1point5kidsandaruger

Steve still isn't one-hundred-percent sure what being a chaperone for a flock of girls no older than ten entails. He's relieved that Peggy got roped into this mess alongside him, even if it means they're taking their youngest along for the ride.

The idea of what Josephine can get into at a campsite falls just a touch short of horrifying.

But he has the license required to drive the bus full of shrieking, laughing, tiny girls up into the woods, trailed and led by a small caravan of vehicles that carry the trip's supplies. He is in fact the only one in the group of adults polled who has the license required. It isn't even as though they'll be far from help if something goes wrong - and really, Rogers, what is going to go wrong on a Girl Scout camping trip other than burned marshmallows? - but it's the woods that put him on edge. He doesn't camp much. It reminds him of Europe, and cold nights in unfriendly territory.

But for his girls, he'll do it. For them he'll do pretty much anything.

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Preparing for a trip to the mall is something of a production in the Carter-Rogers household. It's more than just wrestling overexcited young girls into appropriate clothes or making sure the household chores are done early - there's paperwork to sign, hidden escorts to approve, and weapons to conceal. The latter, mostly on Peggy's part, though a final compromise allows for Clint's bow and quiver to be tucked into the base of Josephine's stroller, accessible without being easily visible.

Steve might not be as prominent a public figure as he was during the War, but the super-soldier program is still a point of contention between the political powers that be - and the daughters of the only living super-soldier on the planet are too valuable in too many ways for any day out to be casual.

That said, it certainly seems casual once they're in the car and on the road. There's no edge to Steve or Peggy's behavior. The girls are nothing but well-dressed and excited, the elder two in dresses and Josephine in overalls. Peggy is in a fashionably modest black dress with red polka-dots, and Steve in a suit. Also a hat. Except Rosalie has stolen the hat at the moment and is climbing over Sarah and to get to Clint.

Josephine is in the front seat, squirming on her father's lap while Peggy drives.

Rosalie plucks the hat off her own head to try to balance it on Clint's. "Wait until you see it. It's the biggest shopping mall in the whole state."

Steve glances into the rear-view mirror, fighting a smile and fixing his ruffled hair. Sarah pushes Rosalie's feet off of her lap before scooting over to the passenger-side window. "He's from the future, Rosalie. He's probably seen flying shopping malls."

Rose pauses to consider this, then shrugs. "I still think it's the best one there is. We can find you a good uncle disguise."

Steve coughs to hide a laugh, and Josephine immediately imitates him, pressing her face to the side window and coughing on it. "It's not a disguise, Rose."

shootingshields

Peggy shuts the door behind her with a sigh, leaning against it with mild fatigue but she’s smiling gently. “Josephine finally fell asleep. It took the German, French and English rendition of ‘Three Blind Mice, but she’s sleeping soundly.”

She pushes away from the door and walks over to the bed where Steve is perched at the edge, a book idly in hand. She pauses to read the title, and then lifts it from his hands, setting it on the nightstand before coming back over. “You’ve read it already,” she says lightly, sliding off her robe and laying it neatly over the back of a chair, leaving her in a simple nightgown.

She sits beside him and takes his hand in hers, dropping her head against his shoulder. “I hope Sarah and Rose weren’t much trouble.” There may or may not be an implication on how deeply they were sleeping.

shootingshields

Peggy knew almost right away something was off with her body. At first, she wasn’t sure what – it wasn’t anything she’d ever felt before. Then she threw up one afternoon, the urge rising in the middle of tea, and she made a mad dash to the bathroom. It raised a flag. She didn’t confide in Steve just yet, because she could very well have just eaten some bad food. And then she was late. That in itself was not terribly uncommon – her line of work left for irregularities on occasion. So still, she waited, but the lateness turned into something unusual even for her irregularity.

Finally, she confessed her suspicions to Steve, keeping her tone unsure and they were off to the doctor. (The doctor Peggy had finally consented to trusting about any potential pregnancies.) Tests were taken, and then she waited.

When the doctor confirms all of Peggy’s suspicions, quite a number of things run through her mind, jumbled together that for once in her life she has a hard time focusing on one. She finishes up the session with ease, completes paperwork accordingly, and slides out into the waiting room where – where Steve has disappeared. Immediately, she steps outside and finds him pacing.

She can’t help it. She shakes her head. “You’re going to force an early re-pavement.”

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[The lab at the NTS gives Steve the crawls, no matter how many times he ends up there. Maybe it's the wasteland backing the place, the radiation warning signs or the huge pits where gamma-based explosive have ripped chunks out of the earth. Maybe it's the way the self-contained facility circulates purified air until the entire place tastes stale. Regardless, when Howard says there's 'something interesting' there and that General Phillips has requested Captain America's presence at the base ASAP, Steve doesn't exactly have a choice but to go.

The surroundings are still unsettling. The air still tastes stale. But there's a wildness to the place that Steve's never seen before. Scientists rushing back and forth, holding conversations that are at once hushed and excited. He almost has to pry one away from her clipboard in order to find out where Phillips and Stark are waiting. "Requested SSR personnel are supposed to go to observation room three," she says, and by the time he manages to get directions there he's already looking forward to stepping back out into the Nevada heat.

What he doesn't expect when he gets to Observation Room Three is to see Peggy and a half-dozen higher ups whose names and faces he knows but whom he's never personally met. What he doesn't expect is to see a man restrained in the otherwise empty cleanroom on the other side of the glass. Steve's escort stays on the other side of the door when it gets shut. He drifts to Peggy's side, saluting the Phillips at the same time.]

General. Is... What is this?

[Phillips raises his eyebrows at Steve in a look the Captain knows too well by now.]

Funny.[Phillips gestures at the glass.]I was hoping you could tell me. Stark got Skull's toy box open - ripped a nice shiny hole in the wall of his lab and spiked radiation levels in the entire facility. And also gave us him.

[Steve moves to the glass, resisting the urge to press a hand against it and peer closer, like the prisoner is a new exhibit at the zoo.] I'm not sure I follow, sir.

Came through the hole, took out two scientists and five guards - and then things got interesting.

[Steve frowns, still watching the prisoner.] ...Sir?

He took one look at the uniforms and started demanding to see you.

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The clock tower down the street from their tiny hotel room in East Germany rang in the new year. Twelve muted chimes rolling into the dark and the snow and the silence before night ate up sound again. Steve lay awake, arm tingling with the numbness of a sleeping limb trying to wake up, Peggy's head pillowed against him. He drew his fingertips down her bare arm, silently counting to twelve in German then back down again. Gooseflesh making her skin rough, somehow more real and the more surreal for it.

Ask him how he thought he'd be spending the turn into 1950 and it wouldn't have been in bed with a friendly spy in enemy territory. His fiancé, the spy, in enemy territory. Waiting for a contact who may or may not be playing both sides and may or may not try selling them out.

He hadn't thought past the war, when he signed on with the SSR. And now "past the war" was one of the things weighing heaviest on his mind.

"Happy New Year," he whispered, and turned his head to kiss her hair, checking out the window in the same movement.

Curtains drawn - nothing to see or be seen. It didn't keep worry away. The room felt vulnerable. First floor, few easy exits and too many openings, drafty and threadbare and with poor locks on the door.

Death never worried him before, not really. But now-

Well, if it happened, it happened.

But still.

"Peggy?"

shootingshields

Peggy got the news straight from Howard himself. She didn’t wait for Phillips’s approval, though he gave it anyway; within the hour, she was on a transatlantic flight to New York, having bullied and manipulated her way on board.

She hadn’t even changed, hadn’t packed before leaving, just rushed straight to the hospital upon landing, half in a daze and in disbelief. Howard was there already, but she barely stopped to say a word except get his room number, and then she was gone. Up elevators and stairs to the right floor, where she froze outside his room.

None of them would dare lie about something like this, but standing here now, it felt like all the air was getting sucked away. Count to three. Deep breath. Slowly, Peggy slips her hand around the knob, but it’s another few seconds before she can will herself to open it.

And when she does, when she steps inside, it’s all she can do but keep from crying, because there he is, sleeping. As if he were merely resting after a long day. His chest moves slowly up and down, but Steve Rogers is there. Alive.

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Steve never forgot the first thing Peggy said when they decided to get their own place.

"You'll make a rather robust housewife."

Howard laughed himself sick, though the alcohol consumption at the baby shower helped with that, no doubt.

Now - looking at the small, serviceable place they'd found, its chipping blue paint and crooked white fence, Sarah in a carrier across his chest and the couch balanced on one shoulder - Steve can't imagine anything more perfect.

Peggy presides over the Howling-Commandos-plus-Howard inside, orchestrating the unloading of the couple's belongings. Howard no doubt trying to delegate the work away or offering to hire movers to finish it up. As though Peggy would allow strange men to set foot in her home, now that she'd designated it as such.

He ducks inside, adjusting his grip on the couch it through the door without bumping the sleeping one-year-old curled against him. "Where should I put this?"

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1point5kidsandaruger

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CAMPIN' TIME

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I seem to be what I'm not, you see. I'm wearing my heart like a crown.

This is my winter song to you;

but here you are, in front of me

I've always known with you I am home... [finished]

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