Title: Nice Guys Finish Strong
Author: clarahow // clarascarters // charleybradburies (will be posted after challenge)
Fandom: Agent Carter
Characters: Daniel Sousa (POV), Original (Sousa Family/Extended Family) Characters, Peggy Carter, Jason Wilkes
Pairing: Daniel/Peggy
Length: 1115w
Rating: T+
Summary: The way to a man's heart is through his stomach.
Notes: '5 Times' fic...as in 5 fortunes Daniel gets from fortune cookies because I'm a cheeseball. Also written for hc_bingo prompt: comfort food or item / feeding someone.


I. The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Daniel grew up going to the Chinese restaurant down the street from his father’s store - one of their favorite haunts, owned by two of the nicest people in Boston, regardless of their relatively loose holds on the English language and American culture. One staple they did, however, incorporate into their business was the rise of the fortune cookie - something the typical American was coming to expect as part of a pseudo-Chinese meal.

Having been an immigrant himself, Daniel’s father was not so disillusioned as to believe that was some common thing where they’d come from, but he wasn’t opposed to people adapting to their surroundings and using them to their advantage; that was what the American dream was about, after all, wasn’t it? So Daniel, and later his sister Josephine, were not denied treats like the cookies Madame Chen had taught herself to make, however many years before.

They don’t go out much at all after Josephine is born - after his mother dies. Without the odd jobs she’d taken on, Daniel’s father takes another shift at the factory, and Daniel’s grandmother comes to Boston for a year or so, and she cooks but doesn’t seem very fond of either of the children. Daniel doesn’t really mind: he’s charmed by his sister, partly because she’s just so tiny and fragile and a little bit incomprehensible, and partly because his mother died giving her to him so he had to love her, right?

The night after his grandmother gets on a train back to her place in New York State, Daniel’s father takes them to the Chens’. It’s a week before Daniel’s twelfth birthday, and it’s the last night they have as a family for a very long time. Daniel cooks for himself and his sister after that, and leaves food out next to his dad’s cigarettes when he can.

II. The greatest war sometimes is not on the battlefield but against oneself.

His father insists on taking him and his sister out the night before he ships out. Daniel refuses to let him pay for something expensive, and they end up back at the Chens’. Madame Chen shuts the place down and makes him a cake, too, as a send-off. Jo spends most of the evening curled into his shoulder, and despite his pride in what he’s choosing to do, he cries himself to sleep that night.

III. Forgive your enemies, but never forget them.

During a relatively peaceful time - a short but well-managed ceasefire - in Germany, both Daniel’s unit and the WAC unit with whom they were working most closely were given a couple days’ leave. Not enough time to do much of anything with themselves, but just enough to take a breath - and enough for Daniel’s then-girlfriend Diana to pounce on the opportunity for a number of them to go to dinner at a somewhat tacky Chinese place. The owners are impressed, or perhaps touched, by Daniel’s small ability to speak to them more in Chinese than German.

He doesn’t want to think about his little Josephine, left behind in Boston, so he gives a one-sentence explanation rather than regaling his friends with stories of his childhood.

IV. You are not a ghost.

The Chens’ son Huang has almost entirely taken over their business by the time Daniel comes home. Jo says he’s plenty nice, but it just doesn’t feel right to Daniel. Mister and Madame Chen make sure to come see them, but Jo’s a secretary at a nice law firm, and their father’s a supervisor at the factory, so Daniel and Jo don’t go anywhere often. She seems surprised that he starts cooking again; he’d never tell her how long it takes, how much more work, with half a leg missing and the prosthetic and the crutch to get used to, but putting food on the table for her feels like the only somewhat normal thing he can do anymore - the only worthwhile thing that can be almost the same as it was before the war.

Huang Chen proposes to Jo in the summer of 1945, and their wedding reception is at the family restaurant. Daniel gets the same fortune the last two times he eats there, the reception and then the night before he leaves for New York to take the job with the SSR. He hates thinking that he needs the reminder, but he slips the last one in his wallet all the same.

V. If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

The first night shift he and Peggy share alone is in Los Angeles, a few weeks after Thompson’s sent her after him. He doesn’t know then how she found out about his possible hang-up on Chinese food, but he knows that Wilkes is the one who tells her that he tends to push himself through his shifts, because Wilkes is the only one who’s ever mentioned it to him, let alone challenged him about it. Guy cares too much for his own good - about everything, everyone. Puts himself in harm’s way without a second thought. Crazy smart, but not taken seriously half the time, because he’s a Negro so of course he can’t actually be that smart.

(Daniel isn’t big on punishment, but the agent who tries to gently remind him of that, out of surprise that Daniel treats Wilkes with the same respect he’ll give anyone, spends his next couple weeks relegated to answering the phone and getting people coffee. But when Peggy showed up and got what some people wanted to call preferential treatment because of what Daniel knew to be her past experience, that agent kept his mouth shut.)

It’s easy enough to see why Peggy likes Wilkes or vice versa, and he tries to treat neither of them differently for any of it, but it’s so damned hard not to want certain smiles of hers to be only his - which is outlandish, and foolish, and unprofessional, but the unfortunate truth. He’d already decided, though, back in New York, that he had to get over her. Her sheer existence doesn’t exactly help, but he thinks he might just be stubborn enough to do it.

She sets down a box of food from the Chinese restaurant a couple blocks over on his desk at two in the morning, though, and lays her hand on top of his as though he wasn’t gonna look up at her in the first place, red fingernails wrapping around, laying claim, to his crutch hand.

He’ll probably never forget the way she says it. That sarcasm that wasn’t actually sarcasm, just thinly-veiled affection.

“Someone has to take care of you, Daniel.”