31 Plays in 31 Days, #6 - “History Book”

More fan fiction, from Forever Captain, though not from the story I’m currently working on.

I mentioned once admiring a fan fiction writer I discovered in high school for how she would write in what she called “hooks”— little details that at their first inclusion didn’t mean much, with significance that wasn’t figured out yet, but could be picked up and expanded upon in later installments. I’ve never been particularly good at it, but I took a stab at it in a recent piece of Forever Captain.

In The Hemingway Trip, which deals with Steve wrestling with what he should do with his knowledge of the future when Howard Stark comes to him feeling ambivalent about his wife’s pregnancy, I tried to lay in such a hook. Steve and Howard have a conversation that takes it for granted that Steve recently had to deal with a fairly significant rift between him and his kids that he had to work through. I thought it added interesting dimension, and though I don’t have it fully figured out, I think it would make the most sense that they would struggle with finding out about his former life. I think he and Peggy would know they had to tell their kids eventually, but in the interest of putting it behind him and allowing them to lead a normal life, he would put off too long— and they would find out for themselves. And it would bother them, for a lot of reasons, beginning with how they kept from them as long as they did.

I don’t know if it would happen the way I depict it in this scene. It references a way Steve himself wonders about in the text of an earlier fic, so that may be too on the nose. But it’s a bit of noodling to start that idea when I have time to get to it.



( Day #6 - History Book )