There is a film series that follows a group of children, interviewing them every seven years. It starts with Age 7 in America, then is followed by 14 Up in America and 21 Up in America. The movies are incisive documentaries, humanizing both personal and political issues. This fanfic is just like that, except it's not a documentary, it's not incisive, and it won't humanize both personal and political issues. Instead, at each age or each life event, I'll have one vignette for each character. Sometimes a character will get a shorter story, sometimes they'll get a longer one. Just depends on how interesting their life was at the time.

As a note, all information should be correct to canon as of episode 02x15.

The Marvel world is very like our own, but sometimes songs or TV shows or products were released a few years earlier or later than in our timestream. This explains any seeming discrepancies you may notice.

Age 18 Months

Skye (Mary Sue Poots)

"The next page is the end of this book and there is a monster at the end of this book. Ooh, I am so scared!" added Sister Claire in her best Grover impression. "Please do not turn the page! Please, please, please!"

The baby girl laughed. She might not have understood all of the words, but she certainly understood the game they were playing. She reached out with her tiny hand and flipped the last page of the book, saying, "Mon-sah! Mon-sah!"

"Well, look at that! This is the end of the book and the only one here is me. I, lovable furry old Grover am the monster at the end of this book. And you were so scared. I told you there was nothing to be afraid of." Sister Claire closed the book and kissed the girl on the forehead. "Grover is such a silly monster. Just like you."

"Govuh," echoed the girl with a giggle, "Mon-sah."

"I wouldn't get too attached, Claire," said Sister Angela. "I'd wager our little Mary Sue is going to be adopted very soon." Angela had served in her present career for over two decades. There were three criteria that predicted which kids would get adopted, and Mary Sue met all three: She was young, she was healthy, and she was white. Well, the paperwork said she was "mixed race", but she could pass for white, and Sister Angela certainly wasn't above smudging a form or two if it meant a child could find a permanent home.

(And yes, the whole thing was uncomfortably racist, but Angela wasn't trying to change the world, just trying to make the best of the world she lived in.)

"I know," said Sister Claire, bouncing the baby on her knee. "It won't be long before someone takes a shine to our little monster."

Leopold Fitz

"Fizzit."

The woman bowed her head and shut her eyes tightly, trying to hold back tears. She loved her son – she did – but he could be so difficult and so demanding.

"Fizzit." Leopold pulled off his left shoe and banged it on the ground. "Fizzit!"

Leo had always been a fussy baby. She had never been able to get him on a schedule of eating or sleeping. He cried often and was hard to soothe. She had hoped at the time that these things weren't signs he was going to take after his moody, mercurial father. (A father who visited less and less. A father who was talking about moving to Belfast with his new girlfriend. In her darkest, most exhausted moments, Leo's mother wondered if an easier, more agreeable baby would have enticed his father to stay in the picture.)

She knew, from the other mums she met at the park, that most parents dread the day when their child learns to use the word 'no'. Leo could say no, she was fairly certain, but he didn't scream it in fits and tantrums the way other children did. Leo's tantrums were longer and stranger than that, and they centered around a single word:

"FIZ-ZIT!"

Leo pulled off his other shoe and threw it at his mother. "FIZZIT!" he wailed.

He was saying 'fix it'. It was what he said whenever something didn't seem right to him, and that happened an awful lot: Fix-it! Applesauce belongs in the blue bowl, not the red one. Fix-it! My toy plane won't fly. Fix-it! These two biscuits are different sizes.

It usually took his mother quite a while to guess what he was upset about. All the while, he'd get louder and more frustrated. And sometimes, the "problem" couldn't even be fixed – she could sew up his favorite blue pants, but she couldn't make the rip disappear.

And now he was yelling it again. Fizzit, fizzit, fizzit.

"Fix what?" she asked. "What is it you want me to fix?"

"Fizzit," said Leo, arms pressed across his chest in determination.

"What is the problem? Hmm? What's the problem now?" She knew there was no point in getting sarcastic with a one-year-old, but she just couldn't help it.

Leo stuck his now-shoeless right foot forward. "Fiz-zzz-zit," he whined.

"Fix what? Your sock?" Socks had needed fixing many times before. If there was a hole, if the whole sock had gotten turned around, or if she had dressed him in a hurry and put on one yellow sock and one white one.

Leo sniffled. That wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no either. His mother looked more closely at his socks. There were no holes and they were on the right way. And they were both blue. (What kind of baby worried about whether his socks matched?) No, wait. They didn't match. The stitching was different. They were the same color, but they weren't exactly the same.

She picked up her son and pulled off the offending socks, carrying him over to the shelves that served as a dresser. She searched through his socks until she found two that were a perfect match. "Is this it? Is this what you wanted?"

"Sa-ahs!" gurgled Leo, apparently pleased with her selection.

She swapped out the offending socks for their replacements, relieved to have averted a tantrum. Perhaps if she'd had more sleep, if she wasn't so worried about paying their bills, if she wasn't utterly overwhelmed by the task of raising a baby alone, it might have occurred to her how remarkable her little boy must be, to notice such a small difference between two socks.

Jemma Simmons

"Do you have time to talk now? Because we really need to talk about Jemma," said the woman, phone pressed between her shoulder and her ear.

"I have time. What's wrong?"

"Well, it's not…it's not wrong, exactly. I'm just…I don't know, maybe I'm worrying too much. But she's…"

Jemma's father twisted the phone cord in his hands. It wasn't like his wife to get this worked up. "Is there a problem? I can cancel the rest of this trip. Sandy will reschedule everything for me."

"No, you don't need to reschedule. It's not urgent. I just…well…she's clever."

"Of course she's clever. Her brother and sister are too. As are you and I, if I may say so myself. Quite inevitable." He relaxed onto the hotel bed cover. This wasn't an emergency, just a normal parenting crisis of confidence.

"She's more than just clever, then. When I was her age, my mum was delighted because I was making little sentences with a noun and a verb. Do you know what she said to me this morning? She said, I want pancakes for breakfast, please, Mummy."

"At least she's polite."

"You're not getting-" The woman sighed. "I told her we didn't have the things for pancakes, so she said, Then I want toast instead, with the red jam, not the purple because I had grape jam yesterday and I've decided I don't fancy grapes."

"So she's a bit picky?" The man was teasing a bit now. He didn't see his daughter as often as he'd like, and he wasn't an expert on child development, but even he could imagine how strange that sentence would sound coming out of a baby's mouth.

"Her older brother was three before he would have said something that long and complicated, and he's the brightest in his class. What's going to happen to Jemma?"

"We'll work something out," he said, reassuringly. "Maybe we can get her a tutor."

"I'm not sure we can afford that."

"Maybe a student from the teachers' college, then. Or we could sign her up for music lessons. Mark from accounting was telling me he knows a Suzuki instructor who will teach toddlers the violin. Or we'll read to her a lot. She's just smart. She's not sick or something. There are a lot of worse things for a child to be."

Phillip Coulson

"Cah-MER!" cried Phillip, waving his arms over his head.

"He's saying 'Camero'," said the boy's father.

His mother shook her head with a tolerant smile. "I really don't think he is."

"Cah-MER! Cah-MER!"

"That's definitely 'Camero'."

"Why would he have a word for a specific type of car he's never seen when he doesn't even use the word 'car' yet?"

"I hear what you're saying, little man," said the boy's father, picking him up and pointedly ignoring his wife. "You were born with good taste in cars and we'd be fools to ignore your advice."

Phillip liked to be picked up. "Cah-MER!" he shouted again. He was talking quite regularly now, but no matter what he said, he always put the stress on the second syllable. He greeted his parents: "Ma-MA!" and "Da-DEE!" He called out to the neighbor's dog: "Yo-VER!" He requested his favorite blanket: "Ban-KEE!" The overall effect was to make him sound perpetually pleasantly surprised.

"Put him in his high chair," said the woman. She put down cheap plastic red-and-blue plate with some mushy pasta and boiled peas.

Phillip ate agreeably, though he made as much mess as any other child his age. He picked up individual noodles, sometimes eventually eating them, but just as often dropping them on the floor. When he had eaten or transferred all of his dinner, he picked up the plate with both hands and threw it to the floor. "Cah-MER!"

"No," said his mother. "No, we don't throw food." She sighed. "I'll clean up the floor if you give him a bath?"

His father stood up, addressing Phillip directly. "Yeah, you do need a bath. You're pretty much filthy between the peas and playing in the garage. We'll get you all clean and into your pajamas."

The boy's parents cleaned up before sitting down to their own dinner – real family meals would probably have to wait a year or so – but the evening was peaceful. Phillip only started to fuss when they tried to put him to bed. He rocked back and forth against the bars of his crib, reaching to the floor with a whimper. "Cah-MER!"

They offered him a pacifier, a bottle, a blanket, a teddy bear, all to no avail. Until his mother saw exactly where he was pointing. She picked the little doll up and deposited in the crib.

"Cah-MER!" answered Phillip in a satisfied tone. He hugged his Captain America and went to sleep.

Grant Ward

"Is your husband coming, Mrs. Ward?"

"No, he couldn't get away from work."

"Well," said the man, "I'm Dr. Martin and I've been overseeing Grant's case. I want to start with the good news: it's definitely not epilepsy. His EEG is completely normal. In fact, the episode he had wasn't even a seizure. It was what we call syncope. It's more like fainting."

"He fainted?"

"Mrs. Ward, are you aware that your son hasn't gained any weight since his 12-month checkup?"

"I'm sorry, what does that have to do with his episode?"

"He's just under 20 pounds. That's very small for his height."

"Yes, and again, what does that have to do with-"

"You have an older son, Christian? He was admitted here three times as a baby, found to be malnourished all three times."

"Are you accusing me of something, Dr. Martin?"

"No, ma'am. Not at all. It's possible they share some kind of genetic problem that's interfering with metabolism. I'd like to get them both in here at the same time for testing." Maybe that was a lie. Maybe it wasn't. It was plausible at least.

"But Christian's fine now. He outgrew the problem. The pediatrician said his height and weight were normal."

"Well, sometimes food becomes a battleground between parents and kids, especially toddlers." Dr. Martin reached into the pocket on his lab coat and pulled out a business card. "This is the contact information for our social worker. She's an expert in failure-to-thrive cases." In reality, the hospital was supposed to contact social services directly if a child presented with nutritional deficits, but…well…the Wards donated an awful lot of money.

Mrs. Ward wasn't precisely sure what 'failure-to-thrive' was, but she didn't like the sound of it. Still, she knew the protocol in situations like this. She took the card with a demure smile. "Thank you, Doctor. I'll get in touch with her as soon as possible." That was a lie, plain and simple. Even if she did want a stranger to criticize her parenting, they certainly couldn't have the bad publicity. Something like that would never stay quiet.

When she entered the examining room, she saw Grant sitting idly in a metal crib. He showed no sign of recognizing her return, but he tensed as she approached. He let out a cry as if he were bursting into tears, but cut himself off and returned to silence. He balled his hands up and held his little fists in front of his face, the yellow plastic hospital ID tag resting on his cheek.

Saying nothing, Mrs. Ward lifted her son and took him home.

Melinda Qiaolian May

"She should be talking," said the woman.

"The pediatrician said she's doing well," answered her husband. "Melinda will talk when she has something to say. Besides, I was a late talker and I turned out just fine."

The woman huffed in response. If her daughter was perfectly capable of unworking all the straps in her car seat and climbing out while they were stopped at the intersection, then she was perfectly capable of opening her mouth and saying ma.

"The pediatrician suggested we stop speaking Cantonese around her. Just English. Let her focus on one language at a time."

"The pediatrician is an idiot," said the man with a wry, pleasant smile that showed he was utterly unconcerned with the inconsistencies in his argument. "Cantonese is fine, Melinda is fine, and above all," he took her hand and kissed it, "you are fine."

There was a thump from upstairs. The cat.

"Flattery will get you nowhere," said the woman.

The man kissed her hand again. "It's worked before."

More thumps. And the tell-tale squeak of the office door opening.

The man stood. "I'll go shoo the cat out of your office." He bowed, gallant and ironic. "I know you hate getting cat hair on your work clothes."

The woman smiled, opened her mouth to thank her husband, but then stopped and furrowed her brow. "The cat is right behind you," she said.

There was a moment, less than a second, in which this information was processed, before both of Melinda May's parents ran down the hall to find their ever-curious, ever-dexterous daughter. Their daughter who had apparently climbed out of her crib, opened her bedroom door, gotten past the gate on the stairs, and tiptoed down to her mother's office. An office, which wouldn't be such a dangerous place for a baby except-

"No!" shouted the girl's mother, giving her a solid swat on the behind. "No! You never, never, never touch Mama's gun!"