Thaw (11/12)
9 Aug 2013 14:34![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneThaw
Avengers/Captain America mashup; Clint Barton POV
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Summary: The Winter Soldier was the dog that ate the good guys' homework during the Cold War, a convenient bogeyman to explain failure, and Clint Barton was pretty sure those tall tales died with the fall of the Wall. But reality is stranger than fiction, something Clint really shouldn't be as surprised by as he is at this stage of his career, and now there are ghosts to chase once more.
Notes: Thaw is a sequel to Freezer Burn plotwise and a successor to BOHICA in terms of characterizations. Neither is required reading for this. However, I do recommend reading the post-credit scene to FB to establish the Winter Soldier within the context of this universe, which is compliant with Phase One movies but diverges afterward.
Costa Rica was a really beautiful country, Clint mused as he rode his bike up the dirt roads that curled up the mountainside. All lush greenery and pretty colors and peace and quiet once you got out of the touristy parts and San Jose. He could come back here on a vacation, bring his mountain bike, eat his weight in tropical fruit, spend some time on the beach maybe, hit up the ruins and the volcanic lakes and everything that had looked so inviting from the plane window.
He'd never been here before; the country hadn't had the kind of political or narcotic crises as its neighbors, hadn't become a hotbed of HYDRA activity, and it wasn't in his region of specialization, so there'd been no professional reasons to visit. And his vacations and leaves over the years had tended to be in CONUS because sometimes, after all of the far-flung places he'd been to, he just wanted to be in a place where he could drink the water, leave his gun and quiver hanging on the corner hooks, and the radio and TV were in English.
But he would seriously consider Costa Rica as a place worth traveling to when he wasn't on the clock. Provided he finished his current business here without a warrant and an extradition request on his head.
"It's someplace not hot and dry," Hill had shrugged when she'd handed him the tablet with the briefing files on it. As if Clint was being given a wetworks assignment based entirely on his hydration requirements. "It's got good coffee."
It had fabulous coffee, but the real reason Clint was being given this assignment instead of one of the other small cohort of snipers SHIELD had on its employ for entirely this kind of mission, was that it was payback.
Prince Omar had about seven names, none of which were actually Omar, and he wasn't quite a prince, although he was Emirati royalty through and through. But he'd been labeled Prince Omar because of his love for bling, for women, for booze, and for profligate spending on all three. He was so very ostentatious about it that it took Western agencies years before they realized that he was putting that Wharton education to good use and was the money manager for half of the Middle East's most dangerous terror networks.
The original, still very-fucking-secret, orders had been capture, then capture or kill, and then (after a few problems with rendition and the threat of a civilian criminal trial for a terrorist) just kill the bastard. Finding him had proven difficult, though, and he had bankrolled the deaths of hundreds since then. So when the intel came in, got verified, got re-verified, and constant surveillance established, it had been a matter of who would get the call. And Clint didn't really think there'd been too much debate as to who that would be. Not when Cilnt had seven photographs of men he'd fought with and played with and drank with and lived with who'd died because of what Prince Omar's money-managing skills could buy his clients.
He hadn't done these kinds of ops for a few years, not when there was so much else he could do. It wasn't a relief or not a relief to have stopped doing it, just as it wasn't a relief or not a relief to be doing it again. He'd been a sniper of legend in the Army, but among actual professionals, killing is not something you bragged about, even within the privacy of your own mind, and Clint had never really felt the urge. He'd kept his book, changing ink colors when he'd moved from the Army to SHIELD, but that was a matter of record, not one of pride. He was good at what he did, full stop.
Prince Omar was living on a coffee plantation in a valley so perfectly green they could have used it as a postcard. The big house had a marble deck and a marble pool and that pool, when Clint set up his scope on top of his rifle, had two scantily clad local beauties lounging at the shallow end. He was perfectly happy to use the blonder one's tits as a landmark to adjust his sights.
He'd come prepared to stay a few days, ghillie suit, water bottles (and one very clearly different-by-touch bottle to pee in), energy bars, and a bunch of bananas he'd bought at a roadside stand on the drive up. He was 682 meters away from the artificially-enhanced-but-still-lovely set of 34Ds and Prince Omar had been so generous as to plant the perfect windsock at the far corner of the deck. (It was a bronze globe with brightly colored pennants attached to it, probably some ridiculous homage to the icons of status that had marked the tents of his royal ancestors before the Emirates had become a high-rise haven of oil barons served by indentured serfs from Bangladesh and the Philippines.) Prince Omar had gotten back into town three days ago and wasn't scheduled to leave for another week. He would not be making that plane.
It took only a day. The bathing beauties had gone shopping that morning and returned home for lunch with bags and bags of things, but Omar had stayed behind and mostly indoors. Clint had seen him twice, once crossing the room that looked out on to the deck and once on the deck itself, but in the shaded corner with the umbrella-topped table and there'd been no good shot. But in the late afternoon, after their presumed siesta, they all three came out in their bathing suits and Clint put away the protein bar and systematically worked out the stiffness from his shoulders and arms before settling into position. Clint waited while Omar swam a few laps and then lounged in the pool, leaning against the side at an angle that completely blocked a clean shot. But then the brunette swam over to him and pulled him playfully into the center of the pool and they frolicked for a few minutes before Omar again retreated to the side of the pool to watch, but this time he was facing Clint dead-on.
"Oh, thank you, darling," Clint murmured to the brunette, who was currently untying the little string bow that held her very small bikini top in place. "I am very sorry for all of the celibacy I am about to cause you. It will be a genuine shame."
Because while Omar was busy enjoying his two pets entertaining each other in a most riveting fashion, Clint was doing a final check on wind speed and direction and didn't even need to adjust for distance because Omar was where the blonde had been the day before.
When it was over, Clint used the rifle's scope to take a picture to confirm the kill before packing his equipment up, policing his hide site, walking the distance to where he'd hidden his bike, and driving down to Limon, where the SHIELD team took his rifle and his gear and gave him a camera with a memory card full of touristy pictures and a plane ticket to Dallas, where he'd hang out for a couple of days before transiting to New York.
He'd been back for two days when his cell phone rang at 0845.
"You had better be needing bail or about to tell me you finally lost your virginity," Clint growled into the phone because he'd been out late last night. This morning. Whatever.
"Can you come down to Philadelphia?" Steve asked and Clint sat up in bed, wide awake and irritation forgotten, because he knew what -- who -- was in Philly.
"How's Peggy?"
Peggy was fine, Steve quickly assured. Physically. Otherwise she was rattled and pissed off for being rattled because she'd walked in to her kitchen at barely past the crack of dawn to make herself tea and breakfast and there'd been something on her kitchen table: a red rose and a photograph of the Tesseract case next to yesterday's Times of Latveria.
"We'll be there by noon," Clint promised.
Natasha cursed him out in filthy Russian before he got a word in edgewise, but when she ran out of air, he explained the situation. "Your ex-boyfriend left a present for Steve's ex-girlfriend."
Steve hadn't said anything about the Winter Soldier, but if Clint were going to bet money on this, he'd bet on that. Peggy Carter was a former spy chief; she had a security system monitored by SHIELD and better than what anyone could get on the open market and there was zero chance she'd have forgotten to set it -- it would have been set for her. Zippy the local housebreaker wasn't getting in to Peggy Carter's kitchen.
"I'll be at the corner of West End and 90th in twenty," she told him. It was nowhere near where she lived, but it was a Sunday morning after a Saturday night and it wasn't that far out of the way.
Peggy was sitting in the living room when they arrived, Steve having opened the door. She looked fine, but there was a brittleness to her that had nothing to do with her age. Someone had broken into her home, which would have been enough to rattle anyone, but they'd done so and she hadn't noticed and that, for a legendary spy, was an extra affront. That it had been an equally legendary killer -- Clint didn't think for a moment that Peggy hadn't drawn the same conclusions he had -- against whom she would have been powerless to raise an alarm, let alone defend herself... Actually, Clint thought she looked good, considering.
Steve, however, looked like crap.
"We stopped at Harold's in Edison on the way down," Natasha announced, holding up the heavy bags for Peggy to see. "I hope you still eat pastrami."
Peggy smiled. "One of those is for Steve, I trust."
Steve got both bags for the time being and disappeared into the kitchen and Clint followed him after exchanging a look with Natasha, who went over to the couch to sit by Peggy. The two of them hadn't gotten off on the right foot the first few times, either because of whatever shit Natasha was pulling at the time or because they were two of the greatest lady spies ever or their personalities or whatever it had been. And that had been before Steve had even entered the picture, at which point things had gotten a lot worse -- it had been kind of horribly amusing to watch Natasha get so worked up over a nonogenarian she somehow perceived as a threat -- before getting a lot better. They weren't friends, but they were friendly and the mutual suspicion had finally given way to mutual respect.
Steve was unpacking the bags on the counter when Clint came in. "You want coffee?" he asked as Clint leaned against the fridge. "I made."
"Sure," Clint agreed. "But we brought Cel-Ray."
Celery soda. Nasty stuff, like ginger ale filtered through lawn trimmings, but Steve and Natasha loved it.
Steve grinned when he pulled out the green cans, but it didn't go up to his eyes.
"She's fine," Clint said. "She's fine and she's probably up to no good sitting there with Natasha. She wasn't in danger, although it will be a while before her nerves catch up with that. Yours, too."
Saying that Steve Rogers, biological age somewhere around twenty-seven, was completely in love with Peggy Carter, biological age somewhere around ninety-six, struck a lot of people as silly and funny and there'd been more than a few jokes about it at SHIELD. But not among anyone who knew Steve and saw the way he looked at her, the way his eyes followed her, because then you realized that he wasn't superimposing the gorgeous gal she'd been in the Forties over the dignified old lady she was now. He was seeing the person underneath, the person who probably hadn't changed nearly as much as the photograph, because that's what Steve did. It's why he put up with Tony no matter how bad he got after the Triple Bombings, it's why he put up with all of them with their flaws and sour dispositions and dirty consciences and bloody hands. And it's why it made perfect sense that his love for Peggy Carter would not be dimmed by the seventy years she had lived while he had slept.
"She wasn't in danger," Clint repeated, since he was pretty sure that part hadn't sunk in. "They want your attention, which they have. Right now, that's all they want."
Steve put down the coleslaw bucket and rested his hands on the counter. "They already had my attention. They know they did. This is deeply personal for me and they know that, too." He looked over at Clint. "Everything the Winter Soldier does, everyone he kills, I have no choice but to take it all personally. They can hurt me that way. Why isn't that enough?"
Clint wished he had an answer. They didn't know yet what the personal angle was over in Latveria. Doom had an ax to grind with the Stark family -- apparently Howard had refused to sell weapons to Victor's grandfather that could have helped him stave off the fascist coup that eventually delivered Latveria first to the Axis and then to the Soviets -- but there was no history between Latveria and Captain America. Lukin, too, was a dry hole. They'd even gone over the life history of Vasily Karpov to see if he'd had some reason to hate Cap, but all they'd gotten there was that Steve hadn't been able to prevent the overrunning of Karpov's hometown by the Nazi invaders, a blame that could have been shared by the four thousand Russian troops that had died that day on the front lines. Millions had died for the exact same reasons, Captain America or no, and Karpov could shoulder the blame for the sons of other villages his band of partisans could not protect and had probably threatened through their actions. It wasn't the stuff of blood feuds.
"It's not enough because they're sick sons of bitches," Clint said, since he didn't really know any more than that.
Steve rubbed his face vigorously with one hand before turning to empty out the last of the bags' contents. "Bucky knew Peggy, knew what I thought about her, knew what she thought about me -- probably better than I did," he said, attention on the packet of rye bread slices. "I don't know whether to hope that he came here not remembering or if he did."
"He might not have come at all," Natasha said from the entrance to the kitchen. "The Tesseract is like a genie's lamp, yes? Whoever it was could have simply wished the picture and the rose here."
Which was not actually a more comforting thought. It was a much more terrifying one, really. Clint still thought of the Tesseract as a fancy battery, something that had created energy weapons for the Nazis and opened portals for the Chitauri, when it was really so much more. It had done bizarre and unimaginably things to Schmidt and, in the hands of someone who knew its potential, it could be used for a lot more than simply fucking with the head of Captain America.
Steve shook his head. "If they'd used it, wouldn't the gamma ray sensors have gone off? I wouldn't be surprised if nobody called me about it, but I think you two would have known by now."
Which was probably sadly true.
"If you are going to steal a weapon that you know could be traced by its usage," Peggy countered as she moved past Natasha and into the kitchen, stopping by Steve and shooing him aside so she could get to the drawer he was leaning against, and pulled out serving spoons and a fork. "Then you have limited options. You are either intending to hold it and not use it until such a point when it will not matter if it can be tracked or you have come up with a way to defeat this tracking ability. Both options are reasonable here. The picture is of the Tesseract's case, not of the object itself, which would seem to indicate that whoever sent the photograph did not want their location known.
"On the other hand," she went on, holding out the servingware for Clint to take, which he did. "If I were either Lukin or Doom and I was committing to a course of action such as this, would I not have had taken some precautions? A lead-lined room, for instance? The inclusion of the newspaper is practically a written invitation to visit Doomstadt, so it's not that they don't want you to know where they are. If the means are the message, then It's perhaps who they don't want to know that is of note."
By the doorway, Natasha started to chuckle.
"Before we completely contaminate the crime scene with your delicious lunch offering," Peggy went on. "I would like to dust the kitchen table for prints. The photo as well, of course. I would have been content to use flour, but Captain Rogers here got his knickers in a twist about that and I presume you two carry something more useful as a matter of course."
Steve was doing his best to look offended, but failing miserably. He was smiling a bit, though, which Clint suspected had been Peggy's purpose all along.
"I'll go get my purse," Natasha said, disappearing from view. By the time she returned, carefully carrying the photo, Clint had been given plates to carry as well.
They watched while Natasha dusted with bright green eye shadow, or what at least was bright green and labeled as eye shadow, and a whisk brush. The photograph was devoid of prints, but the table was not. There were the usual partials around the edges, but not that many because Peggy kept a clean home, There was, however, a full right hand, as if someone had leaned on the center of the table, that could be nothing but intentional. Natasha took careful photos with her phone, making sure the fingerprint details could be seen.
"I guess we've got our answer about whether or not this was hand-delivered," Clint observed wryly. Peggy cocked an eyebrow at the bad punnage, but he shrugged at its inevitability.
"Send it to Tony," Steve said once Natasha finished, pulling his own phone out of his pocket. "He can run it through whatever database without anyone knowing."
Tony, when he picked up, had the same reaction Clint and Natasha had had to being woken up after a night out, but it was after noon, so nobody was feeling too much sympathy and Tony stopped griping once Steve explained what he wanted and why.
"Start with Bucky's prints," Steve told him, eyes on the green-shadowed hand. "I know they're on file somewhere."
Natasha put her things away and looped her hand through Clint's elbow as she passed. "Come on," she exhorted as he followed, since he couldn't do otherwise without dropping his armload. "Let's set the table."
Which was remarkably unsubtle as far as Natasha went for clearing out a room, but he went, so it worked. They could hear low voices from the kitchen as they worked, but the words couldn't be made out at this distance and Clint didn't have any urge to listen in. After the napkins had been folded and the trivets found and set out, there was nothing coming from the kitchen, so Clint cocked his head in that direction and Natasha shrugged. She had no idea, either. He didn't bother asking her if she wanted to go look, since out of the two of them, he wasn't the one who avoided any display of strong emotions.
He didn't sneak toward the kitchen, but the floor was carpeted and he was wearing rubber soles and he couldn't make a warning noise without being completely obvious about it, so he opted for 'act natural.' Which still had him stopping short just outside the kitchen doorway because just because Steve and Peggy had stopped talking didn't mean that they were done. They were standing in a tight embrace, arms around each other, with one of Steve's hands cradling Peggy's head as she leaned it against his chest. He didn't see Clint because he had his eyes closed, but Clint could see the tears on his cheeks and backed away, this time taking care not to make any noise. He shook his head at Natasha, who was watching him, and they went back in to the living room to wait.
By the time Steve emerged -- dry eyed -- carrying serving platters full of pastrami and turkey and corned beef, Tony had sent Natasha a text that simply said "prints = Barnes," which she showed to Steve, who nodded and then went back in to the kitchen to get the salads and drinks.
Lunch was a surprisingly jovial affair considering the reason it was happening in the first place, They talked of their travels and missions gone awry and foods they'd eaten and everyone ended up taking a turn as the butt of the joke. (Clint was unapologetic of his love for jello mold salads, no matter how much crap it got him, because they were one of the only things he remembered from his life before the orphanage and they were happy memories because what kid was not going to think it was the coolest thing ever?) Steve's attempts to get Peggy to come back with him to New York for a few days were met with gentle but insistent refusal -- Peggy did offer to let Steve drive her around the block on his bike, just to scandalize the neighbors -- as did his attempts to stay with her here in Philly.
He and Natasha still left on their own, heading back up to New York early enough to avoid the worst of the Shore traffic. Clint dropped Natasha off at her place, parked the car in the garage, and then called Tony. Who was very surprised to be hearing from Clint.
"Not as surprised as I am to be calling," he assured. "But you know that especially ill-advised idea our mutual friend has been considering for a while? He's about to commit to it."
They'd talked about it on the drive up; Steve making the trip to Latveria was an inevitability now, not a possibility or a probability. And their going along with him was also an inevitability -- at least if they saw it coming. Steve haring off by himself was still the most likely option and there was no guarantee they'd figure it out in time.
Tony sighed deeply. "I could pretend to be surprised, but there's enough artifice to my persona."
Clint accepted a dinner invitation and turned up at Stark Tower a few hours later. Pepper was in California, returning Tuesday, but she'd left instructions with Marcel-the-chef that there were supposed to be vegetables on Tony's plate at least once per day, so dinner was not the promised beer and pizza because tomato sauce and olives did not count. But it was a working meal.
Clint honestly had no idea how much Tony did or didn't know; he knew Steve talked more to Tony than to anyone else not Peggy, but Steve was not a talker by nature and Tony had been flitting around the world and wasn't doing anything with SHIELD right now since there wasn't much to be done about tracking the Tesseract beyond the already-existing sensors (and even less now that they knew where it was).
So he started at the top, including the bit about SHIELD suspecting that Doom had Tarleton's body and possibly a part of a Steve clone, emphasizing that Steve himself didn't know this and would be better off not knowing until it could be proven one way or another. Tony was arrogant and loved to rub his knowledge in the faces of the people who annoyed him, which was frequently the hierarchy of SHIELD, but he was protective of Steve.
"They don't have anything," Tony assured, stabbing at a tomato in his salad. "I can give you the long answer that would make your eyes glaze over, but the short answer is that there were enough nanites in the rubble of the lab in Minyar that it's statistically implausible for a clone body part to be missing. Even something as small as a finger. Most of what was left there was effectively unrecoverable even before SHIELD sanitized it, but the nanites weren't destroyed when the clone bodies were pulverized in Schmidt's cave-in. They were quantifiable and I quantified them and no, there's no chance Doom is able to build himself a Royal Army of Latveria made entirely out of knock-off Caps."
Clint chuffed out a laugh that was as much surprise as relief. "Does SHIELD know this?"
Because it went without saying that Tony did his investigations independently, not willing to trusting them with Steve's well-being.
Tony rolled his eyes. "Now, yes. Until I pointed out that they were using the wrong start numbers, no. Someone had apparently decided to use Steve's weight off of his latest physical instead of the weight of the clone. Which was off by two kilos, which explained why they thought they had missing parts."
It was even odds that Coulson wouldn't have told him if he'd asked, so Clint wasn't feeling too guilty that he'd never sought an update.
"But it's not nanites that are going to be sending Steve over the Carpathians, so what's the rest of the story?" Tony prompted. "Because Captain Chatty has a nasty habit of leaving things out when he makes his confessions."
Over a fancy eggplant dish on fancy bread, Clint filled in the blanks on the saga of the Winter Soldier as it pertained to Steve. They both agreed -- as did Natasha -- that Steve had absolute faith that a kernel of James Barnes's memories and personality had remained intact inside the Winter Soldier, even if it were powerless in the face of the brutal twice-over brainwashing he'd received at the hands of first HYDRA and then the Red Room's Monster Factory. Despite all evidence to the contrary. And Steve believed, unwaveringly, that accessing that kernel was both possible and the key to bringing the Winter Soldier in from the cold.
"This is enough to get him killed," Clint said sourly. "The Winter Soldier didn't so much as twitch when he saw Steve."
"And he saw all of Steve," Tony agreed with a lascivious tone, but it was by rote. "But the odds are that the Winter Soldier's just bait, yeah?"
Clint, mouth full, nodded. "We don't know which one of Lukin or Doom is yanking on the string," he admitted once he'd swallowed, "but one of them clearly is and Steve is past any point of being able to resist. Not after today."
By the time they got around to dessert, Clint and Tony had a working agreement to provide support for Steve's inevitable decision to head for Latveria for the Winter Soldier and the Tesseract.
"Okay, Iron Man's our only flier, so Tony, your job is to try to get these guys on the ground."
"What, so they can set fire to the Mall?" Tony asked as he fiddled with one of his gauntlets.
Sitting across from him in the back of the quinjet, Clint grinned. "Put 'em down down by Congress."
The call had come in on an otherwise quiet weekend afternoon: two human torches were brawling across the sky in DC. It hadn't made any more sense on the second try, either, when it was confirmed with video that yes, two guys completely on fire were throwing haymakers at each other at a couple hundred feet up near the Air and Space Museum.
"If they're on the ground, we can put them out," Steve said with a frown as Tapper handed him a tablet. Steve looked at it and handed it right back. "We've got fire crews from Maryland, Virginia, and the District waiting down below."
The idea of a fire truck being plugged in to every fire hydrant in the District was worth a giggle, but once they got closer, it may not have been that far from the truth. It also might have been necessary. There had already been eight fires started by the fighting men crashing in to buildings and shooting fireballs at each other, one of which had hit a gas station, which of course had turned into a clusterfuck.
All of which meant that Clint wasn't that surprised to find himself perched atop the Jefferson Memorial with a quiver full of fire extinguisher arrows tipped with tranquilizer, waiting for the traveling bar brawl to come this way. He could watch them in the distance, two flaming forms, sometimes tangled together but mostly flying close but apart, slashing across the sky at impressive speeds with comet trails in their wake. They weren't as fast as jets -- or even Tony if he gunned it -- but definitely fast. It was transfixing to watch, both the on-fire thing and the fact that they were men flying without a suit or a magic hammer. Most of the time, Clint was very glad that he had no powers, not even Steve's, but if he could do anything, he thought he'd maybe like to fly. He never wanted to be on fire; he'd gotten trapped in a burning APC during a training exercise back during his Ranger days and, once in a great while, that nightmare still woke him up. These guys were wearing flames like a suit, like skin, and shooting fireballs like they knew what they were doing.
Clint, armed with his extinguisher arrows, knew how to aim, too, and Tony was supposed to be leading them toward him, but all he'd managed to do so far was peel them off the Washington Monument without structural damage. Steve and Natasha were on the ground somewhere; Steve had gotten dropped off by the White House (of course) and Natasha by the Mall. Clint could hear them on the radio sometimes, but Tony was doing most of the talking.
"All right, Hawkeye," Tony warned. "I think I can herd these cats in your general direction. We'll be coming in from the west-northwest. You should be seeing us in five."
Tony underestimated Clint's distance vision; he could see them in three. He raised the bow and arrow and timed the fliers. If he did it right, he could get at least one of them down over the Tidal Basin. He did it right, nabbing the trail fire-man center mass and watching his flames disappear as he fell through the air. He was a white guy, young, in shape, and buck-fucking-naked except for what looked like dog tags and ah, crap, that was not what we needed here today. But he was also unconscious, which meant he was limp enough to fall into the water without breaking his neck. Clint turned his attention to the other guy, now hovering in the air facing Iron Man like they were two dudes talking on the sidewalk.
"Keep him where he is," Clint muttered to Tony as he drew another arrow and fired. Like a deer that had jumped the string, the second human torch turned and started to flee right as Clint loosed the arrow, but Tony grabbed him and, at the last possible moment, twisted him like a pushy dancer taking the lead and the arrow hit.
"Oh, ick," Tony groused as his arms got coated in the extinguishing foam. "And also wow, am I feeling a little inadequate. This guy could've beaten me to death with his--"
"Tony!" Steve cut in. "We're live in the Helicarrier."
One of the Avengers' fun secrets was that Steve wasn't nearly the prudish old lady he looked like on TV and rarely blinked, let alone blushed, when confronted with guy talk. (Especially after Natasha had explained that no, she was not offended and yes, she was filthier than all of them put together.) He was, however, a bit old fashioned about locker room talk in front of superiors and did not care that Fury and Hill were renown trash-mouths.
"We're live on about forty networks, too," Tony pointed out. "And all of them have just broadcast footage of the elephant trunk I'm not allowed to talk about despite everyone knowing Hill can quote entire episodes of Deadwood from memory."
A put-upon sigh was Steve's only answer, followed by a request to fly Suspect #2 to the ambulance waiting on Independence Avenue.
"Lieutenant Colonel James Hammond, USAF," Tony corrected. "That's what his dog tags say."
Tapper, who'd been at the SHIELD command post to pass on info, cursed impressively. He didn't care about a potty mouth being broadcast in surround sound in Fury's office. "Please tell me this isn't some DoD project gone haywire," he asked plaintively to whatever god of small mercies he hoped was listening. But they were the Avengers and they didn't usually get the favor of small mercies or great coincidences, so Clint figured there'd be a lot of shit rolling downhill because this probably wasn't a couple of rogue soldiers and this definitely wasn't something funny-but-sanctioned blowing up at Dugway or Yuma where nobody could see it.
"Oh, this is is going to get very ugly very fast," Tony assured. "Colonel Hammond is supposed to be living in Mississippi after being remitted to outpatient care eight years after he became a triple amputee. Even if I forget that humongous appendage that is brushing against my armor, I still count four working limbs. I know the Air Force was desperate enough to steal Rhodey from me, but I don't think they are actively recruiting octopi."
With this second wave of complications, Clint was left to his own devices to get himself down to street level -- Tony had dropped him off at the beginning -- and then hung around at the shore of the Tidal Basin while the cops fished Suspect #1 out of the drink. He was thus in a position to report that Suspect #1 was Lance Corporal Thomas Raymond, USMC according to his tags. Tapper thanked him and then asked that he make his way to the command post as soon as possible.
One of the cop cars offered him a ride to the Lincoln Memorial, where the command post was located and where Steve and Natasha apparently already were, and Clint took them up on it. But when he got there, Natasha was talking to a couple of guys in Direct Action Service tactical gear and Cap was nowhere to be found.
"Probably off with Tapper," Natasha said as she handed him a water bottle. "Someone's got to do the interviews."
Tony landed a few minutes later, still whining about the retardant foam. "It's nothing a car wash and some WD-40 can't fix," Clint assured, patting him on a metal bicep.
"They seem to come from Maryland," Natasha reported, looking over the shoulder of one of the windbreaker-clad agents sitting at the desk with all of the laptops on it. "At least that's what the images from social media are reporting. And Lance Corporal Raymond seems to have lost a leg and one kidney to a roadside bomb in Helmand in 2010."
Clint shook his head. "This is not going to end well."
Tony, face plate up, was looking thoughtful. "Jarvis, what blood types are Hammond and Raymond?"
Clint didn't hear the answer, but whatever it was, Tony seemed to expect it. "No, I know. We should have done it while I was holding him. We'll get samples from Fury."
They were watching some of the phone-camera video on youtube when Tapper joined them. "Where's Cap? He's not answering his radio and Fury's been trying to reach him."
Clint and Natasha and Tony exchanged looks. They hadn't heard of anything happening to Steve -- he'd been up on the White House roof, then making his way back through the cleared streets.
Tony flipped his face shield down. "I'll go up and do a sweep. He's probably talking to a kid about a lost dog or something."
Tony blasted off and Tapper went to go call Fury and Clint started walking toward the Reflecting Pool because that would be the first step in reversing Steve's most likely course from the White House -- over to 17th and then north. Natasha fell into step alongside.
"Found him," Tony announced almost immediately. "Probably in the first place we should have looked."
Clint looked up and Iron Man was hovering over the far end of the Reflecting Pool facing east. The World War II memorial, which included the tribute to Captain America and the Howling Commandos.
"Shit," Clint muttered. "Let's go."
They found Steve sitting on a stone bench facing the Commandos memorial. It was a small thing, tasteful after the grotesque that had been the original Captain America memorial, just the official service mugshots next to a framed picture, a blow-up of the only shot of all of them in action in the same frame. It had been a complete cock-up of a mission, Steve had confessed to Clint long ago, bad planning (his fault) combined with bad intel (not so much his fault) and the only thing that had saved their bacon -- and their reputation, since they'd known they had a photographer trailing along -- was that they were fighting Italians and not the Germans they'd thought they'd be attacking. There'd been nothing remotely heroic about that day, which they'd been lucky to survive, but it was the only picture of all of them that included Sergeant Barnes, so that was the one that got chosen.
And that was why Steve sat there now, shield at his side on the bench with his gloves sitting inside, and hands over his bowed head, fingers curled into his short hair.
It was weird to look at the pictures of the Commandos, Clint thought, of all of them before, as Steve would put it, things got weird. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes had been a decorated soldier before he'd been a Commando, a battlefield promotion to his name before Steve had even gotten his enlistment papers stamped. He smiled jauntily in his official Army portrait, like he knew a secret you wouldn't ever guess and it was a doozy.
Oh, baby, was it ever.
They stood and watched and waited. Steve had to know that they were there, had to know that they were there because they'd been looking for him and probably for a reason because Captain America was always needed somewhere for something. But those reasons could wait and, for him, for Steve, so could they. Natasha slipped off to talk to Tapper on the radio, telling him that yes, they'd found Cap and no, he would not be coming right over.
"When I officially came back from the dead," Steve began, still talking to the concrete under his boots, "they took down the old picture and put up a new one, in color." He looked up then, turning to face them with an unhappy look on his face.
And what will they do for Bucky? he didn't ask out loud.
A news helicopter buzzed overhead -- SHIELD and the FAA had grounded everything while the sky battle had been going on and Clint didn't know if this was a rogue helo in search of a scoop or just the first one off the ground after the ban had been lifted -- and Steve looked up in annoyance.
"Want me to run it off?" Tony asked. "I'd love to. I hate their coverage. They ran unflattering pictures of Pepper."
Steve shook his head no. He turned his radio back on, reached for his shield, pulled on his gloves, pulled his cowl back up and became Captain America once more.
"Let's just finish this thing so we can go."
Avengers/Captain America mashup; Clint Barton POV
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Summary: The Winter Soldier was the dog that ate the good guys' homework during the Cold War, a convenient bogeyman to explain failure, and Clint Barton was pretty sure those tall tales died with the fall of the Wall. But reality is stranger than fiction, something Clint really shouldn't be as surprised by as he is at this stage of his career, and now there are ghosts to chase once more.
Notes: Thaw is a sequel to Freezer Burn plotwise and a successor to BOHICA in terms of characterizations. Neither is required reading for this. However, I do recommend reading the post-credit scene to FB to establish the Winter Soldier within the context of this universe, which is compliant with Phase One movies but diverges afterward.
Costa Rica was a really beautiful country, Clint mused as he rode his bike up the dirt roads that curled up the mountainside. All lush greenery and pretty colors and peace and quiet once you got out of the touristy parts and San Jose. He could come back here on a vacation, bring his mountain bike, eat his weight in tropical fruit, spend some time on the beach maybe, hit up the ruins and the volcanic lakes and everything that had looked so inviting from the plane window.
He'd never been here before; the country hadn't had the kind of political or narcotic crises as its neighbors, hadn't become a hotbed of HYDRA activity, and it wasn't in his region of specialization, so there'd been no professional reasons to visit. And his vacations and leaves over the years had tended to be in CONUS because sometimes, after all of the far-flung places he'd been to, he just wanted to be in a place where he could drink the water, leave his gun and quiver hanging on the corner hooks, and the radio and TV were in English.
But he would seriously consider Costa Rica as a place worth traveling to when he wasn't on the clock. Provided he finished his current business here without a warrant and an extradition request on his head.
"It's someplace not hot and dry," Hill had shrugged when she'd handed him the tablet with the briefing files on it. As if Clint was being given a wetworks assignment based entirely on his hydration requirements. "It's got good coffee."
It had fabulous coffee, but the real reason Clint was being given this assignment instead of one of the other small cohort of snipers SHIELD had on its employ for entirely this kind of mission, was that it was payback.
Prince Omar had about seven names, none of which were actually Omar, and he wasn't quite a prince, although he was Emirati royalty through and through. But he'd been labeled Prince Omar because of his love for bling, for women, for booze, and for profligate spending on all three. He was so very ostentatious about it that it took Western agencies years before they realized that he was putting that Wharton education to good use and was the money manager for half of the Middle East's most dangerous terror networks.
The original, still very-fucking-secret, orders had been capture, then capture or kill, and then (after a few problems with rendition and the threat of a civilian criminal trial for a terrorist) just kill the bastard. Finding him had proven difficult, though, and he had bankrolled the deaths of hundreds since then. So when the intel came in, got verified, got re-verified, and constant surveillance established, it had been a matter of who would get the call. And Clint didn't really think there'd been too much debate as to who that would be. Not when Cilnt had seven photographs of men he'd fought with and played with and drank with and lived with who'd died because of what Prince Omar's money-managing skills could buy his clients.
He hadn't done these kinds of ops for a few years, not when there was so much else he could do. It wasn't a relief or not a relief to have stopped doing it, just as it wasn't a relief or not a relief to be doing it again. He'd been a sniper of legend in the Army, but among actual professionals, killing is not something you bragged about, even within the privacy of your own mind, and Clint had never really felt the urge. He'd kept his book, changing ink colors when he'd moved from the Army to SHIELD, but that was a matter of record, not one of pride. He was good at what he did, full stop.
Prince Omar was living on a coffee plantation in a valley so perfectly green they could have used it as a postcard. The big house had a marble deck and a marble pool and that pool, when Clint set up his scope on top of his rifle, had two scantily clad local beauties lounging at the shallow end. He was perfectly happy to use the blonder one's tits as a landmark to adjust his sights.
He'd come prepared to stay a few days, ghillie suit, water bottles (and one very clearly different-by-touch bottle to pee in), energy bars, and a bunch of bananas he'd bought at a roadside stand on the drive up. He was 682 meters away from the artificially-enhanced-but-still-lovely set of 34Ds and Prince Omar had been so generous as to plant the perfect windsock at the far corner of the deck. (It was a bronze globe with brightly colored pennants attached to it, probably some ridiculous homage to the icons of status that had marked the tents of his royal ancestors before the Emirates had become a high-rise haven of oil barons served by indentured serfs from Bangladesh and the Philippines.) Prince Omar had gotten back into town three days ago and wasn't scheduled to leave for another week. He would not be making that plane.
It took only a day. The bathing beauties had gone shopping that morning and returned home for lunch with bags and bags of things, but Omar had stayed behind and mostly indoors. Clint had seen him twice, once crossing the room that looked out on to the deck and once on the deck itself, but in the shaded corner with the umbrella-topped table and there'd been no good shot. But in the late afternoon, after their presumed siesta, they all three came out in their bathing suits and Clint put away the protein bar and systematically worked out the stiffness from his shoulders and arms before settling into position. Clint waited while Omar swam a few laps and then lounged in the pool, leaning against the side at an angle that completely blocked a clean shot. But then the brunette swam over to him and pulled him playfully into the center of the pool and they frolicked for a few minutes before Omar again retreated to the side of the pool to watch, but this time he was facing Clint dead-on.
"Oh, thank you, darling," Clint murmured to the brunette, who was currently untying the little string bow that held her very small bikini top in place. "I am very sorry for all of the celibacy I am about to cause you. It will be a genuine shame."
Because while Omar was busy enjoying his two pets entertaining each other in a most riveting fashion, Clint was doing a final check on wind speed and direction and didn't even need to adjust for distance because Omar was where the blonde had been the day before.
When it was over, Clint used the rifle's scope to take a picture to confirm the kill before packing his equipment up, policing his hide site, walking the distance to where he'd hidden his bike, and driving down to Limon, where the SHIELD team took his rifle and his gear and gave him a camera with a memory card full of touristy pictures and a plane ticket to Dallas, where he'd hang out for a couple of days before transiting to New York.
He'd been back for two days when his cell phone rang at 0845.
"You had better be needing bail or about to tell me you finally lost your virginity," Clint growled into the phone because he'd been out late last night. This morning. Whatever.
"Can you come down to Philadelphia?" Steve asked and Clint sat up in bed, wide awake and irritation forgotten, because he knew what -- who -- was in Philly.
"How's Peggy?"
Peggy was fine, Steve quickly assured. Physically. Otherwise she was rattled and pissed off for being rattled because she'd walked in to her kitchen at barely past the crack of dawn to make herself tea and breakfast and there'd been something on her kitchen table: a red rose and a photograph of the Tesseract case next to yesterday's Times of Latveria.
"We'll be there by noon," Clint promised.
Natasha cursed him out in filthy Russian before he got a word in edgewise, but when she ran out of air, he explained the situation. "Your ex-boyfriend left a present for Steve's ex-girlfriend."
Steve hadn't said anything about the Winter Soldier, but if Clint were going to bet money on this, he'd bet on that. Peggy Carter was a former spy chief; she had a security system monitored by SHIELD and better than what anyone could get on the open market and there was zero chance she'd have forgotten to set it -- it would have been set for her. Zippy the local housebreaker wasn't getting in to Peggy Carter's kitchen.
"I'll be at the corner of West End and 90th in twenty," she told him. It was nowhere near where she lived, but it was a Sunday morning after a Saturday night and it wasn't that far out of the way.
Peggy was sitting in the living room when they arrived, Steve having opened the door. She looked fine, but there was a brittleness to her that had nothing to do with her age. Someone had broken into her home, which would have been enough to rattle anyone, but they'd done so and she hadn't noticed and that, for a legendary spy, was an extra affront. That it had been an equally legendary killer -- Clint didn't think for a moment that Peggy hadn't drawn the same conclusions he had -- against whom she would have been powerless to raise an alarm, let alone defend herself... Actually, Clint thought she looked good, considering.
Steve, however, looked like crap.
"We stopped at Harold's in Edison on the way down," Natasha announced, holding up the heavy bags for Peggy to see. "I hope you still eat pastrami."
Peggy smiled. "One of those is for Steve, I trust."
Steve got both bags for the time being and disappeared into the kitchen and Clint followed him after exchanging a look with Natasha, who went over to the couch to sit by Peggy. The two of them hadn't gotten off on the right foot the first few times, either because of whatever shit Natasha was pulling at the time or because they were two of the greatest lady spies ever or their personalities or whatever it had been. And that had been before Steve had even entered the picture, at which point things had gotten a lot worse -- it had been kind of horribly amusing to watch Natasha get so worked up over a nonogenarian she somehow perceived as a threat -- before getting a lot better. They weren't friends, but they were friendly and the mutual suspicion had finally given way to mutual respect.
Steve was unpacking the bags on the counter when Clint came in. "You want coffee?" he asked as Clint leaned against the fridge. "I made."
"Sure," Clint agreed. "But we brought Cel-Ray."
Celery soda. Nasty stuff, like ginger ale filtered through lawn trimmings, but Steve and Natasha loved it.
Steve grinned when he pulled out the green cans, but it didn't go up to his eyes.
"She's fine," Clint said. "She's fine and she's probably up to no good sitting there with Natasha. She wasn't in danger, although it will be a while before her nerves catch up with that. Yours, too."
Saying that Steve Rogers, biological age somewhere around twenty-seven, was completely in love with Peggy Carter, biological age somewhere around ninety-six, struck a lot of people as silly and funny and there'd been more than a few jokes about it at SHIELD. But not among anyone who knew Steve and saw the way he looked at her, the way his eyes followed her, because then you realized that he wasn't superimposing the gorgeous gal she'd been in the Forties over the dignified old lady she was now. He was seeing the person underneath, the person who probably hadn't changed nearly as much as the photograph, because that's what Steve did. It's why he put up with Tony no matter how bad he got after the Triple Bombings, it's why he put up with all of them with their flaws and sour dispositions and dirty consciences and bloody hands. And it's why it made perfect sense that his love for Peggy Carter would not be dimmed by the seventy years she had lived while he had slept.
"She wasn't in danger," Clint repeated, since he was pretty sure that part hadn't sunk in. "They want your attention, which they have. Right now, that's all they want."
Steve put down the coleslaw bucket and rested his hands on the counter. "They already had my attention. They know they did. This is deeply personal for me and they know that, too." He looked over at Clint. "Everything the Winter Soldier does, everyone he kills, I have no choice but to take it all personally. They can hurt me that way. Why isn't that enough?"
Clint wished he had an answer. They didn't know yet what the personal angle was over in Latveria. Doom had an ax to grind with the Stark family -- apparently Howard had refused to sell weapons to Victor's grandfather that could have helped him stave off the fascist coup that eventually delivered Latveria first to the Axis and then to the Soviets -- but there was no history between Latveria and Captain America. Lukin, too, was a dry hole. They'd even gone over the life history of Vasily Karpov to see if he'd had some reason to hate Cap, but all they'd gotten there was that Steve hadn't been able to prevent the overrunning of Karpov's hometown by the Nazi invaders, a blame that could have been shared by the four thousand Russian troops that had died that day on the front lines. Millions had died for the exact same reasons, Captain America or no, and Karpov could shoulder the blame for the sons of other villages his band of partisans could not protect and had probably threatened through their actions. It wasn't the stuff of blood feuds.
"It's not enough because they're sick sons of bitches," Clint said, since he didn't really know any more than that.
Steve rubbed his face vigorously with one hand before turning to empty out the last of the bags' contents. "Bucky knew Peggy, knew what I thought about her, knew what she thought about me -- probably better than I did," he said, attention on the packet of rye bread slices. "I don't know whether to hope that he came here not remembering or if he did."
"He might not have come at all," Natasha said from the entrance to the kitchen. "The Tesseract is like a genie's lamp, yes? Whoever it was could have simply wished the picture and the rose here."
Which was not actually a more comforting thought. It was a much more terrifying one, really. Clint still thought of the Tesseract as a fancy battery, something that had created energy weapons for the Nazis and opened portals for the Chitauri, when it was really so much more. It had done bizarre and unimaginably things to Schmidt and, in the hands of someone who knew its potential, it could be used for a lot more than simply fucking with the head of Captain America.
Steve shook his head. "If they'd used it, wouldn't the gamma ray sensors have gone off? I wouldn't be surprised if nobody called me about it, but I think you two would have known by now."
Which was probably sadly true.
"If you are going to steal a weapon that you know could be traced by its usage," Peggy countered as she moved past Natasha and into the kitchen, stopping by Steve and shooing him aside so she could get to the drawer he was leaning against, and pulled out serving spoons and a fork. "Then you have limited options. You are either intending to hold it and not use it until such a point when it will not matter if it can be tracked or you have come up with a way to defeat this tracking ability. Both options are reasonable here. The picture is of the Tesseract's case, not of the object itself, which would seem to indicate that whoever sent the photograph did not want their location known.
"On the other hand," she went on, holding out the servingware for Clint to take, which he did. "If I were either Lukin or Doom and I was committing to a course of action such as this, would I not have had taken some precautions? A lead-lined room, for instance? The inclusion of the newspaper is practically a written invitation to visit Doomstadt, so it's not that they don't want you to know where they are. If the means are the message, then It's perhaps who they don't want to know that is of note."
By the doorway, Natasha started to chuckle.
"Before we completely contaminate the crime scene with your delicious lunch offering," Peggy went on. "I would like to dust the kitchen table for prints. The photo as well, of course. I would have been content to use flour, but Captain Rogers here got his knickers in a twist about that and I presume you two carry something more useful as a matter of course."
Steve was doing his best to look offended, but failing miserably. He was smiling a bit, though, which Clint suspected had been Peggy's purpose all along.
"I'll go get my purse," Natasha said, disappearing from view. By the time she returned, carefully carrying the photo, Clint had been given plates to carry as well.
They watched while Natasha dusted with bright green eye shadow, or what at least was bright green and labeled as eye shadow, and a whisk brush. The photograph was devoid of prints, but the table was not. There were the usual partials around the edges, but not that many because Peggy kept a clean home, There was, however, a full right hand, as if someone had leaned on the center of the table, that could be nothing but intentional. Natasha took careful photos with her phone, making sure the fingerprint details could be seen.
"I guess we've got our answer about whether or not this was hand-delivered," Clint observed wryly. Peggy cocked an eyebrow at the bad punnage, but he shrugged at its inevitability.
"Send it to Tony," Steve said once Natasha finished, pulling his own phone out of his pocket. "He can run it through whatever database without anyone knowing."
Tony, when he picked up, had the same reaction Clint and Natasha had had to being woken up after a night out, but it was after noon, so nobody was feeling too much sympathy and Tony stopped griping once Steve explained what he wanted and why.
"Start with Bucky's prints," Steve told him, eyes on the green-shadowed hand. "I know they're on file somewhere."
Natasha put her things away and looped her hand through Clint's elbow as she passed. "Come on," she exhorted as he followed, since he couldn't do otherwise without dropping his armload. "Let's set the table."
Which was remarkably unsubtle as far as Natasha went for clearing out a room, but he went, so it worked. They could hear low voices from the kitchen as they worked, but the words couldn't be made out at this distance and Clint didn't have any urge to listen in. After the napkins had been folded and the trivets found and set out, there was nothing coming from the kitchen, so Clint cocked his head in that direction and Natasha shrugged. She had no idea, either. He didn't bother asking her if she wanted to go look, since out of the two of them, he wasn't the one who avoided any display of strong emotions.
He didn't sneak toward the kitchen, but the floor was carpeted and he was wearing rubber soles and he couldn't make a warning noise without being completely obvious about it, so he opted for 'act natural.' Which still had him stopping short just outside the kitchen doorway because just because Steve and Peggy had stopped talking didn't mean that they were done. They were standing in a tight embrace, arms around each other, with one of Steve's hands cradling Peggy's head as she leaned it against his chest. He didn't see Clint because he had his eyes closed, but Clint could see the tears on his cheeks and backed away, this time taking care not to make any noise. He shook his head at Natasha, who was watching him, and they went back in to the living room to wait.
By the time Steve emerged -- dry eyed -- carrying serving platters full of pastrami and turkey and corned beef, Tony had sent Natasha a text that simply said "prints = Barnes," which she showed to Steve, who nodded and then went back in to the kitchen to get the salads and drinks.
Lunch was a surprisingly jovial affair considering the reason it was happening in the first place, They talked of their travels and missions gone awry and foods they'd eaten and everyone ended up taking a turn as the butt of the joke. (Clint was unapologetic of his love for jello mold salads, no matter how much crap it got him, because they were one of the only things he remembered from his life before the orphanage and they were happy memories because what kid was not going to think it was the coolest thing ever?) Steve's attempts to get Peggy to come back with him to New York for a few days were met with gentle but insistent refusal -- Peggy did offer to let Steve drive her around the block on his bike, just to scandalize the neighbors -- as did his attempts to stay with her here in Philly.
He and Natasha still left on their own, heading back up to New York early enough to avoid the worst of the Shore traffic. Clint dropped Natasha off at her place, parked the car in the garage, and then called Tony. Who was very surprised to be hearing from Clint.
"Not as surprised as I am to be calling," he assured. "But you know that especially ill-advised idea our mutual friend has been considering for a while? He's about to commit to it."
They'd talked about it on the drive up; Steve making the trip to Latveria was an inevitability now, not a possibility or a probability. And their going along with him was also an inevitability -- at least if they saw it coming. Steve haring off by himself was still the most likely option and there was no guarantee they'd figure it out in time.
Tony sighed deeply. "I could pretend to be surprised, but there's enough artifice to my persona."
Clint accepted a dinner invitation and turned up at Stark Tower a few hours later. Pepper was in California, returning Tuesday, but she'd left instructions with Marcel-the-chef that there were supposed to be vegetables on Tony's plate at least once per day, so dinner was not the promised beer and pizza because tomato sauce and olives did not count. But it was a working meal.
Clint honestly had no idea how much Tony did or didn't know; he knew Steve talked more to Tony than to anyone else not Peggy, but Steve was not a talker by nature and Tony had been flitting around the world and wasn't doing anything with SHIELD right now since there wasn't much to be done about tracking the Tesseract beyond the already-existing sensors (and even less now that they knew where it was).
So he started at the top, including the bit about SHIELD suspecting that Doom had Tarleton's body and possibly a part of a Steve clone, emphasizing that Steve himself didn't know this and would be better off not knowing until it could be proven one way or another. Tony was arrogant and loved to rub his knowledge in the faces of the people who annoyed him, which was frequently the hierarchy of SHIELD, but he was protective of Steve.
"They don't have anything," Tony assured, stabbing at a tomato in his salad. "I can give you the long answer that would make your eyes glaze over, but the short answer is that there were enough nanites in the rubble of the lab in Minyar that it's statistically implausible for a clone body part to be missing. Even something as small as a finger. Most of what was left there was effectively unrecoverable even before SHIELD sanitized it, but the nanites weren't destroyed when the clone bodies were pulverized in Schmidt's cave-in. They were quantifiable and I quantified them and no, there's no chance Doom is able to build himself a Royal Army of Latveria made entirely out of knock-off Caps."
Clint chuffed out a laugh that was as much surprise as relief. "Does SHIELD know this?"
Because it went without saying that Tony did his investigations independently, not willing to trusting them with Steve's well-being.
Tony rolled his eyes. "Now, yes. Until I pointed out that they were using the wrong start numbers, no. Someone had apparently decided to use Steve's weight off of his latest physical instead of the weight of the clone. Which was off by two kilos, which explained why they thought they had missing parts."
It was even odds that Coulson wouldn't have told him if he'd asked, so Clint wasn't feeling too guilty that he'd never sought an update.
"But it's not nanites that are going to be sending Steve over the Carpathians, so what's the rest of the story?" Tony prompted. "Because Captain Chatty has a nasty habit of leaving things out when he makes his confessions."
Over a fancy eggplant dish on fancy bread, Clint filled in the blanks on the saga of the Winter Soldier as it pertained to Steve. They both agreed -- as did Natasha -- that Steve had absolute faith that a kernel of James Barnes's memories and personality had remained intact inside the Winter Soldier, even if it were powerless in the face of the brutal twice-over brainwashing he'd received at the hands of first HYDRA and then the Red Room's Monster Factory. Despite all evidence to the contrary. And Steve believed, unwaveringly, that accessing that kernel was both possible and the key to bringing the Winter Soldier in from the cold.
"This is enough to get him killed," Clint said sourly. "The Winter Soldier didn't so much as twitch when he saw Steve."
"And he saw all of Steve," Tony agreed with a lascivious tone, but it was by rote. "But the odds are that the Winter Soldier's just bait, yeah?"
Clint, mouth full, nodded. "We don't know which one of Lukin or Doom is yanking on the string," he admitted once he'd swallowed, "but one of them clearly is and Steve is past any point of being able to resist. Not after today."
By the time they got around to dessert, Clint and Tony had a working agreement to provide support for Steve's inevitable decision to head for Latveria for the Winter Soldier and the Tesseract.
"Okay, Iron Man's our only flier, so Tony, your job is to try to get these guys on the ground."
"What, so they can set fire to the Mall?" Tony asked as he fiddled with one of his gauntlets.
Sitting across from him in the back of the quinjet, Clint grinned. "Put 'em down down by Congress."
The call had come in on an otherwise quiet weekend afternoon: two human torches were brawling across the sky in DC. It hadn't made any more sense on the second try, either, when it was confirmed with video that yes, two guys completely on fire were throwing haymakers at each other at a couple hundred feet up near the Air and Space Museum.
"If they're on the ground, we can put them out," Steve said with a frown as Tapper handed him a tablet. Steve looked at it and handed it right back. "We've got fire crews from Maryland, Virginia, and the District waiting down below."
The idea of a fire truck being plugged in to every fire hydrant in the District was worth a giggle, but once they got closer, it may not have been that far from the truth. It also might have been necessary. There had already been eight fires started by the fighting men crashing in to buildings and shooting fireballs at each other, one of which had hit a gas station, which of course had turned into a clusterfuck.
All of which meant that Clint wasn't that surprised to find himself perched atop the Jefferson Memorial with a quiver full of fire extinguisher arrows tipped with tranquilizer, waiting for the traveling bar brawl to come this way. He could watch them in the distance, two flaming forms, sometimes tangled together but mostly flying close but apart, slashing across the sky at impressive speeds with comet trails in their wake. They weren't as fast as jets -- or even Tony if he gunned it -- but definitely fast. It was transfixing to watch, both the on-fire thing and the fact that they were men flying without a suit or a magic hammer. Most of the time, Clint was very glad that he had no powers, not even Steve's, but if he could do anything, he thought he'd maybe like to fly. He never wanted to be on fire; he'd gotten trapped in a burning APC during a training exercise back during his Ranger days and, once in a great while, that nightmare still woke him up. These guys were wearing flames like a suit, like skin, and shooting fireballs like they knew what they were doing.
Clint, armed with his extinguisher arrows, knew how to aim, too, and Tony was supposed to be leading them toward him, but all he'd managed to do so far was peel them off the Washington Monument without structural damage. Steve and Natasha were on the ground somewhere; Steve had gotten dropped off by the White House (of course) and Natasha by the Mall. Clint could hear them on the radio sometimes, but Tony was doing most of the talking.
"All right, Hawkeye," Tony warned. "I think I can herd these cats in your general direction. We'll be coming in from the west-northwest. You should be seeing us in five."
Tony underestimated Clint's distance vision; he could see them in three. He raised the bow and arrow and timed the fliers. If he did it right, he could get at least one of them down over the Tidal Basin. He did it right, nabbing the trail fire-man center mass and watching his flames disappear as he fell through the air. He was a white guy, young, in shape, and buck-fucking-naked except for what looked like dog tags and ah, crap, that was not what we needed here today. But he was also unconscious, which meant he was limp enough to fall into the water without breaking his neck. Clint turned his attention to the other guy, now hovering in the air facing Iron Man like they were two dudes talking on the sidewalk.
"Keep him where he is," Clint muttered to Tony as he drew another arrow and fired. Like a deer that had jumped the string, the second human torch turned and started to flee right as Clint loosed the arrow, but Tony grabbed him and, at the last possible moment, twisted him like a pushy dancer taking the lead and the arrow hit.
"Oh, ick," Tony groused as his arms got coated in the extinguishing foam. "And also wow, am I feeling a little inadequate. This guy could've beaten me to death with his--"
"Tony!" Steve cut in. "We're live in the Helicarrier."
One of the Avengers' fun secrets was that Steve wasn't nearly the prudish old lady he looked like on TV and rarely blinked, let alone blushed, when confronted with guy talk. (Especially after Natasha had explained that no, she was not offended and yes, she was filthier than all of them put together.) He was, however, a bit old fashioned about locker room talk in front of superiors and did not care that Fury and Hill were renown trash-mouths.
"We're live on about forty networks, too," Tony pointed out. "And all of them have just broadcast footage of the elephant trunk I'm not allowed to talk about despite everyone knowing Hill can quote entire episodes of Deadwood from memory."
A put-upon sigh was Steve's only answer, followed by a request to fly Suspect #2 to the ambulance waiting on Independence Avenue.
"Lieutenant Colonel James Hammond, USAF," Tony corrected. "That's what his dog tags say."
Tapper, who'd been at the SHIELD command post to pass on info, cursed impressively. He didn't care about a potty mouth being broadcast in surround sound in Fury's office. "Please tell me this isn't some DoD project gone haywire," he asked plaintively to whatever god of small mercies he hoped was listening. But they were the Avengers and they didn't usually get the favor of small mercies or great coincidences, so Clint figured there'd be a lot of shit rolling downhill because this probably wasn't a couple of rogue soldiers and this definitely wasn't something funny-but-sanctioned blowing up at Dugway or Yuma where nobody could see it.
"Oh, this is is going to get very ugly very fast," Tony assured. "Colonel Hammond is supposed to be living in Mississippi after being remitted to outpatient care eight years after he became a triple amputee. Even if I forget that humongous appendage that is brushing against my armor, I still count four working limbs. I know the Air Force was desperate enough to steal Rhodey from me, but I don't think they are actively recruiting octopi."
With this second wave of complications, Clint was left to his own devices to get himself down to street level -- Tony had dropped him off at the beginning -- and then hung around at the shore of the Tidal Basin while the cops fished Suspect #1 out of the drink. He was thus in a position to report that Suspect #1 was Lance Corporal Thomas Raymond, USMC according to his tags. Tapper thanked him and then asked that he make his way to the command post as soon as possible.
One of the cop cars offered him a ride to the Lincoln Memorial, where the command post was located and where Steve and Natasha apparently already were, and Clint took them up on it. But when he got there, Natasha was talking to a couple of guys in Direct Action Service tactical gear and Cap was nowhere to be found.
"Probably off with Tapper," Natasha said as she handed him a water bottle. "Someone's got to do the interviews."
Tony landed a few minutes later, still whining about the retardant foam. "It's nothing a car wash and some WD-40 can't fix," Clint assured, patting him on a metal bicep.
"They seem to come from Maryland," Natasha reported, looking over the shoulder of one of the windbreaker-clad agents sitting at the desk with all of the laptops on it. "At least that's what the images from social media are reporting. And Lance Corporal Raymond seems to have lost a leg and one kidney to a roadside bomb in Helmand in 2010."
Clint shook his head. "This is not going to end well."
Tony, face plate up, was looking thoughtful. "Jarvis, what blood types are Hammond and Raymond?"
Clint didn't hear the answer, but whatever it was, Tony seemed to expect it. "No, I know. We should have done it while I was holding him. We'll get samples from Fury."
They were watching some of the phone-camera video on youtube when Tapper joined them. "Where's Cap? He's not answering his radio and Fury's been trying to reach him."
Clint and Natasha and Tony exchanged looks. They hadn't heard of anything happening to Steve -- he'd been up on the White House roof, then making his way back through the cleared streets.
Tony flipped his face shield down. "I'll go up and do a sweep. He's probably talking to a kid about a lost dog or something."
Tony blasted off and Tapper went to go call Fury and Clint started walking toward the Reflecting Pool because that would be the first step in reversing Steve's most likely course from the White House -- over to 17th and then north. Natasha fell into step alongside.
"Found him," Tony announced almost immediately. "Probably in the first place we should have looked."
Clint looked up and Iron Man was hovering over the far end of the Reflecting Pool facing east. The World War II memorial, which included the tribute to Captain America and the Howling Commandos.
"Shit," Clint muttered. "Let's go."
They found Steve sitting on a stone bench facing the Commandos memorial. It was a small thing, tasteful after the grotesque that had been the original Captain America memorial, just the official service mugshots next to a framed picture, a blow-up of the only shot of all of them in action in the same frame. It had been a complete cock-up of a mission, Steve had confessed to Clint long ago, bad planning (his fault) combined with bad intel (not so much his fault) and the only thing that had saved their bacon -- and their reputation, since they'd known they had a photographer trailing along -- was that they were fighting Italians and not the Germans they'd thought they'd be attacking. There'd been nothing remotely heroic about that day, which they'd been lucky to survive, but it was the only picture of all of them that included Sergeant Barnes, so that was the one that got chosen.
And that was why Steve sat there now, shield at his side on the bench with his gloves sitting inside, and hands over his bowed head, fingers curled into his short hair.
It was weird to look at the pictures of the Commandos, Clint thought, of all of them before, as Steve would put it, things got weird. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes had been a decorated soldier before he'd been a Commando, a battlefield promotion to his name before Steve had even gotten his enlistment papers stamped. He smiled jauntily in his official Army portrait, like he knew a secret you wouldn't ever guess and it was a doozy.
Oh, baby, was it ever.
They stood and watched and waited. Steve had to know that they were there, had to know that they were there because they'd been looking for him and probably for a reason because Captain America was always needed somewhere for something. But those reasons could wait and, for him, for Steve, so could they. Natasha slipped off to talk to Tapper on the radio, telling him that yes, they'd found Cap and no, he would not be coming right over.
"When I officially came back from the dead," Steve began, still talking to the concrete under his boots, "they took down the old picture and put up a new one, in color." He looked up then, turning to face them with an unhappy look on his face.
And what will they do for Bucky? he didn't ask out loud.
A news helicopter buzzed overhead -- SHIELD and the FAA had grounded everything while the sky battle had been going on and Clint didn't know if this was a rogue helo in search of a scoop or just the first one off the ground after the ban had been lifted -- and Steve looked up in annoyance.
"Want me to run it off?" Tony asked. "I'd love to. I hate their coverage. They ran unflattering pictures of Pepper."
Steve shook his head no. He turned his radio back on, reached for his shield, pulled on his gloves, pulled his cowl back up and became Captain America once more.
"Let's just finish this thing so we can go."
