Peggy Carter

Carter arrives in 1602 having been pulled through a portal at the end of her previous ordeal and lands in a universe mid-crisis, just in time, it seems, to save Prince Loki from a rift and fail to save Hela from the next one. Thor blames her immediately and she is a fugitive before she has fully understood where she is. What she does understand, quickly, is the shape of the problem: two time periods compressed together, the universe unraveling at every seam, and somewhere in this world a Forerunner whose very presence is causing the collapse. The Watcher tells her the universe is doomed and offers her a way home. She refuses both the escape and the verdict.

She builds her team the only way she knows how, by finding the people she trusts regardless of the century they happen to be living in. Tony Stark gives her the science. Rogers Hood and his company give her the muscle to steal Thor's scepter. Wanda and Fury work the angles she cannot reach from outside the court. When Stark's device finally lights up green and Steve Rogers steps forward as the Forerunner, the universe offers Carter the cruelest possible resolution: the only way to save this world is to send him back, and sending him back means losing him again. She tells him it never gets easier, that they never get their happy ending. Rogers presses her gauntlet himself, making the choice before she has to. She saves the universe and Strange Supreme steps through a portal moments later, telling her he has a story for her, pulling her immediately toward whatever comes next before she has had a single moment to sit with what she just lost.

Captain Carter is the peak-human super soldier of the Allied war effort, born of a single choice made in a Brooklyn laboratory. Present as an SSR agent when Dr. Erskine's experiment on Steve Rogers is sabotaged by Heinz Kruger, a Hydra assassin, Margaret "Peggy" Carter steps into the chamber herself as the serum's window of opportunity is closing. She emerges transformed, the sole recipient of Erskine's formula, the rest gone with Dr. Erskine. Colonel Flynn dismisses her as a failure and a mere woman, but she proves him wrong at every turn. Alongside Steve, who now pilots Howard Stark's Tesseract-powered Hydra Stomper armor, she rescues Bucky Barnes and the 107th. She becomes a symbol of the war next to her Howling Commandos.

Her partnership with Steve grows into something deeper as the two turn the tide against Hydra. Tragedy strikes during an assault on a Hydra train, where Steve is lost and the armor captured. Undeterred, she leads the charge on Red Skull's castle in the Black Forest. There the Skull unleashes a monstrous interdimensional creature through the Tesseract, which immediately crushes its summoner. To save her world, Captain Carter drives the beast back through the portal, anchoring herself with a sword as its tentacles drag at her. She is pulled through the closing rift, only to be ejected nearly seventy years later in a world that moved on without her.