Author's note: I'd like to thank girliemom, dissatisfieduser, Guests, LatteLady and MaggieHo for your reviews! It's so encouraging to get feedback and know that someone is reading!

1990

"Where's Bruce Banner when you need him?" Steve asked no one in particular, rubbing his temples wearily.

"Where is he?" Mike asked, looking up hopefully from where he had been staring moodily at a knot in the kitchen table. "Is there any chance he could-"

"He's a student at Harvard," Steve said dully. "Undergrad. He's nowhere near an expert on gamma radiation yet. We're just gonna have to track the Tesseract down ourselves."

"How are we supposed to do that?" Tien asked. She had just joined them in the kitchen after hustling all the kids to bed. She moved aside her laptop, where she had been working on her memoirs; now that the children were older she had finally tackled a long-planned project to record the story of her upbringing in Vietnam and her journey to America. "By now it could be anywhere."

"Not anywhere," Peggy said. "Hydra didn't take it only to shove it in the back of a closet somewhere. They'll have taken it to a lab where they can continue their experiments, and the equipment needed to harness it is rather specialized. That would restrict their options a bit."

"Was Howard Stark in the lab when you went to make the transfer?" Steve asked.

"Yes."

"How did he react when it turned up missing?"

"He was furious," Peggy said wearily. "But then, he was already furious with me about having to hand it off in the first place. Now he doesn't know who to be furious with, and frankly, I don't know who I'm supposed to be furious with, either. There was obviously at least one inside man, maybe more. We questioned everyone. No one saw anything. The footage from the security cameras had been erased, along with the entrance scanner records. Whoever it was, they were extremely thorough."

"Well," Steve said, pulling himself out of his gloom with an effort and forcing himself to sit up straighter. "Look at the bright side. Obviously we're going to succeed in tracking the Tesseract down, since we know Dr. Lawson eventually got it."

"That's very comforting, darling," Peggy said a little tartly. "But it doesn't really help us find it now, does it?"

"I have an idea, Mom," Mike said slowly. "But I don't think you'll like it very much."

"Beggars can't be choosers," Peggy said.

Mike took a deep breath, leaning forward with his elbows resting on the table. "What if we put Howard Stark under surveillance?"

Peggy was quiet for a long moment. "I suppose it could be wishful thinking on my part," she said at last, "but I don't think Howard would go so far as to be involved in this. 'Borrowing' another inventor's ideas is one thing. Stealing an item as valuable — and dangerous — as the Tesseract is something else entirely."

"Even if he wasn't involved," Mike pressed, "I think watching him would be useful. Think about it. Does Hydra have any scientists who can do more with the Tesseract than Howard could? I mean, they probably could have stolen the thing at any time. They obviously found it more useful to leave it in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s possession where Howard could have access to it, so they could benefit from his genius. They only took it away when they realized he was losing his grip on it."

"They might try to recruit him now," Steve agreed, "or more likely, strong-arm him into cooperating with them. Bribery, or blackmail, or threatening his family." The latter option was how Hydra had controlled Dr. Erskine. Steve felt a pulse of worry. They tried to keep an eye on Tony at all times, but ever since he had graduated from MIT three years ago at the precocious age of 17, he had gone into globe-trotting mode, and it was hard to keep track of him.

Peggy thought for a long moment.

"I'm going to set some of my people to tracking electricity usage in the area," she said at last. "If someone starts fiddling with the Tesseract, there's bound to be fluctuations. And then... yes," she added to Mike reluctantly. "Use your team to watch Howard. As much to keep him safe as anything else."

"We'll be discreet," Mike promised.

They broke up their impromptu meeting; Mike going outside to call in the dog, while Tien got up, stretched, and started putting away the clean dishes.

"You okay?" Steve asked Peggy, standing behind her and squeezing her shoulders and neck gently, feeling the tension in her muscles.

Peggy closed her eyes briefly in appreciation for his touch, but she shook her head. "My friendship with Howard is tenuous enough," she said glumly. "If he knew I was spying on him, I'm not sure he would believe I was doing it for his protection."

"I know," he said. "It's a hard choice, with your duty on one side and your friend on the other."

Peggy reached back and covered one of his hands with hers. "I know you know. And these Starks... they don't make it easy on us, do they?"

He smiled a little sadly. "But you can't help but love them anyway."

Steve's eyes snapped open in the middle of the night. An extremely high-pitched whistle was being blown somewhere nearby — and although it only had one note, it was being blown to the distinctive rhythm of the first few bars of the "Star-Spangled Banner."

It was a signal he and his children had worked out long ago if they wanted to call for each other without disturbing anyone else, especially Peggy, who had sometimes worked, and slept, odd hours when she was an active-duty agent. Since no one but the three of them could hear that pitch — unless you counted dogs — it had become their own private signal.

Moving silently so as to not wake Peggy, Steve slipped out of bed, put on his slippers and crept out of the bedroom and made his way to the front door. When he opened it, Sarah was standing there on the porch fully dressed.

"Good morning," Steve said mildly, glancing at his digital watch. "Barely."

"Dad!" she whispered excitedly, grabbing him by both wrists and shaking him a little. "I figured it out!"

"Figured out what?"

Sarah released him and waved her hands expressively in the air, struggling for a moment to find the words. "Everything! What we've been doing wrong with our version of the serum, why the animal testing didn't work, why Howard and Zola's variants were missing the transformative power that Erskine's formula had... everything!" She hadn't taken the time to put her blonde hair in its usual ponytail, and the untamed waves framing her face were lit up by the streetlamp behind her like a halo.

"Calm down," Steve whispered, acutely aware that this might be the first time he had ever had to utter those particular words to Sarah, although he'd worn them out on Mike when he was small. "You were right not to wake up your mother, she's had a hard day. Here, come in." He stood aside to let her come in, and without needing to discuss it with each other, they tiptoed downstairs and into the den, where they could talk without fear of disturbing Peggy.

Steve shut the door quietly behind them. "Okay. What do you mean, everything?"

Sarah sat down on the worn but comfortable love seat, and then almost immediately jumped up again to pace across the floor. "Here's the thing," she started, her eyebrows contracting with deep concentration. "The problem all along is that we've been missing the third factor, the pattern that determines what the subject's new physical form will be. Right? Dave and I assumed all this time that Dr. Erskine must have somehow incorporated a blueprint, so to speak, in the serum to create your new phenotype, using genetic engineering or some other method we haven't discovered yet, but that was wrong, wrong, wrong — he didn't decide how you were going to look at all!"

"Then who did?" Steve asked, mystified.

Sarah took a deep breath. "Dad, you did."

His brow crinkled in confusion. "What?"

"I figured it out," Sarah said breathlessly, pulling a rolled-up comic book out of her back pocket and smoothing it out before handing it to him and tapping on one of the panels. "It was this sketch you made before your transformation that clued me in. You predicted what you were going to look like, exactly. That would be pretty amazing, Dad... except it wasn't a prediction at all! You were designing your own body, dreaming it up inside your head, pulling out desires from the deepest parts of your subconscious. That's why Erskine hypnotized you! He wanted a glimpse into your psyche so he could be absolutely certain you weren't going to turn yourself into a monster the way Schmidt did!"

Steve opened his mouth for a second, and then closed it, frowning.

"It makes perfect sense," Sarah insisted, answering his unspoken question. "Dr. Erskine told you that the serum enhanced what was already inside a man, right? And you thought — we all thought — that he was talking about the personality enhancement... and that was definitely part of it, but there was more to it than that! He meant your physical appearance, too — why else would he be unable to tell Howard Stark how tall you were going to end up, until after he had tested you? He didn't know you would be 6 feet and 2 inches tall until you yourself had decided that that was how tall you wanted to be! I mean, be honest, Dad... what did you think when you first saw yourself in a mirror, after the experiment?"

"That I looked more like my dad," he said slowly.

"And you signed up for the war in the first place because you were trying to emulate him. Yes?"

"Yes," Steve admitted. It was why he had chosen the Army instead of another branch of the military, why he'd even tried to get into the 107th, the same division his father had fought in.

"You said it yourself, Dad." She grabbed the comic back from him and flipped rapidly through the pages until she found the panel she was looking for. "See, here? When you and Mom bumped into each other in Italy, after your performance for the troops there? You told her that thanks to the experiment, you got everything you ever wanted. That wasn't a coincidence. That wasn't luck. It was the serum doing what it was designed to do. You wanted to look that way... and so you did. Your own mind provided the pattern for your new phenotype."

Steve was quiet for a moment. "I'm not saying you're wrong," he said at last, "but there's a problem with your theory. Why would Schmidt have chosen to look like he did?"

"I've got an answer for that, too," Sarah said quickly, pulling another paper out of her other back pocket. She unfolded it, revealing a dot-matrix computer printout bearing the image of a giant skull, coated red with blood. "Look familiar?"

"What is it?"

"This is Ymir," Sarah explained. "He's a figure in Norse mythology — you remember how obsessed Schmidt was with all those old stories? Ymir was the first created being, the father of the Frost Giants, the ancestor of Odin himself. He was the god of gods, and the world itself was created inside his skull, fashioned from his flesh and blood and brains — real savage stuff, these Norse myths. Anyway, Ymir was meant to symbolize limitless potential. And wasn't that Schmidt's obsession? He imagined himself becoming the superior man, rising up to become a god in his own right. So when he was injected with that serum..."

"He became what he imagined himself to be," Steve murmured.

"It may not have been a conscious wish, but if it was deep down inside him, it would become reality."

"And Blonsky-" Steve started.

"Yep. He saw the Hulk, and he went green with envy, no pun intended. So the next time he got a dose of the serum, he was picturing himself as even bigger and scarier than the Hulk. And that's what he got: an abomination." She thought for a moment. "The only thing I'm not sure about is Bruce Banner. I mean, he was a pretty decent guy at heart. Why would he want to look so-"

"-monstrous?" Steve finished softly. "I can guess why." He took in a slow breath. "He told me things in confidence. I won't go into detail, but there were things that happened in his childhood, things that should never happen to any child. Things that left him feeling angry... and powerless. I can see why, deep down inside, he would want to make himself impossibly big and strong — almost indestructible — someone no one would dare touch ever again..."

He rubbed the back of his neck, lost in thought. "But how do you explain Bruce's second transformation?" he asked. "He turned into something different that time."

"Nothing easier," Sarah said. "Look at how he did it. He extracted another dose of serum from your blood and injected it into himself. In other words, he loosened up his genetic code and triggered the transformational power of the serum for the second time, only this time, he wanted something different. This time, he wanted to blend together the best of both the Hulk and of Bruce Banner, and that's exactly what he got."

"If your theory is right," Steve said, his mind running along her track at a fast clip now, "it would mean that the personality-enhancing side effect-"

"-isn't a side effect at all," Sarah finished firmly. "It's the effect, it's what the serum is. It takes everything that's already inside you and manifests it in the real world. Good becomes great, bad becomes worse, and the little guy who couldn't win a fight is suddenly 6 feet tall and capable of getting back up again no matter how many times he's knocked down. That's the reason why no one's experiment turned out exactly like yours did, Dad, and why they never could. It's unique to each individual." Sarah flashed a smile at him. "There's only one Captain America because there's only one Steve Rogers."

Steve looked down at his body in wonderment. Everything he had ever valued, everything he had wished he could be, both inside and out — could he really have made it happen to himself? Suddenly he understood why the first words out of Dr. Erskine's mouth to him had been a simple question: What do you want? It had, in fact, been a test, the only one that really mattered: to choose a candidate whose deepest desire was simply to kill — even Nazis — would have been extraordinarily dangerous.

"Your choices fascinate me," Sarah continued thoughtfully. "Not only did you design a body that was perfectly suited for a soldier, but you also made a few subtle changes to your face. I did a side-by-side comparison. You actually lengthened your jawline slightly, along with a few other minor changes. Basically, you made yourself a shade more attractive than before." She suppressed a teasing smile, bringing out the faintest hint of a dimple in her cheek that was rarely seen. "Almost as if there was some girl around who you were trying to impress."

"I guess it kinda worked," Steve said mildly.

Sarah shook her head a little, smiling. "She loved you before that, Dad. Mom respected Dr. Erskine so much that she would have paid special attention to his choice anyway, and then 10 seconds after you two first laid eyes on each other, you had to go and smile at her when she punched a bully in the nose, instead of being surprised or horrified or threatened like every other soldier standing in that line."

"Bonding over bullies," Steve said in a musing tone. "Classic technique for attracting beautiful dames. It's funny, but that one never really worked for me before that day."

"Well, fortunately for you, you followed it up with win after win in Mom's eyes," Sarah said with a short laugh. "If the flagpole exercise won you her admiration, the grenade incident really cemented things: You weren't like any other man she had ever met."

Then she grew more serious. "Anyway, the really interesting thing to me is how human you remained after the procedure. There must be some limits to how much the serum can change, but there seems to be a wide range of possibilities. Schmidt believed he had left humanity behind, and maybe he did — in the worst way possible — but look at you. You can still walk down the street and not look out of place, unlike the other three... and what's maybe more significant, you were still compatible enough to start a family with an unenhanced individual. I guess somewhere deep down inside, you just wanted to stay a regular guy."

Suddenly an idea occurred to Steve. "You said my abilities were unique to me. But you and Mike have the same qualities," he pointed out. "Just in smaller quantities."

Sarah shook her head. "But we've never been exposed to the serum," she said. "Not by injection or blood transfusion. We came about through more... natural means." She raised an eyebrow and smiled at him knowingly. "Technically, I'm not sure we're super-soldiers at all, because we never experienced a transformation. We were just beneficiaries of your newly improved genes, starting from the very first moment of our conception, just like any other parent and child."

"You said you knew why the animal testing didn't work."

Sarah nodded confidently. "It's because animals aren't sophisticated enough to have any desires beyond instinct. So if I injected them with the serum while they were hungry, they would eat themselves to death. If they were sleepy when I injected them, they would just want to sleep, forever. It can only really work on a creature with free will."

"Even if you're right about this, how does knowing it translate into figuring out how you'll need to adjust your formula?" Steve asked.

Sarah took a long time to answer.

"That's just it," she said slowly. "I'm not sure we need to adjust our formula at all. Dave and I are confident the chemical composition is correct. It was the third step we were missing, the new pattern for the body, and now that we know that comes from the mind of the subject himself..."

"Yeah, but how do you make that happen? How does the idea become reality?"

"I don't know yet," Sarah said softly. "But one thing I do know: we've left the realm of science. We're talking about faith, about the power of belief. It's magical thinking, Dad. It's... well, magic."

Steve was startled. "You think Dr. Erskine used magic on me?"

Sarah looked at him, her eyes pleading a little. "Does that sound so crazy?"

Steve let it sink in for a long moment. "Maybe not," he said at last. "Thor used to say that science and magic are one and the same. At least in a place like Asgard."

Sarah nodded, a new — and stranger — excitement growing in her eyes. "And here, too," she said eagerly. "You've told me before that when Wong explained to you where the Masters of the Mystic Arts got their power from, he said that 'at the root of existence, mind and matter meet. Thoughts themselves shape reality.'" She shook her head in amazement. "That wasn't just mumbo-jumbo. You saw for yourself, their powers were real. And if they could use their thoughts to shape reality — if Dr. Erskine could do it — then maybe..." She trailed off.

Steve smiled knowingly. "You always loved the stories about magic best, ever since you were a little girl. I used to catch you imitating Wanda Maximoff's hand movements when you thought no one was looking."

She laughed softly. "I must be crazy to even be considering this. But I keep thinking about the first strand of the serum that we were able to isolate, the strain that affects the cardiovascular system. If I found a way to enchant it — or program it, however you choose to word it — and then we injected it into someone with a heart condition and asked them to visualize their heart beating, strong and healthy and whole-"

"-they could be convinced to cure themselves."

"Permanently. Like you were." Her eyes suddenly glistened with unshed tears. "If this works, we could save a lot of lives this way, Dad. A lot."

It was less than two weeks later that Steve got a call just as he was finishing up a group therapy session at the VA, and after making as graceful an exit as he could, he jumped into his car and rushed over to Mike's house as quickly as possible.

When he came through the door, the first thing he saw was Mike's oldest, Natty, rummaging urgently through the coat closet in the foyer, shoes and hockey sticks and jackets tumbling out as she searched for something so intently that she barely glanced up at Steve as he came in.

"The black ones!" Mike called from the living room.

"I know, Dad!" Natty replied. "The boys made a mess in here again. Wait... aha, I got 'em!" She dragged a pair of black combat boots out from under a pile of sporting gear, scrambled back to her feet in a surprisingly graceful movement and hurried around the corner with them. Steve followed her.

Mike was just sitting down onto one of the wing chairs, dressed in his black Vo Binh Dinh uniform and holding out his hand expectantly for the boots Natty had just unearthed for him. The younger three children were lined up on the couch, obviously under strict instruction to stay quiet and out of the way. Sammy and Clint were watching the commotion with wide eyes, looking both worried and confused, but Harrison was jiggling his knee with nervous energy, brow contracted, leaning forward with every muscle tense as though at any moment he might leap to his feet.

"Thanks, honey," Mike said to Natty, taking the boots. "Do me another favor and see if you can find a ski mask too, a dark one," and Natty hurried to obey, going up on tiptoe to reach the basket of winter clothing on the top shelf of the closet. At 16, she had already reached her full growth, halfway between her mother's diminutive frame and her father's height, with much of her length in her legs. That made for graceful dancing, and a very deceptive appearance: despite her more slender build she was now every bit as strong as Bram was.

"Tien?" Mike called. "Can you-"

"Already loading it," she called from the direction of the kitchen, where the clink of ammunition could clearly be heard.

"You beautiful creature," Mike called back with a laugh. "You read my mind."

"What's happening?" Steve asked. Their family's paranoia had grown in tandem with Hydra's cunning, and they no longer discussed sensitive details over the phone.

"We intercepted a message Howard Stark got from one of his former colleagues on the P.E.G.A.S.U.S. team," Mike explained, tugging on his boots. "Nothing but a time and a place. Looks a little suspicious; this isn't anyone Howard was close to personally."

"And guess where the meeting is?" Peggy called out from the kitchen. "One of the locations my people flagged for power fluctuations recently."

Mike grinned. "So we're going to crash the party."

Natty came tripping back over with a ski mask just as Tien came into the room with Mike's gun and holster in her hands. Mike stooped to give Tien a quick kiss before pulling the ski mask on, leaving only his eyes exposed.

"Dad, you look like you're trying to pass for a ninja," Natty teased.

Tien handed him his gun. "You know what? It's a good look for you," she said, looking at Mike with a sly smile on her curved red lips.

Just then Peggy walked into the room, heels clicking. "Make sure you don't interfere, Mike, unless you're certain that the meeting is related to the Tess-" she started as she loaded her own handgun with practiced motions, and then glanced up at Mike and suddenly demanded in a sharp tone: "What do you think you're doing?"

Mike turned to fully face her as he adjusted his ski mask. "I think it's best to keep my face covered for this mission, Mom, just in case any of the rats get away. I don't need Hydra memorizing my face. I'd lose my anonymity as Agent 45."

Peggy suddenly took a step back and put her hand on the back of a chair for support. "Michael Steven Carter!" she said, trying to sound scolding and only succeeding in sounding shaky. "For a moment I thought you were your father."

"It's the eyes, Mom," Mike said helpfully, pointing at them. "Brown, not blue."

"Yes, I know, darling," she said tartly, hiking up her skirt and stooping to strap the holster to her thigh. "But the two of you are shaped the same."

"I have an inch on him," Steve put in.

"And I'm more fun at parties," Mike added.

"That's true," Steve agreed.

Mike slid his gun into its holster and glanced out the window.

"Dad," Harrison said from his place on the couch, breaking into the conversation for the first time, his voice intent. "I want to come with you."

Mike didn't hesitate for a second. "Not happening, sport."

"I can help just as much as anyone on your team," Harrison insisted.

His younger sister Sammy turned to stare at him. "What are you, delusional? You're 13."

"Almost 14. And you know I can," Harrison said stubbornly, not breaking eye contact with his dad. He knew better than to say any more in front of his two younger siblings, who were still in the dark about certain things, although he clearly wished that he could say a whole lot more.

"Look at your mother, son," Mike said flatly. "She's never going to agree to that."

"Then what did you teach me to fight for?" Harrison demanded.

"So that when you are grown up," Mike emphasized firmly, "you can help with things like this."

"But Dad-"

"Discussion's over."

Harrison turned to look at Steve meaningfully. "Grandpa-"

"It's your parents' decision, not mine," Steve said mildly.

Peggy trotted over to the window and pulled aside the curtain. "The team is here," she said to Mike. "Time to go."

"You're staying in the van to coordinate, right?" Steve asked Peggy, trying not to sound anxious. "And leaving the fighting to Mike and the others?"

"Don't you dare remind me of my age, or I'll remind you of yours," she said, and reached up to give him a quick kiss. "I'll be careful, darling. And yes, I'll stay in the van... unless I'm needed elsewhere. The rest of me may be slowing down, but there isn't a thing wrong with my aim."

She left with Mike hot on her heels. The front door slammed and a few minutes later the van's engine roared away into the distance.

With a growl of frustration, Harrison launched to his feet and went up the stairs, taking them three at a time, and then his bedroom door slammed. Sammy and Clint exchanged wordless glances and then got up and left, too, both of them going out the back door where the dog could be seen looking through the glass hopefully with a tennis ball in her mouth. Despite the gender differences and a two-year age gap, the two of them had always been on the same wavelength to the point that Tien sometimes jokingly referred to them as twins.

Finally, Natty stooped to give her mother a quick kiss on the cheek before swishing upstairs and knocking softly on Harrison's door, which opened after a few seconds to admit her.

The two of them left alone in the suddenly quiet room, Steve and Tien looked at each other for a long moment.

"They'll be fine," Steve told her.

"Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?" Tien asked a little too knowingly.

"You know what?" Steve said with a soft sigh, putting his arm around her slender shoulders. "It was easier to be the one who left, than the one who stayed behind."

TO BE CONTINUED

Author's note:I'd love to hear what you think, whether it's about how the plot is advancing regarding the Tesseract, the unfolding mystery of the super-soldier serum, or the development of characters like Mike's children (and Sarah's children from the last chapter). Leave a review and let me know!