“His Part to Play” - 15. Elizabeth
Mar. 30th, 2021 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breakinglight11Forever Captain:
“His Part to Play”
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~
Summary: “Steve Rogers has retired to the 1940s to build a new life with Peggy. In leaving behind the mantle of Captain America, at last he’s got a measure of peace. Still, Steve will never stop feeling the responsibility to step up as a hero— except he's not sure how much power his actions have at this point in the timeline. Somehow he must reconcile his new life and identity with the responsibility and burden of being a hero out of time.”
Previous chapters:
1. Lost Time
2. Building
3. Reaching
4. Bonds
5. Ghost
6. Stag Night
7. Wingmen
8. Mr. Carter
9. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
10. Suiting Up
11. On Maneuvers
12. Waiting
13. The World’s Oldest Battle
14. A Pinch of Salt
Chapter summary: Steve and Peggy begin life with their new daughter.
“His Part to Play”
By Phoebe Roberts
~~~
Summary: “Steve Rogers has retired to the 1940s to build a new life with Peggy. In leaving behind the mantle of Captain America, at last he’s got a measure of peace. Still, Steve will never stop feeling the responsibility to step up as a hero— except he's not sure how much power his actions have at this point in the timeline. Somehow he must reconcile his new life and identity with the responsibility and burden of being a hero out of time.”
Previous chapters:
1. Lost Time
2. Building
3. Reaching
4. Bonds
5. Ghost
6. Stag Night
7. Wingmen
8. Mr. Carter
9. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
10. Suiting Up
11. On Maneuvers
12. Waiting
13. The World’s Oldest Battle
14. A Pinch of Salt
Chapter summary: Steve and Peggy begin life with their new daughter.
~~~
15. Elizabeth
Steve got the story as Dum Dum led him back through the maternity ward. It was he that Peggy had reached out to when she went into labor in the field. The Commandos were not always deployed as a unit these days, so it was not uncommon that they were scattered across the world, all on separate classified missions. They tried to stay in contact with Peggy when they could, but for security reasons it was not always impossible. Dugan had only been back in the country a few weeks, in the capital for a debrief and to receive his next assignment. But when he’d picked up the distress signal Peggy had sent her secure channel, he had not hesitated.
“The funny thing is, I was planning on checking back in now that I was Stateside again.” He grinned. “But she got me before I got around to it.”
Peggy had been pinned down when she went into labor, unable to move without tipping off her quarry. If she had wanted to get out of there without compromising the mission, there was no way around it, she was going to need tactical support. It had to have been hard for her, to call in backup when she was so concerned about being sidelined by motherhood. But Peggy Carter was a true operative; pride was not about to come in the way of getting her man. And fierce lioness that she was, she would see, come hell or high water, that just the same she protected her child. That was where Dum Dum came in, and Steve could not have asked for a better man for the job.
All that remained was to explain was Steve’s own presence there; they had not known how to reach the Commandos to tell them. “I know I have a lot of explaining to do,” he began, but Dugan waved him off.
“There’s time for that later. For now... there’s something more important waiting for you.”
And so, just before sunrise on April 18th, 1950, Steve welcomed his daughter Elizabeth Natalie Carter into the world.
It wasn’t her smallness that surprised him; that he had prepared for. No, it was the warmth of her, the warm wriggling weight of that tiny life laid in his arms for the first time. He had wondered, he had dreamed, he had prayed. But nothing could have readied him for this.
It hadn’t been too hard to settle on a name for her. Natalie was his idea, in honor of a fallen friend. “She stood by me in some very hard times. And she gave everything to save us.”
Her first name took a bit longer. Peggy didn’t like Helen or Rosemary, while Steve couldn’t picture her as an Amelia or Victoria. And when Peggy had thrown out “Alexandra?” he’d had to carefully modulate his reaction. That was what she'd called her eldest in the other timeline, her daughter with Daniel Sousa. He supposed it made sense, she must have liked the name. But even now, Steve didn’t think he could bear it.
“No,” he said, keeping his tone neutral. “No, I don’t care for it.” Their daughter was a different person, leading a separate life in another time. She needed her own name.
Elizabeth felt right, finally, of the few other girls’ names they could agree on. It was Peggy’s own middle name, after all; perfect for a girl who would be like her and not like her.
The real test was when they got her home. Of course Steve had heard just how much work a baby was, but nothing had prepared him for the task of keeping this tiny thing alive. She looked so small and fragile that he was almost afraid to touch her with his big awkward paws. Even Peggy, usually so confident to dive into anything, seemed daunted. Neither of them really knew anything about children, and for all they’d tried to do their homework, it all paled in comparison to the squirming, cooing, sometimes screaming reality before them. It was enough to shake the fortitude of even Captain America.
Fortunately, however, they had plenty of help. Ana and Edwin were there from day one, showing up at the house later that very morning. They came armed with a handmade quilt, an enormous Brownie camera, and enough frozen meals to feed an army for a month, ready to welcome Elizabeth home from the hospital. Angie, too, was delighted by the little girl. She came out regularly on the train to lend a hand and keep Peggy company as she adjusted, gabbing away happily with mother and baby alike. There was also a spontaneous rallying around them by the people in their neighborhood, as they passed along old baby clothes and offered to watch the little one for an hour or two. Steve was deeply touched, and pleasantly reminded by it; it was one of the things he’d missed the most in his time in the twenty-first century.
It took some time for Howard to come around. He found excuses to keep his distance, attempting to send extravagant baby gifts in his place, until the combined forces of them and the Jarvises browbeat him into meeting her. Even then, his discomfort remained plain, and they could by no means convince him to actually hold her.
“Goony-looking thing,” he mused, staring down at Elizabeth as she wiggled in her bassinet. “Be a damn shame if the two of you make an ugly baby.”
Peggy glowered. “I’ll hazard a guess that Edwin will end up her favorite uncle.”
“Give me until she’s old enough to build a pinewood derby car,” he said. “Then we’ll be great pals, I promise.”
They didn’t want to push it; some people just weren’t much for kids, let alone babies. But Steve was bothered by it, perhaps more than he should have been, and not entirely for Elizabeth’s sake. It boded poorly, he knew, for the future to come.
But Steve had bigger things to worry about than Howard. He had a new mission tasked to him, and it was the most critical of his career.
True to his word, Steve did everything in his power to see that Peggy could balance their family with the pursuit of her career. A new baby called for all hands on deck, but he knew it meant it was up to him to take the lead on Elizabeth’s care. He worked on his own schedule and didn’t need as much sleep, which allowed for Peggy to occasionally be spared. Unfortunately it seemed that neither did the baby, making for more than a few nights where the only way to head off the screaming was near-constant rocking of her cradle. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for parents who weren’t super soldiers.
But amid the constant demand, there was the tiny little person that was Elizabeth. Steve found he delighted in getting to know her. She had so much personality to her, far more than he ever would have expected from such a young child. And she was full of opinions, too, on everything from the color of her hair ribbons to how Daddy tied her shoes. And watching her brain make connections, taking in information about the world and building up her own presence in it, overjoyed him beyond anything he expected. It made him all the more determined to do his best for her; he’d been at war, he’d lived on the run, but this was by far the hardest thing he’d ever done. The stakes certainly had never seemed higher.
Steve observed his daughter with more than just typical parental concerns. What if she’d inherited more than his blond hair and Peggy’s big brown eyes? What would it mean, that she might be the first and thus far only offspring of a super soldier? In subtle ways he could have sworn she showed advantages over other kids. She seemed immune to the parade of childhood colds that should have been inevitable from putting everything within reach into her mouth. And did she seem so resistant to sleep because she didn’t need as much of it? When she started walking earlier than expected, was it a physical advantage of her genes?
Or, as it struck him later in a panic, what if that wasn’t what she inherited from him at all? He’d had any number of health problems before his transformation, and he had no idea what might have been genetic. What if he passed along not the effects of the serum, but something much worse?
Yet despite those new fears, the truth was that she was to all appearance a perfectly normal healthy little girl. He supposed that was actually a blessing; if there was something exceptional about her, better for it not to be obvious. Peggy’s work occasionally put them in contact with the sort of people who might have recognized the signs, and he was resolved to see that he gave her a normal life. No scientists, no soldiers, no superheroics. Even Peggy’s fieldwork they kept carefully separate. It had been hard enough to be Captain America when he’d chosen it; he would not subject her to being Captain America’s daughter to the rest of the world.
Peggy did her best to allay his fears with good sense. “Nobody knows anything, Steve. She’s safe.”
Still, it wasn’t enough for him to shake it. “I want her to just be a kid,” he said. “Not a freak.”
He focused his energy instead on seeing that her life was full. There were a number of other kids arounds, many not too far off in age from Elizabeth, so she had no shortage of friends to play with. The Haywards’ daughter Keiko was just a few years older than her, and their second girl Sakura was born another year after that. And she had an adoring chosen family around her, especially the Jarvises, who turned their own inability to have children into a boundless love for the children of others. Watching Edwin’s easy joy in Elizabeth made it clear why Tony would one day come to hold him in a place he couldn’t for his own father.
Notably, Steve found himself something of a novelty among the parents of their community. Compared to many dads of the time, he took much more day-to-day responsibility for Elizabeth. Too much baby talk would have Peggy ready to tear her hair out, so Steve often took that bullet. And with Peggy’s work, he was the one who fed and dressed her most mornings, spent the day with her until Mama got home, and saw to introducing her to the neighborhood.
Every now and then Steve would hear a crack from somebody— “I figured you for lace curtain Irish, Grant. Didn’t know that meant you kept in the kitchen.” But he was shanty Irish going back to the old country, and he didn’t care what folks said.
“Don’t worry,” he’d answer, not missing a beat. “I’ll teach her to move the dishes before pissing in the kitchen sink.” He simply went on with being the sort of dad he wanted to be, and so with his usual aplomb and gentle good humor, he eventually brought them all around.
And yet even as she thrived, he could not stem the worry for what might be to come. As time went on, what would she grow into? Would she be faster and stronger? Would she be resistant not only to sickness, but to cold, to poisons, to exhaustion and pain? And how would she understand herself, should it become increasingly clear that she was not like other children, not like any other human being?
And then there was the strange history of his own life. For now, yes, she remained protected from it. But what if she recognized the face in an old photograph of Captain America in a textbook? What if she wondered why Mama and Uncle Howard called him Steve instead of Grant?
“We’ll have to tell her someday,” he mused aloud to Peggy. “We’ll have to explain.”
Peggy’s brows knit. “What do you mean? Explain what?”
“What she is.” Steve breathed deep. “What… I am. And I don’t know how.”
“You’re her father. She’s your girl. That’s all that matters.”
He shook his head. “We can’t keep it from her. It wouldn’t be right.”
Peggy moved in close. “Of course not. I only mean... it won’t change anything. We’re a family. We’ll make sure she understands.”
He wrapped an arm around her, taking comfort in her confidence, her familiar courageous resolve. That faith would be the best he could do for now. This was one part of the future about which he had no inkling.
For once he didn’t know if that was better or worse.
~~~
Next chapter: 16. Maria
15. Elizabeth
Steve got the story as Dum Dum led him back through the maternity ward. It was he that Peggy had reached out to when she went into labor in the field. The Commandos were not always deployed as a unit these days, so it was not uncommon that they were scattered across the world, all on separate classified missions. They tried to stay in contact with Peggy when they could, but for security reasons it was not always impossible. Dugan had only been back in the country a few weeks, in the capital for a debrief and to receive his next assignment. But when he’d picked up the distress signal Peggy had sent her secure channel, he had not hesitated.
“The funny thing is, I was planning on checking back in now that I was Stateside again.” He grinned. “But she got me before I got around to it.”
Peggy had been pinned down when she went into labor, unable to move without tipping off her quarry. If she had wanted to get out of there without compromising the mission, there was no way around it, she was going to need tactical support. It had to have been hard for her, to call in backup when she was so concerned about being sidelined by motherhood. But Peggy Carter was a true operative; pride was not about to come in the way of getting her man. And fierce lioness that she was, she would see, come hell or high water, that just the same she protected her child. That was where Dum Dum came in, and Steve could not have asked for a better man for the job.
All that remained was to explain was Steve’s own presence there; they had not known how to reach the Commandos to tell them. “I know I have a lot of explaining to do,” he began, but Dugan waved him off.
“There’s time for that later. For now... there’s something more important waiting for you.”
And so, just before sunrise on April 18th, 1950, Steve welcomed his daughter Elizabeth Natalie Carter into the world.
It wasn’t her smallness that surprised him; that he had prepared for. No, it was the warmth of her, the warm wriggling weight of that tiny life laid in his arms for the first time. He had wondered, he had dreamed, he had prayed. But nothing could have readied him for this.
It hadn’t been too hard to settle on a name for her. Natalie was his idea, in honor of a fallen friend. “She stood by me in some very hard times. And she gave everything to save us.”
Her first name took a bit longer. Peggy didn’t like Helen or Rosemary, while Steve couldn’t picture her as an Amelia or Victoria. And when Peggy had thrown out “Alexandra?” he’d had to carefully modulate his reaction. That was what she'd called her eldest in the other timeline, her daughter with Daniel Sousa. He supposed it made sense, she must have liked the name. But even now, Steve didn’t think he could bear it.
“No,” he said, keeping his tone neutral. “No, I don’t care for it.” Their daughter was a different person, leading a separate life in another time. She needed her own name.
Elizabeth felt right, finally, of the few other girls’ names they could agree on. It was Peggy’s own middle name, after all; perfect for a girl who would be like her and not like her.
The real test was when they got her home. Of course Steve had heard just how much work a baby was, but nothing had prepared him for the task of keeping this tiny thing alive. She looked so small and fragile that he was almost afraid to touch her with his big awkward paws. Even Peggy, usually so confident to dive into anything, seemed daunted. Neither of them really knew anything about children, and for all they’d tried to do their homework, it all paled in comparison to the squirming, cooing, sometimes screaming reality before them. It was enough to shake the fortitude of even Captain America.
Fortunately, however, they had plenty of help. Ana and Edwin were there from day one, showing up at the house later that very morning. They came armed with a handmade quilt, an enormous Brownie camera, and enough frozen meals to feed an army for a month, ready to welcome Elizabeth home from the hospital. Angie, too, was delighted by the little girl. She came out regularly on the train to lend a hand and keep Peggy company as she adjusted, gabbing away happily with mother and baby alike. There was also a spontaneous rallying around them by the people in their neighborhood, as they passed along old baby clothes and offered to watch the little one for an hour or two. Steve was deeply touched, and pleasantly reminded by it; it was one of the things he’d missed the most in his time in the twenty-first century.
It took some time for Howard to come around. He found excuses to keep his distance, attempting to send extravagant baby gifts in his place, until the combined forces of them and the Jarvises browbeat him into meeting her. Even then, his discomfort remained plain, and they could by no means convince him to actually hold her.
“Goony-looking thing,” he mused, staring down at Elizabeth as she wiggled in her bassinet. “Be a damn shame if the two of you make an ugly baby.”
Peggy glowered. “I’ll hazard a guess that Edwin will end up her favorite uncle.”
“Give me until she’s old enough to build a pinewood derby car,” he said. “Then we’ll be great pals, I promise.”
They didn’t want to push it; some people just weren’t much for kids, let alone babies. But Steve was bothered by it, perhaps more than he should have been, and not entirely for Elizabeth’s sake. It boded poorly, he knew, for the future to come.
But Steve had bigger things to worry about than Howard. He had a new mission tasked to him, and it was the most critical of his career.
True to his word, Steve did everything in his power to see that Peggy could balance their family with the pursuit of her career. A new baby called for all hands on deck, but he knew it meant it was up to him to take the lead on Elizabeth’s care. He worked on his own schedule and didn’t need as much sleep, which allowed for Peggy to occasionally be spared. Unfortunately it seemed that neither did the baby, making for more than a few nights where the only way to head off the screaming was near-constant rocking of her cradle. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for parents who weren’t super soldiers.
But amid the constant demand, there was the tiny little person that was Elizabeth. Steve found he delighted in getting to know her. She had so much personality to her, far more than he ever would have expected from such a young child. And she was full of opinions, too, on everything from the color of her hair ribbons to how Daddy tied her shoes. And watching her brain make connections, taking in information about the world and building up her own presence in it, overjoyed him beyond anything he expected. It made him all the more determined to do his best for her; he’d been at war, he’d lived on the run, but this was by far the hardest thing he’d ever done. The stakes certainly had never seemed higher.
Steve observed his daughter with more than just typical parental concerns. What if she’d inherited more than his blond hair and Peggy’s big brown eyes? What would it mean, that she might be the first and thus far only offspring of a super soldier? In subtle ways he could have sworn she showed advantages over other kids. She seemed immune to the parade of childhood colds that should have been inevitable from putting everything within reach into her mouth. And did she seem so resistant to sleep because she didn’t need as much of it? When she started walking earlier than expected, was it a physical advantage of her genes?
Or, as it struck him later in a panic, what if that wasn’t what she inherited from him at all? He’d had any number of health problems before his transformation, and he had no idea what might have been genetic. What if he passed along not the effects of the serum, but something much worse?
Yet despite those new fears, the truth was that she was to all appearance a perfectly normal healthy little girl. He supposed that was actually a blessing; if there was something exceptional about her, better for it not to be obvious. Peggy’s work occasionally put them in contact with the sort of people who might have recognized the signs, and he was resolved to see that he gave her a normal life. No scientists, no soldiers, no superheroics. Even Peggy’s fieldwork they kept carefully separate. It had been hard enough to be Captain America when he’d chosen it; he would not subject her to being Captain America’s daughter to the rest of the world.
Peggy did her best to allay his fears with good sense. “Nobody knows anything, Steve. She’s safe.”
Still, it wasn’t enough for him to shake it. “I want her to just be a kid,” he said. “Not a freak.”
He focused his energy instead on seeing that her life was full. There were a number of other kids arounds, many not too far off in age from Elizabeth, so she had no shortage of friends to play with. The Haywards’ daughter Keiko was just a few years older than her, and their second girl Sakura was born another year after that. And she had an adoring chosen family around her, especially the Jarvises, who turned their own inability to have children into a boundless love for the children of others. Watching Edwin’s easy joy in Elizabeth made it clear why Tony would one day come to hold him in a place he couldn’t for his own father.
Notably, Steve found himself something of a novelty among the parents of their community. Compared to many dads of the time, he took much more day-to-day responsibility for Elizabeth. Too much baby talk would have Peggy ready to tear her hair out, so Steve often took that bullet. And with Peggy’s work, he was the one who fed and dressed her most mornings, spent the day with her until Mama got home, and saw to introducing her to the neighborhood.
Every now and then Steve would hear a crack from somebody— “I figured you for lace curtain Irish, Grant. Didn’t know that meant you kept in the kitchen.” But he was shanty Irish going back to the old country, and he didn’t care what folks said.
“Don’t worry,” he’d answer, not missing a beat. “I’ll teach her to move the dishes before pissing in the kitchen sink.” He simply went on with being the sort of dad he wanted to be, and so with his usual aplomb and gentle good humor, he eventually brought them all around.
And yet even as she thrived, he could not stem the worry for what might be to come. As time went on, what would she grow into? Would she be faster and stronger? Would she be resistant not only to sickness, but to cold, to poisons, to exhaustion and pain? And how would she understand herself, should it become increasingly clear that she was not like other children, not like any other human being?
And then there was the strange history of his own life. For now, yes, she remained protected from it. But what if she recognized the face in an old photograph of Captain America in a textbook? What if she wondered why Mama and Uncle Howard called him Steve instead of Grant?
“We’ll have to tell her someday,” he mused aloud to Peggy. “We’ll have to explain.”
Peggy’s brows knit. “What do you mean? Explain what?”
“What she is.” Steve breathed deep. “What… I am. And I don’t know how.”
“You’re her father. She’s your girl. That’s all that matters.”
He shook his head. “We can’t keep it from her. It wouldn’t be right.”
Peggy moved in close. “Of course not. I only mean... it won’t change anything. We’re a family. We’ll make sure she understands.”
He wrapped an arm around her, taking comfort in her confidence, her familiar courageous resolve. That faith would be the best he could do for now. This was one part of the future about which he had no inkling.
For once he didn’t know if that was better or worse.
~~~
Next chapter: 16. Maria
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