Author's Note: So this isn't the planned sequel. It's more a fluffy side piece that got too long. A fluffy murder mystery side piece.

The names of Peggy's children are stolen wholesale from Romanimp and Ratherembarassing's most excellent The Mothering of Things.

####

Howard would never fly tourist-class, but if he ever did he would say that it was a true testament of Peggy's love for her children that she elected to take the middle seat for the cross-Atlantic flight.

It is…less than comfortable.

Angie had wrinkled her noses and looked Peggy up and down like she was thinking of having her committed when she told her about the tickets.

"You're best pal owns a jet, and your best gal is on first name basis with half the charter companies on the Eastern seaboard. Why did you buy the tickets through a travel agent?"

Peggy had huffed and pointed out that neither her children or her family in England were familiar with her work in intelligence. "I have an image to maintain."

"An uncomfortable one," Angie had said with nothing more than a look and crossed arms.

A very, very uncomfortable one.

The children are much more game for the flight than Peggy, and the flight attendants coo and marvel over how well behaved they are and how quickly they fall asleep after the plane refuels in Newfoundland.

"I've done this route for two years and never met two such children so well-mannered," one attendant whispers.

Peggy likes to think it's because her children have espionage in their blood. They're born for trans-oceanic flights in tight confines.

But it is also probably the large meals they ate and Angie insisting they they get up earlier than usual the day their flight left. They're exhausted, and just the right amount of exhaustion too. Angie has a gift with the children and can play them as candidly as a piano. Peggy just has the ability to feed them and scold them and take the worst seat on a flight for them.

Sometimes she's envious of Angie.

Who isn't on the plane. An invitation, never extended, hung between them before she and the children left. She never offered to have Angie come even though they've lived together for years and those close to them think of them as a very loving and committed couple.

It just felt wrong to bring her. To invite her to a Carter family gathering where she'd be ostracized and insulted and have very little fun. All so Peggy could have someone at her back. Wrong and profoundly unfair.

The plane lands in London early in the morning when the sky is still twisting from bright blue twilight to the yellow of dawn. By then the children are both wide awake and eager to explore the city their mother's come from. They bounce in their seats as they taxi and press against the glass in the hope of seeing some part of a city they currently know only from stories and films.

Their bout of good behavior starts to dissolve as they disembark. Suddenly Elizabeth and Richard are both British. More accurately they're Peggy. Or a gross mimicry of her. They thank the attendants in clipped accents and then throw in a few "jolly goods" just to tweak Peggy.

She smiles and manages not to scowl at her own children.

She's got two weeks without Angie there as a buffer. Two weeks of just her and the children and Peggy's family.

Her father and her new stepmother, and her brother.

Who is seven.

Three years younger than Elizabeth and Richard.

####

When they arrive at the manse her father now calls home Elizabeth is the color of chalk and Richard looks like he might vomit out of the side of the car. Peggy has to hurriedly usher him out and try to soothe him with a hand on his back—much like her own mother did the first time she took a cab in London.

They're…unpleasant. "I drove nicer running from cops," Angie once groused.

The cab driver is at least polite enough to take their bags up to the door. He even helpfully rings the bell before she can ask him not too.

Which is why her father sees his grandchildren for the first time in six years as his grandson vomits up breakfast all over Eaton Square.

Sir Reginald Carter, newly retired and formerly of the War Office, shows his displeasure with nothing more than the twitch of his great mustache. The same one he's had for the near forty years of Peggy's life. He smiles and it has a way of pulling the sides of his mouth up into his mustache and making him look…charming.

That is something Peggy knows for a fact he is not.

She got her charm from her mother. The dark eyes and willingness to stab a man with an oyster fork she got from him.

Richard wipes at his mouth and eyes his grandfather warily. His back goes rigid under Peggy's palm and she fights the urge to hold him closer.

They have to be very careful with her father. He sees everything. And gleefully slices through it all with words as sharp as the bayonet he wielded in the trenches.

Elizabeth bounds towards "Reggie" (only coworkers and irate daughters with chips on their shoulder call him Reginald) and leaps into his arms. Peggy notes how her daughter makes no effort to control her legs and sees the grimace on her father's face when a foot gets careless and wings a bit of him that shouldn't be winged.

He laughs and it's a warm and booming sort of laugh that brings to mind cozy fires and warm sweaters.

He remarks a few times about how his granddaughter has grown and ruffles his grandson's hair and jokes with him while pointedly ignoring the vomit chilling on the street.

Peggy is saved for last. It's a firm sort of hug where she's acutely aware of the muscles of his back that her fingers press against and the smoothness of his cheek against her own. He gives her a kiss just as he often did and his lips are wet and cool and taste of cigars.

"It's good to see you." He's trying to be warm. Kind.

So she tries as well. Plasters on a smile. It's haphazard and he can see that. His mustache dips a little.

They're saved from further awkwardness by Cecile, who bounds out of the house and wraps Peggy up in a hug like they're the oldest and best of friends.

She's soft and bright and smells like Shalimar. She tells Peggy that it's been too long and that's she's missed her and she leaves a wet kiss on Peggy's cheek before standing back and taking her hands in her own. "So very long," she says, and there are glittering tears in her bright brown eyes.

She holds Peggy's hands in front of her. Clutches them like the two of them were something more than friends in school.

"You look so well, my dear," Peggy says. Her voice is high, even in her own ears. Cheerful and girlish.

Cecile waves dismissively. "You," she says, "you look wonderful! And after two children." She's eyeing all of Peggy in that way people often do when they realize she's a mother of two and on her way to forty. "I wish I could have stayed so trim after Samuel."

Naturally this is Samuel's cue to appear in the doorway, clutching the frame of it like it's his mother's skirts. He's tow-headed like Cecile. Big blond curls that need no iron to be tamed, but his eyes will go dark like his father's one day and he has the cheekbones Peggy always assumed she got from her mother.

He's shy and clearly appalled when Elizabeth, Richard trailing behind her, marches up to him to introduce herself.

Cecile's so very amused by the children's interaction. Reginald just glares imposingly, his great mustache hiding his displeasure.

####

Things go tits up shortly after that.

Well and truly.

It's abominable.

While Peggy tries to enjoy a stifling tea with her father and her old school chum turned mother Elizabeth is busy in the ample playroom. Busy convincing Samuel that she and Richard are Russian spies out to stop the hegemonic capitalist.

Richard was the one that suggested they use the word "hegemonic."

"It sounds scary," he explains to Peggy and he has to say it loudly because Samuel won't stop crying.

Neither Cecile or Reginald are amused by their son's nightmares that night.

The next morning Cecile, dark circles under her eyes masked by makeup, suggests shopping with "just the girls." Her smile is very tired and at odds with her absurdly bright voice and Peggy almost has the urge to apologize for her children.

The urge reappears when the three of them are having lunch and Peggy's father calls to tell them Richard hasn't stopped crying since they left.

"I'm afraid he and Elizabeth are peas in a pod," she says. It's the best excuse she can come up with. Only her father manages to glare at her with reproach—lecture her with nary a look. She's got a boy and a girl and they're too close, he seems to say. The boy's soft and the girl's too strong.

Peggy rankles and says nothing back. Just glares, because two can lecture with a look and she won't have her father ruining a whole other generation of children.

Dinner that night is tedious and excruciating. By the end of it Peggy is curious to learn what about herself and her family Reginald Carter actually likes.

Afterwards she nearly folds and calls Angie. Who doesn't need to be bombarded with something as silly as irritating cradle-robbing backseat parenting fathers.

She tells herself she just has to survive until the next day. That's when they'll all head out to the country to stay at Cecile's family's estate. There will be a dozen or more guests. And food. And dinner parties. And distraction after distraction that will keep Peggy and her children far away from the family they've ostensibly travelled half way across the world to visit.

She just has to survive that long.

####

And she does.

Miraculously she and the children are alive and well the next morning and Peggy allows herself to feel a little excitement about a long week at a country estate. Hunting and feasting and living a life Peggy Carter's never considered living.

"Like a Jane Austen novel," she can hear Angie say.

Angie would dearly love it.

Damn.

She really should have invited her.

Reginald, arm around Cecile's shoulder, looks at their bags gathered in the front entry hall and then back at the car outside. A sporty two-seater.

"You'll take the children with you," Cecile says—more a demand than a plea, "won't you?"

"After you're done with that bit of work," Reginald says, his teeth snapping on the word "work."

She just had to tell them about the phone call back to SHIELD she needed to make. Didn't she?

She gives the couple a pained smile. "Of course."

Her father seems pleased with the situation he's stuck her in. Cecile does too. She gives Peggy a quick squeeze and whispers "have fun" in her ear as though it's going to be a great lark ferrying three children across the English countryside all on her own.

Again she considers calling Angie and moaning a bit about how supremely awful her family is.

Again she manages to resist.

Angie's got a nice family—even if some of them are involved in criminal activities and her brother only has one leg because of a bank robbery gone wrong.

They've managed to come to some kind of terms with Angie's sexuality and even accepted her in spite of it.

Versus Peggy's father.

He's…he's…

He's wretchedness wrapped up in tweed.

Something she dwells on after her call back to Washington.

Broods there at the kitchen table—her fingers drumming on the wood.

The doorbell rings and she starts to push herself out of her chair to answer.

But Richard's faster—shouting through the house that he'll get it. His little feet thumping noisily down the hall.

There's cheering and gasping from the front of the house. Enough for Peggy to know she needs to see who it is.

"Richard," she calls ahead, "I really have to insist that you don't just answer the door like that! It could be any kind of murderer or thieve or—"

Brigand, a radically underused word in day to day conversation, stalls on her lips. Angie, arms around Richard and holding him tight, looks up. She's in full on Angela Carter mode. Hair perfect, make up perfect, dress perfect. Perfect and cool. Angie takes up the whole entrance. Takes up this tremendous amount of space despite being a very small woman.

And takes the breath right out of Peggy.

Which gets Angie smirking, because she seems to know Peggy better than she knows herself. "Hey English," she drawls, "miss me?"

####

While her own children are passingly familiar with Peggy and Angie publicly displaying affection Samuel is not. So Peggy drags Angie up to her bedroom and ignores Angie's amused chuckle.

"Little greedy, wanting me all to yourself," she says as Peggy pushes her back against the door to snog her good and proper.

"I missed you."

"It's been a couple of days."

"Long, long days."

That Angie was supposed to be spending in New York and then Hollywood.

She pulls back. "Why are you here?"

"Missed you too?"

Peggy frowns and Angie kisses the corner of her mouth. "Little birdy told me you were miserable and outgunned. Figured blowing off work was better than hearing you got arrested for murder."

Little bird— "The children called you."

Angie laughs. "You brought two astute kids into the world Peg. Not that astute."

"Then who?"

"Your wicked stepmother." She says it teasingly, tugging on Peggy's nose and laughing.

But Peggy has to step away because, "Cecile called you? She has the emotional intelligence of a scone."

"Or she's a smart cookie," Angie smirks.

Peggy groans and turns her back on her. They've devolved into baked good puns. That can't end well.

"Peggy, if you don't want me here say the word. I can kiss the kids and hop a plane back to the States."

"No," she sighs and turns back again to face her girl, "No I definitely want you here. Likely I need you here. I'm just going to be stinging for the next few days because Cecile managed to do what I couldn't."

"True. Woman knows how to make the hard call."

Peggy harrumphs.

Angie takes her hands in her own and her thumbs run back and forth across the top of Peggy's knuckles. "If it helps I'm pretty sure she can't jump out of planes though."

Peggy sniffs, "That does help."

"Or garrote a man with a scarf."

Peggy nods.

"Or shoot the nipple off a bear at a hundred yards."

Her slow smile turns into an exaggerated frown. "Now you're just blowing smoke up my knickers."

Angie winks, "And you're loving every minute of it."