fic: Revenant (3/?)
3 Nov 2013 10:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneRevenant: Chapter Three
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: 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.
Steve Rogers 'died' ten days after the meeting aboard the Helicarrier. The time in between had been spent deciding where Steve would live, how he would get there, who would take care of him once he arrived, and how he could be moved so that he would survive the journey. Transporting a patient who still needed as much critical care as Steve did would be complicated even were it happening openly, but doing it under the cloak of deceit made it that much more difficult.
The list of people who knew Steve had not actually died had been pared down to the smallest number they -- Fury, Hill, Tapper, Natasha, and Clint -- thought they could get away with without jeopardizing his safety or care. There was a medical team and the security detail that would be following Steve to his new home, there were the Avengers plus Peggy and Pepper, and then Fury and Hill and Tapper. And that was it. The rest of SHIELD, including the thousands stationed aboard the Helicarrier, were among the ignorant. And that included Coulson, which Natasha understood would be devastating should he ever find out the truth, but he was on a field team now and vulnerable because of that and, ultimately, he didn't really need to know. "Turnabout's fair play," Clint had said acidly when it had come up, but she knew he felt it to be a little bit of a betrayal of their relationship nonetheless.
Steve was transported off of the Helicarrier in a coffin designed to contain his respirator and keep his head stabilized and protected as well as keep his essential monitoring systems in place. There was an honor guard that included all of the Avengers, Thor and Bruce included, and the coffin was flown directly to DC, where an identical coffin was prepped and would continue Captain America's final journey (as the news media put it in their captions) while Steve himself was shifted to an unmarked ambulance and then to a different airport, where a private plane flew him and his support team to Michigan, where they would stay at a house purchased for the purpose while the final preparations were made at Steve's new home, an isolated property in Goshen County, Wyoming, less than an hour's drive from Clint's newly-vacated Nebraska homestead. Ostensibly the low-tech retreat for a Silicon Valley startup millionaire (played by a member of the security detail), the money that was pouring in to renovations was not for granite countertops and heated floors. Natasha and Clint had gone over the blueprints and done a site visit with the security detail commander and they were comfortable that once it was finished, it would be about as safe as could be hoped for. And then they'd driven back to Clint's place outside Scottsbluff and gotten very drunk because it had maybe hit them both during the walkaround what they were doing and why and for who.
The funeral for Captain America was magnificent, a solemn and stately pageant on a bright, sunny late spring day that couldn't have been more beautiful. It came after a week of blanket media coverage, retrospectives, marathons of the old (and not so old) dramatizations of Steve Rogers's life and activities, talking head roundtables, and a lying in state that had a five-hour wait time at the start of the day and only got longer. It was a national day of mourning for the United States and, in tribute, several nations around the world, especially those where Captain America had fought during World War II, marked the passing of a hero from a bygone age with their own ceremonies. There wasn't an American embassy or consulate anywhere in the world that did not have at least one bouquet or candle or card outside its gates.
In Washington, there was the funeral proper at the National Cathedral with eulogies given by the President and then Tony. Tony's words were exquisitely moving and heartfelt and honest. For all that he seemed to let everything hang out in public, Tony actually did a very good job of keeping private what he wished to hide. But he hid nothing here. And considering that he was in on the ruse and knew that there was a chance that Steve could wake up and hear this... Natasha took this as Tony admitting that he didn't think Steve would.
The only official representatives of the Avengers were Tony and Thor, the latter clothed regally in what was apparently Asgardian formal mourning dress, but Natasha, Clint, and Bruce were present and visible if one knew where to look because even if they weren't publicly known, the various national and international intelligence agencies knew and it would have been suspicious if they'd been absent entirely. Dressed tastefully in black with a small fascinator, Natasha reminded herself it was an act, just like a thousand other acts she'd performed over the years. Except that this time, she was lying to people she otherwise liked and trusted, inasmuch as she could trust anyone, people who saw her as Natasha Romanova, one of "us" and not someone with a false name or a fake cover or an agenda that differed from theirs. Matt Corrales was there with his wife, Coulson, even Miranda Tung, plus a hundred other familiar faces that even if she didn't choose to share anything with on a daily basis, she still felt dirty for pretending to share their very genuine grief.
But that was before Tony spoke and shattered the thin barrier between the real Natasha and the one on display for others to see by mourning so very genuinely for a friend he didn't think he'd ever see again. She was far back enough that Tony would never know that he'd made her cry.
She did not follow the procession to Arlington, where Steve's fake coffin was buried next to James Barnes's empty grave. Instead, she was on the first leg of a trip that would take her to Bulgaria, where she could rattle the chains among the underworld in Sofia and sill be close enough to hear the whispers out of the Motherland next door.
She had already known that her message to Moscow had gotten through loud and clear, but the waters were still muddy for most everyone else because Putin's response had initially been confused and conflated with James's reign of terror. Which in turn still did not have a known author; conspiracy theories abounded and Natasha earned some future favors among her network of contacts by alternately fanning and putting out those flames of suspicion. Outside of of the principals, nobody really understood what the hell was going on beyond the fact that there were now rivers of (mostly) Russian blood in the gutters of most European cities.
Putin was furious, that much everyone could see. It was it impossible not to notice that the FSB and SVR were both acting with uncharacteristic haste and force, burning resources like they hadn't since the Iron Curtain had been melted down to ingots. They were looking for the Winter Soldier, a secret that had not been kept for long. It was news that shook up the entire world of intelligence, initially disbelieved and then accepted with growing dread by all parties. In the West, it was like saying that the Loch Ness Monster was real -- they'd never had proof of his actual existence beyond the espionage version of an urban legend. In the East, it was an announcement that the maddest dog on the block had slipped its leash.
The Winter Soldier's American origins, let alone his ties to Captain America, were a secret not widely known even inside Moscow's elite, where he'd generally been assumed to be a local boy the Monster Factory had turned into a legend. As far as the rest of the world knew, the Winter Soldier was a purely Soviet invention, a fiction with no historical ties to either Schmidt's HYDRA or the US and the only ones who'd known differently all had their reasons to keep quiet. Certainly now, when the Russians were still a suspect in the murder of Steve Rogers and displaying a level of paranoia, however justified by the body count, that hadn't been seen in decades.
"It's like the Seventies all over again," Natasha heard more than once from old spies who'd lived through it the first time.
After a week in Bulgaria and Albania, Natasha accepted an invite to stay with an old Red Room colleague in Split, Croatia. Sonia was a mentor of sorts, one of the few female Red Room operatives not primarily intended for honey-pot missions, plus one of the highest ranking women in the KGB Second Directorate after her field days were done. There'd been no competition between them -- the age and experience levels too different to make it worthwhile -- and instead they had become allies. While officially out of the game and largely off the radar, Sonia still knew everything about everything, even from the balcony of her villa that overlooked the sea. It was a hobby for her and not a profession, which was why she remained off of the watchlists of her former masters and their friends and enemies.
They sat and ate and drank and sunbathed on that seaside balcony and swapped gossip like any two women might, but instead of news from the supermarket tabloids, their morsels could bring down governments.
"It's terribly Old Testament," Sonia said of Putin and Lukin. "The sagas of brothers turned rivals, the favored son, the stolen blessings... it's better to watch from afar, however. In the Bible, Cain slew Abel and was done with it. This will have much greater collateral damage."
The news that morning had carried an item about Kronas losing a contract at the Port of Tangier, presumably at the influence of the Russians.
But it was not current affairs that had Sonia most curious, instead a much more personal affair. Sonia knew of Natasha's romance with James and she knew what had been done to him because of it. She had assumed that Natasha was SHIELD's hunting dog in the chase to find the Winter Soldier first and had not known that, instead, Natasha was the one to tell the Russians that he was still alive. Sonia was not entirely kidding when she asked why Natasha couldn't have told her first.
"If this were a cat-and-mouse game, I would have," Natasha said. "But this was for revenge and for blood and I did not have time to enjoy it."
In part to make it up to Sonia and in part because she knew Sonia would not misuse the information and might, in fact, use it very wisely, she explained the entire saga of James Barnes, from his appearance at Minyar to his disappearance in Doomstadt, leaving out the details of the Tesseract but including her own discovery of James's true past at the hands of a history book from the SHIELD library.
Sonia was intrigued by the idea that the Winter Soldier was James Barnes; it was hard to be horrified by anything after being trained by the Red Room. Like most, she hadn't been privy to the Winter Soldier's true history, although she did learn during her Second Directorate days that he had not been in Leningrad and had in fact been captured as a HYDRA trooper and turned from that. She had interacted with the Winter Soldier both before and after Natasha's affair with him, worked with him once ("very difficult; he didn't want anyone along and after he failed to ditch us, he led the target's security team right to us and we spent the night running for our lives while he completed his mission"), and had had practically no contact with him once she'd moved over to the Second Directorate. She'd recognized his value as someone who could pass as an American, but hadn't ever dreamed that he'd come by the talent honestly.
"This explains a few things that didn't make sense at the time," Sonia said, sipping at her wine. "Including why they went so far overboard in wiping the Winter Soldier's memories after the two of you were caught. He'd been out of stasis for a while by that point and they were worried that his conditioning was breaking down, that was the official line. It was probably even true. But it's what he might have remembered that must have worried them enough to nuke his memories like that. His possibly corrupting you, their star pupil, with some remembered American glory is much different than than him getting mouthy or waking you up shouting 'Hail HYDRA.'"
Natasha carried enough guilt and anger for what had happened to James in the wake of their affair. She really didn't want to be told that she was even more to blame than she'd been imagining.
Sensing that, Sonia moved on to Lukin and what all of this might mean.
"He never wanted to be in permanent exile among gypsies and Slavs," Sonia said, pouring Natasha more wine. "I knew that but I didn't know why he was anyway. But the Winter Soldier? That makes everything different. By giving the Winter Soldier to Lukin, Karpov told him he was the favored son and Sasha would take that as a pronouncement of destiny far truer than Yeltsin being arm-twisted into naming Vladik as his successor. Enough to keep the flame alive even when he didn't have enough power to effect the result he wanted. He's a patient man and he chose to wait, setting up his pieces and shoring up his positions in the safety of Doom's protection while all along planning on taking Putin down."
But Natasha's revelation had taken away some of Lukin's wiggle room and exposed him to a great many dangers he'd now have to face without his most lethal lieutenant. And not just from Putin and his allies. Lukin lost the pretense of being a retired spy with no desire to greater glory and war between the two was inevitable now, Sonia thought.
"Although that does not mean imminent," she cautioned.
Especially with James still at liberty and hellbent for leather; Putin and Lukin were very possibly more scared of him than of each other. "All the more so if he's really James Barnes and if he thinks one of them killed Captain America."
"There are no 'ifs' on that front," Natasha pointed out, picking a grape out of the bowl.
Sonia didn't know which one of them did, but it was obviously one of them, counting Doom as part of Lukin's team.
"Lukin makes more sense," Sonia admitted, shaking her head. "But assassinating Captain America is such a ridiculous raising of the stakes that making more sense is not necessarily even a factor. There has to be something else going on here. If we've learned anything over the past twenty years, it is that the Americans are a hibernating bear that you can poke a few times with a little stick, but if you poke it enough, it will wake up and destroy the forest just to swat you back."
Natasha stayed three days at Sonia's villa on the sea, a vacation she perhaps didn't realize she'd needed until she'd had it. Sonia perhaps had realized earlier, since she turned the visit from an intel summit into a proper respite, never asking Natasha more than she was willing to give and being generous with what she offered in return. It was only on the third day that she asked Natasha about Steve and then only to ask what kind of a man he really was.
"The very best kind."
From Croatia it was up to Prague and then, two days later, to Frankfurt on the first leg of the trip back to New York. She asked for a few hours' layover there, intending to meet with an armorer not to ask about James, but instead to see about a birthday present for Clint, who had been making eyes at an item in the newest H&K catalog, something SHIELD would happily buy for him -- if he'd wanted them to know he owned it. She knew his likes and dislikes, knew how he'd want it modified and that Ferenc was the one to do it, and knew that Clint would never actually get around to buying it for himself because he viewed changing out personal weapons as something akin to infidelity and he was nothing if not loyal. But he'd accept it happily as a gift, because he was strange like that, and so a gift it would be.
She did not tell him this when she saw him the next day, after her layover in Frankfurt became a stop-transit order because Kronas's large, ultramodern world headquarters in Doomstadt had just been blown up. There had been no fatalities -- it had been in the middle of the night and the fire alarm had been pulled so the night guards and cleaners could leave -- but Natasha didn't think anyone was fooled by what had happened and why. Not even when both Lukin and the Latverian Ministry of the Interior issued separate statements about a gas leak and no signs of terrorism.
"I think we found the Winter Soldier," Clint said dryly as they sat in a bar drinking beer, watching the news, and eating currywurst. (Clint couldn't travel through Germany without eating currywurst, which Natasha didn't mind nearly as much as she insisted she did, but he always picked the strangest places to do it.) He'd been on his way to Amman when he'd been stopped in Amsterdam and, because he hated Amsterdam, he'd made his way down to Frankfurt so that they could twiddle their thumbs together while SHIELD decided if they were going to do something reckless like sneak into Latveria again to look for James.
While they waited for SHIELD to make up its mind, they had little else to do (after Tapper told the both of them to leave him alone and stop asking) but to wander around the city and talk. Clint had the latest information on Steve, who was about to be moved from Michigan to his new home in Wyoming. "He's been more or less upgraded to 'we don't have to keep the crash cart in the room anymore,'" Clint reported. "And he's getting a roommate."
Peggy Carter was packing up her life in Philadelphia to join Steve in Wyoming, Clint said. Selling the house, quitting her volunteer work, telling her friends she was going to an assisted living facility near some relatives. When it had been suggested by Fury that such a permanent solution would not necessarily be required, that even if Steve never regained all that he'd lost, he wouldn't be out in Wyoming forever, Peggy had apparently simply reminded everyone that she was ninety-seven and that the nursing staff at Steve's home would be looking after her as well and this was merely saving someone else a bit of work a little bit down the line. "My hope is to live long enough to see Steve restored to the fullness of his health," she'd said. "It's not necessarily my expectation."
"And she didn't mean Steve dying on her," Clint clarified, in case it hadn't been obvious. "I can't even imagine her dying. She's like Shimon Peres -- they get a little more shriveled every year, but they're basically eternal."
They also talked about the future of the Avengers -- something the media has been asking about out loud and SHIELD a little more quietly -- and how they both assumed that the Initiative was all but dead save for another alien invasion and how surprised they were at how much they'd miss it. Neither of them had wanted to be a part of it in the first place.
Two days, no more bombings or assassinations, and five texts to Tapper later (they coin-flipped to see which one would do it), they were told to continue on to their original destinations. But while Clint was Jordan-bound once more, Natasha was not on a sleeper seat on a flight back to New York. While wandering around Frankfurt with Clint, she'd gotten an email from an old contact in Romania that there was a warehouse full of HYDRA weapons in an industrial park in Cluj and would she happen to know anyone who might like them before they wound up in, say, the Ukrainians' or Russians' hands.
Natasha contacted Coulson, since she didn't know who had taken over the hunt for HYDRA weapons now that he was back in the field and he gave her the name. She didn't recognize it, so she told Tapper to do the talking and he got back to her and asked if she wouldn't mind doing the look-see herself. Which was what she had expected, so off to Romania she went once the hold-in-place order had been lifted.
The warehouse was protected by technology instead of people, which was a warning sign but not an obstacle to people like Natasha. Once in, her first thought was that there were possibly more weapons than Iancu had thought there were. Natasha took photos of the rifles and the two baby spider mechas, all neatly stored and, thankfully, not looking like they were going to be imminently shipped out, and recommended imminent retrieval when she sent the photos in.
It was the middle of the night when she finished, not enough time to get any sleep before she had to check out and get to the airport, but too much time to stay awake with nothing to do. She found a food stand open near one of the warehouses that had been turned into a dance club and got something to eat, then made her way back to her hotel on the far side of town, a rundown place that didn't look too closely at the registry and didn't notice guests slipping in and out in the dark. Which was why she'd set up her own tamper warning on the door to her room and why she was relatively surprised to see it undisturbed.
The man sitting on her bed with a gun in his hand when she opened the door made her reconsider, but only for a moment. The Winter Soldier had gotten past harder obstacles than flimsy hotel doors.
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: 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.
Steve Rogers 'died' ten days after the meeting aboard the Helicarrier. The time in between had been spent deciding where Steve would live, how he would get there, who would take care of him once he arrived, and how he could be moved so that he would survive the journey. Transporting a patient who still needed as much critical care as Steve did would be complicated even were it happening openly, but doing it under the cloak of deceit made it that much more difficult.
The list of people who knew Steve had not actually died had been pared down to the smallest number they -- Fury, Hill, Tapper, Natasha, and Clint -- thought they could get away with without jeopardizing his safety or care. There was a medical team and the security detail that would be following Steve to his new home, there were the Avengers plus Peggy and Pepper, and then Fury and Hill and Tapper. And that was it. The rest of SHIELD, including the thousands stationed aboard the Helicarrier, were among the ignorant. And that included Coulson, which Natasha understood would be devastating should he ever find out the truth, but he was on a field team now and vulnerable because of that and, ultimately, he didn't really need to know. "Turnabout's fair play," Clint had said acidly when it had come up, but she knew he felt it to be a little bit of a betrayal of their relationship nonetheless.
Steve was transported off of the Helicarrier in a coffin designed to contain his respirator and keep his head stabilized and protected as well as keep his essential monitoring systems in place. There was an honor guard that included all of the Avengers, Thor and Bruce included, and the coffin was flown directly to DC, where an identical coffin was prepped and would continue Captain America's final journey (as the news media put it in their captions) while Steve himself was shifted to an unmarked ambulance and then to a different airport, where a private plane flew him and his support team to Michigan, where they would stay at a house purchased for the purpose while the final preparations were made at Steve's new home, an isolated property in Goshen County, Wyoming, less than an hour's drive from Clint's newly-vacated Nebraska homestead. Ostensibly the low-tech retreat for a Silicon Valley startup millionaire (played by a member of the security detail), the money that was pouring in to renovations was not for granite countertops and heated floors. Natasha and Clint had gone over the blueprints and done a site visit with the security detail commander and they were comfortable that once it was finished, it would be about as safe as could be hoped for. And then they'd driven back to Clint's place outside Scottsbluff and gotten very drunk because it had maybe hit them both during the walkaround what they were doing and why and for who.
The funeral for Captain America was magnificent, a solemn and stately pageant on a bright, sunny late spring day that couldn't have been more beautiful. It came after a week of blanket media coverage, retrospectives, marathons of the old (and not so old) dramatizations of Steve Rogers's life and activities, talking head roundtables, and a lying in state that had a five-hour wait time at the start of the day and only got longer. It was a national day of mourning for the United States and, in tribute, several nations around the world, especially those where Captain America had fought during World War II, marked the passing of a hero from a bygone age with their own ceremonies. There wasn't an American embassy or consulate anywhere in the world that did not have at least one bouquet or candle or card outside its gates.
In Washington, there was the funeral proper at the National Cathedral with eulogies given by the President and then Tony. Tony's words were exquisitely moving and heartfelt and honest. For all that he seemed to let everything hang out in public, Tony actually did a very good job of keeping private what he wished to hide. But he hid nothing here. And considering that he was in on the ruse and knew that there was a chance that Steve could wake up and hear this... Natasha took this as Tony admitting that he didn't think Steve would.
The only official representatives of the Avengers were Tony and Thor, the latter clothed regally in what was apparently Asgardian formal mourning dress, but Natasha, Clint, and Bruce were present and visible if one knew where to look because even if they weren't publicly known, the various national and international intelligence agencies knew and it would have been suspicious if they'd been absent entirely. Dressed tastefully in black with a small fascinator, Natasha reminded herself it was an act, just like a thousand other acts she'd performed over the years. Except that this time, she was lying to people she otherwise liked and trusted, inasmuch as she could trust anyone, people who saw her as Natasha Romanova, one of "us" and not someone with a false name or a fake cover or an agenda that differed from theirs. Matt Corrales was there with his wife, Coulson, even Miranda Tung, plus a hundred other familiar faces that even if she didn't choose to share anything with on a daily basis, she still felt dirty for pretending to share their very genuine grief.
But that was before Tony spoke and shattered the thin barrier between the real Natasha and the one on display for others to see by mourning so very genuinely for a friend he didn't think he'd ever see again. She was far back enough that Tony would never know that he'd made her cry.
She did not follow the procession to Arlington, where Steve's fake coffin was buried next to James Barnes's empty grave. Instead, she was on the first leg of a trip that would take her to Bulgaria, where she could rattle the chains among the underworld in Sofia and sill be close enough to hear the whispers out of the Motherland next door.
She had already known that her message to Moscow had gotten through loud and clear, but the waters were still muddy for most everyone else because Putin's response had initially been confused and conflated with James's reign of terror. Which in turn still did not have a known author; conspiracy theories abounded and Natasha earned some future favors among her network of contacts by alternately fanning and putting out those flames of suspicion. Outside of of the principals, nobody really understood what the hell was going on beyond the fact that there were now rivers of (mostly) Russian blood in the gutters of most European cities.
Putin was furious, that much everyone could see. It was it impossible not to notice that the FSB and SVR were both acting with uncharacteristic haste and force, burning resources like they hadn't since the Iron Curtain had been melted down to ingots. They were looking for the Winter Soldier, a secret that had not been kept for long. It was news that shook up the entire world of intelligence, initially disbelieved and then accepted with growing dread by all parties. In the West, it was like saying that the Loch Ness Monster was real -- they'd never had proof of his actual existence beyond the espionage version of an urban legend. In the East, it was an announcement that the maddest dog on the block had slipped its leash.
The Winter Soldier's American origins, let alone his ties to Captain America, were a secret not widely known even inside Moscow's elite, where he'd generally been assumed to be a local boy the Monster Factory had turned into a legend. As far as the rest of the world knew, the Winter Soldier was a purely Soviet invention, a fiction with no historical ties to either Schmidt's HYDRA or the US and the only ones who'd known differently all had their reasons to keep quiet. Certainly now, when the Russians were still a suspect in the murder of Steve Rogers and displaying a level of paranoia, however justified by the body count, that hadn't been seen in decades.
"It's like the Seventies all over again," Natasha heard more than once from old spies who'd lived through it the first time.
After a week in Bulgaria and Albania, Natasha accepted an invite to stay with an old Red Room colleague in Split, Croatia. Sonia was a mentor of sorts, one of the few female Red Room operatives not primarily intended for honey-pot missions, plus one of the highest ranking women in the KGB Second Directorate after her field days were done. There'd been no competition between them -- the age and experience levels too different to make it worthwhile -- and instead they had become allies. While officially out of the game and largely off the radar, Sonia still knew everything about everything, even from the balcony of her villa that overlooked the sea. It was a hobby for her and not a profession, which was why she remained off of the watchlists of her former masters and their friends and enemies.
They sat and ate and drank and sunbathed on that seaside balcony and swapped gossip like any two women might, but instead of news from the supermarket tabloids, their morsels could bring down governments.
"It's terribly Old Testament," Sonia said of Putin and Lukin. "The sagas of brothers turned rivals, the favored son, the stolen blessings... it's better to watch from afar, however. In the Bible, Cain slew Abel and was done with it. This will have much greater collateral damage."
The news that morning had carried an item about Kronas losing a contract at the Port of Tangier, presumably at the influence of the Russians.
But it was not current affairs that had Sonia most curious, instead a much more personal affair. Sonia knew of Natasha's romance with James and she knew what had been done to him because of it. She had assumed that Natasha was SHIELD's hunting dog in the chase to find the Winter Soldier first and had not known that, instead, Natasha was the one to tell the Russians that he was still alive. Sonia was not entirely kidding when she asked why Natasha couldn't have told her first.
"If this were a cat-and-mouse game, I would have," Natasha said. "But this was for revenge and for blood and I did not have time to enjoy it."
In part to make it up to Sonia and in part because she knew Sonia would not misuse the information and might, in fact, use it very wisely, she explained the entire saga of James Barnes, from his appearance at Minyar to his disappearance in Doomstadt, leaving out the details of the Tesseract but including her own discovery of James's true past at the hands of a history book from the SHIELD library.
Sonia was intrigued by the idea that the Winter Soldier was James Barnes; it was hard to be horrified by anything after being trained by the Red Room. Like most, she hadn't been privy to the Winter Soldier's true history, although she did learn during her Second Directorate days that he had not been in Leningrad and had in fact been captured as a HYDRA trooper and turned from that. She had interacted with the Winter Soldier both before and after Natasha's affair with him, worked with him once ("very difficult; he didn't want anyone along and after he failed to ditch us, he led the target's security team right to us and we spent the night running for our lives while he completed his mission"), and had had practically no contact with him once she'd moved over to the Second Directorate. She'd recognized his value as someone who could pass as an American, but hadn't ever dreamed that he'd come by the talent honestly.
"This explains a few things that didn't make sense at the time," Sonia said, sipping at her wine. "Including why they went so far overboard in wiping the Winter Soldier's memories after the two of you were caught. He'd been out of stasis for a while by that point and they were worried that his conditioning was breaking down, that was the official line. It was probably even true. But it's what he might have remembered that must have worried them enough to nuke his memories like that. His possibly corrupting you, their star pupil, with some remembered American glory is much different than than him getting mouthy or waking you up shouting 'Hail HYDRA.'"
Natasha carried enough guilt and anger for what had happened to James in the wake of their affair. She really didn't want to be told that she was even more to blame than she'd been imagining.
Sensing that, Sonia moved on to Lukin and what all of this might mean.
"He never wanted to be in permanent exile among gypsies and Slavs," Sonia said, pouring Natasha more wine. "I knew that but I didn't know why he was anyway. But the Winter Soldier? That makes everything different. By giving the Winter Soldier to Lukin, Karpov told him he was the favored son and Sasha would take that as a pronouncement of destiny far truer than Yeltsin being arm-twisted into naming Vladik as his successor. Enough to keep the flame alive even when he didn't have enough power to effect the result he wanted. He's a patient man and he chose to wait, setting up his pieces and shoring up his positions in the safety of Doom's protection while all along planning on taking Putin down."
But Natasha's revelation had taken away some of Lukin's wiggle room and exposed him to a great many dangers he'd now have to face without his most lethal lieutenant. And not just from Putin and his allies. Lukin lost the pretense of being a retired spy with no desire to greater glory and war between the two was inevitable now, Sonia thought.
"Although that does not mean imminent," she cautioned.
Especially with James still at liberty and hellbent for leather; Putin and Lukin were very possibly more scared of him than of each other. "All the more so if he's really James Barnes and if he thinks one of them killed Captain America."
"There are no 'ifs' on that front," Natasha pointed out, picking a grape out of the bowl.
Sonia didn't know which one of them did, but it was obviously one of them, counting Doom as part of Lukin's team.
"Lukin makes more sense," Sonia admitted, shaking her head. "But assassinating Captain America is such a ridiculous raising of the stakes that making more sense is not necessarily even a factor. There has to be something else going on here. If we've learned anything over the past twenty years, it is that the Americans are a hibernating bear that you can poke a few times with a little stick, but if you poke it enough, it will wake up and destroy the forest just to swat you back."
Natasha stayed three days at Sonia's villa on the sea, a vacation she perhaps didn't realize she'd needed until she'd had it. Sonia perhaps had realized earlier, since she turned the visit from an intel summit into a proper respite, never asking Natasha more than she was willing to give and being generous with what she offered in return. It was only on the third day that she asked Natasha about Steve and then only to ask what kind of a man he really was.
"The very best kind."
From Croatia it was up to Prague and then, two days later, to Frankfurt on the first leg of the trip back to New York. She asked for a few hours' layover there, intending to meet with an armorer not to ask about James, but instead to see about a birthday present for Clint, who had been making eyes at an item in the newest H&K catalog, something SHIELD would happily buy for him -- if he'd wanted them to know he owned it. She knew his likes and dislikes, knew how he'd want it modified and that Ferenc was the one to do it, and knew that Clint would never actually get around to buying it for himself because he viewed changing out personal weapons as something akin to infidelity and he was nothing if not loyal. But he'd accept it happily as a gift, because he was strange like that, and so a gift it would be.
She did not tell him this when she saw him the next day, after her layover in Frankfurt became a stop-transit order because Kronas's large, ultramodern world headquarters in Doomstadt had just been blown up. There had been no fatalities -- it had been in the middle of the night and the fire alarm had been pulled so the night guards and cleaners could leave -- but Natasha didn't think anyone was fooled by what had happened and why. Not even when both Lukin and the Latverian Ministry of the Interior issued separate statements about a gas leak and no signs of terrorism.
"I think we found the Winter Soldier," Clint said dryly as they sat in a bar drinking beer, watching the news, and eating currywurst. (Clint couldn't travel through Germany without eating currywurst, which Natasha didn't mind nearly as much as she insisted she did, but he always picked the strangest places to do it.) He'd been on his way to Amman when he'd been stopped in Amsterdam and, because he hated Amsterdam, he'd made his way down to Frankfurt so that they could twiddle their thumbs together while SHIELD decided if they were going to do something reckless like sneak into Latveria again to look for James.
While they waited for SHIELD to make up its mind, they had little else to do (after Tapper told the both of them to leave him alone and stop asking) but to wander around the city and talk. Clint had the latest information on Steve, who was about to be moved from Michigan to his new home in Wyoming. "He's been more or less upgraded to 'we don't have to keep the crash cart in the room anymore,'" Clint reported. "And he's getting a roommate."
Peggy Carter was packing up her life in Philadelphia to join Steve in Wyoming, Clint said. Selling the house, quitting her volunteer work, telling her friends she was going to an assisted living facility near some relatives. When it had been suggested by Fury that such a permanent solution would not necessarily be required, that even if Steve never regained all that he'd lost, he wouldn't be out in Wyoming forever, Peggy had apparently simply reminded everyone that she was ninety-seven and that the nursing staff at Steve's home would be looking after her as well and this was merely saving someone else a bit of work a little bit down the line. "My hope is to live long enough to see Steve restored to the fullness of his health," she'd said. "It's not necessarily my expectation."
"And she didn't mean Steve dying on her," Clint clarified, in case it hadn't been obvious. "I can't even imagine her dying. She's like Shimon Peres -- they get a little more shriveled every year, but they're basically eternal."
They also talked about the future of the Avengers -- something the media has been asking about out loud and SHIELD a little more quietly -- and how they both assumed that the Initiative was all but dead save for another alien invasion and how surprised they were at how much they'd miss it. Neither of them had wanted to be a part of it in the first place.
Two days, no more bombings or assassinations, and five texts to Tapper later (they coin-flipped to see which one would do it), they were told to continue on to their original destinations. But while Clint was Jordan-bound once more, Natasha was not on a sleeper seat on a flight back to New York. While wandering around Frankfurt with Clint, she'd gotten an email from an old contact in Romania that there was a warehouse full of HYDRA weapons in an industrial park in Cluj and would she happen to know anyone who might like them before they wound up in, say, the Ukrainians' or Russians' hands.
Natasha contacted Coulson, since she didn't know who had taken over the hunt for HYDRA weapons now that he was back in the field and he gave her the name. She didn't recognize it, so she told Tapper to do the talking and he got back to her and asked if she wouldn't mind doing the look-see herself. Which was what she had expected, so off to Romania she went once the hold-in-place order had been lifted.
The warehouse was protected by technology instead of people, which was a warning sign but not an obstacle to people like Natasha. Once in, her first thought was that there were possibly more weapons than Iancu had thought there were. Natasha took photos of the rifles and the two baby spider mechas, all neatly stored and, thankfully, not looking like they were going to be imminently shipped out, and recommended imminent retrieval when she sent the photos in.
It was the middle of the night when she finished, not enough time to get any sleep before she had to check out and get to the airport, but too much time to stay awake with nothing to do. She found a food stand open near one of the warehouses that had been turned into a dance club and got something to eat, then made her way back to her hotel on the far side of town, a rundown place that didn't look too closely at the registry and didn't notice guests slipping in and out in the dark. Which was why she'd set up her own tamper warning on the door to her room and why she was relatively surprised to see it undisturbed.
The man sitting on her bed with a gun in his hand when she opened the door made her reconsider, but only for a moment. The Winter Soldier had gotten past harder obstacles than flimsy hotel doors.
