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Antonia Carter Stark is smart, for her age, but not exceptional. She learned to read quickly, and learned to speak even faster. She devours the stories Jarvis reads her with a kind of desperate thirst that’s just short of alarming, but her schoolwork hovers just about the range of acceptable . Her parents are mildly upset by this absence of genius, but mostly unconcerned with her academics. For Maria, the important part is that Antonia learn to behave herself and act proper, so as to help her father’s name in the press and bring a suitable husband to the Stark Industries roster one day. For Howard, the most important part is that she keep out of his way so that he can work properly.Antonia doesn’t mind this apathy- in fact, the sentiment is returned in full. Her parents are simply wraiths that lurk around her house and occasionally drag her to loud and obnoxious parties. Their lives bear no importance to her own, as far as she knows, and so she does her best to leave them be in hopes they will return the favour. Her schoolwork is mediocre, and she knows this, but doesn’t much care. Learning proper cursive and studying world history are miles short of interesting, so she sees no point to applying herself further.One day she's wandering the mansion- per the usual, as most of her early days are spent exploring the corridors and rooms of her home- when she finds a doorway. The mansion's huge, and while later she'll think of it as desolate and empty, at this age it's more like a foreign country she's exploring for the first time. The huge ballrooms and hallways dwarf her tiny frame, which is why she always clutches her stuffed cat (she's named it Gabby) for comfort as she tiptoes down the shadowed empty corridors.Antonia's just descended a cold set of concrete steps when she finds herself in front of a large foggedglass door. There are words printed across the front that say Laboratory in huge block letters. She's too young to know better, too young to be frightened of what lies behind this cold glass door, so she steps forward and gently pushes it open.The room inside seems like a whole new world. There's clean white countertops littered with papers and diagrams, blueprints stacked against walls, maps and pins and prototypes piled against the walls. Howard is there, leaning over a large blueprint with a group of men surrounding him (she'll learn, some time later, that one of those men is named Obadiah Stane). He's talking loudly with them in words she doesn't understand and pointing out something on the paper. Antonia hesitates for a moment, still propping open the door with one hand. When nobody protests- or even notices- her presence, Antonia steps inside and lets the door swing shut silently. She pads over to a nearby table and picks up a small metal tool, testing its weight and mechanics in her small fingers.She sets the tool down and picks up a small plastic prototype, fiddling with the pieces, but loses her grip. It falls to the ground with a loud clash, startling the men bent over their blueprints. Howard’s eyes roam the laboratory for a moment before dropping down and settling on her. He looks startled, taken off-guard. Ann gazes back at him unflinchingly. Howard is, at this point in time, an enigma. She knows, in purely technical terms, that he is her father, but doesn't see the significance of such a relationship. To her, he is only a strange and tall figure that roams the halls of the mansion. Their paths cross, but never intertwine. “-Antonia?” He asks, staring at her. He seems at a loss for words, shocked by her presence. “Ann, you- you shouldn’t come down here. Go back upstairs and find Jarvis."Antonia steps backwards towards the stairs, not breaking eye contact with her father. Limits arethings she likes to prod and poke, whether they be set by nannies, her mother, or Jarvis, but this feels different, somehow ( dangerous isn’t a word she knows yet).Howard mutters something to the other men, and Ann hears a snatch of it. “I’ll have to get a better nanny,” He’s telling them apologetically. “That girl’s always wandering around. It’s a menace.”Ann turns her back and slowly walks the rest of the way out of the room. Later, she will learn to never turn her back on Howard, but here she’s safe from that fear, shielded by the vanguard of ignorance. ~~~Three months later and nothing has changed. Ann is in the same routine as ever. She wanders the halls of her family mansion, the side tables and massive chandeliers giant next to her tiny frame . She makes up games and stories as she slips from empty, dusty room to empty, dusty room. She clutches her stuffed cat (Gabby) close, and wishes that she had a real pet to clutch instead- animals aren’t allowed inside the mansion. There are guard dogs in the gardens, but she’s yet to overcome her fear of them.Once, as she wanders a rarely-ventured portion of the east wing, she finds a door she’s never encountered before. It has a plaque on the door that reads Study, but this she reads and then disregards. Any plaque that doesn’t read Laboratory is as good as a welcome sign, in her eyes.Ann reaches up and pushes open the door, slipping inside the study. It’s large, with a dark red carpet and armchairs situated at points around the room. One wall is littered with papers and has a huge desk pushed up against it.Howard is sitting in an armchair, his arm drooping over the edge and his head lolling slightly, holding an amber bottle in his other hand. There’s a strange stench in the air that Ann doesn’t recognize.Howard peers up at Ann as she stands curiously by the door, and his expression changes from one of desolation to something akin to humor.“What’re you doin’?” He asks Antonia, his voice slurred. “Why- why’re you in here? You- you should’ be in here.”Ann doesn’t like the way his voice is slurring, or the mocking sneer that mars his features. She takes a step backwards, but doesn’t flee.“You scared?” He hiccups a laugh. “You gonna run to Jarvis? I shoulda fired that damn man ages ago.”Antonia stands where she is, head cocked slightly, watching her father with morbid curiosity.“You just gonna stand there?” He snarls, gesturing sharply at her with a flick of his empty hand. “Not even gonna say anything? God, it’s bad enough my only kid’s a girl , now she has to be stupid too-” He cuts himself off with a long swig from the amber bottle.“The only thing I’ve ever-” He hiccups. “-I’ve ever made that worked was C-captain fucking America , and he’s gone and crashed a goddamned plane -”Ann remembered that name- Captain America. She has comic books about him in her room, birthday gifts and holiday presents from family friends and relatives. She regards Howard with confusion tinged- just slightly- by fear.“Don’t look it me like that, girl,” Howard snarls, pushing himself up out of the chair. “Don’t just stand there like a goddamned idiot-” Struck by a fit of rage, he hurls the bottle down. It smashes to pieces on the carpet a few feet away from him.Antonia slips out the open door. Later that day, Ann sits in the kitchen while Jarvis prepares her dinner, and she asks him about how her father knows Captain America. Jarvis looks surprised, and paused in picking up silverware. “Why do you ask, miss?”Antonia looks out the window. She doesn’t understand what happened in the study, but she has a gut feeling that tells her to keep quiet.“Only wondering,” She responds.“Your father helped design the supersoldier serum that gave Captain America his power,” Jarvis says. “Sir has been searching for his body in the Arctic.”“Oh,” Ann says. “Were they friends?” “Yes, miss.” Jarvis gives her a slightly worried look. “They were. You wouldn’t- you wouldn’t have talked to your father today, would you?”“No,” Antonia responds, looking out the window again. “No, I haven’t talked to him.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Anne is sent to boarding school when she’s seven, to the dismay of Jarvis and the relief of many a household maid exhausted by her antics. She’s relieved, more than anything. She’ll miss Jarvis, but she won’t miss the increasingly common occurrence of waking up late at night to the sound of her father raging at shadows and smashing bottles of expensive alcohol. That rank smell of gin that she first stumbled upon in the study is now a regular staple of her everyday life, and it hangs like a shadow around both of her parents- her mother, who’s thin and frail, clutching at her wine glasses as if they’re a lifeline- and her father, who has become a wraith of anger and fury, constantly raiding the household stash of gin.
“It’s for the best, miss,” Jarvis tells her. He’s trying for cheeriness, but she sees the sadness in his eyes. It’s become a familiar sight. “You’re a very smart little girl, Ann. You’ll enjoy being around those with similar minds.”
She blinks at the foyer floor and clutches her bag even harder. A driver is waiting by the door, and no one else- her mother came by the night before to say goodbye, and her father could care less.
“You’ll write to me,” she tells Jarvis. It’s an order, not a request, and it’s also unnecessary- she knows he’s going to write to her anyway. It still helps, somehow, to hear him respond in the affirmative.
~~
Ann’s earliest days at the boarding school feel more like imprisonment than education. She doesn’t know anyone else there, and the teachers take an instant dislike to her sharp retorts and blatant disregard for class rules. She settled into a routine of spending as little time possible studying or doing homework. Her grades remain steady despite this persistent apathy; she can skim a textbook and then do the quiz in her sleep. Ann doesn’t make any friends, and doesn’t much care to try either, as the other students are either stupid or too old for her to really get along with.
Things change when she finds the school library. It’s huge and nearly always empty, as the massive bookshelves aren’t very helpful for studying. Frankly, most students are more likely to get lost between the aisles than to find a good read. The first day she ventures between those towering bookshelves is spent skimming through old novels with dusty, worn covers- but the
second
day, the day she will remember as a turning point in her childhood, even
decades
later- she finds a science textbook.
Ann won’t realize it for months, but the book is geared towards practically high school level students. By any means, she should barely be able to decipher the back cover, much less read the detailed mathematical theorems held inside its worn pages. But she does understand it, and she understands it perfectly. The intricate diagrams, the algebraic equations that it takes most students years of hard study to understand- they click together in her brain like pieces of a well fit puzzle, like a part of her that was always missing is finally where it’s meant to be. She reads the entire textbook in five hours, huddling in a back corner and hiding from teachers that prowl the bookshelf aisles. She skips three classes in favor of devouring the equations spread across that textbook’s worn pages.
When she finishes the book, the moves on to a higher level textbook. And then higher, and higher, and higher- within five months, she’s reading college level textbooks at the age of seven years old. Her teachers don’t have a clue. Her grades remain painfully, absolutely average. But for all this seeming consistency, her brain has been set alight with ideas, numbers and equations that dance like flames in the shadows of her mind.
~~
Three years go by this way. Her grades remain average, her friendships shallow, and her homelife increasingly war-torn. Howard grows only sicker as time goes on, and by the time Ann’s ten, she’s grown used to him drunkenly raging at her and her mother. She spots pale yellow bruises dotting Maria’s wrists, and pretends she didn’t see anything. Her classes are spent absently doodling equations in the corners of notebooks. During her break time, she opens her window and climbs outside onto the huge oak tree that sits directly next to her room. She’ll sit there, one story off the ground, feet dangling over the edge of the branch as she carefully sketches a detailed blueprint on graph paper for a design she’ll never create. By the time she’s ten, that oak tree has been present for more of her life than any parent or family member.
Howard’s rage toward Ann and Maria only grows, and in the summer of 1980, when Ann is ten years old, he calls her to his office to go on a furious tirade about her mediocre grades and insolent behavior. Ann’s temper is not one to be trifled with, and as he rants she can feel something below the skin bubbling and rising to the surface. She knows, by now, not to enrage Howard further; she knows that he’s a tinderbox waiting to be lit, and she knows that her first instinct when he ordered her out of his laboratory that day so many years ago was correct: never test his limits. But he’s raging, and he’s drunk, and she’s angry, so when he snarls “You’re nothing but a good-for-nothing
idiot
, you useless slut-” something in her snaps and she hurls back “
takes one to know one
.”
For a moment, everything seems to freeze as if it’s a motion picture on pause. Howard’s clutching a bottle, staring at her with fury and shock in his eyes, his expression barely short of rabid. His hand loses its grip on the bottle, which crashes to the ground- and the next thing she knows, Ann’s sprawled on her back with Howard towering above her, her eye stinging with a quickly forming bruise and her lip bleeding. He snarls something that she doesn’t hear and stomps out of the room.
That’s the first time. It’s not the last. Soon, this will be a familiar sensation; the burn of a recent blow, a split lip. Her first forays into the use of makeup are done in secret, hidden behind a locked bathroom door, as she struggled to apply concealer before Jarvis spots her black eye.
This is how the next three years will be spent.
~~
Ann’s obligated to stay home during Christmas holidays, so it’s all part of routine when at the beginning of Christmas break a driver arrives at her school’s carved iron gates to take her back to the mansion. She slides into the passenger seat with her notebook and a pencil, disregarding the long drive’s scenery in favor of sketching a blueprint for a robotic design she’s been thinking on. Everything seems as usual when she arrives at the mansion, shoving her notebook into her bag and tromping down the long brick path from the driveway to the double oak doors.
When she opens the door, dumping her bag onto the carpet and tossing aside her jacket, Margaret Carter is standing in the foyer in all of her gorgeous brunette glory, wearing a white blouse and pencil skirt and looking absolutely flawless for over sixty years old. Ann stands still for a moment, shocked by this unforeseen development to her vacation plans.
Peggy Carter is no stranger, per say; her presence in the world has always been one Ann’s aware of, and her effect on Ann’s own life is hardly one to be discounted. But her presence, while a much kinder and gentler one than Howard’s, is rare. Like Maria, Peggy is more of a shadow of a presence than a true friend, someone who flees from scene to scene in Anne's life and skips months or even years between appearances. She’ll show up at the occasional gala or briefly visit Howard once or twice a year, but anything more is unforeseen. And yet here she is, standing in the foyer of Ann’s home and talking with Jarvis as if nothing is out of place. Ann half expects someone to burst out of the shadows and yell
April Fools
!
Instead, Jarvis quickly abandons his conversation in favor of rushing over to hug her tightly. Ann pecks him on the cheek and tries not to suffocate in the vice like grip of his embrace. “Jarvis, you’re hugging me a little- er- tightly, I gotta breathe.”
He quickly lets go of her and apologizes, but she dismisses his apologies and clomps over to Peggy, disregarding the mud her boots are tracking in.
“Hi, Ms. Carter,” Ann says, sticking out a hand for Peggy to shake, because the only other thing she knows to do is curtsey and she’s sure as fuck not going to curtsey.
Peggy grins at her in a very unladylike way and then seizes her in a hug almost as tight as Jarvis’s. “Call me Aunt Peggy, ducky,” she says fondly. “I’m going to stay through Christmas break, and work on some projects with your father.”
As it turns out, “work on some projects” mostly entails constant arguing. The two spend most of their time together yelling- or Howard does, at least; Peggy’s form of arguing is all clipped tones and cold retorts. Ann stays away from them when she can, and during dinner- which she’s required to show up for- she stays as quiet as possible, studiously studying the grain of the wood while Peggy and Howard debate in hushed tones. At one point, Peggy enquires kindly after Ann’s experience at school, and Ann has barely time to get out a clipped answer before Howard scoffs and snarls out a retort about how abysmal her grades are. Peggy’s lips thin with irritation as she watches Howard and she doesn’t pursue the topic any farther.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The summer is bright and hot, and the vividly colored garden plants bloom to form a gorgeous scene just short of a Degas painting that sprawls across the mansion’s back lawn. Antonia, clad in a tank top and high waisted shorts, gets sick of listening to her father and Peggy exchanging unpleasantries and pulls on a pair of boots to tromp about the garden in. Grabbing her sketchbook and some pencils, she wanders through the rose bushes until she finds the place she’s looking for: a dirt-paved expanse right next to the huge iron gates where three dobermans are kept on long, thin ropes to spend their day harassing passerby.
These dogs used to scare her, but she’s long since found that there are better things to be frightened of. She plops down and leans against the gate, propping her notebook against one leg and leaning her head back to rest on n iron bar. One of the dobermanses comes to rest his head on her leg, so she scratches his ears and does her best to ignore the slobber.
Her notebook pages are filled with elaborate and sprawling equations, mathematical problems lifted from advanced papers and expanded upon. Her most recent work is a blueprint; a carefully created water pump design, the margins full of numbers and notes.
About ten minutes pass by this way- Anne sprawled against the hot iron gate, carefully sketching the water pump concept while three dobermans sprawl around her and her hair is batted about in the hot wind. Around the ten minute mark, Ann is snapped out of her peaceful respite by the slam of a door.
She lays the notebook at her feet and stands, peering above the thick hedges at the mansion’s door. Stalling by the fountain that crowns the garden’s entrance, only just visible above the thick leaves, is Peggy Carter. Ann is just about to duck below the hedges again when the dobermans notice something nearby and start barking.
Peggy’s head snaps to the side and she stares directly at Ann for about five seconds flat, until Ann slinks below the hedges again and hopes in vain that the dobermans will be intimidating enough to keep Peggy from investigating. Naturally, she has no such luck, because within minutes the telltale click of Peggy’s heels is audible over the doberman barking.
“You shouldn’t come any further,” Ann says, sprawling against the gate once again as Peggy appears around the nearest rosebush. “These dobermans are pretty vicious.” Right on cue, two of them spring to their feet and start howling and lunging at Peggy. The third, being a lazy disgrace of a guard dog, remains sprawled across Ann’s legs while she scratches his ears.
What happens next is one of the most amazing things Ann has ever seen. Peggy stops right in front of the dobermans and looks each of them in the eye, and they both stop barking immediately, lay down, and give her the biggest puppy eyes Ann has ever seen.
“Uhhh,” Ann said, staring at them. “You wouldn’t happen to be, say, secretly a goddess? Or maybe telepathic? I’ve never seen them do that. Ever.”
“It’s all in the mind,” Peggy responds, smiling and crouching down to pet one of the dogs. “They can sense if you’re not confident.”
“Neat.”
“So, darling, what are you doing so far back here?” Peggy asks, sitting on the bench next to Ann and crossing her legs. “Aside from bonding with these lovely hounds that is, but I have a feeling you’re working on something, hm?.”
Ann shrugs and tries to draw attention away from the notebook by shifting to sit on it slightly, but it doesn’t work.
“What’s this?” Peggy asks. She pulls the notebook out from Ann’s grasp and flips through the pages, eyes scanning the endless equations and carefully outlined blueprints.
“It’s just a project I’ve been working on,” Ann says quietly, wondering if Peggy will scold her for not working on homework instead. “I have my schoolwork done, though. It’s just a side project.”
Peggy doesn’t respond. Her eyes are flicking over the folder, face impassive. Ann suddenly feels nervous, exposed, as if it’s her diary Peggy is so absorbed in and not a row of emotionless numbers. She feels as though her very mind is imprinted in these patterns and equations, as if the patterns of her thoughts echo in the blueprints, because these detailed and beautiful blue lines that are sketched through the notebook are so intimately connected with her most private memories. These are the blueprints she creates as she dangles her legs from the tree outside her dormitory window, the equations she carefully calculates to distract herself as she hides from her father’s wrath in a third-floor broom closet. To her, they each represent moments of her life that she has carefully kept hidden.
Peggy crosses her legs. “This is very good math, ducky,” she says. “Where did you learn it?”
“Math class.”
“I thought you took eighth grade math.”
You’d know
, Ann thinks rather bitterly, as she recalls her father complaining about just such a fact at dinner the day before.
“I do, why?”
Peggy glances down at the notebook again. “Darling,” she says. “This is...it’s very good math, dear. Very good. But I wouldn’t say it’s at an eighth grade level.”
Ann blinks at her, wondering if that’s good or bad. “Whaddya mean?”
Peggy gingerly runs a finger along one page. “It’s...well, this is college level, darling. Even I don’t understand parts of it.”
Ann frowns. “No, it’s not that hard,” she says. “Maybe you’re misunderstanding my application. Or how to write it. My math teacher says that if i don’t get better about formatting my math I won’t be able to progress with the rest of the grade.”
“No, I understand the formatting, Ann. I do. It’s your math, it’s...very advanced. Have you been getting private lessons?”
Ann shakes her head. Peggy looks a little bewildered. “Where did you learn these techniques?”
“Well- well, i read ahead a bit, in the textbooks. You can get these more advanced math textbooks, in the library, and I sort of have been reading ahead.”
Peggy is silent for a while, flipping through the notebook. Ann starts to feel nervous once again, wondering if she’s fucked up by letting Peggy see the notebook. This sort of interest in Ann’s private endeavors is not something she’s entirely used to coming from anyone, let alone the one and only Margaret Carter.
“Can I ask you something, Ann? It’s just...hearing what I’ve heard about your grades…”
“You thought I was a moron, right? That’s what Dad told you.” Ann slips off the bench onto the dusty ground to cuddle with one of dobermans, but she glances long enough to see a flash of rage on Peggy’s immaculately made-up face. It’s smoothed over instantly and Peggy’s face becomes, once again, a very model of solemnity.
“I never thought that, Ann. Ever. I simply didn’t realize you were so ahead of your age, in studies. This work doesn’t seem to represent the mind of someone who is at home in an eighth grade math level.”
Ann shifts rather uncomfortably. She knows she’s ahead of her classmates in this regard, but Peggy seems to be rather overemphasizing the point. She gets the idea, anyway, and it doesn’t change that she sees no point in changing her situation. What is the point of putting herself, her ideas, out to the world when she knows they will never appreciate it? What does she owe to Howard and Maria, when they have given her so little in the way of happiness and support? She’s long past trying to achieve howard’s approval, and to truly strive for more achievements in her classes seems pointless.
She knows, after all, that it doesn’t really matter where she stands academically, in comparison to her contemporaries. At the end of the day, she will still be a scrawny little thirteen year old- powerless in virtually every way- standing in her father’s study, cringing and waiting for a blow. Becoming smart will not change this. It will not give her power.
Or so she thinks. Peggy disagrees, evidently.
“I just do what the teacher asks me to do,” Ann says. “I don’t see the problem with
that
. I’m not at the bottom of my class or anything.”
“No, you aren’t,” Peggy agrees. “But I would recommend that you do something, Ann. I would recommend that you strive for more than mediocre. Do you know why?”
Ann shakes her head.
“Because you live in a world where you will have to walk uphill for everything. You will have to work ten times as hard as your male colleagues to get where you want to be. But you can get there. You can get there because you have something men
want
, and it’s not just for you to be a pretty trophy wife for someone Howard approves of, even chooses for you. You have intelligence, which means you can create things that they want, Ann. Your father didn’t start out with millions. He started out as a poor young man in a world tilted against him. But he walked uphill, that whole way, because he was smart enough that he could make weapons. He could make something they wanted. Anything they wanted. You have the same thing, Ann. So do me a favour and talk to your teachers. Get them to move you up a grade, okay?”
Peggy leans forward, grasps Ann’s head, and kisses her forehead. Then she stands, brushes off her skirt, and walks away.