Entry tags:

let the only sound be the overflow

WHO: Stella Gibson
WHERE: The fountain/Peggy and Stella's house/the woods
WHEN: 13th-14th March; Stella disappeared from the village on the 10th and returned on the 13th.
OPEN TO: Two locked sections and one open section, all labeled below
WARNINGS: Spoilers for series 3 of The Fall. Mentions of male-on-female violence, suicide, possibly more — will update as needed.

take what the water gave me

13th march ; the fountain ; locked to Kate Kelly

On one early morning, Stella Gibson vanishes. At first, it might be simple enough to excuse as a jaunt into the woods or over to the other village, which she's done before; but as several days go by, it becomes clearer something else is going on. Those who are close to her, or who at least know her routines, come to realize she's actually, truly gone.

On the fourth day, however, there's movement in the fountain, a stirring in the water and the splash of someone surfacing from the depths. For a long, breathless moment, Stella is totally, completely disoriented. Five minutes ago, she was cleaning out her office at the Down Serious Crime Suite after the total collapse of her investigation, and the leap of logic required to take her from there to a fountain in the middle of nowhere in that space of time is nothing less than impossible. There's a second of genuine panic as she doesn't recognize her surroundings or the circumstances that brought her here or any of it— and then it comes back to her all at once, the reorientation of a person waking up in an unfamiliar place suddenly remembering where she is and what brought her here, and oh, fuck.

Stella swims over to the side of the fountain and just... stops, lays her arm on the broad stone rim and puts her head down on it. That brief moment of panic had been the first thing she'd really felt in days — although has it really been that long? It seems like she hasn't seen the village for weeks, but for all she knows it's been no time at all here. It's too much for her to try to sort through right now. Somewhere underneath the numb haze she's been in since Paul Spector committed suicide is a roiling torrent of emotion — fury, grief, exhaustion — that she knows she has to let herself feel sooner or later, but right now she can't deal with any of it.

She hasn't got out of the fountain yet, partly because the water at least is something reassuring, familiar, and partly because she's working up the energy to haul herself out when her left side is a mess of half-healed bruises and even swimming up to the surface had pulled at sore muscles. She knows her face is not any better, and she's probably going to get concerned questions, but there's not a lot that can be done about that. Nothing except time will heal the marks of one of the last things Spector did before he killed himself, his one and only attempt at revenge taken out on the woman who forced him to show his true colors beyond a shadow of a doubt.

There's the sound of footsteps nearby, and Stella finally picks her head up from where she'd been resting it on her arm. "I'm fine," she manages, before she even sees who it is. The words ring hollow, of course. She's not fine, and she knows it's obvious that she's not, but the reflexive attempt to brush off any impending offers of help had come out anyway.

pockets full of stones

13th march ; house 13 ; locked to Peggy Carter

Eventually, later in the day, she goes back home. Home is somewhat of a misnomer, because home is London, and fuck she just wants to be back in her own flat in Crouch End so badly she can taste it — but she's not been allowed that luxury. Instead she's been yanked back here, where the observers can continue whatever ridiculous fucking game they've been playing with her and the other people trapped in this place. It's just adding insult to injury, and yet she doesn't even have the wherewithal to be angry about it right now.

But the house she shares with Peggy is the closest thing she's got to a home here, and at the moment she needs even this small familiarity. She comes through the front door and just stops for several moments in the front hall, looking around her. Everything is more or less in the same place it was when she'd left. She goes into the living room, and only then calls out for her housemate.

"Peggy?" She's not ready for this. She isn't. Unlike Kate, who isn't quite there yet, Peggy is a friend, and Stella's sole reliable source of mental and emotional support in the village more or less since she first arrived. She's going to have been worried that Stella was gone for good, and Stella truly doesn't know if she can cope.

She's going to try, she has to, but she can already feel something awful and vulnerable bubbling up to the surface, pushing through the cracks already forming in the superficial emotionless facade she's been living in since the Spector investigation fell to pieces. Years of practice at keeping herself together when everyone else around her is falling apart are the only thing allowing her to keep her tenuous grip on self-control; how long that will last is another question entirely.

and the ships are left to rust

14th march ; the woods ; open

There comes a point where Stella can't stay cooped up indoors any longer. Since the previous afternoon she's spent most of her time in bed, eating only when she has to, and more or less keeping to herself — but it's not good for her, she knows it's not. The fresh air will help, as will some semblance of her old routine. Do normal things when you've had a bad shock; that's what a therapist told her once, when she was young and green and new to CID, after she'd coped badly with her first time seeing an ugly murder scene. Do normal things and eventually some sense of normalcy will reassert itself.

She does. She takes the basket she's been using to collect edible plants from the woods, herbs and mushrooms and berries, and spends a good hour or so doing just that. For a woman who had absolutely zero wilderness survival skills when she'd first got here, Stella has got fairly good at marking out which ones can be eaten and which she should avoid; another skill to add to her list. Eventually she has a whole basket full, but instead of going right back to the house, she decides just to sit for a few moments, propped against a sturdy tree tall and stout enough to be decades old. The weather is pleasant after the bitter chill of winter, and it's quiet here save for the wind in the trees and the sounds of little forest animals going about their business, and she doesn't really have to think about anything.

Stella hears the rustle of footsteps and looks over. Her brows arch a little, but she can't quite manage a smile, even a small one. "There's a whole thicket of blackberries just over there," she suggests, turning her head a bit in the direction she means, "if you're looking for something." It's spring, or it must be, more or less. Things are growing again. She ought to take comfort in that.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Peggy is reaching forward, as if she needs to prove to herself that Stella is really here, which turns into a firm cup of her cheek, fingers brushing at her pulse, a touch to her hair. They're little things, but they're a reassurance that Stella came back, she didn't just leave the way that so many others have.

"Something happened," is Peggy's dark response, because she doesn't care how bad it looks, what she's missing is the explanation as to how it happened and she does hope that Stella doesn't think she's going to get away without explaining that.

Reaching out, she pulls Stella into an embrace, still not a hugger, but certain times can be made to allow for exceptions and she believes this one is absolutely one of them. Closing her eyes, she indulges in this moment for a few seconds, simply because she can. Then, when she's given in to her own selfishness for long enough, she eases back. "Let's go sit? Then you can tell me what happened."

Stella isn't fragile enough to crumble at a single gentle touch, even though right now she feels like she is. She doesn't react when Peggy touches her face, not even to pull away from the contact or brush her fingers away; and when the other woman reaches out to embrace her, uncharacteristically, she can't even return the gesture properly. If she does, or if she lets the hug last longer than a few seconds, she feels like she's going to start crying, and she wants to hold off on that as long as she possibly can. She manages only to lift a hand to Peggy's upper arm, just barely touching, before they draw apart. Underneath everything, Stella is only human, and desperately needs to be held right now, but allowing herself to acknowledge that is more difficult than maybe it should be.

She follows after, sitting on the sofa, moving a little gingerly in a way that might suggest she has more injuries than just the visible ones. Stella does not really want to talk about what happened. If she had her way the only people who would know about any of this would be the other officers from the task force — but she owes Peggy this much, maybe, after everything, and it helps that she has already told her part of the story, the part that ended with Spector being shot in the forest.

There's a long pause as Stella collects herself, decides how to begin. "I told you about Paul Spector," she starts, "the killer I was hunting before I came here. I think I told you last I'd seen him, he was bleeding to death. Shot in the abdomen." This has nothing to do with her own injuries, but there's a story that leads there first.

"He was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery that saved his life, but when he regained consciousness we were told he was suffering from severe post-traumatic amnesia, that he didn't remember any of the crimes he'd been accused of having committed — that in fact he couldn't recall anything that had happened in the last six years. He'd lost over half his blood volume in the shooting, and it made equal sense for him to be telling the truth as it did for him to be falsifying his symptoms for his own benefit — so we had to take his claims seriously."

As much as Stella had believed strongly, and still believes, that Spector's amnesia was faked, she's the one who had had to convince Public Prosecutions not to assume he was lying. Too many mistakes in otherwise good policing are caused by making assumptions based on one's own belief or desire to believe that what's happening is what should be happening.

Peggy's watchful of everything, making sure that if she can somehow alleviate Stella's pain or make this easier that she's able to. She's not intending to take her eyes off of Stella while she explains any of this and is cautious that she's cataloging precisely the symptoms that Stella seems to be experiencing.

When Stella tells her about the amnesia, Peggy feels a touch surprised at how vehement her reaction is. She doesn't believe it, utterly doesn't, and she's angry that this could somehow actually be a case that he could somehow be won by this. "You can't be serious," she says, giving Stella a look of disbelief, though she knows she doesn't have to convince the other woman.

"Isn't there some way of testing that, to prove that he's lying?" Because to her, there's no other possibility.

There's really nothing Peggy can do to help with the pain — unless she's got a stash of painkillers Stella doesn't know about, but they're rather short on those in the village, at least the kind that would do any good. Stella's alert and lucid at any rate, though she seems to be favoring her left side.

"Mm. There's a sort of machine that uses X-rays to take pictures of the brain, which was one of the first things the doctors tried after Spector woke up — to see if it was possible he had any obvious brain damage. Nothing appeared on the scan, but it was certainly possible the trauma of being shot in itself could have caused the memory loss." She's matter-of-fact, but it's clear even as she says it that she doesn't believe it. The doctors hadn't. Even Doctor Larsen had concluded in the end that Spector was malingering, absent any lasting physical damage to the brain from the blood loss.

"In any case, Spector had to be examined in a clinical setting to determine if he was fit to stand trial — which meant we needed to collect as much evidence as possible to support our case against him. One of the officers on my task force stumbled across a murder committed in London ten years prior, before the time period of Spector's alleged memory loss — a young woman, roughly matching Spector's victim type. The individual serving time for that murder was a man who had previously been in a children's home with Spector at the age of ten."

There's a visible pause. Stella won't talk about Gortnacul House, or the horrors she knows were committed there, and she certainly doesn't believe that anything that happened to Spector as a child excuses his behavior as an adult — but thinking about it still makes her stomach twist, and she has to take a moment before she can continue on.

"We'd had no idea of Spector's whereabouts during the time frame of the murder, but we had some proof he'd been with the victim and the alleged murderer on the night the crime took place. As it turned out, the man in prison, David Alvarez, took the blame in order to repay Spector for something he'd done for him as a child, and the real perpetrator had been Spector all along."

There's a terribly old-fashioned part of Peggy that simply thinks that using trauma as an excuse for losing your memory is ridiculous, but perhaps that's somewhat self-informed because she's been punctured for a rebar through her body and she'd held onto her memory through that particularly traumatic incident.

Then again, it doesn't seem as though she needs to convince Stella of any of this, so she keeps her lips pressed together and her mouth shut.

"This man of yours sounds like the personification of some very dark things," Peggy says, and she's been in the midst of a war trying to stop people from destroying the world. Yet, the private and almost intimate darkness of this one man is almost more chilling to her, simply because of how it could happen to anyone and with complete chaos and no warning.

"He was," Stella agrees, plain and simply. "It might seem quite extraordinary how... normal he could seem if you didn't know any better. A charming, helpful, intelligent, kind family man — until you looked a bit closer and realized underneath the mask was a violent, narcissistic sadist."

She doesn't need to go into all the details. The way Spector treated women like objects, like dolls to play with; the numerous journals he kept detailing women he stalked; the psychopathic delusions and fantasies. "During his initial confession, it seemed he recalled quite clearly the elaborate details of the crimes he committed, and he had a history of lying for his own benefit, so I was convinced he was falsifying the symptoms of amnesia, and during an interview I pushed him quite hard about it."

(Drop the charade. Own your confession. Have the courage of your convictions and admit that you remember it all.)

"When I and the officer with me were preparing to leave the interview room at that point in order to allow Spector to consult with his solicitor, Spector attacked me." And Stella stops, for a few seconds, her breath catching a little because the memory of that moment is so close and she still remembers his fist in her face, remembers collapsing to the floor only for Spector to kick her in the ribs, remembers being blindly terrified for her very life. Her composure falters a little, her hands tightening on each other in her lap, and she has to swallow hard to clear her throat.

"That's why the bruises," she says finally, the volume of her voice dropping to something hushed, barely louder than a whisper.

"Oh, Stella." Peggy's not sure that she has other words for this, but she can feel the way the rage simmers just under the surface and if Peggy were in a room with that man, knowing this, she might have tapped into some of Thompson's aggression with their suspects if given the opportunity to make things right.

And yet, here they are. She's helpless to do anything other than sympathise and be so relieved to have Stella back with her. "I only wish that I could do more for you," she admits, reaching out to gently touch the barest press of fingertips against Stella's cheek, as softly as she can, almost like she's testing that she's still here and still fine.

"What happened to him?" she asks, because she has to believe in her heart that justice was served.

"He meant to kill me. I could feel it." She can't even describe to Peggy what it had been like, to have the full magnitude of Spector's nearly inhuman rage targeted at her. "I know how to defend myself. I'm not helpless. But he caught me off guard." She breathes out, shakily. "One of my officers got his arm broken trying to protect me."

When Peggy reaches up to touch her face, Stella doesn't flinch away; after a moment she catches her hand in hers, just lightly. Maybe to reassure Peggy, maybe to ground herself in the here and now instead of the recent past; she doesn't know. There's nothing Peggy can do, nothing that will fix this. Only time can do that. Stella's been knocked down before, and she's got back up every time, but this — this might take her a little longer than the rest.

"He's dead," Stella says, flatly, and underneath those two words she can feel the fury building, the grief and the hurt. She pulls in a deep breath. "He committed suicide the next night. Had another patient at the clinic he was in create a distraction so he could slip away and hang himself."

She's not sorry that Spector's dead, as such. When the anger subsides, she'll feel a certain relief that he's no longer alive, that he can't hurt anyone anymore. It's the injustice of all of it that hits her like a punch in the gut. Stella can feel her eyes starting to fill with tears and, fuck, she doesn't want to cry in front of Peggy, but she may not be able to stop herself.

"I can't tell you," she says, "how badly I wanted him in prison. How badly I wanted him to pay for hurting those women. Not just the women he killed — he kidnapped his ex-girlfriend and left her to die in the boot of her own car because she talked to us. I mean, for fuck's sake," her voice rises, breaks a little, "his wife tried to kill herself and their two children because she couldn't stand the thought of having them grow up knowing their daddy was a serial murderer."

They're raw, terrible details she doesn't really mean to spill, but the anger is breaking through the numbness now. Stella realizes suddenly her face is wet, that she'd started crying somewhere in the middle of all that — not weeping or sobbing, just tears falling as the buildup of emotion overwhelms her.

"Now there's no one to hold responsible." She breathes in once, twice, deep shuddering breaths, and wipes at her eyes. There's no one left to pay for Fiona Gallagher, for Alice Monroe, for Sarah Kay, for Annie and Joe Brawley, for Rose Stagg, for Sally Ann Spector, for little Olivia and Liam. Stella doesn't say I failed out loud, but she feels it underneath everything, and maybe that's the worst of all.

Peggy doesn't let go, only softens her touch a little so that Stella both knows that she's there to support her, but can also decide to move her hand off, if she so chooses. "Suicide?" The word is a shock and a surprise coming off her lips, and she's sure that Stella feels every bit as annoyed and enraged as Peggy does in this moment.

People like that should have to pay for their crimes. They should be responsible for them, yet for Spector to be able to do such a thing is a terrible injustice and while Peggy is acquainted with plenty of them herself, she still finds her rage boiling up. "There is something you can do, that we all can," she insists, gently brushing the tears from Stella's cheeks.

"We make it so that there isn't another one," she says, with the fierce determination she truly feels. "We do whatever it takes to stop it happening again."

The tears are gone almost as quickly as they came, as Stella forces her self-control to reassert itself. The lapse is a bit embarrassing, but she doesn't apologize or otherwise call attention to it; and she doesn't so much brush away Peggy's hands, but she does take one of them in her own, stopping her from touching but at the same time needing that small point of connection right now. She doesn't often, but quite frankly — quite frankly, she's just been through shit and she's a human being, not an automaton. She's allowed to feel a bit shattered about this, and she's allowed to want someone else's touch once in a while, even if it's just something chaste like this.

"I've been trying to stop men from hurting women for more than fifteen years," she points out, sounding suddenly very tired. Normally, Stella would have all the same determination Peggy has, if not more, but she feels scraped raw right now.

"There's always going to be another person like Paul Spector. It's only—" She stops, just to take a deep breath and let it out. "We made too many mistakes. Things happened that shouldn't have. I ought to have been more careful."

At the same time, how the fuck was she supposed to know Spector meant to kill himself? She's played that over and over in her head, trying to work out what she could have done differently, but — there's nothing.

"You can't live in the past," Peggy says, and now she's speaking from the experience of having something that's consumed her for so long because she's allowed it to. She knows that this Spector is a terrible man and an awful human being, but watching it eat up Stella isn't something that she likes to watch.

She deserves so much better. "So next time, you will be more careful, you'll be able to put him away. Maybe they won't stop, but I know that neither will you," Peggy says, blunt and fierce in her determination and her belief in what Stella is capable of.

"You can tell me I'm wrong, but I'm not," she informs her, with a casual shrug. "I know I'm right."

This is why, after everything, she's come to trust Peggy as much as she trusts any of the friends she's known for years back home. She needs this — the reality check, the reminder of what's important. Stella knows she's capable, strong, but it's one thing to know it and another thing to hear it from someone close to her, especially because right now she doesn't feel strong. She feels fragile, heartbroken in the sense that she was so sure Spector was going to see justice, only to have her certainty dashed to pieces like so much broken glass.

Peggy's stubborn belief in her, though — it's almost enough to make her start crying again, with the mess her emotional state is right now, though mercifully she's able to close her eyes and take a couple of deep breaths to get herself under control before that happens. She looks back up at Peggy, manages the very tiniest of smiles, and squeezes the other woman's hand where she's still holding it in hers.

"Thank you," she says, a whisper really, but sincere. She sighs, and leans her head against the back of the sofa, trying to relax a little after she's been holding herself strung so tight for — well, before this, maybe since the whole trial business started and the solicitor Spector had retained for his defense had put her so on edge. She's still exhausted, and she still needs time to grieve, honestly, but there are other needs that are a bit more immediate.

"I think I could use a hot bath, and possibly a week's worth of sleep." The last bit is only sort of a joke. Stella hadn't slept properly during the investigation at all, not only over the course of the last few days. The unfortunate thing is she's not likely to sleep properly for a while yet, given she can't sleep on her left side and she may very well have nightmares — from stress, and from what Spector did to her.

"Well, it might take me a while, but I can drag in enough hot water for the bath, but I think we ought to be focusing on the latter part of that," Peggy says, with a critical look at Stella, as she's forming a plan in her mind. She's not intending to allow Stella to go off and sleep on her own, both because she wants to provide company and the support that Peggy would want (but never ask for) after something like this.

Moving to her feet, she extends both hands out to Stella with an expectant nod of her head. "Right, then, on your feet, up you come. We can try for at least a half's week of sleep," she bargains. "And I'm coming with you." That's the non-negotiable part and Peggy makes sure that her voice is firm as she says it.

Stella isn't used to being told what to do, but all the same she lets Peggy take her hands and draw her to her feet — carefully, wincing a little bit as the movement pulls at bruised muscles in her side. She hears the first bit, and knows she'll be lucky to get a whole night's worth of uninterrupted sleep, really; but then the I'm coming with you hits her and she looks at Peggy, arches her brows.

"I don't think that's really necessary," she says, but there's so little fight in her tone it sounds more like are you sure? than I'd rather not. She knows Peggy doesn't mean anything more than platonic by it, that she only means to sleep with her in the literal sense, or maybe just to keep an eye on her while she rests — and it's been a long time since anyone just shared a bed with her. Long enough that thinking of this feels a little awkward.

But at the same time, even at home, Stella sometimes found herself tired of sleeping alone. And maybe right now she could use the comfort, even if she won't admit to it.

"I'm sorry, did you think that was a question?" She's not usually so blunt and firm with Stella, but in this case, she's going to be, because there's no way that she intends to let the other woman go sleep on her own after such a long day. "I'm going to lie there and if you want to use some of the warmth that I can provide, or the comfort, so be it."

"You're not getting away from me," she points out, because that's the sticking point that she thinks Stella ought to be aware of. "I know you'd do the same for me," is added after, a steady knowledge and trust in the other woman.

Peggy's bluntness startles her into silence, or else she'd probably be putting up a fight here. The truth is that she would do the same if their circumstances were reversed, but if Peggy was the one understandably upset and exhausted after a series of traumatic events, Stella wouldn't think of that as a weakness. She doesn't apply the same standards to herself. Right now she feels vulnerable, and she doesn't want to look weak, or like she needs someone else's support just to get by—

But she's tired. She's so fucking tired, and not just physically. There are excuses she could make, especially since she has nightmares when she's under a lot of stress and she expects sleep isn't going to be kind to her no matter how much she needs to rest, but when she tries to articulate them she realizes they sound exactly like what they are — excuses. She looks for a moment like she's going to say something, but then the words just seem to drain out of her and she ends up mutely leading Peggy in the direction of her bedroom.

Everything is just where it was when she left, all her clothes neatly folded in the dresser, her bed with the sunflower quilt she got for Christmas just after she first arrived because it's cheerful enough to keep her from feeling utterly despondent on the worst days here. Suddenly she realizes how much she didn't want to come back here, the bars closing on the cage again. Stella swallows hard, takes the rising swell of despair and shoves it into a box in the back of her mind where it can't get to her right now, compartmentalizing it in a way she can't yet do with her feelings about the collapse of her investigation.

"I ought to change into something else," she says, and goes to her dresser to fetch the white sleeveless top and blue scrub trousers that are what she wears for pajamas here; she decided a while ago that she probably can't get away with sleeping in just her knickers, with someone else in the house, and until the observers decide to gift her something proper to sleep in she's making do with this. She is not precisely concerned about Peggy seeing her undress, as such; she barely has any body shyness and there's nothing here the other woman won't have seen on herself. But at the same time — she's bruised all down her left side, uglier than the ones on her face, and Peggy doesn't need to see that.

Edited 2018-04-04 11:44 (UTC)

Peggy's sure that she's going to run into some sort of pushback, but she's rather pleased when Stella bristles a little, but clearly isn't about to fight with her on this point. She follows along into the bedroom, though once she's there, she absolutely begins to think that perhaps she's intruding. Still, she's too stubborn to turn around and leave, which is why she stands her ground and only turns a little in order to give Stella some privacy.

She should go and change herself, she knows, but she wants to make sure that Stella doesn't intend to run away and bolt in the next few moments. After all, they've come quite a long way, but she also understands what it's like for a woman to feel like she can't be weak.

"Take your time, once you're settled, I'll go fetch something myself," she says, making it very clear that she's not going to leave until Stella is settled.

Stella feels less intruded upon than she would if this were her bedroom in her flat back in London. There is very little in here that's personal, intimate. Certainly these are her things, as far as that goes, but nothing that gives away very much about herself. Maybe the choice of that particular quilt to cover the bed instead of something plainer, but that's about all.

She changes clothes as quickly as she can manage — and fuck, it still hurts to lift her arms over her head, so that she has to bite back a noise when she pulls on the white vest top.

"I'm not about to run off," she tells Peggy as she moves past her to sit down on the edge of the bed. It's the closest thing to a tease that she can manage. Stella knows good and well she isn't the only one of the two of them who's tried to escape when the other's back is turned, but she's not going anywhere quickly any time soon, either.

"No? Because I have the feeling that I would, in your place," Peggy says with the sureness of a woman who's not sure how to deal with this sort of affection and support. She tolerates it, but she's never known exactly how to cope with it, so to be on the other side of things is a strange thing.

She leaves only briefly in order to change into her own pajamas, settling onto the other side of the bed. "Colleen and I would have to share like this when our shifts didn't always mirror one another," she admits, speaking about her for the first time. "She was my roommate in New York," Peggy says fondly. "Lovely girl, terribly prone to illness."

Stella doesn't really know how to cope with it either. She's never let herself get used to it enough to know how to cope with it. The list of people she's close enough to at home that she would even allow to approach anything like this is small enough to count on one hand, and not on all five fingers of that hand. She's been mostly alone since before she was even eighteen, and mostly by choice.

But running away from it strikes her as silly, even cowardly, and possibly, given her injuries, unwise. Stella gives Peggy a dry look, but doesn't otherwise respond to that, focused on trying to get herself into a position that's something resembling comfortable. She's arranged things so she can lay on her right side or on her back, with a pillow propped under her shoulders to sit her up a little, which should in theory help with some of the swelling in her face.

The conversation takes more of a turn toward the personal, and — Stella's not really good at this, at sharing; even if the object of discussion isn't anything extraordinarily intimate, it feels awkward. But then she thinks back to that night at Belfast General, and Doctor O'Donnell keeping her awake by asking her questions, random superficial things like whether she could play an instrument or what her favorite season was. She'd allowed it because she'd been so tired and in pain and — as much as she would have never admitted it aloud — so in need of someone who would be kind to her without expecting anything in return, and she's still feeling some of that now. And she trusts Peggy, she does. There's no one else in the village she trusts more.

"Before this place," she says, "I hadn't had any sort of housemate in... Jesus, more than twenty years. Not since university." There's a slight twitch of her mouth as she clarifies, "Cambridge."

A thoughtful pause. "One of my flatmates was the reason I decided to go into policing." There's a story there, but it's sort of a sad one, and unless Peggy asks, she's not in any rush to elaborate.

Peggy isn't sure if it makes her the special exception that she's managed to get Stella to do something that she hasn't done in years, but there's a sense of pride in her, even though she's not going to out and out be victorious about such things. Still, there seems to be a story to it. Even Peggy, who values her independence fiercely, can't imagine twenty years without that sort of contact.

"Were they already a policewoman?" she asks, assuming it had been another woman. "Or is this the opposite effect where you went into policing because they were a poor example and you wanted to do something about it?"

Peggy's assumption is correct; Stella doesn't think she could bring herself to share living space with a man, at least not for any extended length of time. Men can be colleagues, temporary bed partners, and possibly even friends under the absolute right circumstances, but living together is an entirely different issue and one she's never even seriously considered.

"Neither," she says. "She was my age — about nineteen — and studying maths. Beautiful, academically brilliant. Unfortunately, she had, at the time, awful taste in boyfriends. The sort to throw herself wholeheartedly into a relationship with any man who took an interest in her — and there were quite a lot." She is trying not to sound disparaging, because she'd liked Caroline a great deal, but at the same time she recognizes the woman had had a critical deficit in decision-making when it had come to her romantic relationships, a flaw she herself has strenuously tried to avoid developing.

"One evening she came home covered in bruises. She'd been over at her boyfriend's flat; they'd got drunk, had an argument, and he decided the best way to resolve the thing was to beat her within an inch of her life. I drove her to hospital that night, then the police station the next morning after she'd had a chance to sober up. They brought in the boyfriend, and he spun some sort of fantasy about how she'd fallen down the stairs outside his flat and that was where she'd come by the bruises."

Stella's face is very still, the sort of stillness that speaks of holding back anger. Telling this story all these years later still pisses her off, because it's so symptomatic of everything that's still wrong with policing in specific and with society in general. "There'd been no witnesses, it was her word against his. He got off scot-free. Later we found out his older brother was a police officer — so naturally they'd thought there was no way the younger brother could be anything but a model citizen."

She scoffs, just a huff of annoyed breath. There's a pause, and then she adds, "I'd been interested in women's rights and welfare for some time. I suppose at that point I thought that if the police officers we had — if men weren't going to stand up for female victims, then someone ought to.

"After I finished my first degree, I was a special for a couple of years," she says, referring to the Special Constabulary, the volunteer arm of the Metropolitan Police. "I joined the force full-time when I was twenty-four, and CID at twenty-six."

Peggy understands almost instantly where the desire had come from, because as soon as the word 'bruises' happens, Peggy herself can feel a tightening, a feeling that she knows all too well that means that if she were in a similar situation, she would have been quick to also want to do something about it.

"That's terrible," she murmurs, her words hushed as she adjusts with the pillows and the blankets, thinking that after everything, this is the sort of intimate story that shouldn't leave a room. "I'm glad that it drove you to do something about it, even if the whole thing is awful and depressing," she says.

"It was 1947 for me," she points out, "I'd thought that just maybe, the rights of women would be somewhat better by your time, but apparently, it seems I'm doomed to be disappointed."

"I'm sorry I don't have better news for you," Stella says, genuinely. "Certainly we've made strides in more than sixty years, but — well. I was a police constable in 1993. Half of my colleagues were middle-aged men who were still getting used to thinking of female officers as officers and not tea ladies."

If a senior officer had ever asked her to fetch his tea, she probably wouldn't have been able to keep herself from telling him to fetch it himself, and that would have been the end of her career, or near enough to it. Fortunately she'd never been subject to that particular indignity, but the level of sexism she'd still had to put up with then had been quite enough as it was. There's something about an attractive, confident woman that has always elicited particular emotions from men, that combination of fear and desire that, quite frankly, Stella hates. It turns all too easily into loathing, and into uglier feelings still.

"Caroline turned out all right, at least. My flatmate," she clarifies. "Last I heard she was married with three children. I suppose she must be happy." There's the tone in her voice of someone who can't imagine being happy in a long-term relationship, let alone marriage; she's trying to suppress it, but it still shows through. "I haven't spoken to her... in six years, I think. Not since I made chief inspector."

"It's disappointing, but I'd hardly put all the blame on you," Peggy quips, giving her a soft smile, seeing as she knows perfectly well that it's hardly Stella's work alone to make the world a better place, even if at the same time Peggy's sure that Stella does more than her fair share.

She feels her jaw tense a little at the 'tea lady' comment, because she'd been that and the lunch girl and every other demeaning role they had in the office for her.

"That's lovely to hear," Peggy says, "for someone who wants that. Ever since my failed engagement, I put all those thoughts aside. Apart from the late night thoughts that I could never escape. Silly dreams, those," she writes off, making herself comfortable as she tugs the sheets up.

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