My Head's Above the Rain and Roses Chapter Three Extended Author's Note

Review Response:

Thank you to FanficDelivery, Echomoonstone, and the five guests who left kudos on this work and to FanficDelivery for leaving such wonderful comments on AO3! Also, thank you to flowerspring for following on FFN! You’re all the best and it means so much to me!

Chapter Commentary:

Doing my research I learned that a living human being has never been successfully been thawed out after being frozen in ice for an extended period of time. That seems like a “no-duh” thing but I really thought it honestly had been done before. Alright, maybe not seventy years like Steve, but a week maybe? I thought that was possible, but apparently not. It’s things like this that make me not believe my mom when she tells me I’m the smartest person in this family. Also, I also used a post on Tumblr that postulated on how Steve could realistically survive in the ice to kind of come up with the basis for this. I can’t remember who the original poster was (and honestly I don’t think I’d be able to find the post) so credit to them for all the research they did! It truly did help a lot.

Mew-isms:

Pavlov’s Orphan Experiments: Ivan Pavlov is a famed physiologist known for his work in classical conditioning. He performed his experiments on dogs in which the amount of their saliva was measured in response to food. He did this by surgically implanting a canula in the dog’s mouth to collect and measure how much saliva it’s body excreted. He later did the exact same experiments on orphaned children. It was not done in a humane way.

Steve’s Blood: For anyone unaware of what happened in Season One of Agent Carter, the SSR recovered some of the “bad babies” from Howard Stark’s vault. Howard – who was at the time accused of setting up the robbery to secretly sell his inventions to enemies of the United States – asked Peggy Carter to retrieve one invention (the “blitzkrieg button”) from the SSR, telling her it was an EMP that could wipe out the entire New York City electric grid. Peggy became suspicious, though and opened the device to find it contained a vile of Steve’s blood. She and Howard get into an argument over it and Peggy keeps the vial, hiding it in the wall of her apartment. However, she is forced to retrieve it after the SSR catches on that she has been working as a double agent for Howard. As she is fleeing, she’s cornered by an enemy operative who knocks her out and feigns ignorance when SSR agents come to arrest Peggy. The vial then falls back into the hands of the SSR. Eventually, Howard is hypnotized by Johann Fennhoff into flying a plane filled with a toxic gas that causes extreme aggression and violent attacks in people when inhaled. It is unknown in cannon what Howard thinks happened to the vial (I wrote it as he thought Fennhoff forced him to hand over the vial while under hypnosis and then Fennhoff did God-knows-what with it), but in reality the vial was stolen back from the SSR by Edwin Jarvis. Jarvis gives the vial to Peggy, who dumps it into the East River to finally let go of Steve and move on.

“Shoot to Thrill”: Song by AC/DC that was used in both Iron Man 2 (2010) and The Avengers (2012).