Archive of Our Own ^beta

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STAVE I: Krzeminski's Ghost

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Krzeminski was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. He had been shot at close range by Dottie Underwood, and the case file about his murder had been signed by Captain Dooley, before his own untimely demise. Dooley signed it: and Dooley’s name was above contest, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Krzeminski was as dead as a door-nail.

Peggy Carter knew he was dead? Of course she did. How could it be otherwise? They'd worked together for some six months at the time of his death, and she was there for the terrible events surrounding the murder, part of a plot by the Soviet secret intelligence organization Leviathan. Carter had been surprised at the depth of her feelings on her fellow agent's death; they had not been close, for Krzeminski had been a bit of a pig, but he had been a fellow agent of the SSR, and there was a certain sort of camaraderie there that had nothing to do with personal compatibility and everything to do with putting their lives on the line in a dangerous job and trusting each other to have their backs. So Peggy found herself, in spite of herself, shedding a few tears on the day of his funeral.

The mention of Krzeminski’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Krzeminski was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say the Brooklyn Bridge for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

They'd put someone new in Krzeminski's desk soon after his death; in a job such as theirs, they couldn't afford to be sentimental about things like that. The SSR went on without him, although his memory reappeared like specter every now and then when the agents went out drinking and toasts were made. In the time after his death, Ivchenko was stopped, Dottie Underwood escaped, Thompson became the new chief after Dooley's death, and the SSR took down a major arms dealer in the fall. Now it was winter, the day before Christmas, and the SSR was about to undergo another personnel change.

Chief Thompson—Peggy was still working on not resenting having to call him that—had called the whole office together at 11 a.m. on Christmas Eve morning for an announcement. It had to be the morning; most of the staff had been given a half day for Christmas Eve, including Thompson. Peggy had volunteered to be one of the few to remain 'til closing time, as she had no family to get home to—a move that had earned her a great deal of good will from her fellow agents. She had been given Christmas Day off, however; the office would be staffed with a skeleton crew only.

Curious as to what the chief had to say, Peggy swiveled her chair around to see, to her surprise, that Jack had come over to rest a hand on the shoulders of Daniel Sousa. Was the announcement about him, then? She tried to catch Daniel's eye, to give him a questioning look, but he never glanced her way.

"I know some of you have got to be tired of Danny Boy here always showing you up: best arrest record, most cases closed in the last six months—although to be fair, I've been out of the running for the last six months, so there's less competition." Trust Jack Thompson to turn a compliment for someone else into an opportunity to brag about himself. "Well, you're in luck: this is Agent Sousa's last day," he announced, and Peggy's heart dropped right down to somewhere in the vicinity of her shoes. "He's accepted a promotion to be chief of the LA office." Then he hesitated, then removed his hand from Daniel's shoulder and extended it for him to shake. "Good luck, Sousa," he said, his expression and voice (reluctantly) warm in a way it rarely was around Daniel. "You deserve this."

The room burst into applause, with a few "Attaboy, Sousa!"s thrown in. The Ivchenko affair, which had finally earned Peggy the respect of her colleagues, had had a similar effect for Daniel; for months now he had no longer been just the crip—not to mention, for months now he had been working even harder than was previously his wont—and he was finally getting the recognition he was due, and he absolutely deserved the promotion and Peggy was so very happy for him, no matter what the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach said.

The agents all crowded Sousa now, blocking him from her view; she could hear congratulations and pats on the back and the occasional joking "I hear the weather in California's great, how about you transfer me out there with you?" She returned to her paperwork, content to wait her turn—happy to wait her turn, really, because she didn't know what to say and she preferred to put it off as long as possible—and it wasn't until the shift was nearly over that he was finally free to speak. She was in the file room, riffling through old case files, when she heard a very distinctive and very familiar set of footsteps behind her, and she took a moment to compose herself before turning around.

"Congratulations, Daniel," she said warmly.

Daniel looked conflicted, and for a moment her pulse accelerated, but then— "I'm sorry, Peg," he said lowly. "You deserve that promotion more than I do. We both know our closure record is actually tied, no matter what Jack says, and you've got seniority over me, and you're a better leader than I am. You'd be amazing as chief."

"That's kind of you to say," she said, smiling gently. "But I think you deserve it far more than you think you do. Anyway, we both know they were never going to put a woman in that position, and of everyone in this office who could have been promoted, I'm glad it was you. Not because I'm keen to see you leave," she added quickly. "But because you deserve it. You're worth more than that whole lot out there tied together, and you deserve every good thing this world has to offer." That was a little more than she'd meant to say—a little more fervent than she'd expected to sound. The shock of his leaving was making her downright sentimental.

"Thanks," he responded quietly, and then neither of them said anything for a few moments. Peggy opened her mouth a few times, then shut it again; Daniel apparently suddenly found his hands absolutely fascinating and directed his gaze there. She found herself wanting to . . . to something, to step forward, to say his name, to reach out, to ask him if he had any regrets about what had happened (or not happened, really) between them—but six months of uncertainty lay between them, making the three feet of distance feel more like three thousand miles. She opened her mouth again, then hesitated, and in that moment he spoke, his gaze still anywhere but her.

"Well, thanks for everything, Peggy," he said, and finally dragged his gaze to meet hers. "You've been my best friend in this whole rotten office, you know that? I . . . I won't forget that."

And Peggy hesitated, and then she plastered on a smile, firmly ignoring the piece of her heart urging her to do the opposite, and held her hand out to shake. "Likewise, Daniel Sousa," she said. He shook her hand slowly and lingered there a moment; his hands were warm, and dry, and comforting, and—she tore her thoughts away from that rather dangerous path. "I wish you the very best of luck, although you won't need it."

His answering smile was small, and was it wistful, or was that just wishful thinking on her part? "Goodbye, Peggy," he said, and left.

Peggy stood still and silent in the filing room a moment longer, then returned to looking for the case file she needed. When she found it and returned to the main office, the agents who had a half-day were in the process of leaving. The desk two in front of hers was empty, cleared of anything to indicate who'd sat there just this morning. Daniel Sousa was gone.

The afternoon that followed was one of the longest of Peggy's life. She was glad that nearly everyone had gone; there was no one to speak to her, and therefore no one she had to fake good cheer for. And she was glad that there were no calls, no emergencies, and she could spend the afternoon doing paperwork and trying to distract herself from her thoughts. But when the shift ended, she had to pass that now-empty desk on her way out the door, and suddenly her thoughts refused to be ignored, and they followed her out the building and into the cold night air, through dark and quiet streets where dingy patches of snow clung to the gutters, all the way back to her apartment.

Daniel was gone, truly gone. And not just to DC or somewhere nearby: to California, where she had no reason to go, and she would never see him again. She'd been sincere when she said she didn't mind that he'd gotten the promotion—he was probably the only person in the office who could have gotten the promotion without her resenting it. It was just that . . . he was her friend. Her best friend at work, truly; though they no longer shared the dismal bond of being at the bottom of the totem pole, so to speak, their adventures with Ivchenko had made them close, and he had for months now been the one person at the office who always made her smile, who she went out of her way to say hello to. He was a kindred spirit, as Anne Shirley would have said, always able to communicate to her whatever he was thinking with a single look, because she was usually thinking it too.

And yes, fine, she admitted in irritation as she turned onto her street, she was bothered about his leaving because . . . she'd thought there was something between them. He'd asked her out, hadn't he? She'd been over that moment in her head a hundred times, a thousand times, wondering if she'd misunderstood. Because he'd asked her out, hadn't he? A man asking a woman to get a drink with him was a universal symbol of romantic interest, was it not? She'd certainly thought so, and it had certainly fit with the shy glances he so often shot her way. She'd said no that day—her excuse about meeting a friend was true and genuine, and she'd needed time to let go of Steve—but she'd always thought he'd ask again. She'd wanted him to ask again—very much so, she'd realized more and more as the days went by. She'd said "Another time," hadn't she? And she'd been—she thought she'd been encouraging, at least a little.

It was hard to say; they'd been so very busy, with the arms dealer case starting only a week after Ivchenko's capture and lasting for several months. And by the time he was arrested and they had time to breathe again, she found that she and Daniel had settled into a comfortable sort of routine with each other, one where they worked together in a way that was perfectly easy and comfortable and . . . friendly. She'd always thought, she'd always hoped, that he'd been biding his time until he asked her out again. But now he was moving to California, having accepted a job across the country without a word to say that he was sorry they'd never gotten those drinks together, and she was being forced to reevaluate everything she'd thought the last six months. Either he'd lost interest in her, or he'd never actually been interested at all, and Peggy Carter did not need a man to complete her but she still scowled as she hopped in the elevator that took her up to Howard's penthouse, and as she dug in her bag for her keys.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door to Howard's apartment, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Peggy had seen it, night and morning, during her whole residence in that place; also that Peggy had as little of what is called fancy about her as any person in the city. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Peggy, having her key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but a face.

Peggy immediately whirled around, checking behind her to see if the face she saw was somehow the reflection of some figure approaching her in the hallway, though it did not have a reflective surface. She was entirely alone, however, and when she turned back to the door, the knocker was a knocker again.

To say that she was not startled would be untrue. But the moment had passed, and Peggy put her hand upon the key she had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and turned on the lights. The door closing behind her seemed to echo strangely through the cavernous rooms, but Peggy was not a woman to be frightened by echoes. Still, she found herself going into each room of the penthouse, turning on the light to ensure the place was empty of inhabitants.

It was simply because Angie was gone, she decided as she returned to the kitchen to eat yesterday's leftover takeout for dinner. Her roommate had returned home for Christmas, and it was the first time in a long time that Peggy had been alone at home for any lengthy period of time, and she was unused to it and therefore jumping at shadows. Like a good friend, Angie had invited Peggy to come home with her for the holidays, but given that Peggy had to be at work late on the 24th and early on the 26th, and that Angie's family was five hours away by train, she would have had hardly any time to enjoy Christmas with the Martinellis, and it seemed a waste of time and money. So she'd stayed home, and her Christmas plans consisted solely trying to cook herself a nice dinner tomorrow, as Howard and the Jarvises were in St. Thomas for the holiday and besides Angie they were her only friends in the city. (She knew Daniel's family lived in New York City, and she had hoped at one point that he might invite her over for Christmas—but that wasn't worth thinking of now. He'd probably been entirely distracted by thinking about the promotion, and it hadn't even crossed his mind, and she couldn't blame him for that.)

When she was halfway through her leftover Chinese food, the phone rang.

"English!" came Angie's cheery voice. "Just wanted to make sure you were having a nice Christmas Eve."

"Just eating dinner."

When Angie spoke, Peggy could almost see the look of concern on her face. "Please tell me you got something good and you aren't eating that leftover chow mein in the fridge. Not on Christmas Eve."

"Of course not," said Peggy, pushing her plate of chow mein away as though Angie might be able to smell it through the phone. "Jarvis brought over a lovely ham."

"Oh good!" Angie sounded relieved.

"So how are things in the Martinelli household?"

"Same old," signed Angie. "The tree is trimmed, the nieces and nephews are adorable, and my grandma has already hinted that I should give up on the acting thing and come home to marry the new doctor. So basically exactly what I expected. How was work? Did you take my advice and put up some mistletoe over Danny Boy's desk?"

Peggy stifled a sigh and rued the day she had told Angie, after a long hard shift and a bottle of cheap red wine, everything about Daniel. "Actually I have news about him," she said, trying to inject enthusiasm into her voice. "He's been promoted to chief of the LA office! It's an incredible opportunity. I'm very happy for him."

Angie wasn't fooled for a second. "Oh, English," she breathed, barely more than a whisper. "I'm so sorry."

"For what?" asked Peggy briskly. "I am sorry to lose a good friend, but as his friend, I am happy about the things that make him happy, and this is a wonderful move for him."

"Peg, it's okay to be bothered about this."

"There's nothing to be bothered about," was her firm reply. "Yes, I did at one point hope that things would end up differently between us, but he has had six months to ask me out again, and has done so exactly zero times. He is clearly no longer interested, as is his prerogative. That's it. That's the end of the story. I am simply going to be happy that he has earned a well-deserved promotion."

Angie was by no means convinced, but Peggy barrelled on. "Besides, I am perfectly happy without a boyfriend. Falling in love has never done anything but limit my personal freedom or break my heart, or both. In fact, I think I'd rather prefer it if I never fell for anyone else again. I am much happier alone, thank you very much."

Peggy was done discussing this, and after a few more pleasantries, she ended the phone call. The chow mein was soon finished, the dishes washed, and Peggy stretched and considered her options for a moment. It was too early to go to sleep, and she wasn't much interested in turning on the television; she could only imagine that everything on was Christmas-related, and she didn't really want the reminder that this was turning out to be one of her most dismal Christmases ever (which was saying something, for someone who'd spent a number of Christmases on the front lines of WWII).

Reading in bed was the thing, she decided—a luxury she rarely had time to indulge in. She allowed herself one small glass of wine, and then she moved through the apartment, turning off all the lights and checking the lock on the door—and then checking it again, the incident in the hallway still lingering in the back of her mind. Then, satisfied, she repaired to her room and changed into her pajamas, pulling on a robe and slippers to cover the night's chill.

She had just sat on her bed, A Tale of Two Cities in hand, when the phone beside her bed rang. Angie again, most likely, and Peggy picked up the handset and said hello—only to hear the dial tone on the other end. Peggy hesitated, hung up the phone, and picked it up again—her phone company had only just introduced the use of a dial tone, and she supposed that perhaps she'd misunderstood how it worked. But still, there was nothing but the dial tone on the other end.

She shook her head, hung up, picked up her book again—and again the phone rang.

Peggy stared at it, a cold prickle creeping up the back of her neck. A coincidence, surely a coincidence, but coming as it did so soon after that moment of fear in the hallway, I would not believe anyone who claims they would not have found it a little unnerving. In that moment she heard, through the walls, the phone ringing in Angie's room . . . but not in tandem with the ringing of her phone. Another phone across the hall picked up the refrain, and another, and before long it sounded as though every phone in the house was ringing, each in its own rhythm, and Peggy cursed Howard for having so many phones, even as the cold prickle on her neck spread down her shoulders and arms.

She was reaching toward the phone again, determined to figure out what all this was about—never let it be said that Peggy Carter shied away from facing her fears—when suddenly the phones all stopped at once, and in the sudden silence she heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps in the hallway: the heavy footsteps of a man, and a large man at that. Closer they drew, ever so slowly, as Peggy scrambled for the handgun she kept in her nightstand. She rolled over her bed, ducking behind it for cover, and took the safety off the gun, pointing it at the bedroom door. The footsteps stopped outside her room, the door slowly creaked open, and her gun was momentarily forgotten as the figure on the other side came into view. The name that came to her lips was spoken in tones of the deepest confusion and surprise.

"Krzeminski?"

The same face: the very same. Krzeminski in his ill-fitting suit, his ugly tie; every inch the government agent. And not merely a lookalike, for I have omitted a very important detail: his body was transparent; so that Peggy, looking at his torso, could see the painting on the wall behind him.

Peggy had grumbled a time or two that Krzeminski was gutless, but she had never believed it until now.

No, nor did she believe it even now. Though she looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before her; though she felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes, she was still incredulous, and fought against her senses. It was a home intruder, that was all, and the stress of the day was making her see things.

"What do you want with me?" she demanded, gun still trained on the figure. 

"Oh, a lot." Krzeminski's voice, no doubt about it.

"Who are you?"

"Ask me who I was."

“Who were you then?” said Peggy, raising her voice. Was this guy crazy? He'd have to be, to break into a well-secured penthouse apartment belonging to a weapons manufacturer.

The figure scoffed. "Carter, obviously it's me. Ray Krzeminski, remember? We used to work together at the SSR?"

Okay, maybe she was the crazy one. A random home invader wouldn't know her real job, and he wouldn't know about her dead colleague.

"Ray Krzeminski is dead," she said cautiously.

"I know. Killed by some dame, can you believe it? I hear you guys let her get away in the end. Thanks a lot for that."

"We were trying to stop a catastrophic attack—" She caught herself and shook her head. "You are not Ray Krzeminski! He is dead, and I am sorry about that, but it means you cannot possibly be him, which makes you a home invader with far too much information—"

"Carter, can you shut your pretty little mouth for two seconds together and let a guy get a word in edgewise?"

She eyed him a moment, her lips pursed. "Well, you certainly sound like Krzeminski," she admitted.

He rolled his eyes. "Can I come in?" he asked.

"I'm armed," she warned. "If you take one step into this room—"

The man at the door ignored her and strode into the room.

"Stop!" she cried, and when he did not, she fired off a shot at his knee, just to incapacitate him—

Only to have the bullet pass straight through his translucent form and bury itself in the wall behind him. All right, maybe the see-through thing was not just in her imagination.

The figure rolled his eyes as he seated himself in the chair by the balcony window. "Carter, I'm a ghost. Come on, this is not that hard."

She could see the upholstery of the chair through his insubstantial form. It made no sense, but she could see it. Effects of the wine from earlier? But she'd hardly had any at all; certainly nothing like enough to produce such a vivid hallucination. She crept forward, gun still in hand—the figure in the chair simply watched, looking amused and annoyed—and darted one hand out to touch his shoulder.

Her hand went straight through him, with nothing but a chilly sensation against her skin to indicate the chair wasn't simply empty.

“You don’t believe in me,” observed Krzeminski.

“Of course I don’t,” said Peggy. "You are dead, and there is no such thing as ghosts."

"But here I am."

Peggy nodded slowly, and then she began to laugh. "Of course," she said. "I'm dreaming! This all makes so much more sense now."

"Dreaming? Seriously?"

Suddenly she straightened up with a surprised cry. "The hallway—that was you?"

He nodded, looking very pleased with himself.

"And now you're here, with a message for me, on Christmas Eve."

Again he nodded.

She looked down at the book on the bed, with the author's name written in curving script: Charles Dickens. "This is A Christmas Carol," she said. "I am dreaming Dickens' Christmas Carol. What a very odd dream to have. Am I meant now to exclaim, 'There's more of gravy than of grave about you'?"

"You are not dreaming!" he insisted. "Seriously, Carter, I'd forgotten what a pain in the tuckus you are."

"What other explanation could there be for it?"

"Uh, that I'm a ghost? Clearly? Sent from beyond the grave with a special message for you?"

"Of course you are," she agreed cheerfully, pinching her arms, slapping her cheeks, anything she could think of to wake herself up.

"You're not dreaming." The figure in the chair was starting to sound exasperated. "Do you remember going to bed?"

She hesitated, her pinching slowing to a stop. "No," she admitted.

"You ever have a dream that was this vivid?"

"No," she admitted.

"And since you saw me on the door knocker before you even got home, clearly you didn't just doze off on your couch or something."

She frowned. "Good point," she said finally.

"Good, so can you please stop acting like a moron and lemme give my message?"

"Fine," she said, still not quite believing but willing to play along. "What is your message, oh ghostly one? Do you carry a chain you forged by selfish acts in life and have come to help me avoid the same fate? Have I not done enough to help my fellow men? Because I don't mean to brag, but my whole life since the war started has been protecting other people. I don't really know what else I could do."

"Oh, you're actually fine in the chain department," said Krzeminski. "Good job with that, by the way."

She inclined her head graciously.

"No, I'm here to tell you that you're going to regret it if you never make room for love in your life."

Peggy blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"You heard me. And I heard you earlier on the phone with the blonde dame: 'I think I'd rather prefer it if I never fell for anyone else again.'"

"That was a private phone call," she huffed. "And she was on the phone! How did you know she's blonde?"

He gestured at his incorporeal form. "Ghost," he said as though she was being very dense about something that should have been obvious. "Anyway, I'm here to help you learn not to give up on the idea of love so easily, yada yada yada, you will be visited by three spirits, yada yada yada."

"The same as Scrooge's ghosts?" she asked delicately. "I was always a bit afraid of the ghost of Christmas Yet To Come as a child. Is he coming? Because I'd rather not see him, really."

Krzeminski shrugged. "I dunno, no one tells me anything."

"Supposing I went along with this," said Peggy, "why you? We weren't particularly close; no offense, but I have other ghosts I'd prefer to see."

Her companion made a face. "Part of my penance," he admits. "Turns out cheating on your wife is frowned on over on this side. I 'abused the concept of love' by being unfaithful the one I claimed to love, or some garbage like that. So now I have to help you not to 'abuse the concept of love' by completely writing off the possibility. Will you just say that you got the message so I can get outta here?"

"Fine," she said. "If it gets you out of my room, then yes, I got the message."

"Thanks Carter," he said. "You're really not so bad after all, are you?" He stood from the chair and straightened his tie. The balcony door suddenly flew open and he stepped out onto the balcony, where he nearly disappeared against the darkness of the night. She could just make out his face, though, adorned with a little half smile. "Expect the first ghost when the bell tolls one," he said matter-of-factly, then grinned. "See you around, Carter." He hesitated. "But hopefully not for a while; you still gotta catch that dame that killed me."

He faded away, and as he did so, Peggy suddenly became aware of light-colored patches against the darkness outside—dozens of them, all become more and more clear as the seconds ticked past. Some wore suits and dresses that would still be in style today; some wore clothing that resembled the paintings of Peggy's ancestors back in her childhood home in England. Some were floating through the air, some walked on the ground; some had chains like Marley in the book, others were chainless, like Krzeminski. But all had one thing in common: all seemed miserably unhappy, and all raised an unearthly groaning chorus of despair. Across the street, she saw one of the figures standing on a balcony: a man in a sharp suit. There was a woman on the other side of the window—a real live one, not one of the specters—watching TV and knitting, unaware of the man watching her; the ghost reached out and touched the glass gently, as though reaching toward her face, and even all the way across the street Peggy could feel the longing and sorrow radiating off him, so much so that she averted her eyes, feeling as though she'd been caught spying on something very private.

Almost immediately the apparitions faded away again, leaving Peggy wide-eyed and shivering on her balcony. "All right," she said to the still night air when she was alone again, "no more wine before bed."

So saying, she went inside and locked the balcony door; whether it was the long day at work or the bizarre . . . hallucination? genuine visitation? she'd just had, she was suddenly exhausted, and she climbed into bed and was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

. . . . . .

STAVE II: The First of the Three Spirits

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Peggy awoke feeling like she had been asleep only for a moment—but when she looked at her clock, it read 12:45, some three hours after she'd fallen asleep. She sighed, rolled over, and closed her eyes—only to open them suddenly a moment later. "Expect the first ghost when the bell tolls one," Krzeminski had said, and surely that had been a bizarre dream brought on by too little sleep and too much Christmas music . . . but also what if it hadn't? Here in the dark, her mind still hazy with sleep, Peggy found it difficult to remember how to be logical. Better stay up for a bit, just to be safe, she decided; when one o'clock had passed and no spirit had appeared, then she could go back to sleep, comforted in the knowledge that when tired, she hallucinated her dead chauvinist pig of a colleague.

Actually that wasn't as much of a comfort as she'd thought.

Peggy lay in her bed for fifteen minutes, checking the clock every so often; the time dragged so slowly that more than once she thought she must have dozed off and missed it. Finally the hands pointed at the 12 and the 1, and Peggy held her breath . . . then smiled.

"One o'clock," she said. "Take that, Krzeminski."

And who, knowing how these stories work, would be surprised to learn that in that moment there was a flash of light, and when it had cleared there was a figure in the room with her? She peeked at it over her covers, then sank back on her pillow with a sigh. "Drat."

A voice spoke from the corner, soft and gentle and sounding like it came from very far away: "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," she muttered. "Drat." She lifted her head to peer at the visitor. "So either I'm not dreaming, or my dreams are very consistently sticking with the Dickens theme, is that correct?"

The figure tilted its head, obviously not expecting that response. It was just as described in the book: small and smooth-skinned like a child, but with white hair and muscular arms that spoke of age. It wore a white tunic, and the light emanating from it lit up the whole room.

Peggy studied it a while, then sat up and sighed. "Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?" she quoted.

Looking pleased to finally understand what was going on, the spirit smiled. "I am."

"The Ghost of Christmas Past, I presume?"

"Long past?" said the ghost, then shook its head. "No, that's your line. I should say, 'Your past!'"

Peggy sighed. "I suppose I'm meant to come with you, then, and learn something from examining my past?"

The spirit inclined its head graciously. "It will be to your benefit. My business is your welfare."

Peggy examined it a long time, her face doubtful. "Am I asleep?" she asked it finally.

It shook his head.

And the thing was, Peggy was starting to believe it. It was doing the strangest thing; although it was emanating a bright light, the figure itself was strangely hard to see clearly; it seemed to stand in a particularly shadowy part of the room, and its outline seemed constantly to change, with limbs and heads fading into the gloom and then reappearing more distinct than ever. It was strangely fascinating to watch, and Peggy was quite certain it was not something her imagination could have created.

Not to mention, she was curious: what would this spirit show her? How was a trip to her past meant to stop her being such a cynic about romance? Anyway, she reasoned, either she was dreaming, and therefore it didn't matter if she went along with it, or somehow this was real, and she had a chance to experience something extraordinary.

"All right," she said, climbing out of bed and tightening her robe around her. "Dazzle me, Spirit."

The Spirit reached out its strong white hand, and Peggy took it, feeling a bit of a fool. They began to move toward the window, the spirit floating, Peggy walking; when they reached the balcony door, though she felt no movement or change, she lifted her slippered foot from her carpeted bedroom floor and set it down on a wooden floor in the dining room of a fine house in England.

"Bloody Nora!" cried Peggy, startled, who had half-expected nothing to happen. She looked around herself, a smile spreading across her face, at the familiar paintings and the familiar table and chairs. "This is my home," she said in surprised delight, turning back to the spirit. "I was born here. Lived here, until I went off to the war."

"Have you been back?" asked the spirit gently.

Peggy shook her head, her chest suddenly tight. "My brother died early in the war," she explained softly, walking slowly around the table. She tried to run her hand over the tops of the chairs, but like Krzeminski, they were insubstantial—or perhaps they were solid, and she the insubstantial one. She settled instead for inspecting the place settings—her mother's favorite china, and the good silver—and the elaborate decor of pine bows and holly berries. Christmas dinner, she was sure of it. "My parents died after I went off to join the SOE; my mother in 1943 and my father in 1944. The house belongs to me now, but I have no interest in living there, so I've let it to a cousin. No desire to return, I have to admit."

As she spoke, she was barely aware that her eyes were welling with tears—not only for her lost family, but for the memories this place brought up: she was conscious of a thousand odors floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten. “Was your purpose to remind me that my entirely family is dead?” she asked, her voice a little strained. “Because if so, you're doing a bang-up job.”

The spirit might have looked annoyed for a second, but it was hard to tell in the shifting light it seemed to exist in. “We are here to remind you not to close yourself off to the possibility of love.”

“If you meant to tell me that I was loved by my family, I know that. That has never been in question.” Then she scoffed a little. “If you mean to show me romantic love, you have come to the wrong place. My parents cared for each other, certainly. But they weren't exactly shining examples of romance. Very English, in their interactions with each other.”

In that moment there was a pattering of footsteps outside the door, and Peggy froze, one hand pulling her robe closed tighter, instinctively nervous despite knowing that if they were indeed in a memory, there was no way the person on the other side of that door could see her.

“These are the shadows of things that have been,” the spirit assured her. “They have no consciousness of us.”

The door opened then, and true to the spirit's word, the housekeeper that strode in took no notice of the brightly glowing spirit or the young lady in her pajamas standing in the corner.

“Mrs. Morgan!” Peggy exclaimed as the woman bustled about, setting glasses on the table. “I haven't seen her in years! She retired when I was quite young.”

And in that moment, an unexpected figure burst through the door: Peggy Carter, some eight or nine years old, brandishing a wooden sword, her hair and dress in disarray. Not far behind her came her brother Michael, his own sword in hand.

“Good heavens,” breathed Peggy, staring at the little figure, “it's me.”

“Death to tyrants!” yelled young Peggy, and turned to bring her sword down on the head of her brother, who only just managed to block it in time.

“Goodness gracious,” exclaimed Mrs. Morgan, “not in here, if you please!”

The two children had just lowered their swords when another figure entered the room, and Peggy's breath caught in her throat. “Go put your swords away, my dears,” said her mother, “and Peggy darling, do try to straighten your hair. Christmas dinner will be starting soon!”

The children nodded and ran out the room, Peggy swinging one last whack at Michael as they did, and Amanda Carter smiled at Mrs. Morgan. “It smells divine. Harrison will be along shortly and then we can eat.”

Mrs. Morgan nodded and left the room, leaving Peggy to gape at her mother as the woman rearranged the pine boughs on the windowsill just so. There was a curious pain in Peggy's chest, one she would not have expected. She'd loved her mother, of course she had, but they had never understood one another. And their last few years had been less than harmonious, as her mother could never quite come to terms with the fact that Peggy had broken off her engagement with “dear Fred” and joined the military, of all things. But even with all that lingering in their shared past, in that moment Peggy would have done anything to find a way to make her mother turn and see her standing there, to embrace her one last time.

There was no such magic spell to make that happen, however, and Peggy could only watch helplessly, and fight even harder to hold back her tears as her father entered the room.

“Amanda,” he said, smiling warmly, “you look absolutely lovely.”

Amanda blushed prettily, and it made Peggy smile to know that her parents had been married for years at this point, and a compliment from her husband could still make Amanda blush.

“The children are upstairs putting their swords away, and then we'll eat.”

“Plural swords? Peggy had one too?” Harrison laughed. “That child never fails to surprise me.”

“I worry about her,” admitted Amanda with a sigh. “So impulsive, so headstrong. I have the worst time trying to get her to behave like a lady.”

“Would that be the worst thing in the world?” Harrison asked. “If she wasn't quite a lady?”

“I want her to have the good things in life,” said Amanda plaintively. “I want her to be well-liked and respected. I want her to find a young man who loves her . . . like I was fortunate enough to do.”

Harrison laughed. “It's a little early to despair of her matrimonial prospects just yet,” he said. “And I'm sure that she will be irresistible when she grows up.” He stepped closer to his wife, smiling. “After all, she takes after her mother.”

Amanda blushed again, and then, to Peggy's shock, Harrison drew his wife into an embrace and kiss. It felt very intrusive to watch her parents like this, at such a private moment, and yet she couldn't tear her gaze away. “I think I saw my parents kiss each other maybe twice in my entire childhood,” she admitted softly to the spirit. “I knew they were fond enough of each other but . . . but I suppose I sometimes wondered if that was as deep as it went.”

When she turned to the spirit, it was smiling; it gestured at something behind her, and she turned to see that they were now in an all-too familiar tent, looking at a grown version of herself wearing an all-too familiar uniform. 1944, Peggy supposed, eyeing the tent and trying to remember where she'd spent her various Christmases in the army.

Past Peggy was holding a radio, looking less than pleased. “And where were you all going that was so important that you couldn't even tell the rest of us about it?”

The radio crackled to life, and the voice on the other end hit her like a truck. “Bastogne,” said Captain Steve Rogers, and both Peggy and her past self sucked in deep breaths, although for very different reasons.

“Bastogne?” repeated 1944 Peggy, with understanding in her tone. “The battle happening there?”

“I had to go, Peggy,” said Steve plaintively. “They've had our guys pinned down for days now. We could save hundreds of lives.”

“I know,” said past Peggy, while current Peggy pressed her hand to her chest and felt her heart beating wildly there. “You're doing the right thing.” She hesitated, then smiled. “Just warn us next time, before you and the Commandoes go haring off into danger.”

“Yes ma'am,” said Steve, and the Peggy watching the scene could hear the smile in his voice, picture the look on his face. It was incredible how a man that she'd really spent relatively little time with had made such an indelible mark on her.

“Since it seems you will miss the holiday,” her past self went on, “happy Christmas to you, Captain Rogers.”

“And to you,” came Steve's voice. “Here's to ending this war and spending the next Christmas at home.”

“I'll drink to that,” smiled Peggy. The communication ended, and she was left leaning against the table, smiling a secret smile that made her current self's heart ache. They did win the war, and they did spend the next Christmas at home. But Steve Rogers didn't live to see it.

“What am I supposed to learn from this, precisely?” she asked, turning to the spirit who hovered beside her. “If you want me to learn to love, reminding me that the last time I fell in love ended in tragedy doesn't seem to be the way to go about it.”

“Yes, but look at yourself,” said the spirit gently. “You're happy.”

It was right; her past self did look happy—as happy as she ever was out on the front. Peggy watched herself for a moment, then pulled her robe tighter around herself and turned to the spirit. “I think whoever is orchestrating all of this might be operating under a misunderstanding,” she said matter-of-factly. “Yes, I said I'd be happy if I never fell in love again, but I was simply venting my frustrations to a friend. I do believe in love, genuinely; this just isn't a good time for it. I'm focusing on my career, and anyway, I don't have any prospects at the moment. I will settle down when I meet the right man, I assure you.”

The spirit tilted its head at her, something like a grin touching its lips for a moment, and then all around them blackness rose like a curtain, then descended again to show a very familiar place.

“The SSR office!” said Peggy, looking around herself. “1945, then, I presume? I hope you know you are rapidly running out of time, Spirit, since after this I have no past Christmases left.”

The spirit simply held out one hand, and she followed where it was pointing to see her own self, one year previous, working tirelessly away at her desk. She remembered that Christmas Eve well; she'd only been at the SSR a matter of weeks at this point, and she was beginning to understand just how deep Chief Dooley's disdain for women agents ran, and she was still hoping that working hard enough would make him change his mind.

It was the first Christmas she'd spent alone, having not yet met Colleen, and having no immediate family in England to return to. She didn't even have the companionship of her fellow soldiers, and she would spend Christmas Eve night fighting back tears of loneliness.

“How thoroughly depressing,” said Peggy, looking at the lone figure writing away at her desk, her posture straight, her dress bright, her hair and makeup perfect, all in an effort to keep anyone in that office from guessing how tiny and meaningless she felt in that moment. “Why are we here?”

The spirit gestured again, and Peggy looked back to see a very familiar figure approaching her desk. Her heart gave a little leap.

“Agent Sousa,” said her past self, “what can I do for you?”

“Shift's over,” he said. “I'm heading out. It's looking pretty cold out there—you want to share a cab or anything?”

“Thank you,” she said, “but I'm going to stay a bit longer and finish this up.”

He hesitated. “All right. Any big plans for Christmas?”

“Oh, yes, the usual,” she lied, smile bright. “You?”

“My family lives in town, so it's an easy trip.” He hesitated again, then smiled. “See you on the 26^th, Agent Carter.”

“Happy Christmas, Agent Sousa.” She never had understood the American penchant for the phrase “Merry Christmas.”

He smiled a little. “Happy Christmas, Agent Carter.”

As he left, the Peggy who watched from the corner could only stare. What in the world was that memory meant to have taught her about being more open to love? And then realization struck her like lightning, and she whirled about to face to the spirit.

“You're not serious.”

It looked at once perfectly innocent and perfectly confused.

“That's what this is all about? The Other World has crossed into the land of the living and ruined my sleep so that you all can play matchmaker?”

The spirit was still for a moment. And then it grinned.

“Absolutely unbelievable,” she grumbled.

In that moment, with no explanation or goodbye, the spirit vanished. Now that its light was no longer in her eyes, she could see that she was once again in her room, and suddenly quite exhausted. She dropped onto her bed, not even bothering to climb under the covers, and promptly fell asleep.

. . . . . .

STAVE III: The Second of the Three Spirits

. . . . . .

Peggy awoke with the vague sense of having had a long and vivid and dream while she slept. With a yawn, she turned over to her clock: one o'clock, it read, and some niggling thought in the back of her mind told her that was significant, but she couldn't put her finger on why.

It was awfully early to have woken up, and she glanced around the room for a while, wondering what had interrupted her sleep, finally noticing that there was a faint light coming in under her bedroom door as though the kitchen light had been left on. Might as well turn it off, she supposed, and climbed out of bed, noticing she'd fallen asleep in her robe and slippers.

Stretching her arms, she followed the light into the kitchen—where she stopped dead, staring at the sight before her. "Oh," she said. "This again."

It was her kitchen; there was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation: the walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there. The counters and the table were covered with piles of food: turkeys and hams and pies and fruit and cakes, but also all the delights of modern food production: boxes of M&Ms and Milk duds, bottles of 7Up, cans of soup.

And in the middle of this all, shamelessly eating the rest of her leftover chow mein, was a jolly giant of a man, creating a surprisingly impressive figure for someone eating out of a takeout box. He was wearing a green robe bordered with white fur, which hung open over his bare chest; Peggy, looking at that bare chest and the figure's bare feet, wondered how he stood the New York City winter's chill. He wore a holly wreath over its long curly hair, and he was smiling at her as though they'd been friends all their lives.

"Come in!" the spirit declared. "Come in! and know me better, woman!"

"You are the ghost of Christmas present, I presume?"

The spirit beamed at her. "Have you ever seen the like of me before?"

She looked again at the wreath on his head. "No, not quite like you."

"I think you have," he smiled. "You have walked with my elder brothers in your childhood, have you not? You are one who has known the joy of Christmas. But not for the last few years."

"We had a war," she explained awkwardly, wondering if this was something he already knew. "Celebrating Christmas as we did as children was a bit difficult when we were holed up in tents on the front lines."

"And what is your excuse now?"

"I have a very good excuse," she informed him. "My family has all passed away. You know, you spirits are very good at making me feel bad about my situation."

"You have friends, though," he pointed out, ignoring her latter statement. "You could have gone with Angie."

There was something slightly off-putting about this enormous ghost calling her roommate by such a casual nickname. "With my work schedule—"

"There are late trains," he interrupted with a smile. "You could have caught one after work, spent the night there, and returned tomorrow night. Or, even better, you could have not volunteered to work so late on Christmas Eve. You know perfectly well they could have easily staffed the SSR with just the Jewish and the non-Christian Asian employees."

She watched him through narrowed eyes a moment.

"Your willingness to sacrifice yourself for others' sakes is admirable," the spirit told her. "But you're allowed to be happy too. You're allowed to spend Christmas with the people you love, at least."

"Is that what you're here for?" she asked. "To show me the people I love having pleasant Christmas Days without me?"

The spirit smiled and held out an arm. "Touch my robe."

With a sigh, she did so, and in an instant the kitchen vanished away, and she found herself on a street she did not recognize. It was in a small town, or at least the suburbs of a large one, based on the row of small but tidy houses with their neatly kept yards, with a small church standing at one end of the street. She assumed, based on their conversation, that they were in Angie's hometown in Pennsylvania, but for all she knew they could still be somewhere in New York City. She was at least certain, based on all the trees and on the American automobiles parked up and down the street, that they were somewhere in the eastern United States.

And she was fairly certain it was Christmas Day, based on a certain undefinable something in the air—something in the way the people on the street moved and talked and laughed. A service had just ended at the church, and the people bustling out of it were all smiling and wishing each other very warm goodbyes; a few houses from where they stood there were two little boys having a snowball fight while their parents watched happily from the porch; and at the house they stood in front of, the number of cars parked all around, and the sounds from inside, indicated a large Christmas party was happening. Even the snow that lightly fell around them had a Christmas feel to it.

As they watched, another car pulled up, and a couple parked and got out, the man carrying a baby, and the woman carrying a covered casserole dish. The Ghost of Christmas Present beamed happily at Peggy and turned wordlessly to follow them in, and Peggy shrugged and followed suit.

The house inside was packed to the rafters, and Peggy was not certain how the enormous spirit was going to fit in, but although he didn't seem to change in size, he somehow slipped in and stood, looking very comfortable and perfectly in-place, in one corner of the living room. Peggy joined him and observed the assembled crowd.

They certainly could be Angie's family, she supposed; some of the assembled guests were blonde, but many were dark-haired, as Peggy knew a great deal of her roommate's Italian relatives to be. They seemed to be having the times of their lives, whoever they were; new guests were greeted with happy shouts and hugs, and the guests already inside were all talking and laughing in an excited, pleasant din.

It was the sort of happy ruckus that she hadn't been a part of since she parted ways with the Howling Commandoes, and Peggy found herself watching wistfully as a group of teenagers and young adults started discussing a new movie, The Best Years of our Lives, resulting in the kind of good-natured argument that only people close to each other can really get into. Other people came and went, as she watched; at one point a little girl called Maria came in and played "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" slowly and loudly on the battered upright piano, and the other partygoers applauded enthusiastically when she finished. Some time later, a little boy called Nathan recited, for the assembled guests, his part in the school Christmas play: Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol, of all things, and he spoke with great feeling as he declared, "God bless us every one!"

Peggy couldn't say how long she and the spirit stood and watched the party go on, but it seemed like both hours and minutes. She felt a bit intrusive, watching all of these people without their knowing it, but it was strangely compelling, seeing this family interact. It was clear, from the size and decor of the house, and also the dress of the party guests, that this was not a wealthy family, but clearly they were a very happy one. And seeing the children play with their presents, the older folks conversing with genuine affection and snacking on appetizers while the Christmas decorations twinkled around them . . . it was a picture perfect Christmas party, and it left both a warm glow and a dull ache in her chest.

It did surprise her, though, that she never saw Angie—wasn't that the point of all this, to tell her she could have had a fun Christmas if she'd just agreed to the invitation? That question was eventually answered, though, beginning when the spirit turned to smile at her.

"An excellent party," he observed.

"It is."

"It would be a wonderful way to spend Christmas Day," was his next observation.

"Yes, all right, I get it," frowned Peggy. "I'll be happier if I have someone to spend Christmas with. This isn't exactly news, you know. I'm not spending this Christmas alone because I think it will be more pleasant than the alternative."

The spirit only grinned. "Let's check out the other rooms, shall we?"

She agreed and followed him out of the living room—somehow avoiding the crowds, although the house was tightly packed and she and her companion were invisible to everyone else. They walked through the entry way, past the dining room, and into a small front room, where she saw, with a strange twisting feeling in her stomach, a knot of people surrounding a very familiar face. There was a reason she hadn't seen Angie yet; they weren't at Angie's house.

"Ah," said Peggy. "I see where you're going with this. Your friend with the muscular arms tried to bring this up earlier. And I have to say, I wouldn't have expected this to be considered a good use of Christmas Spirit time."

It was Daniel Sousa's family's Christmas party, as astute readers may have already guessed, and the man himself, Chief Daniel Sousa of the LA Office, was standing in the front room with that broad and rarely-seen grin of his that made his eyes crinkle and Peggy's heart patter. He was in a forest green sweater, which caught Peggy's notice strangely; she finally realized that it was because she'd seen him in a sweater vest a hundred times, but never a sweater, and never without his customary shirt and tie. It made him look comfortable and casual and warm and homey, and the thought of seeing Daniel Sousa in a moment of casual comfort at with his family was not helping with that persistent butterfly feeling that had taken hold of her stomach.

He was standing with a group of what had to be relatives—now that she knew to look for it, the resemblance between him and the people she'd been watching was clear. "We're so proud of you, Daniel," said an older woman, and the man with the arm around her waist agreed.

"Always knew you had it in you. Ever since you were a kid, we've known you would do great things."

"Our little Daniel," gushed the woman. "In charge of an entire office of the telephone company."

Peggy wondered, with a secret smile, how much more dramatically they would be reacting if they knew how that his job was significantly more prestigious and important than the telephone company; judging by the ghost of a smile on Daniel's face, she was fairly sure he was thinking something similar.

"But I can't believe you're going to California!" said a younger woman. "You're going to fall in love with the sun and we're never going to see you again."

"I'll come back," he smiled. "As often as I can, I promise."

"Or we'll come visit you," suggested the young woman. "Actually that's better because I hate the winters here."

"You're all invited," Daniel said with a grin. "Just not all at once, because I don't think I can afford that big a house."

A tiny doll of a woman with perfectly smooth silver hair reached up to place a hand on either side of his face. The language she spoke to him was Portuguese, if Peggy was correctly remembering both her time in the war and what she knew of Daniel's family. She didn't understand much of it, but the meeting was clear from the woman's tone and from the way Daniel smiled at her.

"Eu também amo-te, vovó," he said—Peggy knew enough understand that one—and bent down to press a kiss to the old woman's cheek. The sweetness of that gesture burned in Peggy's chest, and she averted her gaze for reasons she couldn't quite explain.

"Dinner's ready," a voice announced from another room, and the group broke up and moved toward the dining table. Daniel stayed back, though, along with a middle-aged woman who had caught his sleeve to slow his egress: his mother, Peggy would wager, because they had the same eyes, and in those eyes, the same look of warm affection.

"I'm so proud of you, querido," said the woman. Her musical voice held a trace of the accent she'd brought over the ocean as a child. "You are making this family so proud, even if we will miss you terribly."

"Obrigado, Mãe."

Daniel made as though to move toward the others, but Mrs. Sousa wasn't done yet. "I don't mean to pry, but what happened with that girl at work?" she asked, while Peggy's eyes widened. "Why didn't you ever ask her out?"

"Mãe . . ." he complained, with that mix of fondness and exasperation that parents and children are so skilled at prompting in each other.

"I mean it," she insisted. "I saw your face when you talked about her, Danny. I haven't seen you that gone on a girl since Giulia Linetti in the fifth grade. So what happened there?"

"Nothing happened there," he said, looking a little embarrassed, while Peggy felt heat spread across her cheeks.

"Are you really going to be happy to go away and wonder for the rest of your life what would have happened if you'd just asked her on a date?"

"I did ask her on a date," he said, in a tone that said he was only volunteering this information to get her to drop the topic.

Mrs. Sousa's eyes lit up. "And?"

"And she said no." He shrugged, his good mood from earlier suddenly dimmed.

Her expression was all sympathy. "No, really? Just 'no,' no explanation or anything?"

"She said she had plans, and then she never brought it up again. And I wasn't about to bother her about it again; she's got enough men in her life that don't listen to her, and I didn't want to be one of them."

"But querido, don't you think maybe you misunderstood her? 'I've got plans,' that's not 'no,' that's . . . 'I've got plans.' Maybe she really was busy, and maybe she would have said yes if you'd asked her again."

"It was a crazy idea to begin with. She's way out of my league. Her last boyfriend was a celebrity, remember?" Then he turned away, as though to hide his expression from his mother; unfortunately for his privacy, this meant he turned so Peggy could see the tight line of his lips perfectly. "No girl is going to trade that for an aluminum crutch."

Peggy's hands tightened involuntarily into fists. She shouldn't be here, really, overhearing such a personal and private conversation. But she couldn't look away.

"Well, she's a fool then," said Mrs. Sousa firmly. "She'd love you just as much as we all do, if she knew who it was using that crutch."

"Thank you, Mãe," he said wryly, turning back to her. "Although you have to say that, you're my mother."

She shook her head. "I still think you're wrong. I think if you ask this girl again—"

"It's too late now," he said. "This is a great position, and it would have been crazy to turn it down over a crush."

"You two!" came a voice from the dining area. "Are you coming over? We can't say grace until you're here and Jacob's going to mutiny if we don't eat soon."

Mother and son laughed and joined the rest of the family in the dining room, leaving Peggy to stare after them, surprised by the swell of emotions coursing through her. "I was obvious," she insisted to the spirit. "I made it quite clear I wanted him to ask again." She hesitated. "Didn't I?"

The spirit only looked at her kindly, and did not give voice the thoughts she felt fairly sure that he was thinking. Instead he glanced back one last time at the door to the dining room, where the Sousa family were gathered to pray. Peggy looked back too and saw Daniel approaching little Nathan, who addressed him as Uncle Danny.

"What would Tiny Tim say right now?" Daniel asked, and Nathan grinned.

"God bless us everyone!"

The spirit touched her arm lightly, and she glanced back to see it leading the way out of the house, through the front wall. Reluctantly she followed, glancing back all the while to see uncle and nephew standing with their arms around each other, until she was through the wall and could no longer see anyone inside.

Wordlessly she followed the spirit down to the churchyard at the end of the street. "So I was wrong about his motivations," she said quietly. "But what can I do? He's moving to Los Angeles any day now. We missed our chance. But he won't be alone long; he'll meet someone new in California, I know it."

She shrugged. "I don't like it," she admitted. "I wouldn't like living with the knowledge that he did truly care for me, and if I'd only said something, we could have—what happened to your hair?" The Spirit of Christmas Present had turned back to smile at her, and she noticed with a start that his hair had suddenly turned gray; and it was only then that she realized that the sky had grown quite dark on the short walk from the party to the church. It must be a ghost thing, she supposed, and I can hardly blame her for leaving it at that and not attempting to understand the mechanism by which so much time had passed so quickly.

"Are spirits' lives so short?" she quoted softly, and the spirit smiled.

"My time upon this globe, is very brief," he said. "It ends upon the stroke of midnight."

She glanced up and saw, on the clock in the church tower, that midnight was only seconds away. A chill spread down her spine. "Is this the part where the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come appears?" she asked delicately. "I always found him a bit off-putting. Any chance we could skip that bit?"

The spirit only smiled. "Go forth," he said, "and know him better, woman!"

The clock struck midnight, and Peggy froze, watching the spirit fade away from her sight. As the last chime sounded, she forced herself to turn and look across the churchyard, where she beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards her.

. . . . . .

STAVE IV: The Last of the Spirits

. . . . . .

"Oh, bloody Nora," Peggy muttered as the figure approached. If her muscles had been obeying her, she might have turned and run for it, but she was frozen in place; it was probably all for the best, though, that she didn't annoy the spirit in any way.

It was standing before her now, impossibly still and quiet, and she cleared her throat. "The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, I presume?" she asked as confidently as she could muster.

There was no answer. She hadn't expected one.

It was all her childhood Christmas nightmares—Thanks for that, Dickens, she thought flatly—brought to life: a tall, robed figure, its black hood hung in just such a way that she couldn't make out the face beneath it. It was so dark in color, and so silent in its movement, that she couldn't have quite distinguished it from the dark night around it if not for the single spectral hand poking out from beneath the robes. It wasn't simply the appearance that had her blood running cold, however; there was a certain air around the spirit, a certain dread and doom that felt as deep and as old as the world itself. She'd felt that feeling before, on the battlefields of Europe, and she shrank back instinctively.

That single visible hand lifted, and the spirit gestured toward the gate of the churchyard.

She forced herself to speak. "You know," she said in an attempt at a conversational tone, "you probably have a lot to do tonight. If you'd like, we don't need to do this. I've learned my lesson, I really have."

The spirit pointed again, and in that slow movement she read something like insistence, and she had to fight to keep herself from taking a step forward. The spirit seemed to notice her reluctance, based on the way its hood turned toward her, and somehow that made it all so much worse, to think that there were eyes beneath that dark hood, observing her every move.

"Fine," she said. "I'm going."

And, holding her elbows in so she couldn't accidentally brush that long black robe, she made her way down the path, the phantom trailing silently behind her.

When she reached out to put her hand on the gate, she found herself instead grasping a doorknob, sitting on a door of the type that you usually find in government buildings and hospitals: institutional-looking and practical. With a glance back at the spirit, who inclined its head slowly, she pushed the door open and walked through.

On the other side she found a large conference room, with machines she didn't recognize ringed around the edges of the room. In the center was a table surrounded by twenty or so seated individuals in suits, some men, some women, all looking very serious. And at the front of the room, Peggy was surprised to recognize herself, dressed smartly in a gray pantsuit. She was clearly quite a bit older, though, from the lines around her eyes and from the gray shooting through her dark hair. A calendar hung on the wall confirmed Peggy's suspicions: it was open to December 1973.

She didn't worry too much about the gray hair, though, being too occupied in watching in delight as her older self addressed the assembled room . . . and they all actually listened to her.

"I'll be flying to DC as soon as we're done here," older Peggy was saying. "So anything else you think needs to go into my address to Congress, this is the moment to bring it up. In the meantime . . ." She smiled warmly. "Go home, everyone. Christmas vacation starts today."

The assembled group began to disperse, but one young man approached her. "Director Carter," he said, and the present-day Peggy broke into a smile. Director Carter? She liked the sound of that. It almost didn't even matter what she was director of.

"Division Chief Thompson," her older self greeted the man, and Peggy, surprised, looked closer at the young man. He did look a bit like Jack Thompson; had she hired his son for . . . whatever it was she was director of?

"I feel like I should come with you," he said. "After all the research and intel-gathering my division has done about these attacks—"

"I appreciate that," Director Carter smiled. "But I assure you I have read and understood all your reports. Besides, Karen will never forgive me if I take you away from home on Christmas Eve."

The young man's face softened then, giving Peggy an idea of what Jack Thompson might look like if he were to ever try to be friendly. "But what about your Christmas?"

"I will be fine," she reassured him. "No one is waiting up for me, and even if they were, those are the sacrifices I agreed to make when I became director of Shield." She patted his shoulder. "You have a bright future here, Thompson, and if you stick around, you will have plenty of opportunities to make personal sacrifices for the job. Until then, enjoy the time off while you can still take it."

He smiled. "Understood, Director. Have a safe flight."

He left, and Director Carter was left alone at the head of the room.

"What's Shield?" Peggy asked, turning without thinking to look at the spirit, then jumping as she found herself looking directly up into his hood; even this close, she could see nothing but blackness underneath. "Never mind," she muttered, turning away and suppressing a shudder. "I know you won't tell me."

She hesitated. "I have to say, though, I don't know if this is working the way you think it should. What this is showing me is that I might not ever have a family, but I will become the director of an intelligence agency that advises the United States Congress. That is certainly nothing to sneeze at. I might very happily choose this future."

The spirit lifted its arm again, and Peggy turned back to see a woman approaching her older self with a file folder under her arm. "Before you go," the woman said briskly, "what about this upcoming summit in Los Angeles? You told the West Coast office to handle security last month, but now the LA FBI office wants jurisdiction."

Director Carter took the file folder and read over it briefly. "I think it still falls under us," she said decisively, handing the folder back. "I'll have a word with Director Kelley when I'm out in DC, and have him pass the word along to his LA office." An odd expression touched her face, just for a moment, and when she spoke again, Peggy could tell from her tone that she was hiding some secret thought behind her words. "Who's the head of the LA office these days?"

The woman consulted her folder again. "Daniel Sousa," she said.

The director had been suspecting that answer, Peggy could see, and there was that odd expression on her face again. "I see," she said simply, her tone carefully controlled—at least to Peggy's ears. The woman with the clipboard didn't seem to notice.

"Would you like us to contact him instead?"

Director Carter hesitated, then shook her head. "No, going through Kelley will be fine."

The woman nodded and excused herself, and Director Carter was left standing alone at the front of the room, the expression on her face wistful and longing for a moment—until she caught herself, shook her head briskly, and strode out of the room.

Peggy watched it all with her lips pursed. "All right," she admitted, turning to the spirit, "maybe my future self has some regrets."

The spirit lifted its arms quite suddenly, its jet black robes suddenly filling her vision, and she took an instinctive step back, equally afraid of the possibility that the spirit was about to attack or hug her. That wasn't its purpose, though; when it lowered its arms, Peggy found herself in an unfamiliar living room, decorated in really a very ugly way: everything was green and orange, there was wood panelling on the walls, and the carpet was strangely deep and thick. Everything was new, however, and she got the impression that it had intentionally been decorated that way. She suddenly found herself not looking forward to the 1970s.

She was distracted from her perusal of the room, however, when voices behind her made her turn around. There were three people sitting on a couch in front of a large box, and Peggy's traitorous heart gave a leap. Two were young adults in their twenties, a dark haired girl and a blonde young man, dressed in a very strange fashion; sitting between them on the couch, changed by age but still immediately recognizable to her, was Daniel Sousa. Like the Peggy they had just seen, his face was lined, his hair touched with gray. Instead of a crutch, she saw a cane leaning against a chair nearby, and it made her smile a little to think that maybe in the future, prosthetics had improved to the point that he needed less help to get around.

The children were clearly his—they had his features, undeniably—and Peggy smiled even as something in the vicinity of her heart gave an unpleasant twist. "See?" she said to no one in particular, her eyes fixed on Daniel's face. "I told you he'll find someone new if he leaves."

Their gazes were all fixed on the box, which was emitting voices not unlike a radio. Peggy leaned so she could see the front of it, and found there was a moving picture on it, like a movie screen. She'd heard of such devices being developed back in her own time: a television device, to allow people to view picture signals being broadcast from other places. Apparently they'd become common in homes by the 1970s.

"This is terrible," the young man grumbled. "Give me that remote."

The girl laughed but handed a small rectangular device over to her brother. "You're such an old grump, Eddie."

Daniel broke in, smiling. "And you're a sucker for anything with Ryan O'Neal in it."

"That's true," she agreed. "Lucky for you I've already seen this movie . . . a few times."

"This is what you do with all the money you make in your fancy new job, Denise?" Daniel demanded. "What happened to the classics? Why does no one watch Bing Crosby anymore?"

Denise just laughed, and Eddie began pushing buttons on 'the remote control.' As he did, the sounds emanating from the box changed; this seemed to be the way you tuned to different signals, like searching through the radio dial for a different station. He'd only been doing this a moment when Daniel suddenly sat up straighter. "Wait, stop!"

"Congressional hearings? Seriously, Dad?" He laughed. "Only you would think this is fun."

"No, it's not that—I know her."

Peggy leaned to get a view of the picture, already fairly sure of what she was about to see. And she was right: there was her own self addressing Congress, looking serious and upright and very impressive.

"Peggy Carter," Eddie read from the screen, "President's Defense Council."

"Do you work with her at the FBI?" Denise asked.

Daniel shook his head, his eyes still glued to the screen. "Back before the FBI," he explained. "Right after the war, actually. We worked together for this government agency, but only for about a year. I haven't seen her since then." He smiled a little. "Peggy Carter, can you imagine it? I always knew she'd do amazing things."

Eddie and Denise exchanged a look fraught with significance. "You two were close?" said Denise casually. "Friends, or . . . something more?"

Daniel was apparently too distracted by watching Peggy's picture to realize he was walking into their trap. "Oh, I was crazy about her," he said, then gave a self-deprecating smile. "Clearly, she never returned the sentiment."

"She's quite a looker," said Eddie. "I bet she was gorgeous back then."

Daniel's expression turned wistful. "She was," he said quietly. "That hasn't changed."

Eddie turned to his sister. "So Denise," he said, "you think your CIA contacts could help you track down the phone number for Peggy Carter?"

"What? Why?" Daniel spluttered, while his daughter nodded enthusiastically.

"So that you can ask her out, obviously." Eddie gave him a look that said he despaired of his father's intelligence.

Peggy, watching the whole scene from the doorway, decided she rather liked this Eddie person.

"And why in the world would I do that?"

"You should be dating, Dad," said Denise, her voice suddenly serious. "We worry about you, out here all alone. And . . . and you know Mom started dating again, don't you?"

Daniel looked pained for a moment. "Yeah, your mom bounced back from the divorce pretty quickly."

"It's been three years," Eddie pointed out. "That's actually a very long time to spend 'bouncing back.'"

"So why not this lady?" Denise asked, pointing to the screen. "You used to be in love with her, she's pretty, you both still work for the government so you'll have a lot to talk about."

"She may not even be single."

"She still uses her maiden name, if you knew her by Carter back then," said Denise. "And she's definitely not wearing a ring."

Peggy nodded her approval at Denise's deduction, even as she wondered why it mattered to her, and wondered why it hurt so much to hear Daniel dismiss the idea of asking her out so completely.

"I don't even know where she lives now—"

"Probably DC, if she works for the government," Eddie pointed out. "And you're back in DC at least once a month for work."

"And most importantly, she wasn't interested in me back then," said Daniel firmly. "I don't think that thirty years of not seeing each other is going to have made her suddenly more interested in me."

Again with being so certain that she wasn't interested. Peggy hadn't realized Daniel was so self-effacing, so ready to believe that Peggy had never felt anything for him at all. But then she thought, why should he think otherwise? She'd turned down his attempt at a romantic overture, and then had apparently never clearly communicated the fact that she wanted him to renew the offer; she'd thought she was being obvious, but if there was anything she'd learned tonight, it was that clearly her attempts at flirting were far too subtle for Daniel to pick up on. She hadn't even told him how much she'd miss him, when he came to say goodbye. She'd told him she considered him a friend, and wished him luck, and no more. Was it that surprising to learn he thought she felt nothing for him?

"But Dad—"

"I will think about what you said about dating," he promised his children. "I will try. But let me assure you guys, this is not the place to start. That ship sailed a long, long time ago."

"Fine," said Denise, settling back into the couch while Eddie picked up the remote control again. "But I'm holding you to that promise."

Daniel grinned and put one arm around his daughter's shoulders, pressing a kiss to her temple, while Eddie settled in close to his father's side. The scene was sweetly domestic; he was entirely suited to being a father, it seemed, and as they returned their attention to the movie they'd chosen, Peggy found her gaze still glued to Daniel's face. Dear Daniel, still so kind, still so loving, still so handsome, even thirty years later. How had she ignored how good and wonderful he was for so many months? How had she missed a thousand chances to say something, to do something, to let him know how she admired him?

How had she failed to realize, until this moment, that her feelings for him were deeper than a workplace crush? How had she failed to realize, until this moment, that she had fallen in love with him?

"Ask me out," she said uselessly, her words falling on deaf ears. "I'd say yes, I promise. Even thirty years later, I'd say yes."

There was no reply, and Peggy could only watch, helpless and longing, until she couldn't take it anymore.

"Fine," she said, whirling around to face the ghost. "All right, fine, I was wrong. Clearly Daniel is interested but has no idea how I feel, and that's why he never asked again. And clearly I regret that nothing ever happened between us, and I'll continue to regret it for a long time to come." She shrugged helplessly. "But he's still leaving. What am I supposed to do about that? Ask him to give up his promotion for me? To give up a major career stepping stone so that we can go out for drinks? That's a selfish thing to ask him. I'm not going to do it."

The ghost tilted its head gently to one side.

"You're right, it's not really selfish if it's something he wants to do," she admitted. "But still, the logistics . . ." She trailed off and was silent and thoughtful a moment. "I thought I was being so obvious," she said. "But then it's not like I have a great deal of experience with this sort of thing. With Fred, he did all the pursuing, all the time, and with Steve it took us years to work up to a single kiss. Being open and vulnerable enough to let a man know how I feel . . . that is not where I excel."

The ghost seemed to nod its head, once, slowly.

"You don't have to agree with me that I'm terrible with relationships," she grumbled. "I do already know this, believe me." She wrapped her robe tighter around herself, and glanced back over at the couch where Daniel still sat. "And it's my fault, too, that I didn't let myself think about quite how much he meant to me until I realized he was leaving; I always assumed we'd have time somewhere down the road to figure all of this out. The threat of absence makes the heart grow fonder, I suppose."

The ghost tilted its head the other direction.

"I do hate the thought of this future," she admitted. "That's part of who I am: I can deal with bad things, I can pick myself up and keep on going very well, if I know that there's nothing I could have done to prevent them. Even Steve—that was horrible, but I found comfort in the fact that I'd done all I could to keep him safe. But if I know there's something I could have done, that haunts me forever. So to know that if I'd just said something to Daniel—if I would just say something to him now—" She shook her head. "I don't know how we'd make it work with him leaving," she admitted. "But I also don't want to live the rest of my life with 'what-ifs.' That would be more unbearable than anything. Especially . . . especially now that I know how I really feel about him."

The ghost folded its arms in front of itself.

"Yes, you win, you've been very clever, you knew how I felt before I did." She pursed her lips. "I can't let him go without telling him, can I? Not now. So I'll do it. As soon as I'm home, I'm going to his house to tell him, and we will figure things out from there." She nodded decisively. "Thank you, Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. I think I may have misjudged you."

The ghost raised its arms up as though looking for a hug.

Peggy blanched. "Wait, no, you're still a little frightening—" She backed up until the backs of her knees hit something soft, and she tumbled backward onto her own bed.

. . . . . .

Stave V: The End of It

. . . . . .

Yes! the bed was her own. The room was her own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before her was her own, to make amends in!

She scrambled up from her bed to find the world outside her window lit with morning sunlight. Was it—was it still Christmas Day? She felt like she'd been awake for hours last night; I think that if you told her it was New Year's Day, she'd have hardly been surprised. After a moment's thought, she reached for her phone to dial the automated Time of Day service.

"Good morning," came the automated voice. "Today's date is Wednesday, December 25. At the tone, the time will be 9:20—"

Peggy hung up the phone, her heart pounding. “It’s Christmas Day!” she said aloud. “I haven’t missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can.”

She stood to pull off her robe and get ready for the day, and then hesitated. Was she really intending to interrupt the Sousa family's Christmas celebrations and tell their son that even though he was leaving the state for a well-earned promotion, she thought her feelings for him might be more important, all on the strength of a very strange night that she even now wasn't entirely certain hadn't been an excessively elaborate dream?

She considered a long moment, and then she nodded her head decisively. She didn't care if it had been a dream or not; she didn't care if she'd been right about Daniel feeling nothing for her. The shock and sorrow she was feeling over his leaving, everything that had happened and that she had felt last night, had proved to her decisively that she cared deeply for him, much more than she'd ever let herself realize, and that she'd be sorry when he was gone. Maybe for the rest of her life, she'd be sorry that he was gone. And she did not want to live a life of regrets, wondering what might have been, knowing things might have gone differently if only she'd had the courage to speak. Even if he turned her away, she wouldn't have to live with questions and regrets.

So she disrobed quickly and headed off to the shower: if she was going to do this, she was going to be looking and feeling her best.

It was after lunch time when she finally left the apartment. She'd spent extra time and care on her appearance, partly because of the task that lay ahead and partly because she didn't want to show up too early in the day; Christmas morning was not something she was willing to interrupt. Showing up on Christmas afternoon seemed a little less intrusive.

Her first stop was the SSR office, to hunt down an address; fortunately for her, no one batted an eye at her showing up on Christmas, when she wasn't even scheduled to work—being a known workaholic had its advantages. In the file room, she rifled through the personnel records until she found the one marked Sousa, Daniel Antonio, and she copied down the addresses marked there for him and for his parents.

His parents' address was in Queens, and she decided to take a taxi there, despite the excessive cost; public transportation was limited on Christmas Day, and now that she'd gotten it into her head that she was going to do this, she wanted to do it now, before she lost her momentum. It occurred to her as the taxi wound through the streets of the city that she had no idea whether Daniel would be at his parents' house at this moment; if Christmas parties were being had, they could be at any number of relatives' or neighbors' houses. But this, at least, was a place to start.

But she was in luck, and also struck dumb with surprise, when the taxi pulled onto a very familiar street and up in front of a very familiar house.

"Something wrong?" the cabbie asked, glancing back at her flabbergasted expression. "This is where you wanted, right?"

"Right," she murmured, paying the cabbie and stepping out. He pulled away, and she was left standing in the very spot the Ghost of Christmas Present had brought her to last night. The house in front of her was the same; the children building a snowman a few houses away were the same; the church at the end of the street was the same. It was even snowing lightly, just like last night.

She knew—she knew—she'd never been in this neighborhood before this whole complicated Christmas ghost affair began. So there was no way her dreams had dredged up a memory of this place last night.

Maybe it hadn't been a dream after all.

That thought terrified her, actually—this sudden proof that last night might have genuinely been spent in the company of ghosts and spirits. But it also buoyed her up. If it was real, then Daniel's feelings for her, confessed twice in two different decades during her nocturnal sojourns, were real as well. She smiled, straightened her dress, checked her makeup one last time in the mirror, and then walked up and knocked on the front door.

It was opened almost immediately by Mrs. Sousa, dressed just as she had been last night, and Peggy forced herself not to react with recognition; they'd never met before, after all. The woman's expression was quizzical but polite, and Peggy smiled warmly. "I'm so sorry to intrude on your Christmas celebrations like this," she said, "but is Daniel Sousa available? I need to speak with him."

Mrs. Sousa's eyes widened, and something like glee entered her expression. "You're Peggy Carter," she said without preamble.

Peggy felt her brow furrow. "How . . ."

"It's the accent," the woman said. "Come in! Come in. Daniel's in the kitchen; I'll go fetch him right now."

She ushered Peggy into the entryway then bustled away to the kitchen, leaving her guest standing awkwardly under the scrutiny of a whole host of Sousa relatives.

"Happy Christmas," she said politely to a pair of small children who were the only ones bold enough to stare openly at her.

Just then Daniel's voice echoed through the hallway, moving closer toward her. "Mãe, why can't you just tell me—" He rounded the corner and came into view; his eyes met Peggy's; his mouth fell open and he came to a stop. "Oh."

She gave him a small smile. "Hello, Daniel." He was wearing the sweater from last night, and he looked just as handsome in it as she remembered, and her pulse accelerated subtly.

"Peggy!" He strode forward in what would look to the outside like a friendly greeting, but his face was serious, and he spoke under his breath. "Is everything okay? Is something happening at the office—"

She shook her head. "But I do need to speak with you," she said. "In private."

He blinked in surprise, but his response was level and polite. "Of course."

This was easier said than done, as it turned out, as every room on the ground floor was filled with partygoers. "Outside, perhaps?" Peggy suggested, and Daniel agreed and pulled a winter coat from a nearby closet. They tried to make their exit from the house discreetly, but Mrs. Sousa saw them going; Peggy caught sight of her winking at Daniel, and Daniel rolling his eyes in return.

"I'm sorry to interrupt your Christmas festivities," Peggy said as they made their way out onto the front porch and shut the door behind them. After the lively noise of the party inside, it was almost startling to step out into the silent, frozen world outside. The neighborhood was quiet in the way that often accompanies falling snow, as though the fluffy white flakes were swallowing up any sounds.

"It's fine," he said; "we're just visiting with each other until the food's ready. But Peg, what's wrong? Why are you here?"

The temperature wasn't as bad as it could have been, given the way it always seemed to get warmer when it snowed, but it was still cold enough that she shoved her gloved hands deeper into pockets of her winter coat. Daniel did the same with his right hand, but, she noticed with a stab of guilt, he had to keep his left one out to hold onto his crutch, and in his haste he hadn't put on any gloves. She vowed to speak quickly so he could get back inside.

"Nothing's wrong," she said, then hesitated, casting her mind about both for the words she had rehearsed all morning and for the courage to say them. Daniel leaned in a little closer, his gaze fixed on her, his dark eyes warm with concern . . . and suddenly it wasn't so hard to speak after all. "It's only that there's something I should have said when we were saying goodbye yesterday at the office—something I should have said a long time ago, actually."

He raised his eyebrows, waiting, still wearing his professional face—still assuming this was work-related.

"I'm happy for you getting this promotion, really I am, for your sake," she said, finding it much easier to speak now that she'd gotten started, like a ball that only needed a push to start rolling downhill. "But, for purely selfish reasons, I'm a little sorry."

His expression fell a little. "I'm sorry, Peggy. I mean it; you deserve it more than I do—"

She silenced him by placing one gloved hand on his sleeve. "Thank you, but that's not what I mean."

He glanced down at the hand on his arm, then back up at her, his expression suddenly very different: confused, cautious, and vulnerable.

"I mean that I'm sorry to see you go, for my sake, because . . . I like you. A great deal." She bit her lip. "In fact, I think I might be a bit in love with you."

Daniel's expression of wide-eyed, wordless surprise might have been a bit comical under different circumstances. To her tightly strung nerves, the silence seemed to drag on forever as he searched for words, and she found herself speaking again to fill it. "I've been waiting for six months now for you to ask me out again, and I decided eventually that you never did because you weren't really interested after all, only suddenly it occurs to me that maybe you didn't realize I wanted you to ask me again. And this realization came, unfortunately, just after your announcement that you were leaving, and the thought of not having you here made me realize . . . well, I've already said what it made me realize." Was she blushing? Her face felt a little hot. But Daniel's expression was softening in a way she found very encouraging, and she pressed on. "And I know this is absolutely terrible timing with you leaving, and honestly I don't have a solution in mind, but I realized last night that if I let you leave without at least saying something, I'm going to regret it for the rest of my life."

Daniel was still staring, but the wondering expression that had replaced his surprise was now slowly giving way to a smile, that big, beaming smile that stretched across his whole face and made his eyes crinkle and Peggy's heart pound. "Peggy," he said in tones of barely repressed joy, "can I kiss you?"

Her knees nearly gave out with relief. "Yes, please."

His crutch clattered to the ground, forgotten, as he stepped toward her. His hands were a bit cold against her neck and her cheeks, but they warmed up quickly; and really, the way he kissed her would have warmed her up even in the coldest snowstorm. Not that she was content to stand there and let him do all the work; her hands were busy finding his waist, and her mouth . . . well, I'll allow her a bit of privacy by not telling you precisely what her mouth was up to.

In time the kiss slowed, then stopped, and he leaned his forehead against hers, his eyes closed, as though simply reveling in the moment. It left her smiling and giddy, to see how the kiss affected him, and the last thing she wanted to do was speak and shatter the hush lying over them. So, content to feel his warm breath ghosting over her lips, she simply stood still and waited until he spoke.

"I've wanted to do that for such a long time."

"I've wanted you to do that for such a long time," she grinned.

He opened his eyes and leaned back, and she wrapped her gloved hands around his in an instinctive need not to lose contact with him. "I didn't know. I thought you saying you had plans was just letting me down easy. And then it seemed like you were treating me the exact same as you did before: no better and no worse. I was glad I hadn't ruined our friendship, but also . . . I've loved you since about the second week you were at the SSR, you know that?"

"Really? That early?"

"We were in the bullpen, and Krzeminski said something rude about immigrants—something like 'I can't believe the sort of people they let in the country these days.' And you said, 'That's nothing; have you seen the sort of people they allow to be born here?' and he didn't even understand what you meant, but I was laughing about it for days. Up to that point you'd just been the new agent who got treated even worse than I did. When you said that, though, I knew you were smart and funny and strong and willing to speak up and push back when it was needed, and I admired that."

"Me being sarcastic with a co-worker? That's what did it for you?"

He shrugged, embarrassed, and she decided that warranted another kiss.

"It was you asking me out that made me realize," she said when it was over, sliding her hands around his waist under his coat, laying her head on his shoulder, and burying herself in the warmth of his thick wool coat. "I'd always been very fond of you, and I thought you very handsome, but between trying to prove myself at the SSR and dealing with Steve's death, dating simply wasn't on my mind. But when you asked me out, suddenly it started to be on my mind, and as time went on and I thought about it more and more, I realized that I did want to go out for drinks with you. Very much."

He groaned, though when he spoke it was clear from his voice that he was smiling. "If only I'd realized—"

"If only I'd been more clear," she cut in. "We both have to take some blame."

They fell silent a few moments, and Peggy thought she could stay like this, the pair of them keeping each other warm, for a long time. But she was actually getting quite cold, and she thought Daniel felt the same, based on a few tiny shivers running through him. Before her teeth started chattering, she thought she'd better speak. "So what now?"

 "I don't know," he admitted quietly, and when she pulled back to look up at him, his dark eyes were serious and troubled. "Peg, I . . . want this so badly. But I'm not sure what to do about California. If I'd known how you felt, I don't know if I'd have . . ."

"You have to take the job," she said immediately. "This is the sort of thing that makes a career. And you know opportunities like this don't come around very often for those of us who don't look and act and have family connections like Jack Thompson."

"I know, but . . ." He leaned forward and kissed her forehead.

"We could do long-distance. People make that work, I believe. Letters and phone calls and visits; you'll be out here often enough, I assume, for the SSR."

"Or," he said, then hesitated.

"Or what?"

"It's crazy."

She smiled wryly. "It's been a very odd holiday for me. I don't think there's anything you can say that I would find too crazy."

"Okay." He took a deep breath. "I was told that to staff my new office, I'm allowed to request transfers of existing employees. And, well, I think Thompson would be willing to let you go, since it would mean you're not always showing him up and getting fawned all over by the other agents." He looked a little embarrassed to be suggesting it, but behind that expression lurked a look of hope.

She hesitated, then smiled. "I hear good things about California. Very warm winters, I believe." The truth was, this possibility had occurred to her in the shower that morning. She found she was surprisingly amenable to it.

Daniel broke out in an answering smile. "They say you can smell the citrus in the air."

"It would be difficult to leave behind Angie and Jarvis," she admitted. "But maybe . . . how soon do you leave?"

"January 2nd."

"Then maybe we try this out until then. If we're both still feeling good about it, you could request a temporary transfer for me—a few months, perhaps? And then we could figure things out from there." She smiled. "I could use some warm weather right now."

Something a bit dazed entered his expression, and he reached up to brush the backs of his fingers against her cheek. "I can't believe we're standing here talking about this. Are we sure I'm not dreaming?"

She laughed a little, thinking of how many times she asked that last night. And then she stepped a little closer. "I hope this isn't a dream," she said earnestly.

He kissed her again.

And maybe they would have stayed out there forever, until the kissing or the cold made their faces go numb, but Daniel saw the way Peggy was starting to shiver and led her back inside. Mrs. Sousa approached them almost immediately, her eyebrows raised in inquiry. Peggy felt a shy smile tug at her lips, and glancing at Daniel, she saw the same look on his face.

And Mrs. Sousa grinned broadly. "Excellent," she said. "Peggy, you'll stay to dinner, won't you?"

"I would love to," Peggy answered warmly.

Mrs. Sousa turned on her heel and led the way back to the dining room. "We need another place at the table!" they heard her yell. "Danny's girlfriend is staying for dinner!"

Daniel actually colored a little at that, and Peggy just grinned and took his hand to lead him to the dining room, where the rest of the family was gathering for dinner. They all looked at the pair's joined hands and smiled approvingly, and Peggy was a little embarrassed, but not much.

Grace was said and everyone sat around the table, Peggy by Daniel's side. The whole room was a happy din of Christmas cheer and excited laughter, glowing warm and golden in the light from the candles on the table, and Peggy felt it surround her like a blanket: the reminder of what it felt like to have family who love you. Then Daniel took her hand under the table and she found a whole new reason to be happy.

"Are you going to stick around?" little Nathan asked from across the table, and Peggy smiled at him, and then at Daniel.

"Yes, I rather think I am."

Peggy was better than her word. She stuck around—not around the Sousa household, of course, but around Daniel; she followed him to Los Angeles, where she functioned as assistant chief, and several high-profile arrests and one wedding later, Daniel followed her back to the East Coast so she could found SHIELD. But no matter what city they lived in, no matter how busy their schedules became, they always made time for each other, for Peggy had come to understand the importance of having Daniel in her life. She came to appreciate romance as much as anyone that the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.

And it was always said of her, that she knew the value of love, if anyone alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Daniel's nephew Nathan observed while playing Tiny Tim in the school play, God bless us, every one! 

. . . . . .

fin

. . . . . .