. why it's good that his ego responds to external stimuli so readily. ]

They're called nanites. Teeny tiny machines that can shrink the space between the very atoms that make up, well, everything.

[ the science itself is cool, and he'll never get bored of talking about it. ]

I developed the nanites before I had the suit, but it took me some time to think of combining them. When I got to Wonderland, I was stuck the miniaturized size for awhile.

[mucked]

[ nanites, he says. and the subject becomes infinitely more interesting than her own sorrows. more interesting, also, than the drama of his team. in effect, it's neutral territory: wonder, futurism, and progress.

there's a twitch in her hand; she wants to reach out and touch it. peggy holds her peace a moment longer. ]

That's -- that's remarkable. [ even the bit about being stuck miniaturized. ] It's not simply the suit that gets smaller? Good God.

[ the applications are dizzying to consider. ]

[shrinkage]

Go ahead. You can touch it, it's totally safe.

[ he holds back, confident in its safety just plopped here on the ground. there's not really anything she can set off without the neuromorphic interface, and it's nearly indestructible.

he waves her on in case his words aren't enough. ]

It took a lot of luck and sweat to get it built.

[ what peggy sees before here isn't just a machine. it was the start of a new life for ray. the means to become someone else.

some

thing

else ]

[mucked]

[ her fingers -- nails done in classic red -- draw an invisible line across one of the suit's shoulders. even its very construction (let alone the technology beneath it) reads as something so far beyond what she knows. what she's seen. ]

Luck? [ it's just about the only thing he might have said that could tear her attention away from the marvel 'standing' in front of her. ] Very few physicists -- very few inventors -- I know would ever deign to acknowledge luck in their successes.

[ a beat. ]

What was so lucky about it, then?

[shrinkage]

You must hang around some crappy physicists, then.

[ he doesn't press it as anything other than a joke, and nods in response to her doubt. ]

You can do everything right and still fail, you know? Luck is just noticing the opportunities and having the resources at your fingertips to capitalize on them. That's all I did. [ he shrugs and then adds as if it's an after-thought: ] I mean, it helped that I had already amassed an astounding amount of wealth and power and had some concerning views on the privacy and boundaries of other people...

[mucked]

[ good lord. peggy nearly laughs -- and had she laughed, it might even have been sincere. crappy physicists, hm? ]

You don't know the half of it.

[ howard stark is a great many things. but she will never, ever absolve him of his ego and his hubris. nor his mistakes, which have wrought so much awfulness despite the bits that have done so much good. forgive, yes, but never quite absolve.

only now does she withdraw her touch from the suit's shoulder. ]

But -- yes, I rather suppose the wealth does come in handy. [ a rich fellow. she should have known. a lush basket of cupcakes isn't that unlike a grand gesture easily afforded by someone with the means to impress at the click of a finger. ] As does the power. The degrees can't hurt, either.

[ she forces herself to ignore the suit, now, in favour of the man. it's not simple. ]

I'm sorry -- [ she really isn't ] -- but 'concerning views?'

[shrinkage]

[ he just looks a bit bashful and gestures to the cupcakes. ]

Old habits die hard? I knew you'd be out here, and I hoped dessert would be sufficient bribery.

[ everyone likes cupcakes. ]

And at home, I needed someone. Someone smarter and more creative than I am. Someone who wouldn't say yes because I was CEO Ray Palmer, but because she was up to the challenge. It's just-- well, I had to be persistent because of the smarter-than-me thing. Obnoxiously so.

[ obnoxiously persistent on his part or obnoxiously smarter on hers-- or maybe both. ]

[mucked]

[ it could have been worse, she supposes. he could have shown up on her doorstep -- but it's good to know this particular breach of privacy isn't unique to her. weirdly, it's a comfort.

(it shouldn't be, but it is.) ]

Persistence can be a virtue. At times.

[ -- and perhaps that's all she has to say on the matter. as much as she might admire the trait, she can't shake her dismay and her unease with the man who ultimately exemplifies it for her. her jaw shifts a moment; she tries not to let her expression slip.

except, in the eleventh hour: ] How did you convince her to say yes?

[ you know, for whatever persistent reason beyond him being ceo ray palmer. ]

[shrinkage]

Oh, I didn't. She determined that what I was offering was real and that it would contribute to something greater than herself.

[ he shrugs, and can't help the smile that follows. ]

I got lucky.

[mucked]

[ could such a determination ever be made in a vacuum? peggy scowls, but not for anything ray's done or said. only that her thoughts spiral away from her, for just a moment, and she needs a moment to centre herself before continuing. ]

It seems she may have found herself equally fortunate -- to gain such an opportunity. [ ... ] They don't always fall into our laps. Chances to be part of something...greater.