Agent Carter. Jack isn't found in time at the end of S2.
It had been a perfect day. One of the few perfect days Peggy could ever remember having. After those moments in Daniel’s office (those glorious moments) they had both done something they almost never did: they’d taken the rest of the day off.
They went to the beach. Peggy took off her shoes and curled her stockinged toes in the sand. They sat on a bench and talked for hours, and then they went and had a late lunch and talked some more, and finally, sunburned and delighted, they went back to Daniel’s house as sunset purpled the sky.
She was sitting in Daniel’s kitchen with her hands curled around a cup of tea, Daniel unwrapping the butcher paper from steaks they’d bought in the way home, laughing and bantering back and forth while Peggy thought I could spend another day like this; I could spend the rest of my life like this – when Daniel’s telephone rang.
They looked at each other, and Daniel smiled slightly. “Gotta be important, to call me at home when I said I didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“Would you like me to get it?”
“Nah. You can get these started.”
She was heating the broiler when she heard Daniel say in an odd voice, from the kitchen doorway, “Peggy?”
She looked around, startled.
“I think –” He took a breath. “Put those in the icebox. We have to go.”
“Dottie,” Peggy said instantly. “Whitney.” She looked at Daniel’s face, saw the pallor and the stillness. “What?”
“Thompson,” he said.
*
The hotel was quiet when they got there. The main activity had been earlier, a few hours ago in the afternoon, while they were walking on the beach and she was curling her toes through the sand. But Peggy tried not to think about that.
It wasn’t as if there was anything she could have done, she told herself. The coroner’s report, which they had picked up before coming over and she’d read in Daniel’s car, had said he’d been shot in the chest. It had taken him about an hour to bleed out. But they hadn’t known. Couldn’t have known. He had been unconscious the whole time, the report said, or at least he didn’t appear to have moved. It wasn’t that he’d suffered, not much anyway …
“I thought he was on a plane,” she said quietly, as she unlocked the door with the key the manager had given them.
“We all did,” Daniel said. He, like Peggy, paused for a moment and then stepped with exquisite care over the bloodstain in front of the door. The room had already been searched by the local police and then the SSR; Jack’s things were currently at the SSR office. Going through them would be the next step, but Peggy wasn’t quite there yet.
She looked out the window, down at the headlights on the boulevard below. The worst thing was, this wasn’t even the first time she’d done this. A year ago she’d been investigating the death of a different supervisor – at least Jack hadn’t actually died in front of her –
“Peggy,” Daniel said softly, and his hand was on her arm, pressing. “Do you –”
“I’m all right,” she said, pulling away. There were things to do. People to interview. A shooter to find.
She hadn’t let Dooley’s killers escape justice. And she wasn’t going to let this pass unavenged, either.
About the rest of it, she just … tried not to think. Tried not to think about You owe me a bourbon and How about collecting the dinner orders? and You’re a good man, Jack, I know that …
“Peggy?”
“I’m fine,” she said, squaring her shoulders. “You take that side of the room, I’ll take this one.”
It was simply another case. She knew how to do this.
But oh. She was tired of losing people.
