#Steggy Month

[steggyistruelove]

Wherever you are is home.

[captainjimothycarter]

Silver Lining

During times of a war torn country, silver linings should be found. --

Peggy smiled, a bit watery, yes as she saw the tarnished rings sitting in the middle of his palm. Rings her parents would balk at because they weren’t perfect and didn’t show elegance in their standards. No, Steve Rogers wore his tactical suit, the shield at his feet. His face was covered in soot and dirt, his own baby blue eyes misty as well. His hair greasy from lack of proper time and care to wash it. A black eye that was just starting to heal after taking the butt of a rifle in the face. For a moment, Peggy couldn’t speak as she slowly stepped closer, looking down into those beautiful baby blue eyes.

“Are you-”

“Pegs, I-”

“Steve, we’re at...we are at war. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow.”

“That’s all the more reason to get married. This isn’t proper and not how I would ever want to-”

“It’s perfect. It's perfect for...us. Yes, yes, Steven, I will marry you.”

This is the first Steggy fic I've ever written. It holds a special place in my heart and I wanted to give it a special spotlight.

I plan to post random fics this month for Steggy Week and maybe try to get some quick fics out. Thanks to @steggyfanevents for running this Steggy Month event!

[steggyistruelovefanfiction]

An Interesting Day

Author: steggyistruelove

Rating: General Audiences

Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: F/M, Gen

Fandoms: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Agent Carter (TV)

Relationships: Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers

Characters: Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, Hank Pym

Additional Tags: Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Peggy Carter is a badass, Steve Rogers is Peggy Carter's husband, Steve Rogers returns the stones Peggy sees him chaos ensues, Hank Pym makes a short cameo, During Canon, Steve Rogers goes home

Language: English

Published: 2024-04-10

Words: 1,086

Chapters: 1/1

Summary:

Espionage had never been Steve's strong suit, he wasn't subtle.

Or what happened when Steve went to put The Space Stone back.

READ MORE ON AO3

[agentnamed]

Here's my contribution to Steggy Month!

[pararave]

one lucky guy from Brooklyn

[thisissteggy]

🌈Steggy is a dinosaur, but doesn't hold prehistoric beliefs! Happy Pride for everydino!! 🌈

[rohirriiim]

@steggyfanevents | STEGGY MONTH CELEBRATION 24’ the road to endgame - attractive and next to each other

[florida3exclamationpoints]

@steggyfanevents Steggy Month – Week Two theme – Steve

Steve Rogers text posts – skinny Steve edition

[steggyistruelove]

AU playlist for Captain Carter and Rogers Hood 💗

[captainjimothycarter]

"My Hero."

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Peggy doesn’t lie to Steve when she tells the truth: a knight in shining armor.

--

"You're not laughing." The words came out in a relieved manner, the tension leaving her shoulders. "Why are you not laughing?"

"Because I think it's fantastic." He sounded generally surprised that anyone would laugh at her, his brow ruffling slightly. His surprise soon turned to curiosity, almost to a level that concerned her as he cocked his head to the side, mimicking a confused dog. "You wanting to be a knight - I think it's adorable. Can I ask why? It's better than what I had said in my youth."

He shrugged this off, like it was of no concern of hers, as if he wasn't baiting her to ask.

Peggy shook her head, busying her hands by rolling the stick between her fingers. "Sometimes I still want to be a knight, to play the hero, to be a savior of the innocent, to be some good in this world."

--

Day Two of Steggy Month ft a lil sappy fic of Steve and Peggy and their childhood dream careers.

[userpeggycarter]

STEGGY ANNIVERSARY MONTH week four — Endgame 👩🏻‍❤️‍👨🏼

I think we deserve a soft epilogue, my love. We are good people and we've suffered enough – Seventy Years of Sleep #4, Nikka Ursula [x]

5 and also 75 years ago, Steve returned to Peggy. ❤️

HAPPY 5TH ANNIVERSARY, AVENGERS: ENDGAME! april 26th, 2019.

@lgbtqcreators creator bingo 💖 transition

[id in alt]

[meidui]

@steggyfanevents steggy month ✦ @peggynet peggy week day 4: favourite romance ♡

[thatscarletflycatcher]

There's something that has been gnawing at me since I saw some comments on the look-how-they-massacred-them poll for Daniel Sousa -with which I didn't want to engage then and there because I really didn't want to pick up a fight with another Daniel fan, there's few enough of us, but also because the argument was very difficult to articulate.

It is difficult to explain how Daniel Sousa is screwed over by Endgame without making it look like either "he deserved Peggy as a prize" or "he was the perfect prize for Peggy", because it all begins by understanding the experience of WWII and the building of the morale of WWII. Something that Markus and McFeely seemed to perfectly understand in Agent Carter, which inclines me to believe it was specific insistence of the Russos, whose concept of narrative and storytelling is at the level of a belligerent and not very bright 4 year old, that gave us that mindblowingly stupid "happy ending" for Cap and Peggy. Or maybe Markus and McFeely are just arcane creatures, at times intelligent and at times really dumb. Anyways.

Point is that both CATFA and Agent Carter understand that for these characters, fighting WWII is a matter of "each doing their bit", of, as Steve put it in The Avengers, to lay on the barbed wire so the one that comes after you can pass on. And in the process of doing that, you have great loses and suffer great grief. The price of war is immense, and for these people the price of war is the price of freedom (yes, that celebrated Steve speech from CATWS is also sharing in that same spirit. It's kind of impressive how until that awful mess of Endgame, the perspective of Steve as a character from movie to movie is one that addresses how some 1940s things are outdated, but how many others are still relevant and inspiring. It is a surprisingly nuanced take on History, that of course the Russo "Cap is an outdated relic that belongs in the past and should stay there" brothers don't seem to have what's needed to grasp).

In that context, the most coherent tone for Steggy is tragedy. Because that is what happened to many, many, many people during the war. You meet, you fall in love fast, because there is no time. And then suddenly the other is gone, never to come back. And all the promises of youth and life and future the other person represented, are gone with them. People who lived through 2020-2022 have some idea of what it is like for projects, opportunities, and years of your life to just vanish. Now you make that five years, eight months, and to mention "just" the British, 1 out every 100 people live in 1939, dead, and over 350.000 permanently disabled. If you were 20 in 1939, your life would be practically on hold till you were 26. It's a whole lot of grief, and an intense grief, that you don't solve the way you solve a random missing connection in a romcom like Serendipity or The Lake House. Doing so is cheapening and bastardizing the grief and trauma of a whole generation of people in different countries.

So, Agent Carter. Here we have a story focused on a group of people, spies, who, in different fronts and with different outcomes, made it through the war and are now facing this new world they are living in, and all the grief of their respective losses. The focus of the story is Peggy, a woman who, like many others, was allowed a wide range of action during the war, and is now subconsiously perceived as a threat by many of her male coworkers. It's a desperate bid to "go back to the way things were before", and her presence is a constant reminder that they can't.

Sousa occupies a very similar position to Peggy's: he's also a reminder that the war happened and that there is no way back, no magic solution, no pretending. And that's why both are ignored, and displaced, and why both struggle to prove themselves in a subconscious way while living by the continued principle that they are doing their bit. That is their lifeline that keeps them sane and working all throughout s1 of Agent Carter.

That's what we mean when we say Peggy and Sousa are equals, and that Sousa is contented with letting her have the spot; not because he's her inferior or her dependant, but because he's her equal -in intelligence, in ideals, in resourcefulness, in loyalty, but also in their relative positions in the power ladder- and does not feel threatened by her because of it.

(It is in this context, btw, that Peggy's rebuke of Daniel's "rescue" of her in the first episode must be understood. Because she was once treated like any other officer/agent of her same rank, she has knee jerk reactions to both being demeaned and being protected. It's also an important theme of that beginning of the series that Peggy needs to learn to let her friends in, and that she needs their help, and that that doesn't make her too weak to protect and defend them.)

But also, in another way, when we talk about Sousa becoming Peggy's husband, it has to do with the sentiment Krezminsky expresses in the series:

The ship of Steggy had sailed and was gone forever since the moment Steve became the legend in the ice and Peggy "Cap's Girl", this embodiment of the ridiculous damsel in distress we hear in the radio drama that plays on one of the episodes: Peggy fell in love with Steve when he was a scrawny, sickly lad, because she loved the man he was inside, but now forever for the world she is just another superficial, weak girl lusting after the handsome godlike rescuer, the picture of the eugenic dream of the übermensch. In Daniel Peggy loves and finds all the same things she found and loved in Steve, but in a different light, because Sousa is a different person, with a different life story, plus something else: they have both gone through war and its loss and grief, and come to the other side in need of rebuilding and finding new meaning in life and hope for the future.

In a world where the Dark, Tall and Handsome Hero of the Six Pack, Alpha Dominance and Endless Stamina reigns supreme, Sousa as a love interest is a remarkable and -sadly- bold statement about the things that truly matter in finding one's life partner.

So I think here is a reasonable point to start talking about Sousa in Agents of SHIELD. Because here's where someone would rationally say "well, but you see, there he's also chosen as a love interest!", and the reasons why context in AoS changes everything are multiple, so let's go there.

But before that, let me make clear that I do wholeheartedly believe the writers of AoS meant to honor Sousa, and sincerely tried to do their best with what they were given. That doesn't change what the end product ended up doing and saying about him.

Like Peggy is the main character of Agent Carter, so Daisy is the main character of Agents of SHIELD. As much as you can say all the team characters are important and get the focus, Daisy is the one which the narrative insists on making the focal point, as the arcs of several seasons hinge on her, and we are expected to sympathize with her first and foremost in any situation in which she is personally involved. But unlike Peggy, Daisy is a superpowered individual. She's more like Steve than Peggy; she's practically a demigod. She is capable of ripping Earth apart with just her hands. Where Peggy and Sousa were equals in the power ladder in-universe, in AoS the distance between Daisy and Sousa is abysmal. That imbalance is the first thing that leads to Sousa being put in the position of Daisy's Boy. The fact that he ends up in space with Daisy's last minute sister who is ALSO an inhuman does not help things.

As a side note, there's something to be said about futuristic prosthetics in AoS and how they interesect with disability. But I'd rather not get into it because it is a thorny subject and I don't feel qualified to speak of it.

In a different way, Daniel being Peggy's love interest in Agent Carter is balanced out by his having a life of his own and many interactions with other characters throughout the series. He pursues his own lines of investigation, he conducts interrogations of his own, he comes up with plans, he teams up with Krezminsky and with Thompson and in s2 he has downright made a life for himself as chief in California with a fiancé and all. There is a clear sense that he exists as a character outside of pining for Peggy.

In AoS, the opposite happens. Part of it is owed to the writers writing themselves into a corner: to take Sousa out of his timeline, they have to do it in such a way that his disappearance is inconspicuous, which means killing him. They do it the best way they can think of, honoring his alertness and intelligence, by making him realize HYDRA is infiltrated in SHIELD decades before anyone else does. But as a consequence, Sousa becomes the man out of time: there's no future for him, because he has died, and unlike Steve, he's not being brought back because he himself is required. They just save him because they take pity on him and the tragedy of his life. So he has no mission and no significant previous connection with anyone on the team. One of the concrete things in which this is evidenced the most is with the switch from being addressed as chief Sousa to Agent Sousa. He was chief, but between that SHIELD and this SHIELD there's not such a connection by which he can claim that title. There's no subordinates to manage. So he's sort of default-called agent without really being a proper agent.

So the writers choose the fish-out-of-water concept for him. Which is far fetched. This guy lived through wwii in a high spy setting where intelligence has knowledge of powerful interstellar aliens. He's most definitely not bewildered by phone cameras, guys. He would quickly adapt... if, again, you know, he was brought back for a mission. But the reality is that from a Doylist POV, he was brought in to be Daisy's love interest, and the only thing he can offer to her, in this huge power imbalance I have pointed out, is chivalrous manners and quaint WWII style references like when he tells her "Agent Johnson, we are going home"; both can be very charming to a modern woman, but they are things that highlight the cultural and psychological distances that separate them, and make it glaringly obvious that they have barely anything in common.

The series tries desperately to give them common ground in the time-loop episode, with this idea that Daisy is like Peggy because she sacrifices herself for others and to protect others all the time. Which is laughable because, again, in Daisy's condition of beloved main character that embodies the tortured, quasi byronic heroine that we understand to be the hallmark of about one half of the contemporary superhero type, the narrative and the characters in it bend all sorts of ways to accommodate her, not the other way around. Peggy's type is different because it is rooted in that WWII morale/frame I was talking about at the beginning of the post.

As a consequence of all of this, Sousa barely interacts with anyone that isn't Daisy (he has of personal scenes, what? one or two with Coulson, the scene where Jemma gives him a new prosthetic, and then he's given an idea to give to Mac in the finale. I don't remember any other non-Daisy ones), has no unique role to fulfill in the mission (specially because so much of the plan is entwined in Fitz and Jemma's rescue plan that was NOT counting with Sousa) and no personal goal to achieve, which weakens his standing as a character outside the romance plot, and when it comes to the romance plot, he has nothing in common with Daisy, and he brings nothing to the partnership other than... narratively forced love, and chivalrousness.

In the end, Daniel, who was a character and a person of relevance in Agent Carter, is nerfed and turned into a prop for the rushed happily ever after of the main character of AoS. And that, in my books, is being screwed over. That's what makes his becoming Peggy's husband and building a life and a future with her a much better and more preferable outcome for Daniel; he gets to build a life of meaning by his own significant work and significant connections, in his own time and place, with a wife who is his equal and with other people that have lived through the same collective experiences of trauma and grief he did.

[doctorhelena]

I’ve created something for every day of Steggy Week 2024 over at @steggyfanevents! This is for Day 5 (Inspired By). Previous Days: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4

This cross-stitch was inspired by the adorable Stardew Steggy drawing that @roboticonography made for Steggy Month back in April (and stitched with permission!)

Here's a process gif!

[steggyfanevents]

April 26 marks five years since Steve and Peggy got their dance in Avengers: Endgame! To celebrate, April is Steggy Month at steggyfanevents!

This event is for all Steggy fans:

Fan creators (writers, artists, gifmakers, and more): share your Steggy creations, both old and new!

Everyone: reblog and comment, make polls or memes, and just have fun!

To join in the fun, use the tag #steggymonth throughout April. Don’t forget to reblog this post to spread the word!

To kick off Steggy Month, we’re partnering with @peggynet, which is hosting Peggy Appreciation Week April 3 - 9! Peggy Week has specific prompts for each day, while Steggy Month will have general themes for each week in April:

April 3 - 9: Peggy Carter

April 10 - 16: Steve Rogers

April 17 - 23: The Road to Endgame

April 24 - 30: Endgame, Baby!

Any questions about Steggy Month? Contact us.

Don’t you dare be late! ⏰

Graphic credits: [gif] [manip]

[cafecitowriter]

Aim for the Heart (Chapter 9 Teaser)

It's Day 3 of Steggy Week over at @steggyfanevents! The theme is AU's and Crossovers, which means I would be remiss not to update Aim for the Heart as I tend to do once a year, particularly on this theme day.

Unfortunately the muse was a little slow on this one this year, so I don't have a full chapter ready, but there was a little snippet that I have already written, really loved and wanted to share!

I mean, Peggy has a party to go to now, after all ;)

Aim for the Heart - Read on AO3

Fic Summary: Though from her angle she couldn’t see too much of her surroundings, and the lights in the room were dimmed, she knew immediately that she was no longer in Howard’s lab.   Bloody hell.

Chapter Teaser:

Peggy was slightly sceptical about shopping with Pepper, Natasha and Maria together, considering she hardly knew them. It was clear that the three of them were good friends, so for the first two stores, Peggy mostly allowed herself to listen to their banter as she discerned through the dresses in the rack before eventually settling for a couple to try on.

“Kinda tough, huh? Being fashionable.”

Peggy arched her eyebrow but didn’t turn her head from the offensive orange fabric that deigned to call itself a dress in front of her.

“I’ll have you know, Romanoff, that outside of army requirements, I’m actually quite fashionable.” She continued thumbing through the options in front of her before tugging on a dress made up of three contrasting shades of neon. “However, that word seems to have changed its meaning in the last seventy years.”

“I’d say the definition technically changes about every six months, so I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” she joked.

Peggy hummed, not taking her eyes off the dress.

“It’s not just the dress, is it?”

“Is this how you normally make friends?” she retorted. “Try to diagnose their troubles?”

“No, normally I fight them first.”

Peggy snorted, but finally looked over at the other woman.

“And for what it’s worth, Carter, I’m sure you made that army uniform look hot,” Natasha winked.

“Oh I certainly did,” she smirked.

“Steve ever see you out of it?”

“Twice,” she allowed herself to admit. Natasha had already made it clear that she and Steve were still as far from obvious as they were nearly 70 years ago, there was no shame in sharing certain facts. “Though the first time was really only a few minutes-”

Natasha’s low whistle cut her off.

“You work fast, Carter.”

“Oh, not like that,” Peggy scoffed, gently shoving her shoulder, which made Natasha nearly cackle. “I was talking about dresses and you know it.”

“It must’ve been good though,” she prodded.

“It was my favourite,” Peggy admitted. “But with the war I hadn’t worn it in years, particularly because it was only appropriate for special occasions.”

“So what was the special occasion?”

“I… had a message to deliver,” she answered.

“And it worked?”

“Quite well, for the most part.”

Natasha’s eyes lit up mischievously.

“What colour was it?”