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This was the fic that involved much flailing from me and was mostly written on the archive in between the deadline and the exchange going live because I had another plan and a longer fic started that, well. *sigh* Maybe that will get written one day.
TITLE: Redefinitions, or An Ode to Avoiding Commitment
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: R
PAIRING: Peggy Carter/Daniel Sousa/Jack Thompson
SUMMARY: It begins because Jack’s an ass and Peggy needs a release and somehow it’s… easier… knowing that he’ll be an ass about it, to turn to him than anyone else...
NOTES: Written for within_a_dream in Fandom Growth Exchange 2015
------
Redefinitions, or An Ode to Avoiding Commitment
It begins because Jack’s an ass and Peggy needs a release and somehow it’s… easier… knowing that he’ll be an ass about it, to turn to him than anyone else. Knowing that sex with him won’t change their relationship, won’t bring complications the way it would with Daniel, whom she has known for a while harbours honest feelings and is gallant enough to want to do right by her.
After Steve, she doesn’t want that sort of commitment. She just wants something. She's tired of the cold, and the time that seems to be stretching ever on since the war, and of being restless, and alone. So she turns to Jack.
Daniel finds out because, despite themselves, the body language changes between them enough that the new intimacy reverberates through all their interactions in the workplace. This is even apparently true when Jack is calling across the room to her (being an asshole) about the quality of his coffee and Daniel, who knows them best out of everyone here, suddenly looks up sharply at his desk. He looks between them and cuts himself off before he gets beyond, "Wh-- you two are--?"
Daniel finding out is… intensely uncomfortable, and in fact painful, the way his face crushes beneath the revelation. For some reason, it's something she hadn't expected to happen, even though she knows he's not stupid, knows he's well able to read people, a good agent, an intelligent man. Perhaps it's that she did not expect herself to change so much so visibly just for the convenience of sleeping with Jack Thompson.
For half a day, it's almost unbearable. She holds herself in and tells herself not to feel and exchanges hard, horrible looks with Jack -- who looks, she notes with startlement, just as horrified, like he too betrayed Daniel. She keeps that tight, tight grip on herself right up til the end of the day. When she hears shouting as she’s getting ready to finally leave (salve her sorrows with a large bottle of something and no refuge in Jack's warm body tonight) in an otherwise empty workplace, she follows the sound and walks in on a fist fight in Jack’s office.
She raises her eyebrows a little, because the way Daniel's holding his own against Jack, using the crutch to propel himself around and make his movements unpredictable, compensating somewhat for his need to use it at all, is eyebrow-raising. But she isn't perhaps as surprised by that as Jack is; she has catalogued the grace of his movements before, enough to peg him as a trained fighter prior to his injury, whatever happened to him in the war. He has never spoken about the circumstances of that.
The moments she spends watching them also exposes her to the sort of dialogue that they're exchanging while they fight.
She wades in the middle of them and puts them both down with a few efficient blows. She remembers yelling at them while they look up at her from the floor, two stupid, ridiculous men. Telling Daniel that, yes, she chose Jack, and that, no, he’s not dishonouring her, that it's just sex and he can go to hell right there if he thinks she would let him do anything with any less than her full cooperation.
She may have expanded on her reasons for Jack. She may have referred to Daniel as a wonderful man who can't give her what she needs. She never does remember, afterward, exactly what she said. She only remembers their stunned expressions. She knows that by the end of it she's in tears, and that Steve’s name left her lips somewhere in the barrage. Then somehow they’re all on the floor, and she’s sitting curled up on her knees with Daniel stroking her hand, and Jack leaned over them both with his hand on Peggy’s shoulder and Daniel’s knee.
"She's right," Jack says, bleeding from his nose and lip but with his acerbic humour apparently intact, "you are a good man, and cloying as hell." He staunches his face in his sleeve with an unpleasant noise. "And you can't half throw a punch. Look, we're all friends here--"
That makes both Peggy and Daniel raise their eyebrows, and a look passes between them as they do some redefining based on what Jack Thompson catalogues as friendship. Peggy is also vaguely aware that after some of the things she just said about him, Jack should be a dust trail out the door. Or -- kicking them out, since this is his office.
"--What? Anyway, what I was going to say is... It's plain as day she likes you, but she's not willing to take you on on your terms. So why don't all of us, I don't know, try to figure this out, as friends who do a little extra?" He slaps Daniel's shoulder in a manner that, though half friendly, is still half patronising as well, but Peggy can only watch the way his hand moves from Daniel's knee, then sneaks inches higher as it returns. She is familiar with all Jack's tricks and liberties. "One thing I sure as hell know is that you need to get laid."
"All of--? You're out of your mind," Daniel says, eyes darting between them, pools of need collected in them that make her ache to witness.
"No, it's--" And maybe she's jumping too eagerly, and she silences herself quickly, but too late to avoid both men seeing how the idea just for that moment caught her up in its promise.
Daniel looks from her to Jack's face, and down at the hand on his... it's just about still on his thigh; swallows, and quickly nods. His tongue licks out nervously over his lip and he's too caught up in the promise, too, to say any of the things Peggy expects him to say about this being wrong, an obscene proposition. Or perhaps he's not so straightforward as she always thought. Staid dinner dates to marriage to children and respectability and interminable years of committment, was what she expected from Daniel, but she has seen such things, she has raided German bases and flown and fought alongside Captain America, and that was partnership, that was symbiosis. She cannot contemplate suffering a lifetime of someone else's expectations and normality.
*
Of course, it’s never going to be that easy. Jack is sarcastic and always too casual with his mouth. Daniel is, while not aggressively against it, tense and nervous about the whole concept of such an arrangement. Both of them have always argued like cats in a sack, even if sometimes they manage to hit a rhythm that’s easy and coast along in that groove for a while.
It's a revelation that continues to roll out and surprise her that Jack and Daniel can, and do, feel something for each other outside of their joint attraction to Peggy. It's also not something they’re initially comfortable with letting her see, or even each other, even though they all saw it, both in the first moment when Daniel understood Jack and Peggy were intimate without him, and in the office later that day. Apparently it was the emotional outpouring of the moment which allowed them to be so honest with themselves, curled around each other on the floor, Jack's hand on Daniel, affectionate, allowed. The rest of the time, that territory is aggressively defended by the barb wire and trenches of fear and the ridiculous thing which is masculinity.
For the first few weeks things are incredibly rocky between them, threatening to turn in and instant, to spin out into violence or just sullenly fall apart.
The first time they meet after that initial, emotionally charged encounter, which was far more comfort-oriented than sexual, is still marked mainly by the jealousy between the men when one of them is touching her and the other is not. It makes Peggy so furious that it almost leads her to ditch the whole idea.
"C'mon, Marge, you know I like Daniel -- he's better at filing than you by far -- but as to liking Daniel, you of all people know I'm not that way inclined." Jack waggles his eyebrows in a manner that makes her fist twitch with the urge to punch him between them.
"I... him... please, Peggy..." Daniel stops as though that covers everything required of a protest and blushes and shakes his head and looks mortified.
They back off, they meander, they obstinately defy the obvious. They both stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that this embryonic relationship has a third rung even when they're exchanging glances of outright conspiracy, that say You know and I know but we will both die before we let Peggy Carter know that we would eagerly indulge in terribly homosexual things with each other, given half the chance, except that we are such men and, look, there is a woman present!
She doesn't know, truly, if the problem is the particular company -- has no knowledge of them on this score, if their past has included stolen schoolboy experimentation, or even full sex acts with others of their sex. It could be her, it could be each other -- competetive to the end, even with the promise of so much to gain. Or this could simply be that she's watching something truly new and unacknowledged stutter and struggle to become an acknowledged part of both of them.
Eventually she sits back and curtly states that she's not doing anything else with either of them until she gets to watch the two of them. But, she allows, she will facilitate if they wish to do that while touching her at the same time.
Electric jumps through her stomach when she watches their lips meet over her. Jack's hand went straight for the territory between her thighs, and irony of ironies, Daniel's competetive enough that his followed it there, and their fingers touch her intimately and each other. But she thinks it's the sight of them finally touching, as they lean over her, that makes her catch her breath and feel like she’ll never be the same again.
She was there in the war, on the front lines, in the barracks, in the strategy rooms, in that terrifically male environment. Talk was not always kept delicate just because she was there. (She preferred it when it was not.) She knows about the intimacies that form between men when they work close, when women are a rare commodity but not necessarily because of that. Steve had admitted to her that he'd had such a relationship, even. But even then, even with such fuel, she'd never thought about it as a prompt for erotic feeling -- vaguely disrespectful, besides. Now, Daniel parts his knees – knee -- in response to the foray of Jack's mouth down from his lips to his throat, and presses his body closer, and Jack’s hand accepts the invitation, and although their hands have left her, at her urging, Peggy feels the shiver of that touch between her own legs.
Such tenderness they can display to each other when cornered! Peggy wonders if they would ever allow themselves to have each other without her presence between them, if there ever could be something existing independantly of the arrangement between the three of them. Well... they would tear each other apart before they ever got to intimacy, without her between them, she thinks, and snorts to herself ruefully.
When they part after the intimate touch, the wariness in their eyes is more sobering and practical.
“I’m not going to bend over for you just because I've got this-” Daniel starts to growl, hand half automatically reaching down for the knee of the prosthetic leg, that's still enclosed inside his pants though they're gaping open at the crotch.
Jack’s breath hisses in, and his eyes dilate further and his face goes dreamy and slack, and he makes one of those declarations like Peggy's heard from him a few times before, the things that he says when he’s wide open and vulnerable. “I’ll do it first. I want to do it.”
Well, that time, they don't – too sudden, too much to take on, too little practical preparations at hand for the endeavour – but the offer is out there on the table, and the next time they meet redefines a lot of things for all of them.
*
When it had been just Jack and Peggy, their liaisons had been scattered about; his home, the office after hours, a few actual dates in bars, a lot of rented rooms. As two, they could be public and normal, even if they had wished to be secretive from their co-workers at SSR. As three, things instantly become a little more complicated than that.
It turns out that, volatile as it had made the mood between them in the first few weeks before they started sleeping together and really discovered what volatility between the three of them was, Jack’s promotion made for the best piece of luck that could have befallen their relationship. It gives them a space – the office, to be precise -- that can be re-framed as theirs, because Jack now possesses the authority to chuck people out at the hours they're actually scheduled for on paper and work late with whomever he likes whenever he likes.
It’s possible enough people know the lion’s share of the work Jack took credit for was done by Peggy and Daniel that the annals of SSI gossip considered this to be Jack desperately flailing to catch up on a job he can't handle. It’s not – Jack does fine in Dooley’s old role. Much to both Daniel and Peggy's occasional disgust, he’s actually something of a competent leader, maybe better than either of them could have been. They don't have his mouth, but nor do they have the desire to manage people, and he's nowhere near so obnoxious as expected when fielding his responsibility for people working under him.
If it was only Peggy Jack was seeing in his office, others might suspect the real reason rather fast. That actually placed a handy time limit on her original no-commitments plans. But because it’s Daniel as well, they avoid any accusations of the truth.
The process of giving Dooley’s old office his own personal touch enables Jack to buy the largest, thickest pile rug he can get away with. When they push the furniture aside at the end of the day, it proves as adequate as any bed... Maybe more so, for the extra space it gives, and the absolute guarantee of nobody falling off the edge.
*
It's Daniel who suggests the rug on the floor, wearily embracing the obvious comments from Jack in suggesting it. Of course, he's less able to athletically negotiate sex on the other items of furniture... the desk... the chair... upright against the bookcases... The sorts of activities which Jack and Peggy engaged in before he came along.
Peggy knows that Jack expected Daniel would be just as clumsy in bed as upright. It’s… well, the whole subject of Daniel's handicap is one of unease for herself, honestly. She is not proud of herself for it, but at least part of the reason she chose Jack was because Daniel requires more effort and involvement than she feels herself capable of investing in any man. That’s not just because of his physical handicap, but his sensitivities, which also do encompass that, are considerable, and it's also part of the reason why contemplating Daniel always has to be such a prospect of playing for keeps, and then just... Peggy shies instinctively from complicating emotion. With Jack there, the investment is shared, and thus easier. They will halve the burden if and when they break his heart. The odd fact is that she could take Jack without Daniel, but not Daniel without Jack, even when she knows which one is in her estimation the better man.
On the rug, for the first time, the false leg comes off. This is in itself rather distracting. Peggy was aware from passing comments and the sound it made when bumped and the intricacies of Daniel's gait that the leg was false from around mid-thigh. Peggy is -- well, she is not going to have her opinion moved by such a thing, it must be understood; she has seen many things, all the shades of war. But as for being intimate with it, she has never, and the scarred, truncated leg is something she must brace herself for all the same, something she needs to get past no matter how little she lets it show on the surface. It may be that Jack copes better by letting his interest in this new-revealed aspect of their lover's body show and indulging it, even if that initially makes Daniel cross.
Though Jack's reaction fascinates and warms Peggy, because it isn't cruel, as she might have expected of him, from the way he's always acted around Daniel in the office.
On the rug, it turns out that a horizontal outlook makes them all equal. Daniel becomes as lithe and limber and able as any of them, in this dimension. It's clear why he campaigned so hard in favour of the floor. And this is such a new layer to him, something he'd never let them see in normal circumstances, while he tries to move around with the crutch by daylight, in public space, acting like his body is shaped the same as theirs, when it is not.
The awkwardness of the first revelation of his true shape becomes an ease with it quickly over the following encounters, although ironically, annoyingly, the ease also manifests in the way Jack becomes far more liberal with his jokes about Daniel's leg by daylight hours.
Daniel scowls and ignores them because he knows he'll get to have his revenge later.
Put the two men together and shake their boundaries down when the clothes come off at the end of the day, and Peggy sees miracles happen. Daniel opens up and some of his resting seriousness falls away. While Jack... Jack becomes sensitive to others' needs, not to mention prepared to lay himself out and take what each of them choose to dish out to him, relinquishing the dominance and alpha-male persona that's so important to his public persona. Jack is good for Daniel in a way Peggy never could be, poking and prodding and forcing him into different modes as he reacts. Jack makes him lighter, the way that only Jack could. Daniel would never worship Jack, never be in awe of him, never idealise him or take him too seriously. Jack makes him take himself less seriously and brings out the humour they both know is in there.
Peggy likes and respects the regular Daniel, but she’s more comfortable with the one that's always vibrating and alive in reaction to Jack's presence. She herself never needed much excuse to fight Jack's fire with fire, but she and him, they're more alike that way, and maybe he makes her more alive, too -- maybe that's what she sought in the beginning, by going to him. He is witty and sharp-edged and reactive, with all his barbs attuned to the places she is sore. Maybe what she sought was that constant sense of combat, and maybe that's a sad statement, in a way. But what Daniel brings to both of them, she is realising with an unease that both grows and lessens like a tide, is both measure and meaning. Without him, they would have been everything she had planned for this relationship, brief and probably bitter but no less physically satisfying for it. A part of her knows that he took them on with intention to change them, and she allowed it. Honestly, he does that anyway, even if he had come without the intent.
She is beginning to see that there is a way the three of them fit together, rounding off the edges of the dynamic between any two of them, making them something more whole and functional than any two of them could be.
Jack sputters as Daniel pins him in a wrestling move and abuses the leverage to molest him on the floor of his own office, Daniel's cock pressing in the crack of his ass while he frees his other hand to reach beneath both their bodies. "I think that earlier, you implied I couldn't catch a 94 year old geriatric purse-snatcher, but I seem to have got you, Jack. So what do we figure that makes you?"
Peggy is fairly certain, at this point, that Jack came out with that remark purely to submit to the future reprisal for it.
They're both laughing a moment later as Daniel lets Jack roll over. Between them, their cocks brush together, and Jack curls a hand upward, to where the stump of Daniel’s leg is rested up against his hip, strokes across the forbidden limb like it’s just a one more part of him on the way to his flank, and Daniel doesn’t particularly notice, comment, or try to stop him.
"Don't hog him," Peggy berates, crawling on top of both of them, the thick pile rug soft against her knees. "I know I've got some come-back due, too, after spending the morning filing."
*
“--Well, I just don't see any reason for it, Daniel! We got a good thing going here already. There's no need to risk being seen and sussed by the world at large. We can get away with using this space as long as we want to. No-one in the office suspects a thing. You know, you and I in important discussions, Peggy taking important notes--“
Maybe she would miss it, if Jack ever stopped being an ass just because he’s sleeping with them. Perhaps he's such a work of art, in his own concentrated focus of assholeishness, that they would both be doing the world a disfavour by taming that out of him. He ducks the slap Peggy aims at the back of his head, but not quite in time. “Peggy! Ow! You’re physically assaulting the boss, now?”
“Considering how much more than that I’ve done with the boss, I’m sure he’ll forbear… If he wishes me to continue…”
"We use this space because it's removed from our home life, from anything personal," Daniel interrupts, and the conversation spirals instantly down the toilet. "I want to take you both out, like real couples do -- though I guess we can't say that's what we are, but you know what I mean. I’m not interested in this if all it’s ever going to be about is flesh. I want to see you both in public even if we do have to pretend it’s a business meeting, or we’re just friends at dinner.”
They’ve been meeting for almost a month, three or more times a week, at the end of the workday. Of course it’s Daniel who wants this to be about something other than sex. It's no more than Peggy's been expecting since they begun, but it brings all her anxieties with this arrangement into relief.
This is why Peggy chose Jack.
"...Yeah." Jack bursts out with the word, as unexpectedly and packed with guerilla emotions as when she blurted out her own acceptance, as when Daniel first agreed to date them. "Yeah, all right, Daniel. I want that, too."
That Jack chooses to go with Daniel’s decree, with emotional investment, with meaning and commitment, is wholly unexpected. Any expression of commitment from him was Peggy's very last concern. He was supposed to be her ally and temper Daniel. They have her outnumbered, and this should be the point at which she turns heel to leave, but she finds…
She finds she no longer wants to walk away. Maybe the idea of that little layer of extra involvement isn’t so hard, after all. Maybe emotional investment isn't so monolithic and impossible as it seemed at the start.
Daniel chooses a little pokey bar where he knows the owner – friend of a war buddy – and the food is good. They go back to Daniel’s place after the meal. Daniel’s place is pokey, too, although carefully laid out to be navigated by a man who isn’t the steadiest on his feet. Jack makes a few comments that cause Daniel’s hackles to rise, which is not the most helpful way to end the evening, but Daniel’s bed isn’t really big enough to be a focus for their liaisons on a regular basis anyway.
Peggy can see what he's trying to do, though, and how.
*
Jack, for all the epic crimes of his untempered mouth, sees the world through the saddest and most brutally honest filter of any of them. Sometimes, drunk either on bourbon on the activities of their bodies, he mouths off lines about his favourite, bitter subjects. The cultural obsession with heroism is uppermost among those. He talks extensively, drunk, about himself as the coward publically hailed a hero, the lie he has to live under, how stifling that is. What freedom, he rhapsodises, to have both of them know he's truly a coward at heart. Daniel, he says, was clearly more heroic, but came back distorted, and now the world only knows how to view him through the filter of their disgust and pity. Shame, that.
Peggy, he calls his bona fide superhero plain to all with eyes to see, who the world will never acknowledge because of the burden of her sex.
Peggy blushes but is also irked, and responds sharply, “Well, we can be whatever we need to be to ourselves, to each other, but respect can start with one person making acknowledgement in public, Jack.”
"I just say it. You know me, Marge -- I'm all talk. And -- drunk."
And yes, he says many things, and she remembers how he lectured her on the disadvantages of her femininity, acknowledging all the while the possibility of equality he so disdained, in his manner, his words, his voice. If he’s astute enough to spot the lines they have to live their lives between, he should have the capacity to break out of them when they aren't in private. But Daniel is the proactive one, who lives on his principles, who has principles to live on. Jack always disappoints. He disappoints himself the most of all, the same way his commentary on himself is always by far the harshest.
The more time passes, the more she realises that she chose him because she was so sure that he would quickly drive her away.
Yet he does not, and still more time passes. So often he’s the one in there, worshipping both of them with his mouth – doubly so as it runs off about how they’re both so much worthier than he is, words turned to gifts to lay at their feet on his usually cruel silken tongue. He's their greatest supporter, in private.
Peggy thinks the real Jack is the one locked down inside. Not the one who always has a scornful remark in public, who takes their successes unashamedly for his own, since the world won’t let them take them themselves.
"You know that's why this relationship works," Jack jokes. No. It's only half a joke. No, not even that. "Between the two of us, me and Daniel make a whole man for you."
Daniel isn’t impressed, seeing no deeper than the slight to himself, and it takes the other applications of Jack’s silken tongue to win him around from his strop, but the remark lines up with Peggy's conviction that Jack came back from the war as broken as Daniel, on the inside.
So she, by comparison, is the lucky one. The war only broke her heart, and the fact that she’s with them both now at all might be the sign that she’s starting to heal, in spite of herself.
*
Howard Stark gifted Peggy with space, when he gave her the grand apartment, but what Angie gives her is greater.
What Angie gives her is the gift of knowing nothing she wants is ever something she should feel ashamed of. There is nothing she should feel she can’t do because of the presence of her room-mate. Their home is big, but it's still shared space and echoing halls, yet even if they can't hide from each other what they do within it, there's no need for judgement between them.
It still takes several months and the third girl Angie's been bringing home on a regular basis before Peggy dares take up that implied freedom by bringing home her two men.
She never had any intention, when they started out, to do this. By this time she's already indulged Daniel, and indulged Jack's attempt to indulge Daniel, though Jack's apartment seems more soulless and sad, somehow, when occupied by three of them than by two, and this time he was embarrassed rather than titillated by the prying of his neighbours.
It’s a frightening new world to have space outside the office where they can freely meet. It's even more frightening that it should have to be her space, and the trappings of normality that it brings. The first time they’re there and Jack makes a comment revealing his assumption she’s going to cook for them, Daniel ends up doing it to salve her outrage. He does so quietly and stolidly. Jack holds up his hands and looks bemused, and makes another comment that inserts both feet firmly in mouth, about how he shouldn’t be surprised Daniel once more proves himself so adept at unmanly things.
Daniel is both a passable chef and not a doormat, and so the next time, he brings the ingredients and sets them to work like a drill sergeant, and domesticity within their new walls becomes a collaboration after all.
The fifth or sixth time Daniel cooks Portugese recipes and Jack complains heatedly about the lack of good old American food, Daniel raises his eyes and makes a pointed suggestion.
The next time, Jack turns up with burgers from the butcher and proceeds to reduce them mostly to charcoal. It’s not such a damaging experience, apparently, that after a few more instances of Daniel insisting upon feeding him an excess of vegetables, he’s not ready to do it again.
Eventually even Peggy softens on her principles enough to cook for them -- once -- but even Jack votes for Daniel’s cooking after that. She swears that it will remain a secret to her dying day how absolutely engineered and deliberately planned that horrible meal was, but all the same, a small corner of her mind wonders if in twenty years time she'll be properly cooking them Sunday roasts as her mother taught her. It should be terrifying that it even crosses her mind. Somehow, it isn't.
*
It becomes almost routine. They leave the office, separately. Jack turns up in a taxi ten minutes after Peggy gets home. Daniel turns up almost an hour later, usually on foot because Daniel is self-flagellating that way. If she’s going out then Angie, with the girl from the theatre ticket booth who is fast becoming a permanent fixture at her side, sends a coy wave the way of Peggy and her two men. If Angie is staying in, then the five of them in the kitchen while Daniel and Kitty prepare a meal will turn into two groups of two and three as they peel off to their separate rooms later.
In the morning, the men will bestow their kisses goodbye -- a very temporary goodbye -- and leave separately, early, to prepare for work in their own homes.
Peggy wonders if Steve watches her from somewhere up there. She wonders sometimes how he’d feel about this particular arrangement she ended up entangling herself in, without him. But the one thing she’s sure of -- so long as this is any kind of love, so long as he cared for her as much as she did him, Steve Rogers wouldn’t judge.
END
TITLE: Redefinitions, or An Ode to Avoiding Commitment
AUTHOR: roseveare
RATING: R
PAIRING: Peggy Carter/Daniel Sousa/Jack Thompson
SUMMARY: It begins because Jack’s an ass and Peggy needs a release and somehow it’s… easier… knowing that he’ll be an ass about it, to turn to him than anyone else...
NOTES: Written for within_a_dream in Fandom Growth Exchange 2015
------
Redefinitions, or An Ode to Avoiding Commitment
It begins because Jack’s an ass and Peggy needs a release and somehow it’s… easier… knowing that he’ll be an ass about it, to turn to him than anyone else. Knowing that sex with him won’t change their relationship, won’t bring complications the way it would with Daniel, whom she has known for a while harbours honest feelings and is gallant enough to want to do right by her.
After Steve, she doesn’t want that sort of commitment. She just wants something. She's tired of the cold, and the time that seems to be stretching ever on since the war, and of being restless, and alone. So she turns to Jack.
Daniel finds out because, despite themselves, the body language changes between them enough that the new intimacy reverberates through all their interactions in the workplace. This is even apparently true when Jack is calling across the room to her (being an asshole) about the quality of his coffee and Daniel, who knows them best out of everyone here, suddenly looks up sharply at his desk. He looks between them and cuts himself off before he gets beyond, "Wh-- you two are--?"
Daniel finding out is… intensely uncomfortable, and in fact painful, the way his face crushes beneath the revelation. For some reason, it's something she hadn't expected to happen, even though she knows he's not stupid, knows he's well able to read people, a good agent, an intelligent man. Perhaps it's that she did not expect herself to change so much so visibly just for the convenience of sleeping with Jack Thompson.
For half a day, it's almost unbearable. She holds herself in and tells herself not to feel and exchanges hard, horrible looks with Jack -- who looks, she notes with startlement, just as horrified, like he too betrayed Daniel. She keeps that tight, tight grip on herself right up til the end of the day. When she hears shouting as she’s getting ready to finally leave (salve her sorrows with a large bottle of something and no refuge in Jack's warm body tonight) in an otherwise empty workplace, she follows the sound and walks in on a fist fight in Jack’s office.
She raises her eyebrows a little, because the way Daniel's holding his own against Jack, using the crutch to propel himself around and make his movements unpredictable, compensating somewhat for his need to use it at all, is eyebrow-raising. But she isn't perhaps as surprised by that as Jack is; she has catalogued the grace of his movements before, enough to peg him as a trained fighter prior to his injury, whatever happened to him in the war. He has never spoken about the circumstances of that.
The moments she spends watching them also exposes her to the sort of dialogue that they're exchanging while they fight.
She wades in the middle of them and puts them both down with a few efficient blows. She remembers yelling at them while they look up at her from the floor, two stupid, ridiculous men. Telling Daniel that, yes, she chose Jack, and that, no, he’s not dishonouring her, that it's just sex and he can go to hell right there if he thinks she would let him do anything with any less than her full cooperation.
She may have expanded on her reasons for Jack. She may have referred to Daniel as a wonderful man who can't give her what she needs. She never does remember, afterward, exactly what she said. She only remembers their stunned expressions. She knows that by the end of it she's in tears, and that Steve’s name left her lips somewhere in the barrage. Then somehow they’re all on the floor, and she’s sitting curled up on her knees with Daniel stroking her hand, and Jack leaned over them both with his hand on Peggy’s shoulder and Daniel’s knee.
"She's right," Jack says, bleeding from his nose and lip but with his acerbic humour apparently intact, "you are a good man, and cloying as hell." He staunches his face in his sleeve with an unpleasant noise. "And you can't half throw a punch. Look, we're all friends here--"
That makes both Peggy and Daniel raise their eyebrows, and a look passes between them as they do some redefining based on what Jack Thompson catalogues as friendship. Peggy is also vaguely aware that after some of the things she just said about him, Jack should be a dust trail out the door. Or -- kicking them out, since this is his office.
"--What? Anyway, what I was going to say is... It's plain as day she likes you, but she's not willing to take you on on your terms. So why don't all of us, I don't know, try to figure this out, as friends who do a little extra?" He slaps Daniel's shoulder in a manner that, though half friendly, is still half patronising as well, but Peggy can only watch the way his hand moves from Daniel's knee, then sneaks inches higher as it returns. She is familiar with all Jack's tricks and liberties. "One thing I sure as hell know is that you need to get laid."
"All of--? You're out of your mind," Daniel says, eyes darting between them, pools of need collected in them that make her ache to witness.
"No, it's--" And maybe she's jumping too eagerly, and she silences herself quickly, but too late to avoid both men seeing how the idea just for that moment caught her up in its promise.
Daniel looks from her to Jack's face, and down at the hand on his... it's just about still on his thigh; swallows, and quickly nods. His tongue licks out nervously over his lip and he's too caught up in the promise, too, to say any of the things Peggy expects him to say about this being wrong, an obscene proposition. Or perhaps he's not so straightforward as she always thought. Staid dinner dates to marriage to children and respectability and interminable years of committment, was what she expected from Daniel, but she has seen such things, she has raided German bases and flown and fought alongside Captain America, and that was partnership, that was symbiosis. She cannot contemplate suffering a lifetime of someone else's expectations and normality.
*
Of course, it’s never going to be that easy. Jack is sarcastic and always too casual with his mouth. Daniel is, while not aggressively against it, tense and nervous about the whole concept of such an arrangement. Both of them have always argued like cats in a sack, even if sometimes they manage to hit a rhythm that’s easy and coast along in that groove for a while.
It's a revelation that continues to roll out and surprise her that Jack and Daniel can, and do, feel something for each other outside of their joint attraction to Peggy. It's also not something they’re initially comfortable with letting her see, or even each other, even though they all saw it, both in the first moment when Daniel understood Jack and Peggy were intimate without him, and in the office later that day. Apparently it was the emotional outpouring of the moment which allowed them to be so honest with themselves, curled around each other on the floor, Jack's hand on Daniel, affectionate, allowed. The rest of the time, that territory is aggressively defended by the barb wire and trenches of fear and the ridiculous thing which is masculinity.
For the first few weeks things are incredibly rocky between them, threatening to turn in and instant, to spin out into violence or just sullenly fall apart.
The first time they meet after that initial, emotionally charged encounter, which was far more comfort-oriented than sexual, is still marked mainly by the jealousy between the men when one of them is touching her and the other is not. It makes Peggy so furious that it almost leads her to ditch the whole idea.
"C'mon, Marge, you know I like Daniel -- he's better at filing than you by far -- but as to liking Daniel, you of all people know I'm not that way inclined." Jack waggles his eyebrows in a manner that makes her fist twitch with the urge to punch him between them.
"I... him... please, Peggy..." Daniel stops as though that covers everything required of a protest and blushes and shakes his head and looks mortified.
They back off, they meander, they obstinately defy the obvious. They both stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that this embryonic relationship has a third rung even when they're exchanging glances of outright conspiracy, that say You know and I know but we will both die before we let Peggy Carter know that we would eagerly indulge in terribly homosexual things with each other, given half the chance, except that we are such men and, look, there is a woman present!
She doesn't know, truly, if the problem is the particular company -- has no knowledge of them on this score, if their past has included stolen schoolboy experimentation, or even full sex acts with others of their sex. It could be her, it could be each other -- competetive to the end, even with the promise of so much to gain. Or this could simply be that she's watching something truly new and unacknowledged stutter and struggle to become an acknowledged part of both of them.
Eventually she sits back and curtly states that she's not doing anything else with either of them until she gets to watch the two of them. But, she allows, she will facilitate if they wish to do that while touching her at the same time.
Electric jumps through her stomach when she watches their lips meet over her. Jack's hand went straight for the territory between her thighs, and irony of ironies, Daniel's competetive enough that his followed it there, and their fingers touch her intimately and each other. But she thinks it's the sight of them finally touching, as they lean over her, that makes her catch her breath and feel like she’ll never be the same again.
She was there in the war, on the front lines, in the barracks, in the strategy rooms, in that terrifically male environment. Talk was not always kept delicate just because she was there. (She preferred it when it was not.) She knows about the intimacies that form between men when they work close, when women are a rare commodity but not necessarily because of that. Steve had admitted to her that he'd had such a relationship, even. But even then, even with such fuel, she'd never thought about it as a prompt for erotic feeling -- vaguely disrespectful, besides. Now, Daniel parts his knees – knee -- in response to the foray of Jack's mouth down from his lips to his throat, and presses his body closer, and Jack’s hand accepts the invitation, and although their hands have left her, at her urging, Peggy feels the shiver of that touch between her own legs.
Such tenderness they can display to each other when cornered! Peggy wonders if they would ever allow themselves to have each other without her presence between them, if there ever could be something existing independantly of the arrangement between the three of them. Well... they would tear each other apart before they ever got to intimacy, without her between them, she thinks, and snorts to herself ruefully.
When they part after the intimate touch, the wariness in their eyes is more sobering and practical.
“I’m not going to bend over for you just because I've got this-” Daniel starts to growl, hand half automatically reaching down for the knee of the prosthetic leg, that's still enclosed inside his pants though they're gaping open at the crotch.
Jack’s breath hisses in, and his eyes dilate further and his face goes dreamy and slack, and he makes one of those declarations like Peggy's heard from him a few times before, the things that he says when he’s wide open and vulnerable. “I’ll do it first. I want to do it.”
Well, that time, they don't – too sudden, too much to take on, too little practical preparations at hand for the endeavour – but the offer is out there on the table, and the next time they meet redefines a lot of things for all of them.
*
When it had been just Jack and Peggy, their liaisons had been scattered about; his home, the office after hours, a few actual dates in bars, a lot of rented rooms. As two, they could be public and normal, even if they had wished to be secretive from their co-workers at SSR. As three, things instantly become a little more complicated than that.
It turns out that, volatile as it had made the mood between them in the first few weeks before they started sleeping together and really discovered what volatility between the three of them was, Jack’s promotion made for the best piece of luck that could have befallen their relationship. It gives them a space – the office, to be precise -- that can be re-framed as theirs, because Jack now possesses the authority to chuck people out at the hours they're actually scheduled for on paper and work late with whomever he likes whenever he likes.
It’s possible enough people know the lion’s share of the work Jack took credit for was done by Peggy and Daniel that the annals of SSI gossip considered this to be Jack desperately flailing to catch up on a job he can't handle. It’s not – Jack does fine in Dooley’s old role. Much to both Daniel and Peggy's occasional disgust, he’s actually something of a competent leader, maybe better than either of them could have been. They don't have his mouth, but nor do they have the desire to manage people, and he's nowhere near so obnoxious as expected when fielding his responsibility for people working under him.
If it was only Peggy Jack was seeing in his office, others might suspect the real reason rather fast. That actually placed a handy time limit on her original no-commitments plans. But because it’s Daniel as well, they avoid any accusations of the truth.
The process of giving Dooley’s old office his own personal touch enables Jack to buy the largest, thickest pile rug he can get away with. When they push the furniture aside at the end of the day, it proves as adequate as any bed... Maybe more so, for the extra space it gives, and the absolute guarantee of nobody falling off the edge.
*
It's Daniel who suggests the rug on the floor, wearily embracing the obvious comments from Jack in suggesting it. Of course, he's less able to athletically negotiate sex on the other items of furniture... the desk... the chair... upright against the bookcases... The sorts of activities which Jack and Peggy engaged in before he came along.
Peggy knows that Jack expected Daniel would be just as clumsy in bed as upright. It’s… well, the whole subject of Daniel's handicap is one of unease for herself, honestly. She is not proud of herself for it, but at least part of the reason she chose Jack was because Daniel requires more effort and involvement than she feels herself capable of investing in any man. That’s not just because of his physical handicap, but his sensitivities, which also do encompass that, are considerable, and it's also part of the reason why contemplating Daniel always has to be such a prospect of playing for keeps, and then just... Peggy shies instinctively from complicating emotion. With Jack there, the investment is shared, and thus easier. They will halve the burden if and when they break his heart. The odd fact is that she could take Jack without Daniel, but not Daniel without Jack, even when she knows which one is in her estimation the better man.
On the rug, for the first time, the false leg comes off. This is in itself rather distracting. Peggy was aware from passing comments and the sound it made when bumped and the intricacies of Daniel's gait that the leg was false from around mid-thigh. Peggy is -- well, she is not going to have her opinion moved by such a thing, it must be understood; she has seen many things, all the shades of war. But as for being intimate with it, she has never, and the scarred, truncated leg is something she must brace herself for all the same, something she needs to get past no matter how little she lets it show on the surface. It may be that Jack copes better by letting his interest in this new-revealed aspect of their lover's body show and indulging it, even if that initially makes Daniel cross.
Though Jack's reaction fascinates and warms Peggy, because it isn't cruel, as she might have expected of him, from the way he's always acted around Daniel in the office.
On the rug, it turns out that a horizontal outlook makes them all equal. Daniel becomes as lithe and limber and able as any of them, in this dimension. It's clear why he campaigned so hard in favour of the floor. And this is such a new layer to him, something he'd never let them see in normal circumstances, while he tries to move around with the crutch by daylight, in public space, acting like his body is shaped the same as theirs, when it is not.
The awkwardness of the first revelation of his true shape becomes an ease with it quickly over the following encounters, although ironically, annoyingly, the ease also manifests in the way Jack becomes far more liberal with his jokes about Daniel's leg by daylight hours.
Daniel scowls and ignores them because he knows he'll get to have his revenge later.
Put the two men together and shake their boundaries down when the clothes come off at the end of the day, and Peggy sees miracles happen. Daniel opens up and some of his resting seriousness falls away. While Jack... Jack becomes sensitive to others' needs, not to mention prepared to lay himself out and take what each of them choose to dish out to him, relinquishing the dominance and alpha-male persona that's so important to his public persona. Jack is good for Daniel in a way Peggy never could be, poking and prodding and forcing him into different modes as he reacts. Jack makes him lighter, the way that only Jack could. Daniel would never worship Jack, never be in awe of him, never idealise him or take him too seriously. Jack makes him take himself less seriously and brings out the humour they both know is in there.
Peggy likes and respects the regular Daniel, but she’s more comfortable with the one that's always vibrating and alive in reaction to Jack's presence. She herself never needed much excuse to fight Jack's fire with fire, but she and him, they're more alike that way, and maybe he makes her more alive, too -- maybe that's what she sought in the beginning, by going to him. He is witty and sharp-edged and reactive, with all his barbs attuned to the places she is sore. Maybe what she sought was that constant sense of combat, and maybe that's a sad statement, in a way. But what Daniel brings to both of them, she is realising with an unease that both grows and lessens like a tide, is both measure and meaning. Without him, they would have been everything she had planned for this relationship, brief and probably bitter but no less physically satisfying for it. A part of her knows that he took them on with intention to change them, and she allowed it. Honestly, he does that anyway, even if he had come without the intent.
She is beginning to see that there is a way the three of them fit together, rounding off the edges of the dynamic between any two of them, making them something more whole and functional than any two of them could be.
Jack sputters as Daniel pins him in a wrestling move and abuses the leverage to molest him on the floor of his own office, Daniel's cock pressing in the crack of his ass while he frees his other hand to reach beneath both their bodies. "I think that earlier, you implied I couldn't catch a 94 year old geriatric purse-snatcher, but I seem to have got you, Jack. So what do we figure that makes you?"
Peggy is fairly certain, at this point, that Jack came out with that remark purely to submit to the future reprisal for it.
They're both laughing a moment later as Daniel lets Jack roll over. Between them, their cocks brush together, and Jack curls a hand upward, to where the stump of Daniel’s leg is rested up against his hip, strokes across the forbidden limb like it’s just a one more part of him on the way to his flank, and Daniel doesn’t particularly notice, comment, or try to stop him.
"Don't hog him," Peggy berates, crawling on top of both of them, the thick pile rug soft against her knees. "I know I've got some come-back due, too, after spending the morning filing."
*
“--Well, I just don't see any reason for it, Daniel! We got a good thing going here already. There's no need to risk being seen and sussed by the world at large. We can get away with using this space as long as we want to. No-one in the office suspects a thing. You know, you and I in important discussions, Peggy taking important notes--“
Maybe she would miss it, if Jack ever stopped being an ass just because he’s sleeping with them. Perhaps he's such a work of art, in his own concentrated focus of assholeishness, that they would both be doing the world a disfavour by taming that out of him. He ducks the slap Peggy aims at the back of his head, but not quite in time. “Peggy! Ow! You’re physically assaulting the boss, now?”
“Considering how much more than that I’ve done with the boss, I’m sure he’ll forbear… If he wishes me to continue…”
"We use this space because it's removed from our home life, from anything personal," Daniel interrupts, and the conversation spirals instantly down the toilet. "I want to take you both out, like real couples do -- though I guess we can't say that's what we are, but you know what I mean. I’m not interested in this if all it’s ever going to be about is flesh. I want to see you both in public even if we do have to pretend it’s a business meeting, or we’re just friends at dinner.”
They’ve been meeting for almost a month, three or more times a week, at the end of the workday. Of course it’s Daniel who wants this to be about something other than sex. It's no more than Peggy's been expecting since they begun, but it brings all her anxieties with this arrangement into relief.
This is why Peggy chose Jack.
"...Yeah." Jack bursts out with the word, as unexpectedly and packed with guerilla emotions as when she blurted out her own acceptance, as when Daniel first agreed to date them. "Yeah, all right, Daniel. I want that, too."
That Jack chooses to go with Daniel’s decree, with emotional investment, with meaning and commitment, is wholly unexpected. Any expression of commitment from him was Peggy's very last concern. He was supposed to be her ally and temper Daniel. They have her outnumbered, and this should be the point at which she turns heel to leave, but she finds…
She finds she no longer wants to walk away. Maybe the idea of that little layer of extra involvement isn’t so hard, after all. Maybe emotional investment isn't so monolithic and impossible as it seemed at the start.
Daniel chooses a little pokey bar where he knows the owner – friend of a war buddy – and the food is good. They go back to Daniel’s place after the meal. Daniel’s place is pokey, too, although carefully laid out to be navigated by a man who isn’t the steadiest on his feet. Jack makes a few comments that cause Daniel’s hackles to rise, which is not the most helpful way to end the evening, but Daniel’s bed isn’t really big enough to be a focus for their liaisons on a regular basis anyway.
Peggy can see what he's trying to do, though, and how.
*
Jack, for all the epic crimes of his untempered mouth, sees the world through the saddest and most brutally honest filter of any of them. Sometimes, drunk either on bourbon on the activities of their bodies, he mouths off lines about his favourite, bitter subjects. The cultural obsession with heroism is uppermost among those. He talks extensively, drunk, about himself as the coward publically hailed a hero, the lie he has to live under, how stifling that is. What freedom, he rhapsodises, to have both of them know he's truly a coward at heart. Daniel, he says, was clearly more heroic, but came back distorted, and now the world only knows how to view him through the filter of their disgust and pity. Shame, that.
Peggy, he calls his bona fide superhero plain to all with eyes to see, who the world will never acknowledge because of the burden of her sex.
Peggy blushes but is also irked, and responds sharply, “Well, we can be whatever we need to be to ourselves, to each other, but respect can start with one person making acknowledgement in public, Jack.”
"I just say it. You know me, Marge -- I'm all talk. And -- drunk."
And yes, he says many things, and she remembers how he lectured her on the disadvantages of her femininity, acknowledging all the while the possibility of equality he so disdained, in his manner, his words, his voice. If he’s astute enough to spot the lines they have to live their lives between, he should have the capacity to break out of them when they aren't in private. But Daniel is the proactive one, who lives on his principles, who has principles to live on. Jack always disappoints. He disappoints himself the most of all, the same way his commentary on himself is always by far the harshest.
The more time passes, the more she realises that she chose him because she was so sure that he would quickly drive her away.
Yet he does not, and still more time passes. So often he’s the one in there, worshipping both of them with his mouth – doubly so as it runs off about how they’re both so much worthier than he is, words turned to gifts to lay at their feet on his usually cruel silken tongue. He's their greatest supporter, in private.
Peggy thinks the real Jack is the one locked down inside. Not the one who always has a scornful remark in public, who takes their successes unashamedly for his own, since the world won’t let them take them themselves.
"You know that's why this relationship works," Jack jokes. No. It's only half a joke. No, not even that. "Between the two of us, me and Daniel make a whole man for you."
Daniel isn’t impressed, seeing no deeper than the slight to himself, and it takes the other applications of Jack’s silken tongue to win him around from his strop, but the remark lines up with Peggy's conviction that Jack came back from the war as broken as Daniel, on the inside.
So she, by comparison, is the lucky one. The war only broke her heart, and the fact that she’s with them both now at all might be the sign that she’s starting to heal, in spite of herself.
*
Howard Stark gifted Peggy with space, when he gave her the grand apartment, but what Angie gives her is greater.
What Angie gives her is the gift of knowing nothing she wants is ever something she should feel ashamed of. There is nothing she should feel she can’t do because of the presence of her room-mate. Their home is big, but it's still shared space and echoing halls, yet even if they can't hide from each other what they do within it, there's no need for judgement between them.
It still takes several months and the third girl Angie's been bringing home on a regular basis before Peggy dares take up that implied freedom by bringing home her two men.
She never had any intention, when they started out, to do this. By this time she's already indulged Daniel, and indulged Jack's attempt to indulge Daniel, though Jack's apartment seems more soulless and sad, somehow, when occupied by three of them than by two, and this time he was embarrassed rather than titillated by the prying of his neighbours.
It’s a frightening new world to have space outside the office where they can freely meet. It's even more frightening that it should have to be her space, and the trappings of normality that it brings. The first time they’re there and Jack makes a comment revealing his assumption she’s going to cook for them, Daniel ends up doing it to salve her outrage. He does so quietly and stolidly. Jack holds up his hands and looks bemused, and makes another comment that inserts both feet firmly in mouth, about how he shouldn’t be surprised Daniel once more proves himself so adept at unmanly things.
Daniel is both a passable chef and not a doormat, and so the next time, he brings the ingredients and sets them to work like a drill sergeant, and domesticity within their new walls becomes a collaboration after all.
The fifth or sixth time Daniel cooks Portugese recipes and Jack complains heatedly about the lack of good old American food, Daniel raises his eyes and makes a pointed suggestion.
The next time, Jack turns up with burgers from the butcher and proceeds to reduce them mostly to charcoal. It’s not such a damaging experience, apparently, that after a few more instances of Daniel insisting upon feeding him an excess of vegetables, he’s not ready to do it again.
Eventually even Peggy softens on her principles enough to cook for them -- once -- but even Jack votes for Daniel’s cooking after that. She swears that it will remain a secret to her dying day how absolutely engineered and deliberately planned that horrible meal was, but all the same, a small corner of her mind wonders if in twenty years time she'll be properly cooking them Sunday roasts as her mother taught her. It should be terrifying that it even crosses her mind. Somehow, it isn't.
*
It becomes almost routine. They leave the office, separately. Jack turns up in a taxi ten minutes after Peggy gets home. Daniel turns up almost an hour later, usually on foot because Daniel is self-flagellating that way. If she’s going out then Angie, with the girl from the theatre ticket booth who is fast becoming a permanent fixture at her side, sends a coy wave the way of Peggy and her two men. If Angie is staying in, then the five of them in the kitchen while Daniel and Kitty prepare a meal will turn into two groups of two and three as they peel off to their separate rooms later.
In the morning, the men will bestow their kisses goodbye -- a very temporary goodbye -- and leave separately, early, to prepare for work in their own homes.
Peggy wonders if Steve watches her from somewhere up there. She wonders sometimes how he’d feel about this particular arrangement she ended up entangling herself in, without him. But the one thing she’s sure of -- so long as this is any kind of love, so long as he cared for her as much as she did him, Steve Rogers wouldn’t judge.
END