One Single Yesterday - Chapter Four
Aug. 27th, 2013 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cassandraoftroyChapter: 4 of 5
Characters: Peggy Carter, the Eleventh Doctor, Martha Jones
Chapter Warnings: Violence, character death almost
Word Count: ~3700
Summary: Back in the 1940s, Peggy confronts her destiny at the hands of an assassin sent to kill Winston Churchill.
Master Post
Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
To an untrained observer, she was nothing more than a personal assistant or military clerk standing as part of the Prime Minister's entourage, her bored expression giving her the air of one who has heard the same speech, or others just like it, enough times to recite it from memory. Though her quarry here was anything but an untrained observer, the combination of her calculatedly aloof demeanor and her gender might lead him to make assumptions that she could use to her advantage. Women in military support roles were generally considered part of the scenery at best, and potential liabilities at worst. She was not the only one wearing a military uniform, mixed in among the Specialist Protection officers who guarded Churchill. She had worked closely with these men over the past several days, since she had uncovered intelligence suggesting that this rally was the target of the spy she was tracking.
The orders from MI5 recalling her to London had come on the Monday morning following Peggy's return. Due in part to her firsthand experience with the Hydra infiltrator in Brooklyn during Project Rebirth, she was assigned the task of ferreting out German spies and deep-cover agents at home. A small team of junior agents were working under her supervision, but Peggy preferred to handle the majority of the legwork herself. Her days became a blur of personnel dossiers and clandestine meetings, until she occasionally needed to ask one of those junior agents what day of the week it was.
But if her superiors had concerns that her single-minded focus on her work bordered on obsession, at least they had no cause for complaint over her results: in the past four months she had uncovered and apprehended two Nazi agents, one a German national and the other a British sympathizer, and was closing in on her third. The first two spies had embedded themselves in positions of access and trust, where they could obtain sensitive information to funnel to the other side – but this new prey was different. He'd remained almost painfully inconspicuous since arriving in the UK, so much so that Peggy had only discovered his existence by happenstance during an investigation into a previous lead. The lengths to which he'd gone to remain beneath the notice of British Intelligence told her that his mission was something far more sinister – sabotage or assassination. If the puzzle pieces she'd assembled of his movements over the last three weeks were correct, it appeared that his intent was the latter.
What her investigation had failed to produce was a photograph of the suspected spy, or even a useful description. She had only a few sparse details: male, late thirties, dark hair, medium build – the sort of man who would fit in almost anywhere with the right clothes and a plausible accent. Unless she got very lucky and her prey made a mistake that revealed something suspicious about him, Peggy would have to wait for him to make his move before she could act. So she schooled her expression into a careless mask and let her gaze drift across the assembled attendees, looking for any sign of disruption in the rhythm of the crowd. Her agents were working with the PM's protective detail to cover the entrances and access points, but some uncomfortable instinct told Peggy that the assassin was already inside the building.
Her feigned disinterest in the speech and her surroundings would actually serve her well here; if she had needed to recognize a particular individual, she would need to focus much more clearly on specific faces in the crowd in order to find the man she was after. Without those details, she had to rely on body movements and out-of-place behavior, which was easier to catch at the edges of her vision. So she unfocused her gaze and let her eyes wander across the crowd, exactly as though she were a bored clerical assistant counting the minutes until the end of the event when she could go home and take off these heels.
The dip of a shoulder caught her eye – a weapon? – sending every nerve into high alert. Her gaze flicked to the dark-haired man in the hat, her body tensed for action as he reached into his jacket and... withdrew a handkerchief to wipe his nose. False alarm. Her muscles tried to relax again, but the adrenaline coursing through her system fought them.
There – movement in the crowd, like someone trying to push past the assembled onlookers – but a closer look revealed it to be only a young mother chasing after an errant child.
In the end, she almost didn't notice the real assassin; the camera he held and the press pass (probably stolen) in his hat made his movements appear natural within the herd of real reporters. She'd barely spared him a glance as he moved forward to get himself a clear line of sight to Churchill. Between Steve's early brush with media stardom and the time she'd spent over the past few days as part of the Prime Minister's entourage, she had become inured to the way reporters nipped at the heels of the powerful.
In fact, the only reason her attention was drawn to this one photographer at all was that he wasn't aggressive enough. He didn't try to elbow his fellows aside or snap a dozen pictures in a matter of seconds. Instead, he glided between the close-packed bodies in the audience and took his photos hesitantly, as if waiting for the perfect shot. When he opened his camera to change the film, Peggy's eyes flicked toward him for just a moment – and she saw him change. The set of his shoulders shifted, and his feet moved into a shooter's stance, bracing against recoil. When his hand emerged from his jacket, it held not a film case, but a pistol.
She had only a few heartbeats to react. Time didn't quite slow, but each moment took on a razor-sharp clarity as she moved. She had two objectives: remove Churchill from the shooter's line of fire, and take down the assassin. "Gun!" she shouted as she ran toward the podium at the edge of the small stage. That achieved the first objective: the PM dove to the ground, and the Specialist Protection officers tackled him, shielding his body with theirs. Before Churchill was even halfway down, she was in position by the podium, where she had the clearest shot through the crowd at the gunman.
Her own sidearm had been in her hand from the moment she had leaped into motion, and she leveled it at the spy, her aim automatic from long practice. Her shouted warning had set the crowd pouring through the exits if they were close enough, or cowering on the floor if they weren't. The removal of human obstacles gave her the perfect shot.
Unfortunately, it had the same effect for the assassin. Just as she squeezed the trigger, she felt a terrible blow to her chest, high on the left side. It felt like she'd taken a blow from a prize-fighter, or been clipped by a speeding car. It unbalanced her, and she fell heavily against the wooden podium before collapsing to the planks of the stage. She landed on her left side, and her shoulder awoke in an explosion of agony. She struggled to move, to take her weight off the source of so much pain, but her left arm was useless. It was only when she glimpsed the blood beginning to soak into the roughly sanded wood beneath her that she realized she'd been shot.
It was the last clear thought she had. The pain was literally blinding now – her vision was fading to gray at the edges, and the noises of the chaos around her faded against the insistent buzzing in her ears.
Someone rolled her over. The pain slackened for an instant, only to return full force when hands pressed heavily on her shoulder. She may have cried out; she knew she tried to push the hands away, but her one functioning arm had no strength in it.
She was dimly aware that she was moving, but she was still lying flat on her back, which made no sense. She couldn't hear most of the voices around her, but there were many of them, talking urgently, sometimes shouting, but without the high note of panic.
A thought penetrated her haze of pain, fuzzy but desperately important; it took her a moment to remember the words that went with it. She opened her eyes – not realizing that she had closed them – and groped weakly for the first person she saw. He was wearing an army uniform, with a red cross on his arm. "…Churchill," she managed, though the word was a struggle.
"The Prime Minister is fine, ma'am. A little shaken up, but not hurt." He spoke loudly and slowly, which she appreciated; it meant she only had to fight a little to understand his words through the pain and worsening dizziness.
"…And the…?" Words were harder now. Fortunately the man, who loomed above and behind her, seemed to understand what she wanted.
"The shooter is dead," he told her. "You got him good, straight through the heart." He smiled down at her; he had a pleasant enough smile, for all that he was upside-down. It looked sad, though. She couldn't see much on either side of it anymore, her vision had narrowed so much, so she just closed her eyes. "It was fine work, ma'am."
There was a bump, which jarred her shoulder horribly, but she had little more than a breathless whimper left in her. Then the movement stopped; she must have gotten to wherever they were taking her, but where that might be wasn't important enough to open her eyes to try and find out. Some time passed that might have been moments or hours, and she heard a sound. It was a strange sound, but she had heard it before… figuring out where was beyond her now, though.
She tried to hold onto whatever threads of awareness she had left, but they were mostly made of pain, and her hands were so weak. Before she faded away completely, she heard another voice, surprisingly clear through the cotton-wool that shrouded her senses. "Don't you worry one bit, Agent Carter. You're in good hands: I'm a Doctor."
* * *
Peggy woke up, much to her own surprise. She had been Church of England since childhood, but rather indifferently for the most part; Christmas and Easter, and little thought given to it the rest of the year. If pressed, she would have admitted that she didn't really believe in an afterlife, as nice an idea as it was. So now either she needed to dramatically re-evaluate her metaphysical expectations about the universe, or she was alive – and she wasn't quite sure which would be the greater shock.
When she opened her eyes, they blearily found their focus on the face of a young woman with dark skin and bright eyes. The woman's hair was pulled up into a bun that fanned out flatteringly behind her head, and the clothing she wore beneath the white laboratory coat was unusual enough that it took Peggy, who was still feeling a bit disoriented, a moment to recognize it: she had seen similar items in the Doctor's "changing room." That decided Peggy that the young woman was not any sort of celestial being, and that Peggy herself was alive somehow. She moved to sit up, until a sharp spike of pain flashed through her chest and shoulder, and the young woman put out a hand to restrain her.
"Please, don't try to get up yet," the woman told her in a gentle tone. "The bullet fractured your collarbone, and there's still some tissue inflammation. You need to take it easy."
Though "taking it easy" wasn't Peggy's usual habit, the burning in her shoulder made her less inclined than usual to argue with the advice. Her mind was slowly clearing, though she seemed able to focus on only one of the questions swirling through her mind at a time. "Who are you?"
The young woman smiled. "My name is Martha Jones. I'm glad you're awake, Agent Carter; with your injuries, I was worried for a while about how much I'd be able to do, even with the help of the TARDIS's medical equipment."
Medical equipment? Anesthesia, or pain medication maybe... That could be why it was such a struggle to think. "You're a nurse?" Peggy guessed.
"A doctor, actually – a medical doctor," Martha clarified, no doubt thinking of the mutual friend they obviously shared. "He came to fetch me three days ago, saying he needed my help. That was a change of pace, I don't mind telling you." She grinned briefly, before her expression turned serious again. "I didn't expect to be performing emergency surgery, though. Fortunately the TARDIS is the best medical assistant a doctor could ask for. I'm not sure how much help I could've been without her."
"Thank you," Peggy replied sincerely. Then she asked the question that she knew Martha had to be anticipating. "How am I?"
"Because of all this," Martha gestured expansively around the room they occupied, which Peggy assumed was the TARDIS's medical bay, "you'll make a complete recovery, and in weeks rather than months. How's the pain? I can give you something, if you like."
She seriously considered the question. The more awake and clear-headed she became, the more aware she was of the throbbing in her shoulder that persisted even when she remained still. But she had dealt with pain before, and didn't relish the thought of descending back into the fog of drugs so soon. Consciousness had been a pleasant surprise, and she found herself reluctant to surrender it again. "In a bit, perhaps," she allowed. "I'd like to chat for a while first, if that's all right with you."
Martha's smile told her that it was – and moreover, that she understood the reason for Peggy's request. "Of course, but you let me know if you need anything, a glass of water or whatever else."
The suggestion made Peggy realize how unpleasantly dry and sticky her mouth was, undoubtedly thanks to the same drugs that had made her feel so groggy. "Some water would be lovely, actually," she replied, and craned her neck to follow Martha's movements without straining her shoulder as the young doctor crouched to reach into a cabinet. "How do you know the Doctor?" she asked, focusing on the only thing she knew they had in common, other than Peggy's injury.
Martha returned to her bedside holding a clear plastic bottle with a drinking straw protruding from the neck. Peggy accepted the water bottle with her good hand and sipped gratefully as Martha replied; the water was ice-cold and almost ambrosial to her cottony tongue.
"We met when a squadron of alien police chased a fugitive into the hospital where I was doing my residency. After that, I traveled with him for a while. It was nice – dangerous and crazy, of course." She glanced down at her hands resting on the edge of Peggy's bed, her smile fond but not quite wistful. "I couldn't stay, though. It wasn't – he wasn't what I needed. He's changed so much since then; I was surprised at how easy it was to come back."
"Changed how?" Normally Peggy wouldn't have continued to sip at her drink while carrying on a conversation, but her body was insistent that she not put down the water.
Martha grinned. "Well, physically, to start with. That was a bit of a shock. The Doctor doesn't... when something happens to him that would kill you or me, instead of dying, he changes. That's how he explained it to me. He's the same man, but different at the same time, in more ways than just the face." She shrugged. "For all that this Doctor is different than he was when I traveled with him, I think I understand this one a little better."
The sound Peggy made in response was just this side of unladylike. "I can't imagine what he must have been like before, then; the Doctor I know is a bit... scattered."
"He was always that," Martha agreed, rolling her eyes. "But now he seems... I don't know, more aware of other people? It's hard to explain." She shrugged. "Honestly, after I left the TARDIS the last time, I didn't think I was likely to see him again at all."
Peggy nodded slightly, trying not to pull at her injury. "What have you been doing since then – did you go back to the hospital?"
Martha shook her head. "Even after you walk away from here, it's hard to leave this life behind entirely. I started working with UNIT as a medical officer, and I worked with Torchwood Three for a while."
"Torchwood?" Peggy interjected, wincing as her shoulder protested the way she'd started to sit up again. She lay back down flat, and the pain receded to a tolerable ache. "One of the girls I went to school with ended up working at the Torchwood Institute. She actually tried to recruit me for a while, saying that it was less of an old boys' club than MI5. But I'd earned my position by then, and I wasn't about to give it up."
When Peggy had moved to sit up, Martha had started fussing over her shoulder, but now she pulled up a stool beside Peggy's bed and sat down. "Do you know what division of Torchwood she worked for, or what she did for them?"
A rueful half-smile touched Peggy's lips. "She couldn't talk about the work she did with Torchwood – security and all. I had the same problem with my work for MI5 and the Strategic Scientific Reserve. It made for some rather awkward tea-time conversations when the two of us would get together to catch up on holiday." She chuckled faintly at the memory. "With neither of us able to talk about our work, we mostly ended up discussing the men we weren't seeing, and the children our mothers kept pestering us to have. To listen to us talk, you'd never have guessed how much of the security of the United Kingdom rested on our shoulders."
Martha offered her a knowing grin. "It's hard, having these secrets, knowing about all these amazing things, and not having anyone you can talk about them with – either for security reasons, or because they wouldn't understand. Sometimes it's just... too much to fit in your own head."
Peggy's imagination offered up a sampling of all the terrifying, wonderful, and impossible things she'd experienced since the war began – from the human horrors she'd seen on her covert missions behind enemy lines, to the technological marvels of Dr. Erskine's serum and Hydra's energy weapons, and the magical moment when she opened a door and looked down at Earth from space. "That's very much the way it feels at times," she agreed. "That reminds me; when am I likely to be–"
"I thought I heard someone being awake and talking in here!" the Doctor announced, all but leaping into her view – which was more than usually startling, with her line of vision restricted by her immobility on the medical bed. "How's our favorite patient?"
She exchanged a glance with Martha, then responded. "I've definitely felt better, but as my condition is a decided improvement over any expectations I might have had, I'm hardly in a position to complain. It's actually quite tolerable so long as I don't move too much."
"Well, not to worry about that," the Doctor assured her heartily, "Martha here will have you absolutely ship-shape and Bristol fashion in no time at all!"
"More like a couple of weeks," Martha put in pointedly, but was waved off by the Doctor.
"So – in light of the fact that records of your death were just a teensy bit exaggerated, you've got a decision to make," he plowed on.
Peggy suddenly found herself quite glad that the Doctor had waited a bit to visit her after she'd awoken; the idea of trying to keep up with him while she was still woozy from the medications and protracted unconsciousness made her head spin. "Oh?"
"Of course," he affirmed, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. "There's the question of where you'd like to end up once you've recovered. Returning to your own time is a possibility, though admittedly a somewhat sticky one, since you were very publicly shot and are listed as having been killed in action. On the other hand, there's the whole of time and space out there, waiting for you!" Completing the grandiose gesture that accompanied the phrase, he turned to Peggy, his expression turning more serious. "I can take you anywhere you want to go, any time you want to be there. Just say the word."
She didn't try to sit up this time, despite the realization that made her want to start upright. Instead she settled for staring up at him intently. "That was your plan all along, wasn't it? To go back and save me, so I'd be able to go to his future."
The Doctor's face folded into a sad smile, and for a moment his eyes reflected the truth of his claims to be more than a thousand years old. "Two people who belong together shouldn't be separated by time," he said simply. "I had a hard time accepting that not very long ago. It seems only right that I should help bring you two back to one another – if that's what you want."
Peggy relaxed back into the thin cushion of the medical bed. I've done my duty to King and Country; there's nothing more history expects of me – and in fact, it might change history if I went back. She was free now, to do as she wished, to go where she pleased. She raised her eyes to the Doctor's again and returned his smile. "Yes, I do believe that's precisely what I want."
Next Chapter
Characters: Peggy Carter, the Eleventh Doctor, Martha Jones
Chapter Warnings: Violence, character death almost
Word Count: ~3700
Summary: Back in the 1940s, Peggy confronts her destiny at the hands of an assassin sent to kill Winston Churchill.
Master Post
Previous Chapter | Next Chapter
To an untrained observer, she was nothing more than a personal assistant or military clerk standing as part of the Prime Minister's entourage, her bored expression giving her the air of one who has heard the same speech, or others just like it, enough times to recite it from memory. Though her quarry here was anything but an untrained observer, the combination of her calculatedly aloof demeanor and her gender might lead him to make assumptions that she could use to her advantage. Women in military support roles were generally considered part of the scenery at best, and potential liabilities at worst. She was not the only one wearing a military uniform, mixed in among the Specialist Protection officers who guarded Churchill. She had worked closely with these men over the past several days, since she had uncovered intelligence suggesting that this rally was the target of the spy she was tracking.
The orders from MI5 recalling her to London had come on the Monday morning following Peggy's return. Due in part to her firsthand experience with the Hydra infiltrator in Brooklyn during Project Rebirth, she was assigned the task of ferreting out German spies and deep-cover agents at home. A small team of junior agents were working under her supervision, but Peggy preferred to handle the majority of the legwork herself. Her days became a blur of personnel dossiers and clandestine meetings, until she occasionally needed to ask one of those junior agents what day of the week it was.
But if her superiors had concerns that her single-minded focus on her work bordered on obsession, at least they had no cause for complaint over her results: in the past four months she had uncovered and apprehended two Nazi agents, one a German national and the other a British sympathizer, and was closing in on her third. The first two spies had embedded themselves in positions of access and trust, where they could obtain sensitive information to funnel to the other side – but this new prey was different. He'd remained almost painfully inconspicuous since arriving in the UK, so much so that Peggy had only discovered his existence by happenstance during an investigation into a previous lead. The lengths to which he'd gone to remain beneath the notice of British Intelligence told her that his mission was something far more sinister – sabotage or assassination. If the puzzle pieces she'd assembled of his movements over the last three weeks were correct, it appeared that his intent was the latter.
What her investigation had failed to produce was a photograph of the suspected spy, or even a useful description. She had only a few sparse details: male, late thirties, dark hair, medium build – the sort of man who would fit in almost anywhere with the right clothes and a plausible accent. Unless she got very lucky and her prey made a mistake that revealed something suspicious about him, Peggy would have to wait for him to make his move before she could act. So she schooled her expression into a careless mask and let her gaze drift across the assembled attendees, looking for any sign of disruption in the rhythm of the crowd. Her agents were working with the PM's protective detail to cover the entrances and access points, but some uncomfortable instinct told Peggy that the assassin was already inside the building.
Her feigned disinterest in the speech and her surroundings would actually serve her well here; if she had needed to recognize a particular individual, she would need to focus much more clearly on specific faces in the crowd in order to find the man she was after. Without those details, she had to rely on body movements and out-of-place behavior, which was easier to catch at the edges of her vision. So she unfocused her gaze and let her eyes wander across the crowd, exactly as though she were a bored clerical assistant counting the minutes until the end of the event when she could go home and take off these heels.
The dip of a shoulder caught her eye – a weapon? – sending every nerve into high alert. Her gaze flicked to the dark-haired man in the hat, her body tensed for action as he reached into his jacket and... withdrew a handkerchief to wipe his nose. False alarm. Her muscles tried to relax again, but the adrenaline coursing through her system fought them.
There – movement in the crowd, like someone trying to push past the assembled onlookers – but a closer look revealed it to be only a young mother chasing after an errant child.
In the end, she almost didn't notice the real assassin; the camera he held and the press pass (probably stolen) in his hat made his movements appear natural within the herd of real reporters. She'd barely spared him a glance as he moved forward to get himself a clear line of sight to Churchill. Between Steve's early brush with media stardom and the time she'd spent over the past few days as part of the Prime Minister's entourage, she had become inured to the way reporters nipped at the heels of the powerful.
In fact, the only reason her attention was drawn to this one photographer at all was that he wasn't aggressive enough. He didn't try to elbow his fellows aside or snap a dozen pictures in a matter of seconds. Instead, he glided between the close-packed bodies in the audience and took his photos hesitantly, as if waiting for the perfect shot. When he opened his camera to change the film, Peggy's eyes flicked toward him for just a moment – and she saw him change. The set of his shoulders shifted, and his feet moved into a shooter's stance, bracing against recoil. When his hand emerged from his jacket, it held not a film case, but a pistol.
She had only a few heartbeats to react. Time didn't quite slow, but each moment took on a razor-sharp clarity as she moved. She had two objectives: remove Churchill from the shooter's line of fire, and take down the assassin. "Gun!" she shouted as she ran toward the podium at the edge of the small stage. That achieved the first objective: the PM dove to the ground, and the Specialist Protection officers tackled him, shielding his body with theirs. Before Churchill was even halfway down, she was in position by the podium, where she had the clearest shot through the crowd at the gunman.
Her own sidearm had been in her hand from the moment she had leaped into motion, and she leveled it at the spy, her aim automatic from long practice. Her shouted warning had set the crowd pouring through the exits if they were close enough, or cowering on the floor if they weren't. The removal of human obstacles gave her the perfect shot.
Unfortunately, it had the same effect for the assassin. Just as she squeezed the trigger, she felt a terrible blow to her chest, high on the left side. It felt like she'd taken a blow from a prize-fighter, or been clipped by a speeding car. It unbalanced her, and she fell heavily against the wooden podium before collapsing to the planks of the stage. She landed on her left side, and her shoulder awoke in an explosion of agony. She struggled to move, to take her weight off the source of so much pain, but her left arm was useless. It was only when she glimpsed the blood beginning to soak into the roughly sanded wood beneath her that she realized she'd been shot.
It was the last clear thought she had. The pain was literally blinding now – her vision was fading to gray at the edges, and the noises of the chaos around her faded against the insistent buzzing in her ears.
Someone rolled her over. The pain slackened for an instant, only to return full force when hands pressed heavily on her shoulder. She may have cried out; she knew she tried to push the hands away, but her one functioning arm had no strength in it.
She was dimly aware that she was moving, but she was still lying flat on her back, which made no sense. She couldn't hear most of the voices around her, but there were many of them, talking urgently, sometimes shouting, but without the high note of panic.
A thought penetrated her haze of pain, fuzzy but desperately important; it took her a moment to remember the words that went with it. She opened her eyes – not realizing that she had closed them – and groped weakly for the first person she saw. He was wearing an army uniform, with a red cross on his arm. "…Churchill," she managed, though the word was a struggle.
"The Prime Minister is fine, ma'am. A little shaken up, but not hurt." He spoke loudly and slowly, which she appreciated; it meant she only had to fight a little to understand his words through the pain and worsening dizziness.
"…And the…?" Words were harder now. Fortunately the man, who loomed above and behind her, seemed to understand what she wanted.
"The shooter is dead," he told her. "You got him good, straight through the heart." He smiled down at her; he had a pleasant enough smile, for all that he was upside-down. It looked sad, though. She couldn't see much on either side of it anymore, her vision had narrowed so much, so she just closed her eyes. "It was fine work, ma'am."
There was a bump, which jarred her shoulder horribly, but she had little more than a breathless whimper left in her. Then the movement stopped; she must have gotten to wherever they were taking her, but where that might be wasn't important enough to open her eyes to try and find out. Some time passed that might have been moments or hours, and she heard a sound. It was a strange sound, but she had heard it before… figuring out where was beyond her now, though.
She tried to hold onto whatever threads of awareness she had left, but they were mostly made of pain, and her hands were so weak. Before she faded away completely, she heard another voice, surprisingly clear through the cotton-wool that shrouded her senses. "Don't you worry one bit, Agent Carter. You're in good hands: I'm a Doctor."
Peggy woke up, much to her own surprise. She had been Church of England since childhood, but rather indifferently for the most part; Christmas and Easter, and little thought given to it the rest of the year. If pressed, she would have admitted that she didn't really believe in an afterlife, as nice an idea as it was. So now either she needed to dramatically re-evaluate her metaphysical expectations about the universe, or she was alive – and she wasn't quite sure which would be the greater shock.
When she opened her eyes, they blearily found their focus on the face of a young woman with dark skin and bright eyes. The woman's hair was pulled up into a bun that fanned out flatteringly behind her head, and the clothing she wore beneath the white laboratory coat was unusual enough that it took Peggy, who was still feeling a bit disoriented, a moment to recognize it: she had seen similar items in the Doctor's "changing room." That decided Peggy that the young woman was not any sort of celestial being, and that Peggy herself was alive somehow. She moved to sit up, until a sharp spike of pain flashed through her chest and shoulder, and the young woman put out a hand to restrain her.
"Please, don't try to get up yet," the woman told her in a gentle tone. "The bullet fractured your collarbone, and there's still some tissue inflammation. You need to take it easy."
Though "taking it easy" wasn't Peggy's usual habit, the burning in her shoulder made her less inclined than usual to argue with the advice. Her mind was slowly clearing, though she seemed able to focus on only one of the questions swirling through her mind at a time. "Who are you?"
The young woman smiled. "My name is Martha Jones. I'm glad you're awake, Agent Carter; with your injuries, I was worried for a while about how much I'd be able to do, even with the help of the TARDIS's medical equipment."
Medical equipment? Anesthesia, or pain medication maybe... That could be why it was such a struggle to think. "You're a nurse?" Peggy guessed.
"A doctor, actually – a medical doctor," Martha clarified, no doubt thinking of the mutual friend they obviously shared. "He came to fetch me three days ago, saying he needed my help. That was a change of pace, I don't mind telling you." She grinned briefly, before her expression turned serious again. "I didn't expect to be performing emergency surgery, though. Fortunately the TARDIS is the best medical assistant a doctor could ask for. I'm not sure how much help I could've been without her."
"Thank you," Peggy replied sincerely. Then she asked the question that she knew Martha had to be anticipating. "How am I?"
"Because of all this," Martha gestured expansively around the room they occupied, which Peggy assumed was the TARDIS's medical bay, "you'll make a complete recovery, and in weeks rather than months. How's the pain? I can give you something, if you like."
She seriously considered the question. The more awake and clear-headed she became, the more aware she was of the throbbing in her shoulder that persisted even when she remained still. But she had dealt with pain before, and didn't relish the thought of descending back into the fog of drugs so soon. Consciousness had been a pleasant surprise, and she found herself reluctant to surrender it again. "In a bit, perhaps," she allowed. "I'd like to chat for a while first, if that's all right with you."
Martha's smile told her that it was – and moreover, that she understood the reason for Peggy's request. "Of course, but you let me know if you need anything, a glass of water or whatever else."
The suggestion made Peggy realize how unpleasantly dry and sticky her mouth was, undoubtedly thanks to the same drugs that had made her feel so groggy. "Some water would be lovely, actually," she replied, and craned her neck to follow Martha's movements without straining her shoulder as the young doctor crouched to reach into a cabinet. "How do you know the Doctor?" she asked, focusing on the only thing she knew they had in common, other than Peggy's injury.
Martha returned to her bedside holding a clear plastic bottle with a drinking straw protruding from the neck. Peggy accepted the water bottle with her good hand and sipped gratefully as Martha replied; the water was ice-cold and almost ambrosial to her cottony tongue.
"We met when a squadron of alien police chased a fugitive into the hospital where I was doing my residency. After that, I traveled with him for a while. It was nice – dangerous and crazy, of course." She glanced down at her hands resting on the edge of Peggy's bed, her smile fond but not quite wistful. "I couldn't stay, though. It wasn't – he wasn't what I needed. He's changed so much since then; I was surprised at how easy it was to come back."
"Changed how?" Normally Peggy wouldn't have continued to sip at her drink while carrying on a conversation, but her body was insistent that she not put down the water.
Martha grinned. "Well, physically, to start with. That was a bit of a shock. The Doctor doesn't... when something happens to him that would kill you or me, instead of dying, he changes. That's how he explained it to me. He's the same man, but different at the same time, in more ways than just the face." She shrugged. "For all that this Doctor is different than he was when I traveled with him, I think I understand this one a little better."
The sound Peggy made in response was just this side of unladylike. "I can't imagine what he must have been like before, then; the Doctor I know is a bit... scattered."
"He was always that," Martha agreed, rolling her eyes. "But now he seems... I don't know, more aware of other people? It's hard to explain." She shrugged. "Honestly, after I left the TARDIS the last time, I didn't think I was likely to see him again at all."
Peggy nodded slightly, trying not to pull at her injury. "What have you been doing since then – did you go back to the hospital?"
Martha shook her head. "Even after you walk away from here, it's hard to leave this life behind entirely. I started working with UNIT as a medical officer, and I worked with Torchwood Three for a while."
"Torchwood?" Peggy interjected, wincing as her shoulder protested the way she'd started to sit up again. She lay back down flat, and the pain receded to a tolerable ache. "One of the girls I went to school with ended up working at the Torchwood Institute. She actually tried to recruit me for a while, saying that it was less of an old boys' club than MI5. But I'd earned my position by then, and I wasn't about to give it up."
When Peggy had moved to sit up, Martha had started fussing over her shoulder, but now she pulled up a stool beside Peggy's bed and sat down. "Do you know what division of Torchwood she worked for, or what she did for them?"
A rueful half-smile touched Peggy's lips. "She couldn't talk about the work she did with Torchwood – security and all. I had the same problem with my work for MI5 and the Strategic Scientific Reserve. It made for some rather awkward tea-time conversations when the two of us would get together to catch up on holiday." She chuckled faintly at the memory. "With neither of us able to talk about our work, we mostly ended up discussing the men we weren't seeing, and the children our mothers kept pestering us to have. To listen to us talk, you'd never have guessed how much of the security of the United Kingdom rested on our shoulders."
Martha offered her a knowing grin. "It's hard, having these secrets, knowing about all these amazing things, and not having anyone you can talk about them with – either for security reasons, or because they wouldn't understand. Sometimes it's just... too much to fit in your own head."
Peggy's imagination offered up a sampling of all the terrifying, wonderful, and impossible things she'd experienced since the war began – from the human horrors she'd seen on her covert missions behind enemy lines, to the technological marvels of Dr. Erskine's serum and Hydra's energy weapons, and the magical moment when she opened a door and looked down at Earth from space. "That's very much the way it feels at times," she agreed. "That reminds me; when am I likely to be–"
"I thought I heard someone being awake and talking in here!" the Doctor announced, all but leaping into her view – which was more than usually startling, with her line of vision restricted by her immobility on the medical bed. "How's our favorite patient?"
She exchanged a glance with Martha, then responded. "I've definitely felt better, but as my condition is a decided improvement over any expectations I might have had, I'm hardly in a position to complain. It's actually quite tolerable so long as I don't move too much."
"Well, not to worry about that," the Doctor assured her heartily, "Martha here will have you absolutely ship-shape and Bristol fashion in no time at all!"
"More like a couple of weeks," Martha put in pointedly, but was waved off by the Doctor.
"So – in light of the fact that records of your death were just a teensy bit exaggerated, you've got a decision to make," he plowed on.
Peggy suddenly found herself quite glad that the Doctor had waited a bit to visit her after she'd awoken; the idea of trying to keep up with him while she was still woozy from the medications and protracted unconsciousness made her head spin. "Oh?"
"Of course," he affirmed, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. "There's the question of where you'd like to end up once you've recovered. Returning to your own time is a possibility, though admittedly a somewhat sticky one, since you were very publicly shot and are listed as having been killed in action. On the other hand, there's the whole of time and space out there, waiting for you!" Completing the grandiose gesture that accompanied the phrase, he turned to Peggy, his expression turning more serious. "I can take you anywhere you want to go, any time you want to be there. Just say the word."
She didn't try to sit up this time, despite the realization that made her want to start upright. Instead she settled for staring up at him intently. "That was your plan all along, wasn't it? To go back and save me, so I'd be able to go to his future."
The Doctor's face folded into a sad smile, and for a moment his eyes reflected the truth of his claims to be more than a thousand years old. "Two people who belong together shouldn't be separated by time," he said simply. "I had a hard time accepting that not very long ago. It seems only right that I should help bring you two back to one another – if that's what you want."
Peggy relaxed back into the thin cushion of the medical bed. I've done my duty to King and Country; there's nothing more history expects of me – and in fact, it might change history if I went back. She was free now, to do as she wished, to go where she pleased. She raised her eyes to the Doctor's again and returned his smile. "Yes, I do believe that's precisely what I want."
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