Chapter One: Of Condolences and Congratulations

"Your father is only your father until one of you forgets." -Ocean Vuong

February 12, 1946 - Los Angeles, CA

"You're pregnant."

Excuse me?

Peggy Carter's fingers, which had been drumming against the examination table she sat on, stilled immediately. At the doctor's words, her lips parted in shock and the entire world seemed to freeze. I'm sorry, she wanted to say, I must've misheard you. Pregnant? I don't think so. For a moment, all she could think was no, and then her brain's floodgates burst open, spilling a million thoughts. A good half of them were this isn't real. Pregnant? No. This was a routine physical, which meant that the doctor was supposed to tell her that she was in good health, that she needed to incorporate more vegetables into her diet, and make an offhand comment about how she was in the prime for beginning to have children.

Not that she was actually going to have a child.

He flipped the papers back over onto his clipboard, smiling at her thinly. "Congratulations, Missus."

Peggy opened her mouth to protest the results—Excuse me, but there's no way—

She flipped her eyes closed when the realization hit her. There was a way. She and Steve, before he'd put the plane down, one time. And as it turned out, the worst case scenario had happened.

Clenching her hands into fists, the confusion and denial fizzled away, replaced by complete, total panic. Peggy was an unmarried pregnant woman, in 1945, with no clue how to raise a child, let alone one that was half super soldier. She inhaled sharply and then gritted her teeth together.

"Are you sure?" she asked the doctor, straining to keep her voice even.

"Positive," he answered with a nod. "Your husband will be pleased, I'm sure."

I don't have a husband. No husband, no house, considering she'd been living in military bases for the past few years, and a job where she couldn't be pregnant. Probably. It was probably unwise to be a pregnant field agent.

No husband, her brain repeated. That was always the solution when someone had children—they would have a husband to provide income so they wouldn't have to work, to be there and sanction the pregnancy, to pay the rent.

No husband.

Peggy's panic subsided, though not completely, making space for a whole other emotion to fill her: determination. No husband had never been a problem before. She'd never depended on a man, and that wasn't going to change anytime soon. If nothing, she had the sheer willpower and a few allies she knew she could count on to pull this off. Peggy smiled down at the doctor, fibbing, "I'm sure he'll be thrilled at the news. Thank you so much, Doctor." Gathering her purse, she pushed off the examination table, her heels hitting the ground with a click and reminding her of exactly who she was: Agent Carter, who'd defied orders and the beliefs of others, and she was not going to be taken down by a baby.

With every exhale, she repeated it to herself like a mantra. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.

The devil himself would have to crawl out of hell if he wanted to stop her.

April 12, 2012 - The Hub - New York, NY

It had been three days.

Three days of biting her nails raw, of anxiety and excitement keeping her awake at night, of nonstop stillness and jokes going over her head.

Three days of waiting.

Audrey Carter-Rogers took the seat she'd remained in since Monday, outside the observation room where the apparently not-dead Captain America was lying, unmoving.

Where her dad was lying, unmoving.

She was still struggling to wrap her head around it.

April 9, 2012 - The Hub - New York, NY

On Monday, three days previous, she'd been halfway down the hallway when someone spoke, "For a sixty four year old woman, I'd say you're pulling off that dress pretty well."

She'd stopped, spinning around on her heel. There were only four people in the building who knew about her age, about the serum in her bloodstream that had given her questionable mortality—and that was including herself. The only other person who didn't have a distinctly masculine voice was supposed to be on a mission in Manila. Maria Hill stood before her with a file in hand, raising an eyebrow at the blonde.

"That's about to get a lot more significant," she'd added.

"I thought you were in the Philippines," Audrey said, frowning and choosing to ignore Hill's comments.

"They called me back in when an 0-8-4 turned out to be something…bigger," she settled, "than we originally thought."

Audrey rolled her eyes at the elusiveness of her words. She'd been a SHIELD agent in some capacity for four decades, and she still knew how to spit out what she wanted to say without being too cryptic. "Are you going to elaborate, or keep talking in riddles? Maybe you've been spending too much time with Fury."

"Funny," she'd said, notably not laughing. "We need your help." She extended the file in Audrey's direction, forcing the woman to juggle around the items in her hands: a coffee cup, a set of keys, about a dozen of her own file folders, and a DVD case that Claudia had loaned to her.

Audrey took the offered file, struggling to flip it open with her thumb. Maria, after watching her fumble for a good thirty seconds, picked the coffee cup and the DVD case out of her hands.

"Star Wars?" she asked.

"Don't judge me. Tony and I snuck into that movie together, I'm nostalgic."

"You snuck out of a house run by Howard Stark and Peggy Carter for a movie?"

Audrey gave her a look that attempted to be intimidating but didn't succeed. She finally managed to flip the folder open. Steve Rogers was printed across the top of the yellowing paper in block letters.

"Uh, what's this?" she questioned. "I've seen my dad's file before, I don't need—"

"Keep looking," Maria interrupted.

She'd raised an eyebrow, but did as she was told. A few pages of pre-serum photos and measurements, a few mission reports, all of his failed attempts to enlist in the army. More pages on what he'd done after, the battles he'd fought in and the men he'd saved. One page dedicated entirely to Bucky Barnes, three to his work with her mother, and one with information about her. None of it was new; her father's identity alone had led to the way she'd been raised—mostly quietly in mansions owned by Howard Stark with a cycle of people helping take care of her. After all, Peggy could do a lot, but balancing a baby in one hand and a gun in the other had proven to be quite difficult—not that she hadn't tried, once or twice.

And then there was the whole aging ratio. Howard wasn't a biologist, but a few blood tests and minimal observations had yielded the knowledge that Audrey's entire aging process had been thrown off by the serum. Even though she was born the size of a normal baby, the prolonged lifespan her body had been determined to deliver aged her four months physically for every year. So Audrey was old—sixty-five, to be exact—but she'd also been hidden from the world for most of her life. The world had been one giant mystery to her until a few decades ago, and she was still something of a recluse. So Audrey was old, but also, she felt a lot closer to her physical age than her actual age most days.

The information wasn't anything she hadn't laid her eyes on. She was about to return the file to Maria when the corner of a photo caught her eye. Unlike everything else, it was in full color, and the date in the corner wasn't from the forties.

It had been from the day before.

That was probably what she was supposed to look at.

Audrey had turned to the photo only to find at least three other pages that hadn't been there in the past. A recent mission report listed that agents had travelled into the arctic circle after finding an 0-8-4, which was what Maria had told her. What Hill hadn't mentioned was that the 0-8-4 was a plane, on which they found her dad's body, still breathing.

Still alive.

"What the hell?" she asked, and her heart began to beat like a bumblebee's wings. "My dad's alive?"

Oh my god, oh my god. She'd traced the words over with her thumb. Captain Rogers was found alive in the ice.

Alive.

The first thing she thought was, How the hell did this happen, and then there was Jesus, even his hairstyle is still intact, and then, finally, I need to call mom.

"After," Maria dismissed.

Apparently, she'd said that out loud. She winced.

"Coulson and Fury are overseeing his transfer from the hospital to an observation room. They want you to break the news to him."

Audrey couldn't see herself, but she'd been fairly sure that her eyes bugged out of her head at that. "What?" The amount of stuff she had in her hands made it difficult to keep up with the agent's pace as she started power walking down the hall. "Which news? The seventy-years-later part or the hi-I'm-your-kid part?"

"I understood it to be both," Hill said. "They're in the East Wing, and I'd walk you over but I still have to fill out paperwork to get Manila transferred to someone else." She muttered, "I'm second in command, and I know Fury doesn't care, but I still have to do the goddamn paperwork. Unbelievable."

That had been on Monday, and it was Thursday now, but Captain Rogers—Steve—what was she even supposed to call him?—hadn't made any movement to wake up since then. Still, she'd been practically chained to the chair outside, only leaving a few hours ago because her fellow agents Lindsey and Claudia had dragged her to a nearby deli for food.

("Just because you can survive on vending machine food, doesn't mean you should."

In reality, all the garbage food was messing up her metabolism and making her sluggish, but neither of the women knew about her status as the Captain's daughter; they just thought he was her mission. If they were confused about why an investigative agent was working a recovery assignment, they didn't say anything.)

It was nearing two in the afternoon now, and Caroline was complaining about the 1940s garb again. Coulson and a few other agents had decided to ease the Captain into the twenty-first century, which apparently included dressing up one of their assassins in victory rolls and vintage shoes and making her pace outside his room every day in case he woke up.

"Can I just say that shoemakers in the forties had very little regard for the existence of toes," she complained again.

Audrey snorted at the taller agent's comment, grimacing sympathetically as she stomped her foot on the ground petulantly.

"Also, I feel like it was unnecessary to dress me in forties lingerie. My boobs hurt, and I don't see it making that much of a difference, because, really, how much action do you think he got? How many boobs did he actually get to look at?"

Audrey had never had the experience of being grossed out by her parent's love lives, since her mother hadn't gotten remarried to a strange man, just to Souza, who Audrey had grown up with and considered a father figure anyway. The feeling of disgust that pooled into her stomach was entirely foreign, because, really, she didn't need to think about her dad in relation to her friend's boobs.

"I don't—I don't know," she said, wringing her wrists out and fidgeting in her chair. "You're getting paid overtime, at least."

"Oh, please. I should be getting a bonus just for having to sleep with my hair in rollers. Do you know how much that sucks?"

Audrey thought back to the eighties, and resisted the urge to nod. "Uh, once, probably. In college."

Caroline turned around, cocking her head to the side as she looked at her. "What year did you graduate? You look so young."

Oh Jesus. Why had she brought up her age again?

"Uh, I graduated early."

She prayed to God that Caroline wouldn't push it further. The powers that be must've been listening, because she went back to complaining about the outfit again. One of the agents working the computers flinched every time she cursed the itchy material of her shirt. Audrey thought about reading the file again, and then she considered grabbing a laptop and watching a movie on it until something happened to keep her nerves at bay, but before she could do either of those things, the red light went off.

Someone had helpfully stuck a post-it under the light that read if this is on, captain america is awake.

"...chafing against my stomach, and—" Caroline paused her rant to gape at the light for a second, then straightened. "Let's get this over with, then."

"Do you have the emergency button?" the flinching agent asked her.

"Yup. Am I clear to go in?"

He counted the security agents in the room and checked the camera monitors over once more and nodded. "Clear."

Audrey bounded up from her chair to cross the room and stare down at the monitors. The room where Captain Rogers was being held was like the set of a movie, placed in a warehouse-like space in the New York S.H.I.E.L.D. base. One of the walls was a one-way mirror, so Audrey and the rest of S.H.I.E.L.D. could see out, but nobody could see in. She gripped the desk with white knuckles, focusing on the camera feed.

He was standing up, and Audrey felt a sense of rubatosis as her heart began to thud in her chest like the pounding of a flittering hummingbird. Though a bit muffled, the speakers emitted the audio from the room.

Caroline's voice sounded awfully docile as she greeted him with a smile and a "Good morning." She checked her watch and continued, "or should I say 'afternoon.'"

"Where am I?" he asked, and the sound of his voice made Audrey freeze. This was the first time she'd ever heard her dad's voice, and it unnerved her.

The plan was to make it seem like the room was an SSR recovery room in New York City. Caroline explained as such, the radio segment one of Coulson's interns had picked playing dimly in the background. Things were going smoothly until another line of words came out of the speaker.

"Where am I, really?"

Oh no.

Audrey gripped the desk tighter, hoping this was just skepticism and not a mistake in the setup.

"I'm afraid I don't understand," Caroline said, shaking her head and smiling with faux apprehension. "I—"

"The game," he clarified. "It's from 1941. I know, because I was there."

Well, shit. Audrey squeezed her eyes shut, flinching as the rest of the agents in the room scrambled into action.

"Where's that intern?" one of them demanded. "He's fired."

All the noise after that was dulled down as she removed her fake glasses and set them down on the table. Yet another disguise S.H.I.E.L.D. had insisted on ("nobody will suspect you're a super soldier in glasses") that made her life about eight times more difficult and was not at all beneficial. As she rubbed her temples nervously, the beep signalling Caroline's panic button went off.

Wow. She must've been really clinging to her cover. Agent Carmichael took at least some credit for five assassinations since her recruitment and was capable of holding her own in a hand-to-hand with Barton. But seconds after the security team rushed in, they were hurled out the door. Audrey's eyes flew away from the computer monitors and towards the window into the warehouse just in time to catch Captain Rogers punch a hole in the wall and jump out. He took a quick glance around the room and then made a run for the double doors leading into the main facility.

Caroline's call for a code 13 was drowned out as Audrey swiped her badge and sprinted out of the room and down the hallways. She began to sprint after the escaping man, dodging agents who had been shoved out of the way in his flight.

Just before she made it out the doors, Coulson appeared out of nowhere, grabbing her shoulder and stopping her.

"Wait!" she protested. "I can catch up to him."

He shook his head. "Wait for him to get back, okay? There's no doubt that he's going to associate S.H.I.E.L.D. with something bad for the foreseeable future, and we don't want you to be a part of it in his head."

"How are they gonna catch him?" she argued.

"They've already got the cars. When they bring him back, you can explain, okay?"

"But—" Audrey spluttered, realizing she'd run out of arguments.

Coulson took that as all the answer he needed to lead her to the room where they planned on breaking it to him: an office with a window over the city, not too large but not small enough to be claustrophobic, with a view of the skyline but not of the chaos in Times Square.

Caroline stormed in a second later with a notepad in one hand and a pen in the other. "One of the agents thought you might wanna write down everything you want to say, just so that nothing is left out, and also, I can't believe I wore that stupid hair for three days, and the plan still didn't work." She gritted her teeth together. "I mean, why were we even using radio feedback from when he was alive?"

Audrey shrugged. "I don't know, I mean, the intern's obviously fired. Maybe he was praying for amnesia, or something?" She took the paper and the pen and began to compile a list of speaking points, holding the pad at an angle to keep Caroline from seeing. 1. You have a daughter; 2. I am the daughter; 3. It's 2012 and you've been asleep for seventy years; 4. S.H.I.E.L.D. has rented an apartment for you in Brooklyn in an attempt to help you adjust. 5. I'll be in charge of re-introducing you to life. Her pen hovered over the first two bullet points as she debated a more...graceful way to share those facts. And should the seventy years thing come before or after the hi I'm your kid part? Should she mention her mom yet?

Caroline tilted her head to the side. Under her gaze, Audrey felt scrutinized. What was she thinking? In an attempt to appear natural, she bent over and began writing again. Caroline hummed under her breath and then dropped something on the desk before strolling out of the room. Upon looking up, Audrey realized that it was her glasses.

Her eyes flew over to the now-empty doorway, just missing the spy's retreating figure. Had she tried them on and found out they were fakes? There were cracks in her cover now.

People wore fake glasses to be trendy now, didn't they? Audrey wasn't trendy in any other sense, but maybe Caroline would buy it if she claimed to be just this once.

She slipped them on just as Captain Rogers and a few other agents entered the room. She was seeing him in person now, and wow, she totally had his nose. He still looked wildly alarmed as one of the agents pulled the chair out for him.

Another agent, this one a woman, distributed a file on the desk. Audrey glanced at it once to find that it was hers. The lady nodded shortly, and closed the door behind her as she and the rest of the agents left.

She gawked at the man in front of her for a few seconds, mouth open partially in shock. It was only when he shifted uncomfortably that she remembered her mission and snatched up the notepad. "Um, hi, uh...Captain."

Wow. Nice. The first word she ever said to her father was "um". It's better than it could've been, she tried to convince herself. Her half siblings, Laura and Michael, had just screamed when they first encountered their dad. Granted, they were newborn babies, but still. At least her first word to her dad was an actual word?

Optimism. Nice.

"I'm Audrey," she introduced, careful not to mention either of her last names. "So, uh, S.H.I.E.L.D. wants me to break the news to you. You have a daughter." Steve's eyes, previously unfocused, cleared suddenly as he shifted all his attention onto her. Before he could say anything, she spit out, "And, uh, the daughter is me. Hi." She pushed the folder on the desk towards him. "Here's my birth certificate. Um, Peggy Carter is my mom."

Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Audrey wanted to simultaneously pat herself on the back and punch herself in the nose.

Audrey gritted her teeth as Captain Rogers slowly lifted a hand to the file, pulling it towards him and opening it. The raw panic never seemed to leave his eyes. She did her best to hold still and keep her lips sealed as he stared at the documents. Something seemed to catch his eye and he looked up at her. Then back down. Then up again.

He squinted. "These… these can't be real. You aren't sixty-five."

Apparently, someone had already mentioned the year to him. Which meant there was no subject to move onto when things inevitably got weird.

"They're real," she assured him. "I promise." Biting her lip, she added a quick, "Congratulations, I guess."

Captain Rogers opened his mouth but didn't say anything, just looked down at the file and back up again. "How are you sixty five?" he questioned finally.

"Same way you're ninety-five. The serum is in my bloodstream, which means that I age slowly, to help prolong my lifespan." Captain Rogers nodded slowly, still looking doubtful and kinda like he was considering breaking the glass of the window behind Audrey and jumping out. She didn't hold it against him. This was the most painful conversation she'd ever experienced, including the time Jarvis tried explaining the birds and the bees to her, which had been really, really painful.

He kept flipping through her file, which was more of a photo album than anything. Audrey's work before she took over her current team, human trafficking investigations, had been pushing paper. There wasn't much of a career to record. Some experimental observations on Stark Sr.'s behalf, her date of recruitment, a list of tutors who'd homeschooled her. There were an entire two pages dedicated to her various home addresses, both in the US and a few in England. The only actual school she'd ever attended, acting as an American foreign exchange student in England. It had only been for a year, but it had been the most thrilling experience.

She couldn't go to an actual school, really, because it tended to raise questions when a six year old in first grade looked practically the same in fifth grade. Still, Peggy had acquiesced to let Howard help her find tutors to educate Audrey. Eventually, Audrey had gotten bored and started going to college, collecting mostly irrelevant degrees just to pass the time.

"You said Peggy's your mom?" Captain Rogers asked again. Audrey nodded, suddenly filled with the dreadful feeling that there were multiple possibilities to whom he'd had a kid with. He continued. "You said she is, not she was. She's still alive?"

Oh thank god.

Audrey nodded enthusiastically. "She's in England, because she wanted to be somewhere more familiar." She hesitated before adding, "She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's a few years ago, and being here kept...reminding her. Of you, and of everything else. It would upset her, so Daniel and I had her moved to somewhere closer to her childhood."

"Who's Daniel?"

Oh no. She hadn't meant to let that slip. That wasn't—crap.

Oh no.

Just spit it out.

"Daniel is my stepfather," she blurted. "He and mom got married in 1950."

Steve looked like a tragedy, for a moment, and Audrey wasn't sure how a person could look like a concept, but he seemed to embody it. Everything about him was tragic for that half second—his eyes were saddened, his shoulders slumped, he looked tired and finished and just generally tragic. Audrey bit her lip, chewing hard, because if she'd just remembered not to mention it to him, she could've told him later when not everything was a shock, and she'd been the one to make him look that depressed, and—

"That's good."

"Wait, what?"

She hadn't meant to say that out loud either.

"I'm glad she moved on," Captain Rogers clarified.

"Oh." Laughing nervously, she added, "Yeah. Uh. It was good."

That tipped the scale away from pat-on-the-back and towards punch-in-the-face. She could not. Stop. Talking. It was good. What did that even mean?

"There's an apartment," she burst out. At Steve's confused look, she elaborated, "There's an apartment in Brooklyn that S.H.I.E.L.D.'s renting out for you. They've also got enough in a bank account for you to survive without getting a job for a decent amount of time."

"What's S.H.I.E.L.D.?"

"Pardon?"

"What's S.H.I.E.L.D.?" he repeated.

"They didn't explain this part?" she inquired disbelievingly. "I'm judging them, not you, by the way. I can't believe they didn't introduce themselves. But, um, S.H.I.E.L.D. is the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. It's like the FBI, or the CIA, but weirder, because we deal with all the stuff that's kinda extraordinary." As a last note, she added, "My mom helped found it. Peggy. Mom. She wanted to name it in honor of you." She remembered listening to Howard, Peggy, and a few other men discussing names. The acronym had come first, and they'd built around it.

"Can I visit her?" he asked slowly. "Not yet, but do you think that's possible?"

Audrey nodded vigorously, thankful that he'd said something before she could begin babbling again. "Yeah, of course! I'm actually going to see her at the beginning of May, which, to be fair, is only in two weeks, but you're welcome to come if you'd like."

He seemed to respond well to her enthusiasm because Steve cracked the tiniest of smiles and answered, "I'd appreciate it."

She waved him off. "It's not a problem. I usually like to go for the Friday and the whole weekend, and then stick around on Monday. If she's having a good day, we're allowed to take her around. Sometimes she likes to go to London. There are shops she likes to visit sometimes." Audrey smiled wistfully at the thought of her mother. "Do you want to head back to your apartment? I don't know if you're tired or what but I'm getting the feeling that you're kind of done with being here."

"Not tired," Steve clarified. "I've done enough sleeping for a while. Hungry, maybe."

Audrey grinned and took the opening he gave her. "I know a place that has the best sandwiches ever," she swore. "We should get some." There was an invitation to continue catching up in there, somewhere. She hoped he understood.

He nodded, smiling a little more. "Sure."

"Great." She collected the papers from the desk, ripping the top sheet off the legal pad and discarding it. She pulled all the files together. "Do you want to keep this for now?" Audrey asked him, pointing down at the file on her.

"If you wouldn't mind."

"Sure," she told him, face splitting into a grin. "I can get you mom's file too, if you want." He nodded, and she rushed ahead to open the door for him. "After you, Captain."

"Uh, you can call me—"

Please don't say dad.

"—Steve."

Oh thank god.

"Will do. After you, Steve."

She shut the door behind her, getting the feeling that maybe things weren't going to be so terrible.

a/n: AHH okay so I teased this idea in a gifset on my tumblr a little while ago (aftcrnoon) and while I deal with writer's block for my other Marvel fic (Ink Blots) I decided to draft a first chapter, which accidentally got really long? I'm so sorry (unless you like long chapters and enjoyed the fic, then I hope all the words were worth it).

This fic of course ties in with a lot of the canonical plot elements, but the main part of it is about the characters and the way their relationships develop. Audrey and Steve have a long way to go in terms of their dynamic, and it's going to take a long time for them to actually become a family and become comfortable with that. Aside from that, Audrey's dealing with how to build up her own person, because even though she's been alive for so long she's only just been starting to feel like an adult.

This fic is part of a series that I'm dubbing the Stars and Stripes series. Monachopsis will span from the end of The First Avenger to the end of Avengers, topping off at about twenty or so chapters. I'm not too sure on the way the rest of the series will be divided, but the Captain America and Avengers movies are likely to get their own separate fics.

I really enjoyed writing this! I hope you liked reading it, and I'd love to hear your feedback in a review.

EDIT 5/19/20: Fixed some typos, clarified Audrey's voice, closed some plotholes.