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WHO: Peggy Carter
WHERE: The Carter-Gibson Residence
WHEN: May 3
OPEN TO: Stella Gibson
WARNINGS: n/a
STATUS: Open

Peggy feels as if she's lived a year in the last week and a half. In the thick of things, her attention had been wholly fixed on crisis management and coping with the issue at hand. Finally, when things calmed and no one's life had been taken (though several injuries to be noted, including Sam), Peggy felt like she could honestly breathe. She was sore and her head ached every day, as if with the awareness that this place could only get worse.

For the last few days, Peggy has done nothing but rest and sleep, staying indoors for the most part other than visiting the hospital. She barely does more than don her robe and sip at her tea and the fish she's been storing, aware that she ought to do something, but she can't. Her mind is constantly working through alternatives that worry her, including the notion that it might not have gone so smoothly. Beyond that, she truly worries about the future.

What happens now? How will Credence feel? Peggy makes a note to go and visit him, but standing here in the kitchen with a cup of tea, she's caught frowning because she has absolutely no idea what to do when it comes to something like this. She's stuck here, now, even as she hears movement near her and realizes that she hasn't moved in some time.

"Stella," Peggy murmurs, catching the other woman in the corner of her eye. "How are you?"

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She hasn't, partly because it simply hasn't come up and partly because she hadn't felt the need to discuss it. Still, she's never really minded talking about her work, especially as it's such a large, public aspect of her life, or at least had been at home, and the question is an easy one to answer.

"His name was Paul Spector," she says, in the tone of a woman used to hearing and saying that name, though this is the first she's spoken of him in months. "If you'd simply met him on the street I doubt you'd have known he was anything but a charming, likeable man. A husband, a father of two young children, who worked during the day as a bereavement counselor. The last person most people would suspect."

Of course, Stella knows all too well that these sorts of men often appear to be this way: kind, helpful, unassuming. It's all a facade, but it takes a practiced investigator to break through the affable mask.

"He had a particular victim type: dark-haired white women in their thirties, professional, educated, attractive." She's not quite looking at Peggy as she speaks, uncomfortably aware as she says the words that the other woman is perilously close to matching that profile; she's thought that for months. "He'd stalk them, break into their houses, steal items of underwear or jewelry, then return later to kill them."

She doesn't go into more detail, although she's spent far too long looking at Spector's crime scenes and knows all too well what he preferred to do with the dead women after the fact — but she doesn't want to disturb Peggy unnecessarily, so unless she asks, Stella will keep some of those details to herself.

"We finally identified him because he made a mistake. Otherwise I think things would have gone on for months longer."

While Peggy feels as if she ought to be taking notes, this isn't the most pressing case they have to solve. Beyond that, she also knows that if this Paul Spector were to arrive here, Peggy is sure that Stella would instantly warn her. Listening to the type, she can't help but raise her brow, aware that she fits that profile in all ways but age. That said, she also would like to see him try, because she's been attacked in her home before and has handily dealt with all of them.

Of course, people had been hurt in those cases, too. Some had even died. She tries to shake the memory of Colleen, knowing that she's finally moving on from that by living with Stella. "What mistake?" she asks, keen to learn more about the detective side of policework. The SSR required some of that, but hardly in the conventional ways.

"He tried to murder a fourth woman," Stella says, "but he didn't prepare well enough. He rushed things. The woman's brother was visiting her at her flat the night Spector broke in; he interrupted Spector in the midst of attempting to strangle his sister and tried to defend her. Spector stabbed him to death with a pair of decorating shears, then fled the scene. He attempted to dispose of the murder weapon by dropping it in the river a short distance away."

She relates all this calmly, almost passionless, like a woman reading from a history book instead of recounting events that directly involved her. Stella's used to having to keep herself at a fair emotional distance from these things, but it's hard not to feel a slight sense of personal responsibility. Like she ought to have caught him sooner. She's not one to beat herself up or wallow in guilt over these things, but the feeling is still there.

"He certainly wasn't stupid. I'd always believed he had some knowledge of criminal investigation and forensic procedures, and I think he crossed near the river on purpose; he anticipated we'd use human scent dogs and reacted accordingly. We nearly gave up looking for the weapon on account of lack of time and funds, but an officer dredged it out of the mud at the bottom of the river at the last minute."

She pauses, and there's the very smallest of smiles before her next words. "In about forty years or so from your time, someone will develop the technology to take a sample of human blood — or saliva, or a strand of hair, even fingernail clippings and flakes of skin — and match it with the person it belongs to. There were traces of blood on the scissors that were found to be a good match to Joe Brawley, the stabbing victim, and a partial fingerprint belonging to Spector that enabled us to tie him to the scene."

There's a lot she's leaving out here, information that's not relevant — but she's also telling Peggy a lot of things that weren't made public about the case, either. It's strange, to be able to relate these things without the concern that the information will get into the wrong hands.

Peggy keeps an impassive face as she listens to horrific details, wishing that this was the first time in her life that she was being told such a terrible, awful story. The trouble is that she's not and this could be an excerpt from some of the things that happen any day in New York. She wishes that it weren't commonplace, but it sadly is. Still, she's very glad that a woman like Stella Gibson had been on the case, back home in the future.

What she talks about seems mad, something Howard and Samberley might discuss in their wilder hairs. "We have scientists who are pursuing technology like that, but we're not quite there yet," she says. "I'm sure they're going to race each other to get there first once they realize it's possible," she notes with mild disdain, recalling the awful egos that men can have.

"How did you proceed, once you had the evidence?" Peggy asks, focusing on the practical aspect of Stella's case.

"Well, after that attack, he ran to Scotland with his family, and we lost track of him. I think some would have liked to believe that he'd gone away for good, that he was going to stop, but it's never that simple."

She'd said it time and again: serial murder is an addiction, a compulsion, irresistible once it's started, all but impossible to stop. She'd known that when Spector had called her to tell her he was going to walk away. It was why she'd never for a second believed him.

"Eventually his wife and children returned, and we had extensive surveillance set up on their home, believing that Spector would come back — and he did. I don't think he could have helped it.

Still, it took us some time to make the arrest. He evaded us more than once, but eventually we caught him. Interviewed him. It didn't take him long to confess. He was proud, in a way, of what he'd done."

Stella is, of course, leaving out details again. She's not said a word about Rose Stagg, because that particular guilt — and it is guilt, personal responsibility on a level that the other incidents hadn't been — is still a bit fresh, even now. And she hasn't mentioned that it was she who had to interview Spector in the end, she who got the confession because he refused to talk to anyone else — out of some perverse desire to have her at his beck and call, or some twisted sense of kinship, she doesn't really know or care.

He'd told her he thought they were alike. He'd been wrong, of course, but sometimes, that thought still pulls at her mind in the dead of night when she can't sleep.

Peggy feels a chill running down her back this entire conversation, as if she can't quite believe that such an evil man can exist, yet she fought an entire war against evil men just like this, so why isn't she surprised? "I would have thought that his self-preservation would have compelled him to hold out and try and retain his freedom," Peggy says, though she hasn't met the man. She only has Stella's stories to go on, which means that she can't paint a clear picture.

She might have liked a round of interrogation, if only to see if she could have cracked him. "That must have been terribly draining on you," she offers with sympathy. "I can't imagine any of that would be easy to cope with."

Normally, Peggy wouldn't be too far off the mark. In most cases, even with suspects who have a mountain of evidence against them, there's a degree of bargaining that goes on: an attempt to fight for a reduced sentence, if nothing else. Spector had been an anomaly. "He wanted to gloat," says Stella. "He believed he was above the rest of us, that he had the right to choose who lived and who died. He was a narcissist; he wanted attention." She pauses, the brief dip of her gaze away from Peggy's the only indicator that what she's about to say is a little more personal than she'd normally let on. "Before we caught him, before we knew who he was, he called the incident room asking to speak only with me. After we caught him, he wouldn't speak to anyone but me. In some way, I think he took my particular involvement in the investigation personally."

The sympathy is well-meant, Stella knows that; she can accept it a little, coming from Peggy, in a way she hadn't accepted it from Jim Burns when he'd told her he knew the strain the investigation was putting on her. Jim had said those words hoping for a particular sort of response that he hadn't got; Peggy is saying them as a friend who wants to support her. Still — her first instinct is to brush it off. "I did what needed to be done," she says. There's a moment, and then a slight smile that pulls at the corner of her mouth, all the more noticeable after the somber things they've just been discussing. "You should be familiar with that, I'd think."

She doesn't know a lot about what Peggy did in her own world, outside of fighting in the war — but that on its own requires a level of determination, an ability to go above and beyond one's personal feelings, to see what needs to be done and do it.

She's known villains like that, but even then, they typically only ever gloat and offer themselves up when they think they still have a chance to get away. Then again, hasn't she been a part of that problem? Dottie Underwood would not have escaped if not for Peggy's releasing her to fight a worse threat, but it's still on her shoulders. Ana Jarvis' accident will forever rest on her shoulders.

"It was always exhausting, to me," she says, still not knowing how she'd managed to do it, but perhaps that was because she was also fighting the uphill battle of proving that she could. "What needs to be done is important. Convincing others that it's what needs to be done is the truly exhausting part," she says.

"My last case, I had to take vacation, because no one would believe there was something more insidious going on."

"I understand." That's not just empty sympathy; she does understand. True, Stella has never been in Peggy's exact position, and maybe she copes with it better than most, but — she knows a thing or two about having to be convincing. Her subordinates usually listen to her, and after the Moon case she'd got a lot more respect than she'd had previously and a promotion to boot, but she still remembers how long it had taken her to convince Jim the Fiona Gallagher, Alice Monroe and Sarah Kay murders were linked. And he hadn't been the only man to be dubious about trusting her word and her judgment.

Peggy's next words make her brows arch. "You mean enforced leave," she says, her voice bone-dry. It's almost typical: sideline a bright, intelligent woman for being too persistent about something she strongly believes because it's inconvenient — or at least, that's what Stella assumes had to have happened.

"Something like that," Peggy agrees. "My superiors back in New York didn't actually know that I was investigating what I was, so being on vacation was a rather good cover," she says, even if Thompson had come around in the end to aid their cause, it had taken a while for her to be able to trust him in such a capacity. "My work wasn't strictly normal, at times. You might think it mad, but large conspiracy cover-ups were unfortunately a normal thing."

"That, and inexplicable scientific facts, cross-country espionage, and generally, the sort of thing most people read in pulp novels. What I was uncovering, it was best that I take vacation to do it quietly. I didn't want to drag anyone else into it." It hadn't worked, obviously, seeing as most of the SSR had wound up with her, but, well, she had tried.

Stella rests one elbow on the table, leaning her chin on her hand as she listens. Peggy's not wrong; this sounds like the plot of a cheap paperback she bought in an airport once when she was bored during a stopover and needed something to read. If she didn't know Peggy better, she might ask her if she'd spent a little too much time reading exactly those sorts of novels — but Stella does know her better, so she doesn't ask.

"I'll guess other people were dragged into it anyway," she hazards, because obviously there's more to this story. The sort of thing Peggy's describing never goes off without a hitch. Stella is familiar with too many law enforcement operations that were meant to be secret, or covert, that blew up because word got out to the wrong person, or because some step of the process wasn't fully planned out, or because something unexpected interfered. Really, she's expecting all three here.

"Once we established who could be trusted, yes, we had ourselves a strike force," she says, though she doesn't want to think too long about the decisions she'd made, given what they had inevitably led to. "I'm afraid that in the course of events, I wound up harming a dear friend and her husband. I'm just glad that I was able to apologize before I was sucked into this awful place," she says, wishing that she could have done more to assure Ana and Mr. Jarvis of her sincere apologies, but now she's here and she's trapped away.

"I was lucky. I had an excellent group of scientists, agents, and allies," she says. "We had managed to solve the problem, but I confess, I thought perhaps zero matter was the reason that I'm here. Some part of it that we missed, perhaps. It has sucked people into other places before, why not me?"

There's not much outward reaction to Peggy's story except for a very brief, slight sympathetic look in answer to her description of having hurt someone she didn't intend to; for a moment, Stella's thoughts go to Rose Stagg, the one victim in the entire Spector investigation for whose fate she blames herself. If only she hadn't used Spector's name, if only they'd used a composite likeness instead of Rose's nine-year-old description — if only, if only. But hindsight is perfect and she suspects Peggy knows that too, suspects trying to reassure her that whatever happened couldn't have been her fault wouldn't do much good.

"I've heard stranger theories," she says, with a mild whimsical smile at the idea that she's starting to grow used to such things. It's no more bizarre than Credence's magic or any of the other ideas she's heard for how they got here, although the more logical part of her is still tempted to dismiss them. "Did something change your mind?"

"Truthfully, it was the various range of people," she admits. "I could accept that people from my future or from space had perhaps come into contact with zero matter in a different form, but then there are people like you," Peggy says, "who have never heard of alien artifacts or zero matter or magic in their lives. You certainly would have recalled such a strange element in your presence. With that in mind, I can hardly explain how we all came to be here if I'm expected to believe it was two incredibly odd circumstances." Zero matter had been a pert, neat solution. It had been easy to believe. The trouble is, it was much harder to believe zero matter and kidnapping and whatever else might be afoot.

"I also think that if it were zero matter, then others near me would be here too," she says. "Those who were working on the case with me and they haven't turned up, at all."

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