[ he watches for a moment, until it's clear peggy is going to savor her bribe to the fullest. ray then extricates himself from the interior of his machine and moves to slide the large metal panel back into place with delicate care he doesn't exercise almost anywhere else.
after that, he heads to the corner behind the couch, to a mini fridge. it's probably telling, that he'd rather keep a fridge stocked than simply pull it from the closet, but he makes his way to plop onto the couch with a milk carton in each hand.
once he pulls the corners open and slides one in front of peggy, he reaches for those gluten-free selections and goes to town. ]
[ milk. not that she's anti-dairy by any stretch but -- well, it's simply not the beverage her thoughts leap to when she thinks of what pairing might work best with a bit of sweet.
but she selects a second brownie. and, all at once, this is beginning to feel remarkably similar to their afternoon by the fountain. peggy hesitates on her feet for a moment longer before deigning to take a seat.
-- and not yet a sip of milk. there are some lines of barbarism even she won't cross with a stranger in the room, and drinking out of the carton might be one of them. might be. she hasn't yet decided. it's still up in the air. ]
[ ray takes a bite, and takes a sip. a bite, and a sip. bite. sip. ]
Ooh. More for me.
[ and he reaches right over to steal what miss-too-adult-for-a-classic doesn't want. he's weathered the ribbing and hazing of leonard snart, mick rory, and sara lance. it's only strengthened his resolve to be weird. to be an outsider.
[ hey! now! only a thin sense of decorum stops her from swatting at his hand and informing him she hadn't yet decided whether the offer had passed muster or not. seems it doesn't much matter because, bloody hell, there he goes. peggy watches him with an incredible mix of awe and disgust. ]
The polite thing would have been an offer to put the kettle on.
[ except no. the polite thing would have been her graciously accepting his offer of milk and possibly also not bruising his sternum with his own damn tool box but peggy carter never met a line she didn't want to push.
and she damn well knows it when she takes a bite out of her second brownie. ]
[ he finishes his rudeness and only offers peggy a smile and a shrug that might tap into those 'memories' she's struggling with. ]
The workshop is a do it yourself zone. I mean, anywhere the Legends congregate tends to turn into one anyway. We threw a party at Rip's once. I don't think he knew we were going to...
[ and she's pretty certain that 'helpy selfy' isn't a thing. or a word. or a pair of words. and to think some might claim the british have the gall to make things up. ]
I was at that party. [ which might actually be the most shocking reveal of this entire conversation, because it certainly hadn't been her sort of party. she'd attended by accident. mostly. ] But I don't recall seeing you there.
[ she would have remembered, she thinks. ]
is this too much goof for you lmao i feel like i'm hardcore testing your limits lol
[ to her credit it doesn't take her long to puzzle out his meaning. even without the accompanying stress on the telling word, peggy could have found her way around the implication. one doesn't consider oneself an aficionado of the cryptic crossword without appreciating a phrasal twist or three.
so she nods, puffing out a breath as the realization hits, and fills in the blank: ] You were wearing your suit. Fair enough.
[ she can even imagine how being minuscule and easily missed might improve a social function. lord knows she wasn't there having fun in her own right. ]
It didn't strike me as particularly appropriate leisure wear, however.
[ he tries to keep pushing away from how vulnerable he'd felt that party made them with a shrug. ]
Oh, uhh. You'd be surprised. [ time to start stuffing more food in his face. a bite at least gives him a moment to think about how not to get too serious about his personal post-chronos paranoia. ] Besides, I don't sing or drink, and I didn't want to leave our friend Kara all the chaperone duties.
[ super or not, she deserved a buddy to help her keep on lookout. ]
[ with no milk (and no tea!) peggy's brownie consumption slows. she enjoys what she's eating, yes, but she digs in with a measure or two less of enthusiasm. not least of all because she's back to picking apart the tones and falls in his answers.
not singing? well, that's also fair enough. peggy doesn't carry a tune. but not drinking? well! she doesn't ask. ]
You were on picket duty. [ something also easily deduced; peggy drives straight for it. the suit wasn't for leisure at all and she can remember rip's injury when she'd first met him. ]
[ he nods loosely, working against feeling like his paranoia is suddenly on display. paranoia that he's fought with since arriving, and that one of his closest wonderland friends has advised him to tread carefully. ]
Yeah, I mean. Loud music, lots of drunk people. They all needed to blow off steam, but accidents happen, so.
[ time mom was on duty. totally chill. way normal. nbd. ]
Accidents happen, yes. [ peggy polishes off the end corner of her second brownie before sitting back on the sofa -- thoughtful, and just that little bit calmer than she'd been before. ]
But the mansion itself isn't always the safest location. I arrived in the middle of all that mirror mess -- and I can appreciate a desire to 'man the perimeter' so to speak.
[ she stops just short of expressing gratitude as one of the attendees blowing off steam and therefore under time mom's purview. mostly because she's quite certain such gratitude would stick in her throat -- milk or none. ]
[ ray picks up on that, at least. maybe it's something about having already misstepped so horribly during this encounter that emboldens him. he's taken a toolbox to the chest and she's still here. it's worth the shot (and yet another cocky smirk): ]
You're welcome.
[ but the arrogance subsides quickly. he feels like he should confess his intention a little more directly. ]
Honestly? I wasn't worried about more Wonderland incidents. The mirrors' real power lies in their ability to turn us against each other, as far as I've experienced.
Have you heard about last year's mirror crossing? The barrier came down completely, and both sides could mingle almost freely.
[ he pulls at the hem of his shirt, needing movement while he talks about it. this is the reason he reacts so violently when people joke about his mirror, and why he goes overboard and tells friends to shoot the guy on sight. ]
Up until then, my mirror just harassed a friend of mine with writing on her mirror. It was really uhh-- invasive.
[ up until then. and with the barrier down, he was able to harass her more directly. he still doesn't know all the details (they're not for him to know, of course), but that only makes him think the worst. ]
After that, things changed between us. It took awhile to get back to something close to what we had before...
Because of what a man who wasn't you did? Seems a bit -- much. To change things for you.
[ but she speaks from the comfortable position of someone who has never met her own mirror. indeed, her experiences with anyone from that side of the mansion have been oddly comforting. barnes, well, he'd been like the man she'd known in the howlies.
and steve. god, she could almost prefer a man so twisted and wrong that she could hate him -- easier to stomach than a man she loved but couldn't bear to speak to.
of course, there is the other option: she's prodding, goading, looking for sore spots to try and pull on a thread she shouldn't pull. heedless, always, to the sorts of trouble she might cause herself merely in asking. it's entirely possible she knows exactly how flippant she sounds. ]
[ he frowns-- not in anything like anger. it's more akin to consternation, really. his eyes slide downward as he processes peggy's point of view but he comes up relatively empty. ]
I think if someone who looked like you stalked me for months and then tried to kill me, I'd like a little space.
[ still confused, ray thinks he might not understand her perspective at all. he's learning that offering his own helps more anyway. but he also knows how myopic he can be, and he feels his original point slipping away from him. ]
And Chronos knew to go after people his real cares about. Some of those people are children.
[ he nods, and discomfort starts to settle in, finally.
something about the clinical way in which peggy's approaching this makes him start to close up a little. but more than that, he wonders if he should even be talking about something that didn't actually happen to him. he's too clumsy for all this, to get a point across without going through the whole picture. maybe it's ok to skip to the end, to some useful advice. ]
If you kill a mirror on this side, they come back.
[ there'd been so much blood. the least he'd been able to do was clean it up. ]
[ clinical is precisely the word for it. and maybe she should pay better attention to his discomfort, but this isn't any sort of official interrogation. she's got nothing to salvage or save, she decides, and so she all but resists the urge to lean into the conversation. ]
And on the other side? [ she seizes upon the wording.
it's telling. his mirror was killed, was he? maybe by his own hand; maybe by his friend's. and that would also be knowledge worth having. but she betrays her priority when she cuts to this particular chase. ]
[ she shrugs away his concern. she doesn't like the way he worries over the warning -- it reminds her too sharply that in this place death isn't always permanent. and it makes her think that perhaps ray palmer has been here too long if his natural instinct is to consider the prospect of a permanent death the 'odd one out' of the arrangement.
no matter. she got her answer, didn't she? so she can pull back a beat from her hard press. ]
I don't know anything about mine. A blessing, really. I'm in no rush to meet her.
[ normally, being brushed off when he's trying to be helpful would stick in ray's craw. but his defense is one he doesn't like to talk about much. so after he opens his mouth to belabor his point out of habit, he lets the words die and just nods. ]
That's a good policy, honestly. Mine never talked directly to me, so there's that.
I've met two. [ she volunteers this information with a sudden and sharp announcement -- offered after a moment of silence wherein she must have been weighing her options rather carefully. ] Mirrors, that is. One, I confess, duped me from the outset.
[ she rubs the palm of her hand against her chin -- betraying a brief agony. it's not fair to say that barnes's mirror tricked her, really, given the mirror seems more like the man she'd known during the war than the man she's met since arriving here. ]
The other, though? I'd only been here a few days and I knew him for a mirror almost immediately.
[ all she'd had to do was look at steve. listen to him. and she'd known. ]
I've met two. One was Chronos-- which wasn't hard to pick out. The other one was easy, too.
[ leo had been terrifyingly endearing. at first, ray thought they'd probably have been friends in another life. he'd been immediately distinguishable, even if it'd taken ray a moment to shift from leaning on expectation into reality. ]
But it was sort of worse? He was kind, almost sweet. I think I liked him.
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after that, he heads to the corner behind the couch, to a mini fridge. it's probably telling, that he'd rather keep a fridge stocked than simply pull it from the closet, but he makes his way to plop onto the couch with a milk carton in each hand.
once he pulls the corners open and slides one in front of peggy, he reaches for those gluten-free selections and goes to town. ]
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[ milk. not that she's anti-dairy by any stretch but -- well, it's simply not the beverage her thoughts leap to when she thinks of what pairing might work best with a bit of sweet.
but she selects a second brownie. and, all at once, this is beginning to feel remarkably similar to their afternoon by the fountain. peggy hesitates on her feet for a moment longer before deigning to take a seat.
-- and not yet a sip of milk. there are some lines of barbarism even she won't cross with a stranger in the room, and drinking out of the carton might be one of them. might be. she hasn't yet decided. it's still up in the air. ]
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Ooh. More for me.
[ and he reaches right over to steal what miss-too-adult-for-a-classic doesn't want. he's weathered the ribbing and hazing of leonard snart, mick rory, and sara lance. it's only strengthened his resolve to be weird. to be an outsider.
and so he grins and chugs her carton dry. ]
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The polite thing would have been an offer to put the kettle on.
[ except no. the polite thing would have been her graciously accepting his offer of milk and possibly also not bruising his sternum with his own damn tool box but peggy carter never met a line she didn't want to push.
and she damn well knows it when she takes a bite out of her second brownie. ]
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[ he finishes his rudeness and only offers peggy a smile and a shrug that might tap into those 'memories' she's struggling with. ]
The workshop is a do it yourself zone. I mean, anywhere the Legends congregate tends to turn into one anyway. We threw a party at Rip's once. I don't think he knew we were going to...
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I was at that party. [ which might actually be the most shocking reveal of this entire conversation, because it certainly hadn't been her sort of party. she'd attended by accident. mostly. ] But I don't recall seeing you there.
[ she would have remembered, she thinks. ]
is this too much goof for you lmao i feel like i'm hardcore testing your limits lol
like why would he even do that peggy why would he that would be super ridiculous next you're going to say that synergize isn't a word wow ]
I was there, I was just having a little less fun than everyone else.
[ hey did you know that ray palmer doesn't usually get to sport a shit eating grin ]
it's lovely.
so she nods, puffing out a breath as the realization hits, and fills in the blank: ] You were wearing your suit. Fair enough.
[ she can even imagine how being minuscule and easily missed might improve a social function. lord knows she wasn't there having fun in her own right. ]
It didn't strike me as particularly appropriate leisure wear, however.
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Oh, uhh. You'd be surprised. [ time to start stuffing more food in his face. a bite at least gives him a moment to think about how not to get too serious about his personal post-chronos paranoia. ] Besides, I don't sing or drink, and I didn't want to leave our friend Kara all the chaperone duties.
[ super or not, she deserved a buddy to help her keep on lookout. ]
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not singing? well, that's also fair enough. peggy doesn't carry a tune. but not drinking? well! she doesn't ask. ]
You were on picket duty. [ something also easily deduced; peggy drives straight for it. the suit wasn't for leisure at all and she can remember rip's injury when she'd first met him. ]
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Yeah, I mean. Loud music, lots of drunk people. They all needed to blow off steam, but accidents happen, so.
[ time mom was on duty. totally chill. way normal. nbd. ]
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But the mansion itself isn't always the safest location. I arrived in the middle of all that mirror mess -- and I can appreciate a desire to 'man the perimeter' so to speak.
[ she stops just short of expressing gratitude as one of the attendees blowing off steam and therefore under time mom's purview. mostly because she's quite certain such gratitude would stick in her throat -- milk or none. ]
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You're welcome.
[ but the arrogance subsides quickly. he feels like he should confess his intention a little more directly. ]
Honestly? I wasn't worried about more Wonderland incidents. The mirrors' real power lies in their ability to turn us against each other, as far as I've experienced.
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I don't imagine you're much prepared to share an example of that power.
[ which is her way of not outright asking him to share one, although it leaves plenty space for him to correct her.
there are some instances where she courts the possibility of being proven wrong. ]
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[ he pulls at the hem of his shirt, needing movement while he talks about it. this is the reason he reacts so violently when people joke about his mirror, and why he goes overboard and tells friends to shoot the guy on sight. ]
Up until then, my mirror just harassed a friend of mine with writing on her mirror. It was really uhh-- invasive.
[ up until then. and with the barrier down, he was able to harass her more directly. he still doesn't know all the details (they're not for him to know, of course), but that only makes him think the worst. ]
After that, things changed between us. It took awhile to get back to something close to what we had before...
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[ but she speaks from the comfortable position of someone who has never met her own mirror. indeed, her experiences with anyone from that side of the mansion have been oddly comforting. barnes, well, he'd been like the man she'd known in the howlies.
and steve. god, she could almost prefer a man so twisted and wrong that she could hate him -- easier to stomach than a man she loved but couldn't bear to speak to.
of course, there is the other option: she's prodding, goading, looking for sore spots to try and pull on a thread she shouldn't pull. heedless, always, to the sorts of trouble she might cause herself merely in asking. it's entirely possible she knows exactly how flippant she sounds. ]
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I think if someone who looked like you stalked me for months and then tried to kill me, I'd like a little space.
[ still confused, ray thinks he might not understand her perspective at all. he's learning that offering his own helps more anyway. but he also knows how myopic he can be, and he feels his original point slipping away from him. ]
And Chronos knew to go after people his real cares about. Some of those people are children.
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(or perhaps peggy hasn't been quite burnt enough by the mirrors. or, perhaps, a great deal many things.)
she sits back on the sofa with her legs crossed at the ankles. comfortable, but nevertheless composed. ]
Is that what yours did? [ she ignores 'chronos' for the time being. ] Stalked someone? Your friend?
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something about the clinical way in which peggy's approaching this makes him start to close up a little. but more than that, he wonders if he should even be talking about something that didn't actually happen to him. he's too clumsy for all this, to get a point across without going through the whole picture. maybe it's ok to skip to the end, to some useful advice. ]
If you kill a mirror on this side, they come back.
[ there'd been so much blood. the least he'd been able to do was clean it up. ]
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And on the other side? [ she seizes upon the wording.
it's telling. his mirror was killed, was he? maybe by his own hand; maybe by his friend's. and that would also be knowledge worth having. but she betrays her priority when she cuts to this particular chase. ]
If killed over there, do they stay dead?
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Peggy, if anyone dies over there, it's permanent.
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[ she shrugs away his concern. she doesn't like the way he worries over the warning -- it reminds her too sharply that in this place death isn't always permanent. and it makes her think that perhaps ray palmer has been here too long if his natural instinct is to consider the prospect of a permanent death the 'odd one out' of the arrangement.
no matter. she got her answer, didn't she? so she can pull back a beat from her hard press. ]
I don't know anything about mine. A blessing, really. I'm in no rush to meet her.
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That's a good policy, honestly. Mine never talked directly to me, so there's that.
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[ she rubs the palm of her hand against her chin -- betraying a brief agony. it's not fair to say that barnes's mirror tricked her, really, given the mirror seems more like the man she'd known during the war than the man she's met since arriving here. ]
The other, though? I'd only been here a few days and I knew him for a mirror almost immediately.
[ all she'd had to do was look at steve. listen to him. and she'd known. ]
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[ leo had been terrifyingly endearing. at first, ray thought they'd probably have been friends in another life. he'd been immediately distinguishable, even if it'd taken ray a moment to shift from leaning on expectation into reality. ]
But it was sort of worse? He was kind, almost sweet. I think I liked him.
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