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Fic: Ain’t Love a Kick (11/11)
Title: Ain’t Love a Kick
Relationship: Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Rating: M
Word Count: 33K (total) 5K (this chapter)
Summary: Steve wakes up after the crash to find his life has changed dramatically - the main change being, he’s married to Peggy Carter.
This chapter: A 5K marathon of childbirth. Make a cup of tea and bring a snack.
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Posted for Day 5 of Steggy Week: Domestic Bliss.
Six Sentence Sunday
From the upcoming chapter of Ain’t Love a Kick:
For his part, Steve is preparing for fatherhood as best he can.
Which is how Peggy happens upon him in the nursery, in the middle of the night, pinning a diaper on her copy of the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Are you mad?”
“What was I supposed to do? Go and buy myself a baby doll?” He knows his behaviour is odd, and knowing that makes him just defensive enough not to back down. “I need to practice. This works.”
“Yes, as long as the baby has a square arse.”
“That actually runs in my side of the family.”
(Like my work? Fuel the bot with coffee here.)
Oh dude, there's no way to pick! Let's go with: “The room tilts and sways around him. Her voice sounds far away, tinny, like a bad long distance connection. “Steve, what’s wrong?” He squeezes his eyes shut, the pain so bad he can’t talk through it. He can’t breathe. Darkness— His head is wrapped in something. It’s warm, and smells of cigarettes and stale sweat. A coat. He’s on his knees, hog-tied. Above him, a voice, shouting in German—the words are taut, the speaker anxious."
Wow, interesting choice!
This is from the most recent chapter of Ain’t Love a Kick - and this is a very timely ask, since I’ve been working on the scenes that explain Steve’s memory loss. There’s a lot I don’t plan to put in, since exposition is a pain in the ass and slows things down, but this gives me a reason to talk about it! ;)
Without giving too much away, there is definitely a pattern to the memories Steve is recalling: they are the ones that are tied, in his mind, to strong emotions. So he remembers his and Peggy’s first date, their honeymoon, etc. But not all strong emotions are positive ones, and so it was important to me to have him remember at least one bad thing.
There are a few types of scenes that I really hesitate to write, and the type that probably gives me the most pause is anything involving physical violence. Which, you know, makes superhero movies a great genre to write for! :P So it was a bit of a challenge to get this on the page. But I made it happen, because I had a thing I wanted to do.
The thing I wanted to reveal with this memory is that the shooting is not what we expect. As we know from the setup in Chapter 1, this HYDRA operative had orders to bring Steve in alive, but instead decided to shoot him. We’re given to understand that this was the purposeful act of a glory-seeking egotist, but as the flashback reveals, it isn’t at all.
The operative is young, he’s nervous, and he’s talking too much, trying to psych himself up. He’s got Steve bound hand and foot, but he’s still terrified of him. He throws his coat over Steve’s head so that he won’t have to look him in the eye; that’s not the move of an experienced killer. Steve sizes all of this up in an instant, but he’s still not quite fast enough.
I wanted the emotion in this scene to come from how quickly it happens, how almost accidental it is, and how easily it could have gone differently. And I wanted Steve’s last thoughts to be about how he argued with Peggy over something that suddenly seems completely stupid, because that’s how our minds tend to work in situations where a lot is on the line.
DVD commentary meme
Baby
This is from an upcoming chapter of Ain’t Love a Kick.
The next few weeks pass without incident. Steve doesn’t haveany more fainting spells, but he doesn’t have any new bursts of memory, either.He isn’t sure whether to feel relieved or disappointed.
He and Peggy settle into something like a routine. Theyfinish up the baby’s room together, with her mostly stage-directing him fromthe chair in the corner. Her feet have started to puff up something awful, evenin the mornings, bulging out of any shoe she tries to squeeze them into. She’ddie before she’d admit discomfort, he knows, but she can’t seem to help thesigh of relief that escapes her whenever she has a chance to sit down.
She takes up knitting in the evenings, while they listen toher terrible crime shows on the radio. The little jacket steadily grows untilit fits over Steve’s palm, his thumb and pinky in the sleeves.
(The first night she gets the carpet bag out of its hidingplace, he teases her a little about NoviceNeedlepoint, pointing out that she sure didn’t give him theimpression of being a novice. She gives him a playful swat with the book, whichleads to a little roughhousing, which leads to no knitting getting done thatevening.)
She makes hats, too: he catches her at the kitchen counter,trying one on an orange, and welling up when it fits.
“Don’t forget the pears,” he calls from the doorway. “Maybesome little scarves?”
“Sod off,” she says hoarsely, without looking up.
He puts his arms around her instead, which turns out to bethe right choice.
“It’s supposed to be the same size,” she tells him, not verycoherently, her voice muffled by his chest. “As a baby’s head, I mean. Theorange.”
“Yeah.”
He doesn’t ask any more where she gets this stuff from; he’sjust accepted that there are pieces of information shared among women. Thefront of his shirt is damp with tears, but her crying doesn’t stop him shortthe way it used to—which is an awful commentary on their marriage, if taken outof context.
“Tea?” he suggests.
She grumbles something that sounds suspiciously like “If youcan manage not to muck it up,” which he ignores.
Ain’t Love a Kick (9/?)
Title: Ain’t Love a Kick
Relationship: Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Rating: M
Summary: Steve wakes up after the crash to find his life has changed dramatically - the main change being, he’s married to Peggy Carter.
This chapter: Howard has a theory, and some truly terrible timing.
Read the entire story (AO3)
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5, 11, 15 for Ain't Love a Kick?
Oh boy. I am really, deeply unimpressed with Tumblr right now. I wrote a Whole Answer to this and posted it and apparently it went exactly nowhere?? What the heck. All right, stand back, I'm going to try and recreate my answer from memory. Wish me luck.
5. What part was hardest to write?
The part that gave me the most grief was that last mega-chapter. I had a plan in mind for how Steve was going to get his memory back, but I hadn't worked out much beyond that.
First, I had to resolve the whole sequence of events with Steve's surgery - which, I will be honest, did not interest me at all. Sometimes I write myself into these weird corners where I've covered all the emotional beats I want out of this particular plot point, but then the plot still needs to happen. So I had to find a way to approach it that wasn't going to be boring to write.
Then, once I got that sorted, there was the small matter of Baby Rogers. After spending an entire story hyping up this baby, sight unseen, it felt like a little bit of a cheat to just go "and then the baby also happened, bye ✌️". So I started really unpacking what it would be like for them as first-time parents, and it turned a little melancholy on me, so I had to write my way through to a place that wasn't a total downer.
I'm happy with where it eventually ended up, but getting there was a journey, let me tell you.
11. What do you like best about this fic?
I rarely write stories that have sustained plots. It's not my forte. So I'm really proud that I managed to do it here.
15. What did you learn from writing this fic?
In consulting with friends for details about pregnancy and childbirth, I learned more than I ever wanted to about what it is like to incubate and then expel an entire human being. I learned that (a) people who go through pregnancy are heroes because (b) pregnancy is wild.
Thanks for the questions!
[Ask me about my fanfictions]
blackbatpurplecat replied to your post “Ain’t Love a Kick (9/?)”
that roll of film is something that needs t o come back later.... ;-)
Nope. Barred. Peggy is putting her foot down on this one.
Ain’t Love a Kick (8/?)
Title: Ain’t Love a Kick
Relationship: Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Rating: M
Summary: Steve wakes up after the crash to find his life has changed dramatically - the main change being, he’s married to Peggy Carter.
This chapter: Steve and Peggy go for a moonlight swim. Everyone’s having a lot of feelings. The story earns its M rating.
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