Fanfic advent day 1
As a reminder, I'm doing a Fanfic Advent kinda thing to clear out my backlog of 2019 prompts (mostly from Tumblr, a couple from prompt fests on DW). Here's the list, though they won't necessarily be in this order because I'm writing them somewhat out of order, so I'll shuffle as necessary to get the finished ones to the top.
Day 1: Agent Carter. From Tumblr: I dont kno if ur still into agent carter at all but i was wondering about daniel/peggy/jack established relationship and how they are with their kids growing up - maybe in the same verse as the ‘steve is found in the 70s’ ficlet
Here's the 'Steve was found in the '70s' ficlet. This is a few days later. Also posted on Tumblr.
"I thought you weren't going to be home for my graduation, Dad," Debbie Sousa declared, flinging her arms around Jack's neck hard enough to make him stagger backwards.
"Plans change, kiddo." Jack caught her up in a hug, whirling her in her graduation gown. "Got in late last night. Hey, watch it, you're going to break an old man's back."
"Old?" she laughed. "You're not old!"
Peggy didn't think so either, but Debbie certainly made her feel old -- both of the kids, honestly. She watched the byplay with her arm around Carol, whose profusion of blond curls made it clear which of the men in Peggy's life was her biological father -- for all that it mattered; Carol had hewed to Daniel's quiet calm from an early age, while fierce, driven Debbie, who had just become one of the only women in her graduating law class, was just as evidently Jack's daughter despite her clear resemblance to Daniel.
And not a single person in Peggy's life would have really understood (the closest anyone ever got were the persistent rumors that she'd had an on-again, off-again affair with Jack for the last twenty years) but at times like this, it didn't really matter, on green grass under a clear blue sky. Ironically, the thronging crowd at Yale's commencement ceremonies provided almost as much privacy as total isolation. All around them, graduates and their parents or siblings were having their own little reunions, hugging or wandering about their arms around each other. The reporters had gotten tired of Peggy (and tired of Debbie, one of the only girls in her graduating law class) early on, and now the five of them enjoyed a rare kind of anonymity, just one little family group among many. In this kind of setting, no one was going to ask which of the men was Debbie's father and which was her uncle. They could stroll off, as they did, with their arms around each other -- Peggy with Daniel's hip bumping hers, and her other arm around Debbie, and Debbie with her arm laced through Carol's -- and the only thing anyone would think, looking at them, was There's a family.
And Debbie had never asked why Jack was home from Berlin days before he should have been.
*
Peggy had picked him up at the New York airport late the previous night. Jack was jet-lagged and grouchy, and she was already dreading the night drive up to New Haven for the ceremony. Daniel and Carol had driven up earlier. Peggy hadn't yet seen them, because she herself had only just gotten back from Norway less than twelve hours before. She was dazed and tired and still trying to convince her brain of the difference between midnight and dawn, and she kissed Jack without really thinking about it, then pulled back when she realized what she'd done. But no one at the gate was paying attention, she understood an instant later; no one thought her anything other than a middle-aged woman with gray streaks in her dark hair kissing a tall blond man, dapper despite the creases in his suit and his obvious jet-lag, who must be her returning husband or European paramour.
"Where is he?" Jack asked, as if she might have Captain America in the trunk of her sensible Chrysler.
"They flew him directly to SHIELD headquarters in DC. They have the facilities to deal with him there."
She realized after she said it that she was speaking of Captain -- of Steve as if he was some kind of superpowered threat to be dealt with.
But ... in some sense he was, wasn't he? She didn't know how to think of him, and most particularly she didn't know how to cope with the feelings that had been stirred up after nearly thirty years of laying dormant.
"He wake up yet?" Jack asked her, as they walked to her car in the parking garage adjoining the terminal.
"No," Peggy said. "He may not, you know. The serum appears to have preserved his body, but --" It came out steady. "Perhaps not his mind."
She had seen him in Tromsø, before he was hustled onto a plane for the US. The sight of that face had taken her back a quarter century, kicked her right back into the head of a completely different woman, one who had seen a very different future for herself.
The future she had imagined as a young woman would have completely erased Debbie and Carol. It would have washed away the life she'd shared with Daniel and Jack. And now here was the ghost of that life, dangled in front of her, while her real life went on: Debbie's graduation and Carol's angry diatribes about Vietnam and the mortgage on the new house in New York and the work on the permits for the New York SHIELD construction project and the vet bills for their aging Jack Russell terrier (currently boarding with the Jarvises while the family went up to Connecticut for Debbie's commencement) and midnight airport pickups and last-minute paperwork and ...
It was a life she had here, filled with her friends and her lovers and her children and the job she'd devoted her life to. She didn't even know how to fit Steve back into it.
"So who's driving?" Jack said, dragging her back to reality.
"Me. Obviously."
"I think you've had less sleep in the last twenty-four hours than I have."
"Me," she said, and he didn't argue.
*
Debbie and Carol were chattering about where to go for drinks after the traffic cleared out a little, the sisters' political differences washed away in their simple pleasure at seeing each other after several years of infrequent get-togethers at family holidays. Peggy rested against Daniel's hip and enjoyed the feeling of Jack's arm sliding around her from the other side, and the way their hands clasped briefly behind her back, letting go only with a light stroke across the wrists that she was aware of only because it happened across her hip.
If circumspection was a lifestyle for her and Jack, then Jack and Daniel had raised it to an art form. Thus far, even at the SSR, no one had guessed the second component of the secret the three of them shared.
The life that she loved was a house of cards, resting on a foundation of secrets. Any number of things could bring it crashing down. But never, in all her thoughts along those lines, had the thought occurred to her that Steve might be the agent of that destruction.
It didn't have to happen, she told herself. But ... she really didn't know what was going to happen when he woke up. She didn't know.
"Someone's moody today," Jack said, resting his head against hers.
Here, today, where familial gestures of affection were not uncommon; where she could stroll with two men while the girls giggled mere feet away, and she could feel Jack and Daniel's hands linked behind the small of her back.
"Just today?" Daniel said, like a tennis player batting back a serve, and she aimed a nudge at his ribs, but not hard enough to actually knock him off stride
Well. Okay then, if that's the way they wanted it. This was an oasis, with the real world still out there. The world, and Steve; the past she'd left behind; the politically uncertain present in which she lived.
But they'd lived their lives leapfrogging from oasis to oasis. And she had learned to take those warm feelings as they came, and not to worry too much about the future, a future that could break them apart.
She dragged in a breath. They had found Steve. They found him.
"But the real question is, who drives us to the restaurant," she said, and Jack laughed and Daniel kissed her temple, and things were good. Oh. So good.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1285953.html with
comments.
Day 1: Agent Carter. From Tumblr: I dont kno if ur still into agent carter at all but i was wondering about daniel/peggy/jack established relationship and how they are with their kids growing up - maybe in the same verse as the ‘steve is found in the 70s’ ficlet
Here's the 'Steve was found in the '70s' ficlet. This is a few days later. Also posted on Tumblr.
"I thought you weren't going to be home for my graduation, Dad," Debbie Sousa declared, flinging her arms around Jack's neck hard enough to make him stagger backwards.
"Plans change, kiddo." Jack caught her up in a hug, whirling her in her graduation gown. "Got in late last night. Hey, watch it, you're going to break an old man's back."
"Old?" she laughed. "You're not old!"
Peggy didn't think so either, but Debbie certainly made her feel old -- both of the kids, honestly. She watched the byplay with her arm around Carol, whose profusion of blond curls made it clear which of the men in Peggy's life was her biological father -- for all that it mattered; Carol had hewed to Daniel's quiet calm from an early age, while fierce, driven Debbie, who had just become one of the only women in her graduating law class, was just as evidently Jack's daughter despite her clear resemblance to Daniel.
And not a single person in Peggy's life would have really understood (the closest anyone ever got were the persistent rumors that she'd had an on-again, off-again affair with Jack for the last twenty years) but at times like this, it didn't really matter, on green grass under a clear blue sky. Ironically, the thronging crowd at Yale's commencement ceremonies provided almost as much privacy as total isolation. All around them, graduates and their parents or siblings were having their own little reunions, hugging or wandering about their arms around each other. The reporters had gotten tired of Peggy (and tired of Debbie, one of the only girls in her graduating law class) early on, and now the five of them enjoyed a rare kind of anonymity, just one little family group among many. In this kind of setting, no one was going to ask which of the men was Debbie's father and which was her uncle. They could stroll off, as they did, with their arms around each other -- Peggy with Daniel's hip bumping hers, and her other arm around Debbie, and Debbie with her arm laced through Carol's -- and the only thing anyone would think, looking at them, was There's a family.
And Debbie had never asked why Jack was home from Berlin days before he should have been.
*
Peggy had picked him up at the New York airport late the previous night. Jack was jet-lagged and grouchy, and she was already dreading the night drive up to New Haven for the ceremony. Daniel and Carol had driven up earlier. Peggy hadn't yet seen them, because she herself had only just gotten back from Norway less than twelve hours before. She was dazed and tired and still trying to convince her brain of the difference between midnight and dawn, and she kissed Jack without really thinking about it, then pulled back when she realized what she'd done. But no one at the gate was paying attention, she understood an instant later; no one thought her anything other than a middle-aged woman with gray streaks in her dark hair kissing a tall blond man, dapper despite the creases in his suit and his obvious jet-lag, who must be her returning husband or European paramour.
"Where is he?" Jack asked, as if she might have Captain America in the trunk of her sensible Chrysler.
"They flew him directly to SHIELD headquarters in DC. They have the facilities to deal with him there."
She realized after she said it that she was speaking of Captain -- of Steve as if he was some kind of superpowered threat to be dealt with.
But ... in some sense he was, wasn't he? She didn't know how to think of him, and most particularly she didn't know how to cope with the feelings that had been stirred up after nearly thirty years of laying dormant.
"He wake up yet?" Jack asked her, as they walked to her car in the parking garage adjoining the terminal.
"No," Peggy said. "He may not, you know. The serum appears to have preserved his body, but --" It came out steady. "Perhaps not his mind."
She had seen him in Tromsø, before he was hustled onto a plane for the US. The sight of that face had taken her back a quarter century, kicked her right back into the head of a completely different woman, one who had seen a very different future for herself.
The future she had imagined as a young woman would have completely erased Debbie and Carol. It would have washed away the life she'd shared with Daniel and Jack. And now here was the ghost of that life, dangled in front of her, while her real life went on: Debbie's graduation and Carol's angry diatribes about Vietnam and the mortgage on the new house in New York and the work on the permits for the New York SHIELD construction project and the vet bills for their aging Jack Russell terrier (currently boarding with the Jarvises while the family went up to Connecticut for Debbie's commencement) and midnight airport pickups and last-minute paperwork and ...
It was a life she had here, filled with her friends and her lovers and her children and the job she'd devoted her life to. She didn't even know how to fit Steve back into it.
"So who's driving?" Jack said, dragging her back to reality.
"Me. Obviously."
"I think you've had less sleep in the last twenty-four hours than I have."
"Me," she said, and he didn't argue.
*
Debbie and Carol were chattering about where to go for drinks after the traffic cleared out a little, the sisters' political differences washed away in their simple pleasure at seeing each other after several years of infrequent get-togethers at family holidays. Peggy rested against Daniel's hip and enjoyed the feeling of Jack's arm sliding around her from the other side, and the way their hands clasped briefly behind her back, letting go only with a light stroke across the wrists that she was aware of only because it happened across her hip.
If circumspection was a lifestyle for her and Jack, then Jack and Daniel had raised it to an art form. Thus far, even at the SSR, no one had guessed the second component of the secret the three of them shared.
The life that she loved was a house of cards, resting on a foundation of secrets. Any number of things could bring it crashing down. But never, in all her thoughts along those lines, had the thought occurred to her that Steve might be the agent of that destruction.
It didn't have to happen, she told herself. But ... she really didn't know what was going to happen when he woke up. She didn't know.
"Someone's moody today," Jack said, resting his head against hers.
Here, today, where familial gestures of affection were not uncommon; where she could stroll with two men while the girls giggled mere feet away, and she could feel Jack and Daniel's hands linked behind the small of her back.
"Just today?" Daniel said, like a tennis player batting back a serve, and she aimed a nudge at his ribs, but not hard enough to actually knock him off stride
Well. Okay then, if that's the way they wanted it. This was an oasis, with the real world still out there. The world, and Steve; the past she'd left behind; the politically uncertain present in which she lived.
But they'd lived their lives leapfrogging from oasis to oasis. And she had learned to take those warm feelings as they came, and not to worry too much about the future, a future that could break them apart.
She dragged in a breath. They had found Steve. They found him.
"But the real question is, who drives us to the restaurant," she said, and Jack laughed and Daniel kissed her temple, and things were good. Oh. So good.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1285953.html with
comments.