fic: Revenant (2/?)
31 Oct 2013 16:05![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneRevenant: Chapter Two
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
The instructions from Fury had been simple: "Use what the Red Room gave you and find me the fucker who did this."
Steve was alive. Barely. The damage was catastrophic, as only a large caliber bullet to the head could be. Without his costume's helmet, it would have been even worse. He was still in surgery to put his skull back together, she'd been told, and would be for hours more. He'd crashed on the table twice so far, the second resuscitation being a near thing. And even if he made it through the surgery, they had no idea what would be left of Steve Rogers the man, let alone Captain America the icon. They could be frantically saving his life now only to have to choose to end it as an act of mercy down the line.
The Red Room had given her many things: ruthlessness, determination, a skill set that had taken her far too long to realize could be used to protect as well as destroy. It had not given her hope.
She walked back to her hotel feeling only anger, pointedly ignoring the headlines scrolling across television screens and LED displays proclaiming the Death of Captain America. Once in her room, she made a phone call to an old contact, who in exchange for the name and address of the Tallinn SVR rezident wanted details of the assassination. "It's not one yet," she answered.
By the time she got to Estonia the following morning, Steve was out of surgery and the theories for why it had been necessary in the first place were thick on the ground. Aliens, al-Qaeda, HYDRA, homegrown terrorists, foreign governments, even Tony had a supposedly valid reason for wanting to kill Captain America and the various news sources gave voice to all of them. In a world where aliens really did show up to kill them, what might have once been restricted to supermarket tabloids was now fodder for the self-proclaimed public intellectuals. Natasha didn't think it was terrorists or aliens (or Tony), but she was willing to put at least two foreign governments on the suspect list and Lukin's Kronas empire was almost big enough to count as a third. There had been no claim of responsibility, which to her mind dismissed all non-state actors, since for them the theater of destruction was how they made their coin. Clint, when she'd spoken to him, agreed. However, he reported that at least some departments within SHIELD were allowing for one significant non-state actor to remain on the table until proven otherwise.
"How could they think James Barnes would do such a thing?" Natasha asked him, not bothering to hide her incredulity. "He ran away from Steve in shame, not in anger."
"Hey, no shooting the messenger," Clint exhorted, his voice low and raw from exhaustion. He'd been in Tunis and had flown back all night to get to DC to be part of the forensics team, a sniper to figure out a sniper. "You know why they can't rule him out, as ridiculous as it sounds. You and I saw him, but they didn't. And none of us have seen him since he got teleported or whatever by the Tesseract. He may or may not look like Bucky Barnes anymore, but we don't know what the hell is going on in his head beyond wanting to hurt the people who made him hurt. If he's sufficiently fucked in the head, there's a chance Steve looks just as guilty as Lukin."
Natasha's reply to that had been a derisive snort and Clint had not tried to press the point, but they both knew that it wasn't nearly as outlandish as she was making it seem. They really had no idea what the Tesseract had done to James and the fact that they'd been unable to track him at all in the last few months did not factor in for either way side as to his state of mind.
Talinn in late May was a beautiful city, but Natasha was in no mood to enjoy it. She stopped at a venerable-looking bakery for a selection of little cakes and then took a taxi to the address she'd gotten from Ilya. Charming her way into the home of Mikhail Komorov, the SVR's man in Tallinn, was simple enough -- she was a demurely dressed Russian woman holding a box of pastries and wearing a hopeful expression that her cousin Misha was able to get out of work early as he said he might... the nanny, an unattractive girl from Omsk judging by her accent, never had a chance. The housekeeper was a slightly tougher challenge, but not hard. Not when Natasha was on her game, fueled by rage and determined to succeed. She was telling Komorov's wife and three little children all about her life in St. Petersburg when Komorov arrived. To his credit, he recovered well, apologizing to his wife and the housekeeper for forgetting to mention the visit. And then he asked to speak to her in his study, since they had so much to catch up on.
Komorov did not pretend to wonder why she was there and promptly launched into the official Russian party line about how they had nothing to do with the shooting and this was in no way, shape, or form payback for either the SHIELD assault on Minyar or the mysterious deaths that had been occurring more recently. "What did Nick Fury think would happen?" he asked imperiously. "You pissed off Putin, Lukin, and Doom at the same time. Poke enough bears with enough sticks and you will eventually get mauled. But this wasn't us."
"You have no idea whether it was 'us' or not," Natasha spat back from the leather chair she'd been graciously escorted to before the door had closed. "You are the resident in fucking Tallinn. You wouldn't be in Estonia if you were in a position to know anything about anything."
Komorov asked her what she was in his home for if she hadn't come for information.
"I'm here to give you a message to pass on to the people who do know," she told him, standing up. "You tell them that if they are responsible for the bullet in Steve Rogers's brain, then it will end badly for them and their ashes will be salted."
"Nobody's afraid of you anymore," Komorov offered bravely, or not quite so bravely because he took a half-step back when she looked to take one forward. "You're an Avenger now. A costumed hero. You don't scare them anymore."
Natasha smiled sweetly. "As I said, you know nothing from nothing, which is why you are in Tallinn. They are plenty scared of me still and they will be wise enough to listen to this: the next warning won't be me coming with a message from Nick Fury. The next warning will be a bullet and it will be coming from the gun of the Winter Soldier."
Komorov stared at her. "The Winter Soldier? He's--"
"Alive, well, and pissed off," she promised, retrieving her purse from the floor. "And God help you all if he decides that you tried to assassinate Captain America."
Komorov didn't know who the Winter Soldier really was, but the people he passed the message on to would, or their bosses would and from there, it was a short hop to the top with the news that the Winter Soldier was out of his tank. She had just fired the first shot in the war between Putin and Lukin. The fallout, she hoped, would reveal either James's whereabouts or Steve's shooter or, possibly, both. Along with plenty else, not all of it useful or productive, but Fury had given her freedom from the leash to get things done and she knew of no faster way to get into the piggy bank of secrets than to bring a hammer. It made things less safe for James, perhaps, but that was no longer her priority. She didn't think he was the shooter, wouldn't think he was until she saw indisputable proof, but the time for worrying about him was passing quickly.
She made her apologies to Mrs Komorova and the children, expressing sadness that she could not stay for dinner and hoped that they would enjoy the rest of the treats she had brought and that she would see them again soon.
She checked with the armorer she had been sent to visit and, of course, he hadn't seen the Winter Soldier in thirty-five years because Estonia was what it was and James could now get his weapons in Germany, like everyone else. An evening flight got her to Vienna, where she figured she'd stay for a day or two before the aftereffects of what she'd told Komorov could be seen. But she had to change her plans when she was summoned back to New York.
Nonetheless, by the time she turned her phone back on after landing at Newark, there was a message from one of her contacts telling her that a mutual former colleague had just been grabbed off the street in London by other mutual former colleagues still employed by Moscow and did she happen to know why?
She was given a wide berth upon her arrival at the Helicarrier, which annoyed her but was also a relief. The agent escorting her off the flight deck gave her directions to the medical bay Steve was being kept in (the Helicarrier had three) without prompting and Natasha had no choice but to go directly there, not with more than an hour to kill before the scheduled meeting and no excuse not to save her own cowardice. The Black Widow did not show fear.
She'd seen Steve vulnerable before: just after he'd been defrosted, drugged and chained in Minyar, down on his knees before the Winter Soldier in Doomstadt, a hundred times when he'd fallen asleep in her presence. But this, this was something else entirely, something far more delicate and heartbreaking. His head was shaved and bandaged and trapped in a kind of halo to keep his skull fractures from being jarred. He had facial hair for the first time she could recall. He was hooked up to a ventilator that rasped out breath for him and he was connected to so many tubes and electrodes. He had never looked so young and so old.
Peggy Carter was at his side, looking older and frailer, too, everywhere except her eyes, which were as piercing as ever and Natasha wanted to look away so that Peggy couldn't see how much she wanted to flee. She didn't want to see Steve like this, helpless and her being helpless to do anything to make things better, to keep him alive. Instead, she took a deep breath and held her ground. Until the door slid open behind her and she heard a gasp as Pepper and Tony came in and then she did flee. Straight down to the range where she emptied clip after clip until her hands rang and her shoulders ached and Clint came for her, looking worn.
"It's time," he said.
The meeting to decide Steve's future took place in Fury's office. Fury, Peggy, Pepper and Tony, Clint, and herself were the only attendees. "This isn't a SHIELD matter, not entirely," Fury explained at the start. "This is a personal matter. This is about Steve Rogers the man, not Captain America."
That being said, Fury ran the show, but he was clearly not speaking for himself. He explained that Peggy and Pepper were Steve's medical proxies, which Natasha already knew about because she remembered Steve's unhappiness with being told that he could not have a then-96-year-old woman as a proxy and would need to find someone else, if only as a backup. Any and all decisions regarding Steve's care would be theirs to make in accordance with Steve's stated wishes, but that they both felt that any discussion of Steve's future would benefit from being held with those he was closest to.
"I have suggested to Ms. Carter and Ms. Potts that it's time to let Captain America die, at least in public," he said and Natasha saw that Tony and Clint were as surprised as she was. Tony started to protest, but Fury held up a hand. "The reasons for this are many. First and foremost, we can't protect him."
"What the hell does that mean?" Clint spat out.
"How many catastrophic security breaches do we have in SHIELD facilities per year?" Fury asked pointedly and Clint blanched, even though Natasha knew it hadn't been a barb aimed at him. "No matter how secret a facility we choose -- SHIELD or Stark Industries or some freshly-built igloo in Alaska -- no matter how well we fortify it, we can't guarantee nobody will come knocking or that we'll be able to hold them off if they do. The only chance we have to keep Rogers safe is to keep him hidden. And the only way to do that is to make sure nobody is looking for him in the first place. Especially because we don't know who already is looking for him."
Fury looked at her and she did not look away.
Fury's -- or, Natasha realized, most probably Peggy's -- second reason was that it was still very likely that Steve's death would not have to be faked. He'd needed to be revived three times already so far, the last only yesterday, and his accelerated healing factor could not guarantee any kind of recovery from such a traumatic injury. The doctors couldn't say if he would ever wake up or, if he did, what kind of life he would have. "They said that we don't understand how the brain works well enough to make even an educated guess." The serum could eventually completely heal his brain and he could still wind up a vegetable, profoundly brain damaged in a way that left permanent physical or cognitive or diminishment, or there might be personality changes or memory loss. Or all of the above.
"We are where we were when he was first found in the ice," Fury explained. "Even if he wakes up again, his days as Captain America may be over for a thousand different reasons."
There was a pause then, silence around the table. Pepper reached over and took Peggy's hand in her own.
"And if he wakes up next week and is ready to go by his birthday, what do we do?" Tony asked in his belligerent-but-not-really tone, the one that went with him knowing you were right and hating it. "Because I remember the plans for the original shebang and it made the Kennedy procession look like a pauper's funeral."
Natasha didn't think she'd ever seen the look on Fury's face when he told Tony that if that would happen, he would never be happier than to do those apologetic press conferences.
"If this is what needs to be done," she began, "then where would Steve actually be? It would have to be somewhere accessible but remote and nowhere anyone would think to look for him because even if we somehow did an open coffin funeral, someone will look for him."
"His grave, more likely," Tony said. "The super-soldier serum just sitting there in Arlington?"
Fury had answers to both questions. The grave would be guarded and, should it be violated, it would be easy enough to explain it away for exactly those reasons. "It was what we had planned to do when we'd initially found him," Fury explained.
"The empty grave while his actual corpse was dissected in SHIELD labs, more likely," Tony said bitterly. "Let's not pretend this would be about the dignity of Steve's remains."
Pepper looked like she was about to say something to him, but he brushed her off. "No, Pep. You are the guardian -- back-up guardian, whatever -- of Steve's body while he's alive. I respect that and I'm glad he chose you. You're going to be much saner about it than any of us would. But someone has to be cynical and suspicious and make sure that when the worst happens, be it tomorrow or fifty years from now, that he doesn't get cut up like a Spanish ham for all the medical researchers in the world to play with before he's even room temperature. He deserves better than for people to forget that he was a real person and not just a scientific marvel."
Any other time, the rest of them would be talking over each other to point out that Tony had been the last person in the room to figure that out. But he'd more than made up for it since, which was why they did not.
"He agreed to donate his body to science as part of the conditions for undergoing the procedure," Peggy said into the growing silence.
"He would have agreed to do a striptease in front of Eleanor Roosevelt to undergo the procedure," Tony retorted. "Don't think I don't know the stories of what else you guys tried to get him to sign away before Rebirth kicked off."
Peggy looked back at him without rebuke or denial. "You know this is what he would want."
"It is," Tony agreed easily. "And I have no problem with the idea of donating your body to medical research. I have my own plans for it. But there's a way to do it properly and there's a way to wind up like the Oscar Meyer display at the supermarket. And I don't trust SHIELD to do the right thing by him."
"Then trust me," Peggy told him. "If you think I'm going to let the one-eyed bastard to my left pull a fast one, you haven't been paying attention."
It was, unsurprisingly, the right thing to say. Serious, but not. Making her point clear and defusing the tension at once. Peggy Carter had had to learn a far more complicated kind of grace than Natasha ever had.
After a meaningful pause, the discussion about where Steve would be kept while he recuperated -- and that was the word they used, despite it not being anything close to guaranteed -- continued.
There was a serious thought to taking Steve outside the US, apparently. The UK, France, and Israel were three nations with trusted security services who would accept the assignment not as a favor to Fury, but as an act of respect for Steve. Natasha didn't like the idea and Clint and Tony audibly liked it even less, but Peggy and Pepper were calm and Natasha wondered if this was already a fait accomplit.
"Out of the past ten years that Steve was alive," Peggy pointed out tartly, "much of that time was not spent in the United States. He would not mind living in these places. And as for the rest of your objections, you will not be dropping by for tea every week regardless of where he is. The commute for you is immaterial."
They might not be able to visit him at all if he were overseas. There wasn't an airport anywhere in the world that didn't have eyeballs on it, mostly belonging to foreign security services.
"What about my place in Nebraska?" Clint asked. "It's intentionally in the middle of nowhere and it's not a transatlantic flight from New York. I get not wanting to put him in one of our places, but we can hide a hardened civilian location a lot better domestically and it would be easier on the logistics -- forget us visiting, you're going to need regular shipments of equipment, drugs, rotations of doctors and guards and then food for them. That's a lot to hide."
Natasha looked over at him. "I thought you sold that place years ago."
He'd loved that place, had hoped to retire there, and he'd kept it long after it became obvious that New York was going to become their base of operations and even irregular trips out there would not be likely.
"Market was crap," Clint replied with a shrug she took to mean that there was more to the story. "Ended up renting it out."
"I have a few dozen places," Tony offered. "I can get more."
"No, Tony," Pepper told him gently. "There isn't any way that a Stark property, even one you never lived in, stays under the radar."
The discussion ended without any decision announced, although Natasha rather thought that Steve would end up staying in the US, or maybe Canada. She was ready to go, restless and unsettled and full of dark humors because this was all new to her and she didn't like it. She'd held so many lives in her her hand over the course of her career, lives she could snuff out at whim or on command. This was the first time she'd held even a tiny part of a life she desperately wanted to save. She'd never felt so useless.
"Natasha, could you walk back to the infirmary with me, please?" Peggy asked. "I'm supposed to always have an escort -- sadly, Fury's more worried about me breaking my hip than making off with his toys. And I'm in no mood for one of the baby-faced agents who will coddle me as if I've lost my mettle instead of my mobility."
Natasha smiled. "Oh, no, you have lost nothing of that," she agreed because Peggy was not asking for Natasha because she was the closest free arm.
They made their way slowly to the elevator; Peggy relied heavily on her cane, looping her free arm around Natasha's. They got back to Steve's bedside in due course and Natasha waited as Peggy fussed with Steve's coverlet, the only noise the rasp-rasp of the respirator and the beeps of the monitors. She didn't run away, which might have been what Peggy was testing her on, but that turned out not to be the case.
"I need you to find Bucky Barnes," Peggy said, looking up from where she held Steve's limp, young hand between her own gnarled, strong ones.
Natasha laughed humorlessly. "I've been trying for a few months. We all have."
Peggy nodded. "This will change things and Steve being pronounced dead will change things even more."
And Natasha's telling the Russians that James was alive was going to affect things, too, but she did not say so aloud.
"You know they're half-convinced he shot Steve," Natasha warned instead. "Especially after the forensics came back."
The bullet had come from more than two thousand meters away. There weren't many who could make that shot even under ideal conditions and this had been while hiding from the aerial portion of the presidential security detail.
Peggy scoffed. "He's no more likely to have done so than Mister Barton. Whatever the Tesseract might have done to him, it would not make him into someone who could hate Steve Rogers enough to kill him."
Which Natasha believed as well, although with varying degrees of fervor. She'd seen James stripped of everything he'd loved once before, too, and she'd been wounded by what they'd turned him into as a result. She wanted to believe that he'd never willingly do that to himself, that he'd never put himself in a position to let that happen again, but she couldn't bet anything on it. Not again.
"I think he's going to make contact," Peggy said, settling back in her seat. "Or at least be amenable to you making contact. Whether that's before or after he does something we're all going to regret is another matter. Whatever else he's become, he's still James Barnes and the pea in the pod next to Steve Rogers."
There was a touch of fondness in the last bit. It's not that Natasha had forgotten that Peggy knew James once upon a time, but it still startled her a little to hear someone else speak of him as a man and not as whatever the Winter Soldier had become.
"Steve was breathtakingly reckless after he thought he got Bucky killed," Peggy went on. "Even for his levels of cavalier disregard for both his own safety and the given-for-a-reason mission parameters, which history has done a find job of downplaying. The other Commandos weren't all that keen on reining him in, but they kept him from giving in fully to his guilt. Bucky has no such support and a far deeper wellspring of anger to work from."
If James were not the assassin, then it was very likely that he would see the shooting as a measure of revenge against himself. And the guilt over that would be overwhelming, which in turn could make him escalate. Natasha said as much to Peggy.
"Or it could make him stop and reassess and come to you."
Natasha had never had reason to ask Steve if he had told Peggy about her and James. It made sense that he would -- this little bit of good human history in his friend's life when everything else he'd learned was so horrifying -- but it still embarrassed her. Irritated her a little, too, but she shoved that aside. It hadn't been a secret between her and Steve, not a secret that could never be told even if she hadn't wanted to elaborate on it, and he wouldn't have shared it with Peggy to gossip. It was Steve. He'd probably done it out of pleasure because that's how he'd taken the backhanded revelation of hers and James's history. He'd been happy that his old life and his new life had one more connection, but he'd possibly been more happy for James, which in turn had made Natasha a little embarrassed. And he'd been amused because, as he'd put it, Natasha was the kind of gal Bucky Barnes had needed but usually hadn't been patient enough to seek out.
"And if he does? If I find him?" Natasha asked, shaking herself free of the memories.
Peggy raised her chin and looked at Natasha firmly. "Then you tell him to come home and look after his brother once more."
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found.
Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
The instructions from Fury had been simple: "Use what the Red Room gave you and find me the fucker who did this."
Steve was alive. Barely. The damage was catastrophic, as only a large caliber bullet to the head could be. Without his costume's helmet, it would have been even worse. He was still in surgery to put his skull back together, she'd been told, and would be for hours more. He'd crashed on the table twice so far, the second resuscitation being a near thing. And even if he made it through the surgery, they had no idea what would be left of Steve Rogers the man, let alone Captain America the icon. They could be frantically saving his life now only to have to choose to end it as an act of mercy down the line.
The Red Room had given her many things: ruthlessness, determination, a skill set that had taken her far too long to realize could be used to protect as well as destroy. It had not given her hope.
She walked back to her hotel feeling only anger, pointedly ignoring the headlines scrolling across television screens and LED displays proclaiming the Death of Captain America. Once in her room, she made a phone call to an old contact, who in exchange for the name and address of the Tallinn SVR rezident wanted details of the assassination. "It's not one yet," she answered.
By the time she got to Estonia the following morning, Steve was out of surgery and the theories for why it had been necessary in the first place were thick on the ground. Aliens, al-Qaeda, HYDRA, homegrown terrorists, foreign governments, even Tony had a supposedly valid reason for wanting to kill Captain America and the various news sources gave voice to all of them. In a world where aliens really did show up to kill them, what might have once been restricted to supermarket tabloids was now fodder for the self-proclaimed public intellectuals. Natasha didn't think it was terrorists or aliens (or Tony), but she was willing to put at least two foreign governments on the suspect list and Lukin's Kronas empire was almost big enough to count as a third. There had been no claim of responsibility, which to her mind dismissed all non-state actors, since for them the theater of destruction was how they made their coin. Clint, when she'd spoken to him, agreed. However, he reported that at least some departments within SHIELD were allowing for one significant non-state actor to remain on the table until proven otherwise.
"How could they think James Barnes would do such a thing?" Natasha asked him, not bothering to hide her incredulity. "He ran away from Steve in shame, not in anger."
"Hey, no shooting the messenger," Clint exhorted, his voice low and raw from exhaustion. He'd been in Tunis and had flown back all night to get to DC to be part of the forensics team, a sniper to figure out a sniper. "You know why they can't rule him out, as ridiculous as it sounds. You and I saw him, but they didn't. And none of us have seen him since he got teleported or whatever by the Tesseract. He may or may not look like Bucky Barnes anymore, but we don't know what the hell is going on in his head beyond wanting to hurt the people who made him hurt. If he's sufficiently fucked in the head, there's a chance Steve looks just as guilty as Lukin."
Natasha's reply to that had been a derisive snort and Clint had not tried to press the point, but they both knew that it wasn't nearly as outlandish as she was making it seem. They really had no idea what the Tesseract had done to James and the fact that they'd been unable to track him at all in the last few months did not factor in for either way side as to his state of mind.
Talinn in late May was a beautiful city, but Natasha was in no mood to enjoy it. She stopped at a venerable-looking bakery for a selection of little cakes and then took a taxi to the address she'd gotten from Ilya. Charming her way into the home of Mikhail Komorov, the SVR's man in Tallinn, was simple enough -- she was a demurely dressed Russian woman holding a box of pastries and wearing a hopeful expression that her cousin Misha was able to get out of work early as he said he might... the nanny, an unattractive girl from Omsk judging by her accent, never had a chance. The housekeeper was a slightly tougher challenge, but not hard. Not when Natasha was on her game, fueled by rage and determined to succeed. She was telling Komorov's wife and three little children all about her life in St. Petersburg when Komorov arrived. To his credit, he recovered well, apologizing to his wife and the housekeeper for forgetting to mention the visit. And then he asked to speak to her in his study, since they had so much to catch up on.
Komorov did not pretend to wonder why she was there and promptly launched into the official Russian party line about how they had nothing to do with the shooting and this was in no way, shape, or form payback for either the SHIELD assault on Minyar or the mysterious deaths that had been occurring more recently. "What did Nick Fury think would happen?" he asked imperiously. "You pissed off Putin, Lukin, and Doom at the same time. Poke enough bears with enough sticks and you will eventually get mauled. But this wasn't us."
"You have no idea whether it was 'us' or not," Natasha spat back from the leather chair she'd been graciously escorted to before the door had closed. "You are the resident in fucking Tallinn. You wouldn't be in Estonia if you were in a position to know anything about anything."
Komorov asked her what she was in his home for if she hadn't come for information.
"I'm here to give you a message to pass on to the people who do know," she told him, standing up. "You tell them that if they are responsible for the bullet in Steve Rogers's brain, then it will end badly for them and their ashes will be salted."
"Nobody's afraid of you anymore," Komorov offered bravely, or not quite so bravely because he took a half-step back when she looked to take one forward. "You're an Avenger now. A costumed hero. You don't scare them anymore."
Natasha smiled sweetly. "As I said, you know nothing from nothing, which is why you are in Tallinn. They are plenty scared of me still and they will be wise enough to listen to this: the next warning won't be me coming with a message from Nick Fury. The next warning will be a bullet and it will be coming from the gun of the Winter Soldier."
Komorov stared at her. "The Winter Soldier? He's--"
"Alive, well, and pissed off," she promised, retrieving her purse from the floor. "And God help you all if he decides that you tried to assassinate Captain America."
Komorov didn't know who the Winter Soldier really was, but the people he passed the message on to would, or their bosses would and from there, it was a short hop to the top with the news that the Winter Soldier was out of his tank. She had just fired the first shot in the war between Putin and Lukin. The fallout, she hoped, would reveal either James's whereabouts or Steve's shooter or, possibly, both. Along with plenty else, not all of it useful or productive, but Fury had given her freedom from the leash to get things done and she knew of no faster way to get into the piggy bank of secrets than to bring a hammer. It made things less safe for James, perhaps, but that was no longer her priority. She didn't think he was the shooter, wouldn't think he was until she saw indisputable proof, but the time for worrying about him was passing quickly.
She made her apologies to Mrs Komorova and the children, expressing sadness that she could not stay for dinner and hoped that they would enjoy the rest of the treats she had brought and that she would see them again soon.
She checked with the armorer she had been sent to visit and, of course, he hadn't seen the Winter Soldier in thirty-five years because Estonia was what it was and James could now get his weapons in Germany, like everyone else. An evening flight got her to Vienna, where she figured she'd stay for a day or two before the aftereffects of what she'd told Komorov could be seen. But she had to change her plans when she was summoned back to New York.
Nonetheless, by the time she turned her phone back on after landing at Newark, there was a message from one of her contacts telling her that a mutual former colleague had just been grabbed off the street in London by other mutual former colleagues still employed by Moscow and did she happen to know why?
She was given a wide berth upon her arrival at the Helicarrier, which annoyed her but was also a relief. The agent escorting her off the flight deck gave her directions to the medical bay Steve was being kept in (the Helicarrier had three) without prompting and Natasha had no choice but to go directly there, not with more than an hour to kill before the scheduled meeting and no excuse not to save her own cowardice. The Black Widow did not show fear.
She'd seen Steve vulnerable before: just after he'd been defrosted, drugged and chained in Minyar, down on his knees before the Winter Soldier in Doomstadt, a hundred times when he'd fallen asleep in her presence. But this, this was something else entirely, something far more delicate and heartbreaking. His head was shaved and bandaged and trapped in a kind of halo to keep his skull fractures from being jarred. He had facial hair for the first time she could recall. He was hooked up to a ventilator that rasped out breath for him and he was connected to so many tubes and electrodes. He had never looked so young and so old.
Peggy Carter was at his side, looking older and frailer, too, everywhere except her eyes, which were as piercing as ever and Natasha wanted to look away so that Peggy couldn't see how much she wanted to flee. She didn't want to see Steve like this, helpless and her being helpless to do anything to make things better, to keep him alive. Instead, she took a deep breath and held her ground. Until the door slid open behind her and she heard a gasp as Pepper and Tony came in and then she did flee. Straight down to the range where she emptied clip after clip until her hands rang and her shoulders ached and Clint came for her, looking worn.
"It's time," he said.
The meeting to decide Steve's future took place in Fury's office. Fury, Peggy, Pepper and Tony, Clint, and herself were the only attendees. "This isn't a SHIELD matter, not entirely," Fury explained at the start. "This is a personal matter. This is about Steve Rogers the man, not Captain America."
That being said, Fury ran the show, but he was clearly not speaking for himself. He explained that Peggy and Pepper were Steve's medical proxies, which Natasha already knew about because she remembered Steve's unhappiness with being told that he could not have a then-96-year-old woman as a proxy and would need to find someone else, if only as a backup. Any and all decisions regarding Steve's care would be theirs to make in accordance with Steve's stated wishes, but that they both felt that any discussion of Steve's future would benefit from being held with those he was closest to.
"I have suggested to Ms. Carter and Ms. Potts that it's time to let Captain America die, at least in public," he said and Natasha saw that Tony and Clint were as surprised as she was. Tony started to protest, but Fury held up a hand. "The reasons for this are many. First and foremost, we can't protect him."
"What the hell does that mean?" Clint spat out.
"How many catastrophic security breaches do we have in SHIELD facilities per year?" Fury asked pointedly and Clint blanched, even though Natasha knew it hadn't been a barb aimed at him. "No matter how secret a facility we choose -- SHIELD or Stark Industries or some freshly-built igloo in Alaska -- no matter how well we fortify it, we can't guarantee nobody will come knocking or that we'll be able to hold them off if they do. The only chance we have to keep Rogers safe is to keep him hidden. And the only way to do that is to make sure nobody is looking for him in the first place. Especially because we don't know who already is looking for him."
Fury looked at her and she did not look away.
Fury's -- or, Natasha realized, most probably Peggy's -- second reason was that it was still very likely that Steve's death would not have to be faked. He'd needed to be revived three times already so far, the last only yesterday, and his accelerated healing factor could not guarantee any kind of recovery from such a traumatic injury. The doctors couldn't say if he would ever wake up or, if he did, what kind of life he would have. "They said that we don't understand how the brain works well enough to make even an educated guess." The serum could eventually completely heal his brain and he could still wind up a vegetable, profoundly brain damaged in a way that left permanent physical or cognitive or diminishment, or there might be personality changes or memory loss. Or all of the above.
"We are where we were when he was first found in the ice," Fury explained. "Even if he wakes up again, his days as Captain America may be over for a thousand different reasons."
There was a pause then, silence around the table. Pepper reached over and took Peggy's hand in her own.
"And if he wakes up next week and is ready to go by his birthday, what do we do?" Tony asked in his belligerent-but-not-really tone, the one that went with him knowing you were right and hating it. "Because I remember the plans for the original shebang and it made the Kennedy procession look like a pauper's funeral."
Natasha didn't think she'd ever seen the look on Fury's face when he told Tony that if that would happen, he would never be happier than to do those apologetic press conferences.
"If this is what needs to be done," she began, "then where would Steve actually be? It would have to be somewhere accessible but remote and nowhere anyone would think to look for him because even if we somehow did an open coffin funeral, someone will look for him."
"His grave, more likely," Tony said. "The super-soldier serum just sitting there in Arlington?"
Fury had answers to both questions. The grave would be guarded and, should it be violated, it would be easy enough to explain it away for exactly those reasons. "It was what we had planned to do when we'd initially found him," Fury explained.
"The empty grave while his actual corpse was dissected in SHIELD labs, more likely," Tony said bitterly. "Let's not pretend this would be about the dignity of Steve's remains."
Pepper looked like she was about to say something to him, but he brushed her off. "No, Pep. You are the guardian -- back-up guardian, whatever -- of Steve's body while he's alive. I respect that and I'm glad he chose you. You're going to be much saner about it than any of us would. But someone has to be cynical and suspicious and make sure that when the worst happens, be it tomorrow or fifty years from now, that he doesn't get cut up like a Spanish ham for all the medical researchers in the world to play with before he's even room temperature. He deserves better than for people to forget that he was a real person and not just a scientific marvel."
Any other time, the rest of them would be talking over each other to point out that Tony had been the last person in the room to figure that out. But he'd more than made up for it since, which was why they did not.
"He agreed to donate his body to science as part of the conditions for undergoing the procedure," Peggy said into the growing silence.
"He would have agreed to do a striptease in front of Eleanor Roosevelt to undergo the procedure," Tony retorted. "Don't think I don't know the stories of what else you guys tried to get him to sign away before Rebirth kicked off."
Peggy looked back at him without rebuke or denial. "You know this is what he would want."
"It is," Tony agreed easily. "And I have no problem with the idea of donating your body to medical research. I have my own plans for it. But there's a way to do it properly and there's a way to wind up like the Oscar Meyer display at the supermarket. And I don't trust SHIELD to do the right thing by him."
"Then trust me," Peggy told him. "If you think I'm going to let the one-eyed bastard to my left pull a fast one, you haven't been paying attention."
It was, unsurprisingly, the right thing to say. Serious, but not. Making her point clear and defusing the tension at once. Peggy Carter had had to learn a far more complicated kind of grace than Natasha ever had.
After a meaningful pause, the discussion about where Steve would be kept while he recuperated -- and that was the word they used, despite it not being anything close to guaranteed -- continued.
There was a serious thought to taking Steve outside the US, apparently. The UK, France, and Israel were three nations with trusted security services who would accept the assignment not as a favor to Fury, but as an act of respect for Steve. Natasha didn't like the idea and Clint and Tony audibly liked it even less, but Peggy and Pepper were calm and Natasha wondered if this was already a fait accomplit.
"Out of the past ten years that Steve was alive," Peggy pointed out tartly, "much of that time was not spent in the United States. He would not mind living in these places. And as for the rest of your objections, you will not be dropping by for tea every week regardless of where he is. The commute for you is immaterial."
They might not be able to visit him at all if he were overseas. There wasn't an airport anywhere in the world that didn't have eyeballs on it, mostly belonging to foreign security services.
"What about my place in Nebraska?" Clint asked. "It's intentionally in the middle of nowhere and it's not a transatlantic flight from New York. I get not wanting to put him in one of our places, but we can hide a hardened civilian location a lot better domestically and it would be easier on the logistics -- forget us visiting, you're going to need regular shipments of equipment, drugs, rotations of doctors and guards and then food for them. That's a lot to hide."
Natasha looked over at him. "I thought you sold that place years ago."
He'd loved that place, had hoped to retire there, and he'd kept it long after it became obvious that New York was going to become their base of operations and even irregular trips out there would not be likely.
"Market was crap," Clint replied with a shrug she took to mean that there was more to the story. "Ended up renting it out."
"I have a few dozen places," Tony offered. "I can get more."
"No, Tony," Pepper told him gently. "There isn't any way that a Stark property, even one you never lived in, stays under the radar."
The discussion ended without any decision announced, although Natasha rather thought that Steve would end up staying in the US, or maybe Canada. She was ready to go, restless and unsettled and full of dark humors because this was all new to her and she didn't like it. She'd held so many lives in her her hand over the course of her career, lives she could snuff out at whim or on command. This was the first time she'd held even a tiny part of a life she desperately wanted to save. She'd never felt so useless.
"Natasha, could you walk back to the infirmary with me, please?" Peggy asked. "I'm supposed to always have an escort -- sadly, Fury's more worried about me breaking my hip than making off with his toys. And I'm in no mood for one of the baby-faced agents who will coddle me as if I've lost my mettle instead of my mobility."
Natasha smiled. "Oh, no, you have lost nothing of that," she agreed because Peggy was not asking for Natasha because she was the closest free arm.
They made their way slowly to the elevator; Peggy relied heavily on her cane, looping her free arm around Natasha's. They got back to Steve's bedside in due course and Natasha waited as Peggy fussed with Steve's coverlet, the only noise the rasp-rasp of the respirator and the beeps of the monitors. She didn't run away, which might have been what Peggy was testing her on, but that turned out not to be the case.
"I need you to find Bucky Barnes," Peggy said, looking up from where she held Steve's limp, young hand between her own gnarled, strong ones.
Natasha laughed humorlessly. "I've been trying for a few months. We all have."
Peggy nodded. "This will change things and Steve being pronounced dead will change things even more."
And Natasha's telling the Russians that James was alive was going to affect things, too, but she did not say so aloud.
"You know they're half-convinced he shot Steve," Natasha warned instead. "Especially after the forensics came back."
The bullet had come from more than two thousand meters away. There weren't many who could make that shot even under ideal conditions and this had been while hiding from the aerial portion of the presidential security detail.
Peggy scoffed. "He's no more likely to have done so than Mister Barton. Whatever the Tesseract might have done to him, it would not make him into someone who could hate Steve Rogers enough to kill him."
Which Natasha believed as well, although with varying degrees of fervor. She'd seen James stripped of everything he'd loved once before, too, and she'd been wounded by what they'd turned him into as a result. She wanted to believe that he'd never willingly do that to himself, that he'd never put himself in a position to let that happen again, but she couldn't bet anything on it. Not again.
"I think he's going to make contact," Peggy said, settling back in her seat. "Or at least be amenable to you making contact. Whether that's before or after he does something we're all going to regret is another matter. Whatever else he's become, he's still James Barnes and the pea in the pod next to Steve Rogers."
There was a touch of fondness in the last bit. It's not that Natasha had forgotten that Peggy knew James once upon a time, but it still startled her a little to hear someone else speak of him as a man and not as whatever the Winter Soldier had become.
"Steve was breathtakingly reckless after he thought he got Bucky killed," Peggy went on. "Even for his levels of cavalier disregard for both his own safety and the given-for-a-reason mission parameters, which history has done a find job of downplaying. The other Commandos weren't all that keen on reining him in, but they kept him from giving in fully to his guilt. Bucky has no such support and a far deeper wellspring of anger to work from."
If James were not the assassin, then it was very likely that he would see the shooting as a measure of revenge against himself. And the guilt over that would be overwhelming, which in turn could make him escalate. Natasha said as much to Peggy.
"Or it could make him stop and reassess and come to you."
Natasha had never had reason to ask Steve if he had told Peggy about her and James. It made sense that he would -- this little bit of good human history in his friend's life when everything else he'd learned was so horrifying -- but it still embarrassed her. Irritated her a little, too, but she shoved that aside. It hadn't been a secret between her and Steve, not a secret that could never be told even if she hadn't wanted to elaborate on it, and he wouldn't have shared it with Peggy to gossip. It was Steve. He'd probably done it out of pleasure because that's how he'd taken the backhanded revelation of hers and James's history. He'd been happy that his old life and his new life had one more connection, but he'd possibly been more happy for James, which in turn had made Natasha a little embarrassed. And he'd been amused because, as he'd put it, Natasha was the kind of gal Bucky Barnes had needed but usually hadn't been patient enough to seek out.
"And if he does? If I find him?" Natasha asked, shaking herself free of the memories.
Peggy raised her chin and looked at Natasha firmly. "Then you tell him to come home and look after his brother once more."
