Synopsis / Summary / Plot
38 years ago Howard Stark consoles his wife Maria over their failure to have a child, and suggests they could try again.
37 years ago Amanda Armstrong and SHIELD Agent Jude are attacked in a Berlin hotel room by 2 disguised Agents of Hydra, who Jude kills. Amanda has a flesh wound in the leg from an earlier attack in rehearsals at a Hamburg club. Jude organises their extraction by SHIELD.
Young singer Amanda (going by her stage name Amanda Strong) does a TV interview where she follows the cover story that she was shot by an overzealous fan during the rehearsal.
Her SHIELD handler Val de Fontaine tells Amanda they'll let her follow her rock career while she recovers - a career that has been boosted by the publicity. She says they've dealt with the leak and the people who were leaked to. Amanda's cover is intact again. Val also commends her choice of Jude as a man to fall for.
Amanda is doing a gig in New York when Jude reappears in her life. He's been busy with SHIELD stuff, including fixing her particular problem. She hasn't got another gig for a while so they take off on a boat.
2 years later Jude returns from another mission and she tells him she's pregnant.
9 months later she finds Jude bleeding from a wound in their bathroom. Amanda has resigned from SHIELD. Jude tells her he's got enough money for them and the imminent baby to disappear into a new life together.
As she binds up his wound Jude suggests that SHIELD is as bad as Hydra. It's all a game and the clever player plays the game to his own advantage. This is all leading up to him admitting that he made the money by betraying SHIELD to Hydra. He says of course he wasn't working for Hydra when they attacked her. But he can't tell her he hasn't betrayed other agents to them.
So she stabs him in the throat with a pair of scissors and calls SHIELD.
When it's over Amanda asks Val to take her baby when it's born and get it adopted through SHIELD. SHIELD bosses aren't too happy about this, but they do have a procedure to cover it - they put the child in an orphanage and burn the evidence connecting it to the mother. But Howard Stark sees this as a solution to a problem. He takes the baby from the orphanage (at least that has to be true to fit the trail Tony followed) to Maria and that's the origin of Tony Stark.
Now we continue from the end of #5 where Tony found Amanda. They bond as mother and son.