A/N: I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty sure this will never be finished. To avoid having super slow updates, I was planning on not posting it until I'd written the whole thing, but… well, it's been months and I've only managed to write two-and-a-bit chapters; so I really just wanted to share what I've done so far. It won't allow me more free time, but maybe it will motivate me? The problem is, I'm a final year student, I have a paid job and voluntary work, and I have very little time. So I'm saying this right at the start- if you don't like fics that will probably never be finished, and/or rarely updated, please don't bother reading this- I don't want to let anyone down! Chapter 2 will be posted in a few days, chapter 3 when it's finished, and after that… I just don't know, I'm sorry. .

But, if you want to continue, let's go :) The title is from Edgar Allan Poe's poem 'Annabel Lee' for reasons I hope will become clear later on.

Chapter One

January, 1942

Working in weapons development, you were bound to suffer a few explosions, especially if you insisted on testing everything yourself. Howard was well aware of this fact, but it was not enough to stop him filling the few milliseconds available to him before he was knocked off his feet by the blast with as many curse words as his mind could process. He passed out.

It must have been a bad one because he woke up in the military hospital on the edge of town, where they brought home the boys to that had been injured overseas or the rookies that managed to hurt themselves during training. It wasn't Howard's first visit since he had gained the US arms contracts just over a year before, and each time it was more humiliating to be back. Still, the nurses usually made a fuss of him, and it was the only holiday he'd got since the Europeans started kicking the stuffing out of each other, so he supposed the time wasn't a total loss. That day, when he woke up, it was a nurse he hadn't spoken to before who was attending to him. He knew her face, he had seen her flitting about the wards, but this was the first chance he'd had to study it up close. She was carefully wiping his face when he came round, in fact, so he was able to see her extremely up close indeed. It wasn't a bad face either; a little pinched, perhaps, the face of someone who'd had a hard time of it ten years ago and never quite got their appetite back, or maybe she'd been ill a lot growing up. Other than that, it was a pleasant enough face, creased into a frown of concentration, blue eyes and blond hair. She was a mousy, thin, frail little thing, but appealing in a certain way. She was certainly attractive enough to warrant his attention.

She saw his eyes open and immediately backed off, allowing him to haul himself upright with a grunt of exertion that was annoyingly un-dashing.

"Urrgh, I don't know what you nurses do to me, but I always feel terrible when I wake up." He complained. It was a joke, of course, not one of his better ones, but a joke all the same. The nurse barely smiled, folding up the cloth she'd been using.

"That's your fault, Mr Stark, not ours." She said. "Do you remember your accident?"

"I remember a big fire ball."

"It wasn't that big, you were the only one hurt. And your burns were only superficial."

"Tell that to the pain."

"Are you in pain? I can fetch the doctor."

"You could tell me your name."

"It's Nurse Rogers. As I said, Mr Stark, your injuries were minor but-"

"Your first name?"

"-You're not going anywhere until matron is satisfied that you're properly rested and your fever has gone down. You've been overworking, Mr Stark, your body is run into the ground. You really should try to be a little more responsible."

"Has anyone ever told you that your bedside manner is terrible?"

"Has anyone ever told you that this hospital is supposed to be treating soldiers, not profiteers?"

Silence. That had been, Howard would admit, a little unexpected. Her face was turned away from him now, nominally as she straightened and smoothed his bed sheets, but he could see she was looking sideways at him, daring him with her eyes to contradict her. He couldn't help but smile a little. This was going to be interesting.

"You have a problem with what I do?" He asked, trying to sound curious rather than accusatory. "Listen, sweetheart, I save lives."

"You make guns."

"Yes, and if our boys didn't have guns, the Nazis would still kill them. We aren't going to beat Hitler with a white flag. So unless you want to be singing Deutschland über alles,doll-face, you'd better get used to people like me." He looked her up and down again, taking in the blond hair and blue eyes. "You'd probably be fine though, you're just his type."

"Our boys need guns, yes." She agreed, brushing off the rest. "But you don't have to make money off it."

"They aren't free, sweetheart."

"No, but you're not selling them at cost either."

She was completely unashamed, Howard thought, she had no qualms about saying these things to him. In fact, from the look of her, she had probably wanted to say them to him for some time. She looked like a woman on a crusade. The idea of the challenge made her infinitely more interesting in his eyes; the idea she had a cause, and passion, made her more attractive. He saw something in her, even then.

"Well, why don't you let me take you for dinner and I'll tell you all about it?"

"I don't think so, Mr Stark."

"Never?"

"Get better and then we'll talk. I'll fetch the doctor to come and examine you."

"If I can't get a date, will you at least give me your name?"

"It's Nurse Rogers." She repeated and left; but he had seen the small smile on her face. She was not immune to his sweet talk- in fact, if he didn't know better, he would have thought she was flirting back.

April 2012

SHIELD were, in Tony's opinion, missing a trick by ignoring the intelligence-gathering skills of preteen girls. His twelve year old daughter, for instance, hoarded information like the most experienced of officers, and could use it against him to devastating effect. Not only did Penny have an encyclopaedic knowledge of British boy band and international pop sensation One Direction- which Tony now knew more about than any adult male should- she always knew when he was about to break a promise, whether accidentally or on purpose, whether the promise had been made drunk or sober, recently or aeons ago, none withstanding. Always. Usually she knew before he did himself. In the two years since his daughter had come to live him with him, Tony had learnt that sometimes, at least as far as promises to Penny were concerned, lying was not worth the effort.

Goodness only knew the kid had probably had enough promises broken over the years. Her history was turbulent at best; Tony had never really been a part of her life when there had been others to take the responsibility. Her mother had been a one-night-stand of his, he had been a rebound after her engagement had apparently fallen apart. Of course, Parker had married her anyway and he had treated Penny as his own even before she was born; she even had his surname. While he had been around playing daddy, Tony hadn't seen any need to get involved with the kid. He sent some money now and then, visited perhaps twice for just a few minutes on his way elsewhere, looked occasionally at the photographs her mother sent him and generally gratefully considered himself to have escaped any real responsibility.

That had only lasted two years, then Penny's mother and Parker were both killed suddenly, in the same accident. Tony couldn't remember when or how he had learnt the news, but he remembered it took him a few days before it really occurred to him that the responsibility would now be on him, that he needed to work out what to do with his daughter. He was not in a good place at the time; his father had just died, and however volatile their relationship had been, it left a gap in Tony's life. It also meant, of course, that the controlling shares of Stark Industries went to him and the company had been in absolute chaos, requiring Tony to put in long hours in boring meetings to try and straighten things out. Add in the fact that the kid was probably already traumatised by losing her parents, that Tony was basically a stranger to her and had no idea of how to take care of her, even if he'd had the time, and the suggestion of Penny coming to live with him became completely ridiculous. Her stepfather's family had been taking care of her ever since the accident, and had considered her their niece ever since she was born. May and Ben Parker accordingly agreed to take the young girl in, but it had been on the strict condition that Tony became more involved. True, his biweekly visits were rarely more than bimonthly, and were usually spent in awkward silences as they wondered what to do with and say to each other, but at least he wasn't a stranger to her anymore.

That was probably why, when a robber broke into the house, killing her uncle and hospitalising her aunt, Tony was woken up in the early hours of the morning to find a terrified ten year old had come out of hiding and run straight to him.

That night was his first real taste of what it meant to be a father. He had to stay with her, support her and listen as she told the police officers how she had woken up to noises downstairs, how she had gone out to look but her aunt and uncle, also emerging, had sent her back to her room. She told them how she had heard shouting and gunshots and run downstairs, slipped unnoticed into the kitchen looking for a phone, for a way to contact the police, but then heard steps approaching and had somehow managed to wedge herself into the cupboard beneath the sink before he came in. The man had the gall to stop and call 911 himself, making up a bogus story about it being a false alarm, saying a rat had got into the kitchen and his wife had tried to shoot it, obviously trying to buy time to get away in case the neighbours had alerted the cops. Hoping the noise would cover her actions, Tony's brave, reckless little girl had pulled the door open a crack, trying to memorise every part of his appearance for the police. The man didn't notice, and left. Penny had stayed in the cupboard, wanting to be sure he was gone- and then had come the sound of the door being broken down. Already more frightened than any child should be able to tolerate, Penny had bolted out her cupboard, out of the back door, over the yard fence and straight to Stark Tower without pausing to find out who the new arrivals were.

It was the police, of course, who were not so easily duped by false alibis. For one thing, neither of the registered owners of the address held gun licenses, so at the very least there was a firearms offence going on. When no-one had answered the door, further alarm bells had rung and they had finally broken it down, to find Ben Parker already dead, his wife shot, unconscious but alive and their niece missing. They contacted Tony just as Tony had got enough out of Penny to realise he needed to contact them, and the rest was a sleepless night and endless questions.

Aunt May had survived her injuries, but her recovery was long and slow and had mostly taken place at her sister's house. Penny had settled in with Tony and had been staying there ever since, but the bright-eyed girl glaring suspiciously at him over her breakfast cereal was reassuringly different from the wild, near-hysterical creature that had come to him that night.

The reason for her suspicious glare was simply this- Javis had announced that Tony had a call, from Doctor Banner, no less; Tony had taken up his headset and told him to patch it through, and somehow, Penny just knew that meant she wouldn't be having dinner with her dad that night like he'd promised. Her unimpressed look spoke volumes.

"I'm just taking a phone call, Penny. It doesn't mean I'm about to jet off to Europe for ten months." He said.

"What?" Bruce said.

"Sorry, I was talking to Penny. She never quite forgave me for the whole hostage thing. I missed her birthday." Tony began pulling up what he could on Banner's recent activity; if the good doctor was bothering to contact him, something big was going on. They had never actually met in person, but they'd had a lot of contact over the last decade through calls and e-mails and occasionally SHIELD agents in non-descript suits and pseudo-intimidating sunglasses, the exchanges mostly boiling down to "Can I have your father's notes on the super serum?", "No", "Why?" and "I can't find them". His old man had never exactly been big on writing things down, his notes had mostly been in his head. The rest had been doused in whiskey and set fire to in 1945, when Howard had been in a drunken rage because the one successful candidate, a woman he called 'Annie', had died. Tony only knew as much about Stephanie Rogers, stage name Captain America, as every other kid did after they covered her in grade school history. That was about as much as he knew about his father's war work too, as the old man had refused to reminisce but had always looked relentlessly forward into the future and fought nostalgia even on the frequent occasions he was drunk, which usually began with swearing and cursing at anything he could get to and ended with a teary-eyed rendition of When Irish Eyes are Smiling.

Bruce had finally given up on any assistance from the past and had continued with his own efforts, which Tony had watched with interest; occasionally making a contribution, but they were essentially beginning again from scratch and Bruce should have expected a few hiccups along the way. Even Tony, however, had not expected such a gigantic green hiccup and had been waiting for an excuse to meet Banner in person ever since. Unfortunately, given that most of Shield viewed Tony as a distinctly shady and unreliable personage, the opportunity had never presented itself, until now at least.

"Can you get down to the Shield labs?" Banner asked him.

"Well, I don't know. I haven't exactly been welcome there before." He glanced at Penny, who was glaring at him more than ever. "And I'm not sure mommy is going to let me out to play."

Penny stuck her tongue out at him.

"You'll want in on this, Tony, trust me." Banner said. "The expedition was successful. We found her."

Tony felt a little shiver run through his guts, the feeling of discovery. She could only be one person; the successful serum candidate. Shield had trawled the ocean more times than Tony cared to recall looking for the corpse, hoping it would hold the key to recreating the serum. This could certainly be a break through. Bruce clearly thought so- the man was generally quiet and not prone to prattling, but even now, he was still going.

"The cadaver was perfectly preserved in the ice; there's no deterioration at all, it's scientifically perfect. I'm going to examine her now, just cursory stuff first, muscle development and so forth, and then I'm going to get into the blood work-"

"Alright, alright, I'll come down to view the results." Tony said, curious in spite of himself. He'd always loved a challenge, especially ones that involved a puzzle. It sort of felt like a contest- his father had invented the serum, and now Tony was going to help reconstruct it, backwards, just from viewing the end results. The old man wasn't going to beat him.

Still. He had no desire to go corpse-digging himself.

"Feel free to start without me on the post-mortem." He said. "I don't need to see anything squishy."

"Just get down here." Banner said, and Tony hung up. Penny sighed, loudly, clearly having gathered he was going out again.

"Sorry, kid." Tony tried.

"No you aren't." She said, matter-of-factly, because she always knew when he wasn't being entirely sincere. She scowled briefly, but she was good natured beneath it all, and had an interest in science which meant she couldn't dismiss a phone call from Doctor Banner any more than her father could. "What did he want?"

It was entirely possible that Bruce and his buddies at Shield would not want Tony's twelve year old daughter knowing this probably-sensitive information. Tony consoled himself, however, with the argument that if they did not want him knowing (and potentially sharing) their secrets, they should not have put their top-secret offices just a couple of blocks away from Stark Tower. Of course, their labs and buildings had been built in his father's day, when Howard had been all buddy-buddy with Shield's predecessors, but still. If they didn't want him to spy on them, they shouldn't have made it so easy for him to do so. Besides which, Penny was something of a Captain America fan. Ever since she had studied the woman at school, and discovered her grandfather's personal involvement, she had been fascinated. Tony wasn't quite sure the extent his daughter's collection of memorabilia went to, but he knew there was at least a stuffed doll and a child's dressing up kit involved, as well as some collectible postcards Penny had used to plug the gaps between the wall of One Direction posters and the tatty enlargement of an AC/DC album cover which she had put up to keep her father happy when he criticised her taste in music. One day she might actually listen to it. She was still looking at him expectantly.

"Well, you know Doctor Banner's been working on the super serum? He's found something."

"He's thought that before." Penny answered, ever the sceptic. "Before he went all Hulk-y."

"Yes, but by something, I mean someone."

"Someone who knows about the serum?"

"Better."

Penny thought for a second, then squealed in a way that only twelve year old fan girls could. Shield was definitely missing a trick.

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

Despite his specific request not to see any squishy bits, when Tony arrived Bruce still hadn't got as far as cutting the cadaver open. He'd had one of his lab assistants hustle Tony in through a side door, hoping that somehow, just for once, the billionaire would go unnoticed. He knew there was some controversy surrounding Tony at Shield- some of them wanted him involved in a new initiative Nick Fury was putting together, and some didn't. That was all Bruce had been able to gather from workplace conversation and a little innocent eavesdropping, and that was all he knew. Tony probably knew more about it, being that he had the time, skills and moral disregard to have hacked into the computer system more than once. This was the first time, however, that Bruce would see him up close; not on a TV screen or computer monitor. Tony was watching the progress of the post mortem from a glass wall in the floor above, with a perfect view of the table. Bruce would almost have been nervous, if he hadn't been too excited. This was it. This was the clue he had been hoping for- surely, with a sample of blood, with the original serum in his hands, it wouldn't be too hard to isolate the components? Perhaps he would even be able to unlock a cure to his own condition. The possibilities seemed to unfold endlessly before him, a winding, golden road.

But that was all in the future. He needed to concentrate on the task at hand, or none of it would happen. Every inch of the body had been photographed, recorded and scanned; including by X-ray. Considering the speed she must have hit the water, she was in remarkably good shape, with no broken bones and no internal injuries. Most spectacularly of all, there didn't seem to be any frostbite or major skin damage in spite of seventy years in deep freeze. The serum really was potent stuff. It was time to set up a blood drain and then remove some of the key organs, the heart and lungs, to study if the serum had affected them or simply the muscles, and if so how far beyond the norm they were.

"Fitting the blood drain now." He said, as his team silently and efficiently got themselves, and the cadaver ready for it.

"Just make sure you leave something for the state to bury." Tony's voice buzzed over the intercom. "My little girl was very insistent about that."

Bruce rolled his eyes, plugging the drain into the wrist before turning to the intercom himself. "How do you feel about stem cell research?" He asked.

"Why, have you got some?"

"Mm, I'm not sure yet. From the looks of the X-ray, it seems like she was pregnant when she went down. No more than two weeks or so, I'd say, she probably didn't even know herself." He glanced again at the X-ray of the lower body. "It doesn't seem to have any form yet, anyway, just a bundle of cells. At a guess, it probably got torn away from the lining on the impact of hitting the water. I can't really tell until I get in there though, for all I know it could just be a spot… on the… um, on the…" He ground to a halt.

"On what?" Tony demanded. "Bruce?"

Bruce was no longer listening. He'd thought he'd been imagining it, but there was a definite spurt coming now and then in the draining blood, beginning to occur more frequently, slow, comatosely slow, but almost as if-

But it was impossible. She'd been in ice for seventy years, and anyway, they would surely have noticed when they scanned her-

But none of them had looked for a pulse. None of them had checked. Why would they?

And there was the blood, not so much flowing, but occasionally being forced. As if her heart was still beating, slowly, slowly, but beating all the same- and quicker all the time.

Bruce swore. He never swore unless the occasion really demanded it, but he felt it was justified. He pulled the drain out before it could do any more damage, yelling to his team, demanding a heart monitor. The room fell into chaos as they tried to reorganise themselves, to find one, searching for any other signs of life. From the outside, it must have been completely incomprehensible, which was probably why Tony's questions of what was happening were growing more irritated. Bruce continued to ignore him, he wouldn't say anything until he was sure; after all, there were plenty of other explanations, more logical ones- but he couldn't help hoping.

Someone had found a heart monitor. Bruce hooked her up, and felt his breath catch. His heart was as still as the flat line on the screen. The room was in silence, apart from the dull, continuous thrum of the machine.

And then, there it was; a beep, a peak, followed a few seconds later by another, and then another, the gap slightly shorter. No-one was quite sure what to do. Bruce went back to the intercom.

"Tell your kid the burial is going to have to wait." He said. "She's still alive."

OoOoOoOoOoOoO

Stephanie came round slowly, with a struggle. Part of her didn't want to bother at all. Waking up had been an entirely unexpected occurrence anyway. She had accepted that she would die; that she needed to die, to save the others. Survival had not been part of the plan. All in all, though, it was a nice bonus. Howard would be pleased, if he didn't kill her for being so reckless.

She wondered what sort of shape she would be in. Perhaps she would be invalided out of the army, which, given how things were right now, might be the best outcome. Then again, she didn't remember anything beyond hitting the water and feeling the first rush of cold. It was entirely possible that she was still in the water. She might still be in danger.

She forced herself through the last few inches into consciousness. There was a ceiling above her, which was a good start. The tiles looked wrong, somehow, though perhaps that was just because they were unfamiliar. Ignoring the dizziness the movement caused, she rolled onto her side to see the rest of the room. It was fairly typical of a private hospital room she supposed, though it wasn't the sick bay at her last posting, nor the military hospital back home in New York. Where on earth had they taken her?

Something was wrong, though. Her instincts were recognising something off before her brain could. She struggled to her feet, shocked by how weak she was, looking around. There were no windows. Why would they build a hospital without any windows? Come to that, how could it be a hospital without any smell of disinfectant ingrained by long use into the walls and floors? She suddenly wondered, with a sickening twist in her stomach, if she had washed up on the wrong side. Maybe the Germans had her.

But there was baseball on the wireless. It didn't get much more American than baseball. She tried to calm down, to listen- she wondered how long she had been asleep. It took a few moments for her brain to catch up with the goose bumps on her arms, a few moments before she realised that she had heard this game before, around two weeks ago. It had been on the night- she couldn't forget it, anyway. Somehow, someone was playing a recording. This was a trap, a trick.

She wasn't going to hang around. The lock on her room's door didn't give her a moment's pause and she staggered out into the corridor, where the lights were just fluorescent tubes, but bright, brighter than any she'd seen anywhere outside of the Stark labs. Someone shouted behind her- she disabled them. She ran. She'd figure out where the hell she was and what to do about it once she was clear.

There was a fire door at the end of the corridor, but it was like no fire door she had ever met before. She punched it, but either she really was weak or the doors were reinforced, because she did little more than dent it.

An alarm began to go off; red lights flashing and a siren wailing, like inside the submarines. She had to get out now. In her panic, she turned to the control panel on the side of the door. There weren't any buttons. It was a flat piece of glass, but the numbers were there, drawn on behind it. More importantly, there was the small logo of Stark Industries that marked it as Howard's tech. If this really was an enemy base, it could be bad news; but for the moment, it gave her hope. There was the code, the code that only she knew, that Howard had put in because she had worried so much about his experiments going wrong again. It was meant to be compatible with all Stark Tech- but she couldn't find any buttons on this thing, no keyboard, there seemed to be no input at all. The seconds were ticking by, she could hear people approaching, and all she could do was tap the glass.

It seemed to work. The numbers lit up as she touched them, just as if they had been actual buttons. The door deactivated and she staggered out into the outside world.

It wasn't Germany. She didn't know where it was. If she had to guess, she'd say it was New York. She'd known the city all her life, she knew its street and its folks, and though she recognised nothing, it seemed familiar. It was like what New York would turn into in a hundred years' time, with towers stretching right up to heaven, every road crammed full of cabs and cars, people of every race teeming together over the sidewalks. She wasn't so sure that this wasn't New York a hundred years in the future, that she hadn't walked into a real-life Science Fiction. All she could do was stare, to stop herself screaming.

But there, barely two blocks away, the highest skyscraper of all of them, the one that rose the highest into the clouds; the name was written ostentatiously enough on the side of it. Stark.

Stark. There could only be one. Howard. It had be Howard. Howard would know what to do, Howard would know what was going on.

There were pursuers coming up behind her now. She kicked the door shut in their faces and ran, ran as if her life depended on it, just in case it did; ran past all the cars that looked like spaceships and stores advertising things she didn't recognise and people wearing clothes made of fabrics she never knew existed, heading for the one thing she could see that was still familiar.