open » i've got an atlas in my hands

[mucked]

Who: Peggy Carter + YOU
Where: Library, Rabbit Hole Diner, and other locations.
When: Early Feb
Rating: PG-13; will warn for changes in individual threads.
Summary: A catch-all for the first half of the month. There are some open prompts under the cut, but I'm also posting some closed starters in the comments. Hit me up if you'd like something other than the options below.
The Story:
[ DURING february's first few days, peggy pays a few productive visits to the »LIBRARY. she arrives armed with a scrap pressed into her palm. the paper is thin and torn, jagged, from a puzzle book -- folded in threes with precision and hard corners forced onto its asymmetrical shape. while she walks from stack to stack she traces the list's edge with the pad of her thumb. in reality, she doesn't need it. she'd long-since memorizes the book titles recommended to her in order to bring her loosely up to speed with popular science. so the list is a flimsy talisman, maybe, but during these visits it represents purpose. forward momentum.

her reading list is accumulated over multiple days, as though some reflexive defense mechanism convinces peggy to take her time. patience is rarely her strongest suit but she nevertheless makes an effort, knowing that a rush will only leave her rudderless and once again without distraction. to that end, she allows herself to wander off-path. maybe she's come for non-fiction, but she detours through a shelf of thrillers and mysteries and adventure stories.

she touches the spines as she passes them by -- her little list peeking between her knuckles like an ace at the ready. peggy never intends to appear lost but catch her at an odd moment and she might want some help. after all, stark never gave her author names to go with the titles.

LATER, with her coursework assembled, she goes elsewhere to conduct her reading. a great deal of it happens behind her bedroom door as she readjusts to a solitary life now that jane has returned to her husband. but some of it happens at the »DINER. with a whole booth claimed for herself, she sits with the dust jacket removed so bystanders can't easily discern what she's reading stephen hawking's a brief history of time, incidentally. it takes some two or three chapters to really dig into work she couldn't already recognize in passing -- and, on occasion, she offers up an audible scoff when she finds herself confronted with a colourful explanation of scientific discovery which nevertheless somehow manages to neglect howard stark's contribution.

she orders a plate of chips (hot; crispy; salted) and implores the wait-staff to keep them coming. instead of tea, she asks for a milkshake. not a quarter of an hour passes before she's cracked open a journal and uncapped a pen. her annotations are, for the time being, made in pitman shorthand -- and so appear as a series of near shapeless scribbles to those who aren't fluent. even so, there's no secrecy behind that choice. merely a swell of impatience after she'd worked so hard to contain it earlier.

and yet peggy's not averse to interruptions. not exactly. she may not be the most welcoming conversation partner, nor is she particularly fond of idle chatter, but she doesn't chase off interruptions or inquiries.

OTHERWISE, known associates and strangers alike are free to run into her »OUT & ABOUT. whether she's 'commuting' from quarters to library or grabbing a quick breakfast in the dining room early in the morning. she doesn't have a precise schedule (on most days) but she's not impossible to chance upon. she's nearly always immaculate -- from heel to hair-pins. having a project in hand puts her in a better mood. ]

Comments

[beautifullies]

Well, when one washes up shipwrecked on the shores of a new country, I suppose learning about your new home is appropriate.

[ If she can help it, she's never getting on another bloody ship ever again. Her apologies to Scotland. Since (the real) Peggy saw her last, Claire's aged twenty years, and her neatly respectable pinned back hair is streaked with gray. ]

Not that I'll remember anyway, but it's something to do, at any rate. I'd like to tell Jamie a bit more about it if I can, without getting the facts too wrong.

[mucked]

Indeed. [ she waggles a book on popular science. ] Something to do.

[ shores of a new country, though? it sounds as though claire has joined her in the ranks of the expats. and she files away the name 'jamie' as well. not to mention claire's stately appearance. a lot of little notes end up added to the mental dossier within the first minute. ]

Whereabouts in America, then? Those shores are awfully long.

[beautifullies]

The coast of Georgia, according to my husband. We'd been returning from Jaimaca to Scotland. The last thing I remember is facing a wall of water, and then I woke here, on the shores of Wonderland.

[ It wasn't a great time and she'd been afraid she'd died, until Jamie returned and assured her that she hadn't. Tilting her head to catch the title of the book, Claire's eyebrow goes up. ]

I didn't realize you had an interest in the field of science. What sort?

[mucked]

[ georgia. certainly nowhere near peggy's wheelhouse. but then again, it all sounds like a terrible accident. claire mentions her husband and peggy goes out on a limb to guess that maybe, just maybe, the aforementioned jamie is him. although it's always possible that's not the case... ]

Oh, this? [ she lifts the book. ] It's a new pursuit. Newish. [ because although she keeps it close to her chest, the truth is that she did work for the strategic scientific reserve. ]

I thought I should read up on some future achievements. There's no sin in looking forward.

[ it's a veiled comment -- she and claire talked about the war the first time they met, and yet claire dresses like she's from an entirely earlier age. ]

[beautifullies]

[ Claire purses her lips together in a smile. Before, when she'd first met Peggy, she was fresh off of being accused of being a witch, so she'd lied. She didn't know where she was and burning wasn't really a thing she felt like doing. ]

No, but it can be quite dangerous. Or not as beneficial as one might think. Being from the future is a burden. Trust me.

[mucked]

[ her laughter isn't the least bit mean-spirited. quite the opposite, actually. ]

So is being from the past, although I would sooner call it 'present.'

[ there is something strangely comforting to hear someone chide her about the difficulties of being of another time. she's endured a lot of it; she's had a lot of time to find a sense of humour about it. something she would never have managed without certain influences. ]

Although -- it all begins to blend together, here. [ and yet you won't catch peggy wearing jeans and tshirts or abandoning her pin curls. ] Past, present, future.

[beautifullies]

Try your hand at being from both.

[ Claire looks at Peggy and ducks her head a bit. ]

It blends, certainly, I haven't switched from 18th-century clothing to those from the 20th century yet. I seem to be stuck in a sort of limbo.

[ She's about to have some explaining to do, and she knows it. ]

[mucked]

And why is that?

[ she doesn't shy away from the question. peggy sets her book aside, finding this mystery to be far more interesting. ]

Surely, it can't be for ease of movement. Or comfort. Or one's desire to breathe.

[beautifullies]

My husband, mostly. He's from the 18th century. I'm not dressing to please him, mind you, but it keeps us a little more rooted in home, what we both know. I'm actually a little worried he might have a heart attack at the sight of my bare legs anywhere but our bedroom.

[ She does smile a little at that, a fond smile. ]

[mucked]

...It all sounds terribly complicated. [ she prompts, like fishing for an explanation. ] Married to someone from such a radically different time. It raises questions.

[ which, in turn, raises another: may she ask them? ]

[beautifullies]

[ Claire never wants to assume that people want to hear the entire drawn out story, so she nods at Peggy with a slight smile. ]

Please, feel free to ask them.

[mucked]

How do two people from such disparate times meet, for one. You mentioned your husband was involved in your ocean journey -- so unless you're talking of an entirely different spouse I can only surmise that you didn't meet him here.

[ which was her first guess. after all, there are people from all sorts of different worlds and places here. some of them (it seems) even get married to one another. ]

[beautifullies]

You're correct, we did not meet here. It's a long story, but I have a feeling you don't mind hearing it.

[ Claire gestures toward a table and sits on one side, waiting for Peggy to do the same before speaking. ]

I'll request before I begin, for you to not ask many questions of how. Because the truth is, I don't know how this happened, only that it did.

[ Taking a deep breath and letting it out, Claire always feels a bit...unsteady when she tells the tale. Though at least here, so many bizarre things happen that it's a drop in the hat, her story. ]

My husband Frank and I [ So not Jamie. ] decided to take a second honeymoon when the war was over. It was 1945, things were good and we went to Scotland, stayed in the town of Inverness. Just outside of town was a spot called the Craigh na Dun. A sort of circle of stones. Like a mini-sort of Stonehenge, I suppose. I went alone while my husband spent the afternoon with a historian because I wanted to collect some of the wildflowers. At the stones I heard this...odd sort of buzzing, like a distant hum of electricity and I realized it was coming from one stone in particular. I don't know what made me reach out, I couldn't help myself, I suppose. Sheer curiosity and...something else pulling me closer. But I touched it, and the next thing I knew I was lying flat on my back with a blinding headache. Sort of like when we suddenly appear here in Wonderland, except I was in the same spot. I never left the circle of stones.

[ She pauses because already, she feels like she's spoken quite a lot. ]

[mucked]

[ peggy takes a seat. she settles across from claire, crossing her elbows on the surface and leaning that little bit forward. somehow, the gesture still appears poised. she's got no intention of rushing the other woman through her story, but there's something to be said for peggy's inquisitive nature. she has an appetite for information.

and that appetite only grows sharper when the things prove themselves complicated straight off the bat: another husband! and then the year -- 1945 -- hits her like a sack of flour and peggy shrugs away her own associations, her own memories of that year, and the dark dark dreary places it had taken her. and yet, for a little while there, that year had also been one of the most thrilling...

but that's another story, and one she's unlikely to tell. but she'll listen to claire's with rapt attention and darting eyes as she begins to back-fill what else she knows. the older style of clothing, the year on that book claire picked up, and the concessions she makes for jamie -- not frank.

peggy's palm thuds dully on the table. eureka! ] You travelled in time, didn't you?

[ it's not the sort of conclusion she would ever have naturally arrived at. but since arriving in wonderland, her horizons have certainly been expanded. ]

[beautifullies]

[ Claire supposes that's the only logical - if anyone is applying logic to such things - to come to and she nods. ]

I did. To 1743. I thought I was in some sort of war re-enactment, only I couldn't find the road or my car. Instead, I found a clan of Scots who immediately took me for a British spy. Or a whore, considering the dress I was in resembled a shift and I was walking through the woods barefoot. But in their camp, they had an injured man and I tended to his dislocated shoulder, got it back into place. I tried to run, he tracked me down. Then he went and got himself shot, which I also tended to. It was the first time I ever saw James Fraser. By no means was it love, I only wanted to get home and tried my damndest, but I was captured by the British who in turn thought I was a spy for Scotland. They wanted me arrested and sent to prison for treason where I surely would have hanged. But if I were to marry a member of the laird's family, I would be protected. And...so a few weeks later, my marriage to Jamie was arranged.

[mucked]

A marriage of convenience.

[ she speaks before she thinks. that happens, on some rare occasions, and peggy's breath catches a moment afterward. it's not the sort of thing she should have said considering she's only crossed paths with claire a couple of times, but then again it can't be such a sin. can it? after all, apparently the woman still claims her marriage. and with rather warm tones.

and maybe, just maybe, peggy has the capacity to understand how emotions can grow where emotions didn't exist before. she stays where she sits, leaned forward. ]

But -- it didn't stay that way, did it? Otherwise I can't see any reason why you'd work so hard to help him feel at home here.

[beautifullies]

[ Claire glances up at 'marriage of convenience' and shifts a bit in her seat before nodding. ]

Yes, I suppose so. A marriage in an effort to keep me alive. One of us was more accepting of the idea than the other. And one of us got so drunk they were very hungover at the ceremony the next day.

[ That would be Claire. ]

But it...did turn into love. Not on our wedding night, exactly. I felt like I was betraying Frank.

[ She holds up her hands now, to show two wedding bands. One a perfectly rounded gold band on her right hand, one a more rustic looking silver band on her left. ]

After that, he started treating me like a man treats a wife and without him knowing anything about me, where I'd actually come from, he saw my independence and disobedience. We fought, quite a lot, until I realized no one had asked him what he wanted in all of this. He's younger than I am by a few years. No one gave him a choice in marrying me, and for a Catholic in 18th century Scotland, well. It would be forever whether he loved me or not. But he did. He loved me and it took...

[ Claire tries to put this as delicately as she can. ]

It took being...treated roughly by another man and Jamie rescuing me, laying his own life on the line, for me to come around. But I did. I was arrested on suspicion of witchcraft which was ludicrous and after that, after Jamie got me out of that, he finally asked about my smallpox vaccination scar. I had to tell him the truth of it all. I thought he'd leave me in the woods forever, but instead, he gave me a choice. He took me back to the stones and let me go. Rather than take me as far away from them as he could, he understood that I had another life, one impossibly far from him, and he was willing to let me get back to it.

[mucked]

[ something about the pair of rings unnerves her -- although she won't say so and certainly doesn't show it. but maybe peggy finds herself disquieted by the bifurcation of loyalty they suggest. a hand for one; a hand for the other. it's not that she's naive or childish enough to believe in soulmates, except...

except, perhaps, it seems so unlikely to properly love one person. how could anyone have enough heart inside of them to love two? what does it matter. peggy doesn't foresee that being a question she'll ever have to answer. ]

They do say that's a rather telling sign of true love.

[ to let it loose, to make its own choice, to never hold it hostage. but peggy can only speak in abstracts, here. best to stick to what's concrete -- all the little details of what claire is telling her. the insinuations and the careful gaps. ]

Was it tempting? [ ... ] To try to touch the stones again -- just in case it worked, that time?

[beautifullies]

I sat in that circle of stones all day and well into the night. Staring at them.

[ She rubs her thumb over her silver ring, Jamie's ring, thinking back to that moment when she had a decision to make. ]

It was a choice, but then it...never felt like much of one. He saved my life, twice over, more. He listened, he believed me. And he was already so deeply in love. I knew I wanted to stay with him, so I did. Perhaps it was selfish. But I can't ever get myself to believe it was the wrong one. In any case, three years later I wound up at the stones again and that time went through. Pregnant and alone. Then my husband went off to die in a battle I knew his clan would lose from history.

[ Only he didn't, and she could have gone back for him so much sooner if only she'd started researching then. But maybe it wasn't meant to be for those twenty years. ]

[mucked]

[ told as the story is, it begins to sound as though claire has lived two lives. pieces, here and there. carded and shuffled into one another. not unlike, she supposes, the way this place is like a whole sub-life: one big path not taken. or, rather, one that can be untaken.

and perhaps that's not the case for someone like claire. she feels a twinge of sympathy in her stomach that she doesn't know how to articulate. ]

Although it had been three years, did the stones take you back to the moment you left? Or beyond it?

[beautifullies]

Time did move, yes. Frank thought I was dead but he'd never left Scotland. He stayed. Hoping...

[ And that makes her feel a bit guilty, yes. ]

And suddenly I was back, in clothing that belonged in a museum, and pregnant with another man's child. But he...didn't want a divorce. And I didn't want to raise my child alone. I thought Jamie was surely dead, so Frank and I left for America, I had Brianna, and we...well, he tried. I never quite did.

[ She looks down at that, frowning at herself. ]

I was back in the correct time, physically. But my heart wasn't.

[mucked]

[ -- her breath hitches. her understanding, plain and simple, shudders home with a whip-crack of pain. heartache. and the words leave her throat before she has any time to think twice: ]

It must have been very difficult for him.

[ in truth, it must have been very difficult for claire as well. but peggy keenly knows the pain to find yourself on the other side of that very lonely situation: the person you'd grieved and loved was not only alive but pledged to someone else.

only instead of moving backwards in years, steve had moved forward. and then laterally, once, to wonderland. ]

[beautifullies]

It was.

[ Claire can acknowledge that freely. ]

I had Bree, and we vowed, then, to try. Both of us. But she had this...shock of red hair. Jamie's hair. Frank was always wonderful to her, he loved her as much as if she were his own. But...I know every time someone asked where her red hair came from, it had to be like a dagger in his heart. Still, he supported us, both of us. He put me through medical school. I tried to be a good wife, to love him. But he knew that my heart hadn't returned to him, too. So, he found someone who would love him. Someone at the university where he taught. I offered to grant him a divorce but he was so...afraid I would take Brianna away from him. Until she was eighteen. Then, he wanted to take Brianna away from me, go to Oxford. And that was the argument that ended everything.

[ Claire sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. ]

He died. In a car accident. Never getting to have a life where someone loved him, wholly. I feel guilt about that quite often, in fact.

[mucked]

[ peggy wonders whether she'd ever be capable of such sacrifice. love has never been a priority of hers, but to live like marginalia in one's own marriage -- no, absolutely not. she can understand moving on and moving forward and finding companionship as one can but...

what claire's first husband chose isn't something she can blame claire for. by all accounts, the fault lies with the man's own stubborn loyalty. a dogged faithfulness that she can only imagine except that she'd devoted hers to a vial of blood. to all that remained of the man she loved.

her eyes flick nervously off of claire before they suddenly flick back. rather than engage with the story, its painful parts, peggy tries to march it forward: ]

And yet there are parts yet missing. You went back, again, didn't you? [ because there's a ship that needs to wreck and a shore that needs to be washed up on. she's been paying attention. ]

[beautifullies]

[ Claire lets out a breath and nods. ]

We lived in Boston, Brianna and I, but a dear friend of mine passed away in Scotland, so we went to the funeral. He was a historian as a hobby, and he'd kept every single...article, every news clipping of the mysterious woman who'd gone missing and showed back up again years later. Bree found it all and confronted me. She only ever thought it was a torrid affair that resulted in her conception. She...never knew that Frank wasn't her father.

[ Should she have lied to her daughter for twenty years? Probably not. But when is the right time to tell your child you traveled through time. ]

She only began to believe it when we discovered Jamie hadn't actually died in battle, that he'd lived but gone immediately to prison. His fate would have been to be shot or hanged, and the trail went cold, so I supposed that was it. We went back to America. It took me weeks to...move on again. And then someone who'd been helping us in Scotland arrived on my doorstep telling me that Jamie was alive but had simply changed his name to Alexander Malcolm. He was a printer in Edinborough and...had taken a poem I'd recited to him once and used it in a leaflet. We realized because...he used it decades before it was actually ever written.

[ Now, her fingers are twisting at her silver wedding band and she smiles softly, forehead creasing. ]

I wasn't going to go back. But Bree...insisted. Because I'd left to keep her safe, to make sure she had a chance to even live. She wanted to give Jamie back to me in a way. So I...went. Better prepared this time. I took penicillin and some modern medical equipment with me. And I found him. The moment I saw him, everything I hadn't felt in twenty years came back.