fic: Revenant (5/?)
5 Nov 2013 11:48![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneRevenant: Chapter Five
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.
They arrived in DC in the evening via quinjet. James spent the flight reading notes on a SHIELD tablet: Steve's medical file (authorized by Peggy, who had been told of James's arrival before he'd even stepped foot aboard the 'Carrier), the various reports attached to Steve's shooting, and then the files on the mission to Doomstadt, which Natasha hadn't realized he was looking at until she saw James lean back with closed eyes and let the tablet rest on his lap and then she could see the scanned images of one of Steve's own AARs and made the connection after catching a few words of it. Steve, who until the end had written his post-mission thoughts out longhand (Tapper usually got a secretary to transcribe them), had written the facts as they were and had been, but he'd also given James a ringing endorsement as someone with a future as a force of good.
She wondered if Fury had sent him the file intentionally or if James had simply found it of his own accord.
SHIELD had booked them rooms in the same hotel as the investigation team was staying in and, after checking in with Rasmussen, the lead agent on the team, and setting up a schedule for the following day, they were left to their own devices.
"Do you want to come have dinner with me or do you want some time to yourself?" Natasha asked James when it was just the two of them again. "It's been a long day."
He chuffed out a humorless laugh at her understatement, then shook his head. "I don't know."
She looked at him carefully and he let her examine him, not dropping his gaze or turning away. He looked fragile, which did not make him any less deadly, and he looked lost. And he looked like he was very close to burying it all under the comforting blank mask of the Winter Soldier, who was never fragile or lost.
"We can revisit the options after dinner," she told him. "Let's go."
Over a meal at the Oval Room, she carried the conversation with relative ease. When he'd raised an eyebrow at the menu, she'd told him of how she'd come to love food, good food, since leaving the Red Room and its bioengineered meals calculated to provide maximum nutrition with minimal fuss (or taste). When he asked her if this meant that she cooked, she'd laughed and assured him that she absolutely did not. And then she took the calculated risk of telling him that Steve did, that he'd gotten pretty good at it, that cooking had become his hobby and respite away from the job along with his art.
James did not hide his interest in these details about Steve's life, so she went on to explain Steve's farmer's market adventures, including the time he'd bought half a cow and how the rest of the Avengers kept inviting themselves over for beef dinners.
"We invited ourselves over for dinner a lot, cow or no cow," she admitted. "We brought food sometimes so he could try new things, but mostly he cooked for us. He said once it was the best way he could think of to pay you back for feeding him."
Steve used to laugh when he'd talk about how James had always gotten jobs in the food industry -- stocking shelves at the supermarket, waiting tables -- so that they'd be able to supplement their meager income with whatever he could scrounge, dented cans and bruised fruit and table scraps from diners who'd never consider a doggie bag. Steve would laugh, but it had been wistful laughter, tinged with sadness and a little bit of amazement at how lucky he'd been to be taken care of like that when he'd had no right to expect that from anyone.
Here and now, James put down his knife and fork and closed his eyes to keep the tears at bay.
"He's also befriended a young female agent," Natasha went on, changing gears because she'd wanted to draw him out, not shut him down. "Or maybe she befriended him. I wasn't around when that began. Either way, they send each other photographs of their meals, although it has finally progressed to eating said meals in each other's presence."
James opened his eyes and raised his eyebrows in silent question.
"It's all very chaste and very sweet," Natasha assured, smiling at James's eyeroll. "And he blushes whenever anyone -- including Peggy -- intimates otherwise. But she's done wonders for his chopsticks skills."
"Which is sadly not a euphemism for anything," James said wryly, although the smile that accompanied his words did not yet quite reach his eyes. Natasha laughed, however.
"He's still only got eyes for Peggy," she told him and James did not look at all surprised. "Miranda, I suspect, understands that. I don't know her well enough to know if that was a relief or a disappointment."
James smiled again, this time less forced, then he sobered. "He was happy, though, right? He was okay?"
Natasha smiled. She felt more optimism looking at his concerned and hopeful expression than she had when she'd seen him board the plane in Cluj. Getting James to come in from the cold had only ever been a tiny part of the battle. Getting him to care about something more than revenge, to care about other people and see past his own pain, that was always going to have been the bigger fight.
"He was happy," she assured him, reaching out to touch his flesh-and-bone hand. "He also wanted nothing more than for you to be able to say the same."
James turned his hand so that her fingers rested on his palm and his curled around her wrist briefly, a ghost of a touch reminiscent of a far different time, before withdrawing completely. He picked up his knife and fork again and she chose to be graceful about his retreat.
"I'm gonna need a little more work than he did," James said, attention back on his pork chop.
It wasn't for her to tell him what she'd overheard Tony say to Pepper and Peggy that night aboard the Helicarrier before she'd fled: "He'd finally stopped wishing I could build him a time machine, but I'd give anything right now to have been able to punt him back to 1944 to avoid this."
"He needed a little more work than you think he did," was what she did say, leaving him to his safe distance.
Despite the occasional uncomfortable moments, she felt dinner was a positive experience, a far better alternative than leaving James to brood in his hotel room, and he seemed to feel the same. They walked back to the hotel in a companionable quietude, her arm looped in his, keeping their conversation limited to observations about their environment and what time they should meet the following morning and where.
If she felt a bit of the old pull anyway, she was more than happy to chalk it up to good food and wine and the fact that she'd been up for more than thirty-six hours with only a nap to keep her going.
James walked her back to her room and she kissed him on the cheek goodnight, mostly to get it out of her system and maybe a little to see what he would do. (Answer: look at her thoughtfully.) He didn't continue on to his room, instead turning back toward the elevator and she called after him to make sure he got a little sleep because tomorrow was going to be a very long day. He gave her a vague hand gesture that could have been "yes, I know" or "I don't care," but he never turned to face her, so she didn't know for certain.
There was a text from Clint on her phone and she answered it, telling him that they were in DC and would be flying out tomorrow and that James knew. Clint could unpack it properly.
The phone rang for her wake-up call ten minutes after she turned off the light (not really) and there was a gentle knock on her door a half-hour later, by which point she was showered and dressed and packed, if not necessarily alert.
"Did you sleep at all?" she asked James as he entered bearing coffee and what turned out to be still-warm croissants for her and a bagel for himself.
"Yes, Mom," he drawled, dropping his backpack on the floor next to the club chair and sitting down. "I went over to the World War II memorial, said hello to a few friends, then came back. It was harder than I thought, but not for the reasons I expected."
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't, so she finished her breakfast and looked around for where she'd kicked off her right shoe the night before.
It wouldn't be officially summer for another few days, but DC was already swampy and warm. James was still dressed in long sleeves with his pressure glove despite the heat; in someplace quieter that wasn't crawling with spies, he could probably expose the arm without drawing attention, but here there was no such option. Natasha wore a sundress; she was working, but not working and this was no weather for long pants, let alone kevlar-nomex weave.
The sniper's nest was on the roof of a mixed-use high-rise in Rosslyn, Virginia, at the very far end of the range for a good sniper using a heavy caliber bullet but still within the protective sphere of the presidential security detail. Which in turn was getting plenty of heat for missing the assassin, even if the President hadn't been the target. The hide site had been well-camouflaged and had avoided aerial surveillance; Natasha had seen the video footage and there'd been nothing to spot with the naked eye or even with heat sensors. The assassin had apparently hidden under a heat-shielding blanket that had been designed with that particular roof in mind as far as camouflage. Which meant that the shooting had been long in the planning.
James lay down in the sniper's spot now, bringing a scope on a tripod to his eye and settling in. She'd seen him like this once before and she'd seen Clint a few times since; there was a way that the best snipers had about them, the way they didn't so much relax themselves as give the impression of almost melting into the ground. It was why she'd never been a good sniper or even much of a distance shooter at all -- she could be still as a statue and patient as a grandmother, but she couldn't do this.
She and Rasmussen watched James for a few moments, but it was frankly rather boring, so they looked around at the vista and Rasmussen ended up taking her over to the other side of the roof, where they'd found evidence that the roof camera had been tampered with even though the video had been gone over frame by frame and they could find no evidence of looping or splicing going back three days before the shooting.
After about fifteen minutes, James started asking questions, not raising his voice enough to be heard from where they were standing, so they had to go back over to where he was and have him begin again. James's questions were mostly about the weather and wind speed (the day of, the week of, two weeks, a month), about when particular trees in the cemetery had been trimmed and by who and at whose order, about details that pertained to the sniper's rifle that they still had no specifics on but James (like Clint before him) was assuming had been custom-built because all of the rifles that accepted the kind of bullet that had shot Steve (Bulgarian-made anti-tank round, mass-produced and essentially untraceable) should have left a different kind of residue pattern than what had been found. Most of these questions had been asked by Clint as part of the original investigation and Rasmussen had the answers, but a few had her scribbling down notes and promising to get back to him as soon as possible.
After James got up and dusted himself off, Rasmussen explained what they were doing about tracing building access and the massive computer power required to do facial recognition on the building's camera footage -- assuming that the other cameras, including the one across the street -- had not been similarly tweaked like the one on the roof. She asked if they had any questions, gave them her card when they said no and assured them that she was great with email, then apologized because she had to get to a meeting with the Secret Service to hopefully get more out of them than Fury had because she looked less likely to bite their heads off and spit them out afterward.
"If they try to feed me bullshit again," she said with a sigh, "I will not be shy about telling them that they should stick to chasing meth-heads who try to pass counterfeit twenties at 7-11s, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt first."
After Rasmussen left, Natasha and James poked around on the roof for a little bit and then headed back downstairs, looking over the stairwell once more even though they'd gone over it with Rasmussen earlier. And then they got a taxi to the airport, the ride taking half the time Natasha had budgeted for it, and so they got lunch at the Five Guys and wandered into the newspaper stand to look at headlines. James bought himself the first Harry Potter novel because people with nothing to do on airplanes stood out and everything else had been chick lit or spy thrillers.
They were flying to Denver and then driving up; there hadn't been enough time for SHIELD to provide them with a clean vehicle, so they had to rent one and clear it themselves. They did a graceful two-person security check in the lot (she dropped the keys so that she could look under the chassis, he 'accidentally' opened the hood while checking that everything on the dash worked and got a look at the engine block) and they disabled the GPS and swept for bugs before they got to the first corner.
The drive would be almost three hours and it began quietly after Natasha called the safehouse to let them know they were en route. James turned on the radio, but he couldn't seem to find anything he liked, so he turned it off again. He'd gotten a little restless on the plane, not really reading his book and not trying to sleep, just staring out the window at the clouds and fidgeting in a way that had hardly been noticeable and yet deeply distracting at the same time. She'd suspected it was him realizing what he was flying toward -- who he was flying toward -- and didn't press, although she had told him that if he didn't still, she had a paralytic agent and she'd use it.
"Do you even know what you're looking for?" she asked him after his second attempt at the radio, curious. Steve had had trouble finding modern music that didn't make him wince or laugh. Clint and Tony had separately and together spent a lot of time trying to find something he'd like -- the two of them had surprisingly overlapping tastes -- but it turned out that nature was stronger than nurture and Steve stuck to the music that he probably would have enjoyed best if he'd lived his normal lifespan. He liked the music from the forties and fifties and sixties, the Standards that came right after the war and early pop music and some jazz (but not Miles Davis) and his iPod had a lot of Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford and The Supremes and Buddy Holly and Elvis was about as edgy as he was likely to get. Old Man Music, Tony liked to call it, but it all tended to appear on the playlists when they were over at Stark Tower for a social occasion anyway.
"Not really," he admitted, sounding a little grateful for the distraction. "I was never sent on any missions where music was something I needed to know or care about."
The Winter Soldier's work had been solitary and silent. The Black Widow's had often been neither, but she'd only decided on her own tastes relatively recently, entirely because Clint had been so absolutely appalled that she had no preferences that she felt obligated to develop them just for the sake of their working relationship. The first moment she'd ever looked at Clint and thought friend was over beers and burgers and Led Zeppelin II.
While she was curious what James would think of her affection for Seventies guitar rock, as a gesture of goodwill she pulled out her phone and found out whether Denver had a baseball team, what it was called, if they were playing, and on what station; she thought the game dull and slow, but she knew from Steve that James had been a fan. Perhaps he still was.
He gave her a look when he realized it was baseball on the radio.
"Colorado Rockies versus the Arizona Diamondbacks," she reported.
"You like baseball?" he asked, surprised and maybe, she thought, a little hopeful. Or maybe she was imagining it.
"Absolutely not," she replied firmly. "But you can take me to a Rangers game in the winter."
It was a spontaneous thing to say, to presume that he'd be around come hockey season, that he'd want to either go or go with her.
"It's a date," he said with a sly grin and Natasha, for a moment, heard both her James and Steve's Bucky in the insouciant tone. She thought he heard it, too, because he seemed startled and maybe not entirely comfortable with it and the smile faded.
They drove on in silence, only the baseball game between them, for the next fifty miles.
The overlapping layers of security at the safehouse meant that their approach had been monitored from before they'd turned off US-85 and so it was no surprise that the outside lights turned on as they came up the driveway and Natasha could see at least three agents in tactical gear on the sides of the house. They were given retinal scans before they were allowed to climb up the porch steps, where Lieutenant Commander Yondo, the detachment CO, greeted them with a nod.
"Ms. Carter and Captain Rogers are upstairs," he told them. "Second door on the right off the stairs."
The house functioned like a regular house, albeit one with combat-outpost defenses, so they entered into a foyer with an askew row of toed-off shoes, presumably whatever some of the agents wore off-duty, a pegboard for keys, and the other odds and ends that made a home look lived in. Natasha could smell food and see the kitchen down the hallway at the back of the house and then the living and dining room on the sides, but her attention was on the staircase and what came at the other end.
James gave her a quick look like he, too, was considering turning and running and she frowned at them both, steeled herself, and pushed James lightly on the arm so that he'd start climbing. They could hear Peggy's voice as they got to the top landing, telling Steve that he had visitors and who they were, commenting acerbically that Bucky clearly considered timeliness no more of a priority today than when he'd made Steve late to half of the planning meetings during the war. "Don't think we didn't know who you were really apologizing for."
There was a guard, rifle cradled in his arms as he sat with a view to both the stairs and the length of the upstairs hallway, and Natasha nodded to him as they followed Peggy's voice, then nearly walked into James's back because he was frozen outside of Steve's doorway, a look of such utter grief and guilt on his face that she had to tamp down the urge to turn away.
"Well don't just stand there, Sergeant," Peggy exhorted and James shook himself free of his stupor and took steps forward, Natasha behind him, and then stopped again.
There was an empty chair on the other side of Steve's bed from Peggy and Natasha pushed James toward it gently, not sure if he was present enough to recognize her as not an enemy. But he went unresisting. He didn't sit though, instead standing by the bedside over Steve and looking him over as if he wasn't sure Steve was real before she could see the mask drop down as he cataloged Steve's condition with a professional eye and an impassive expression.
Steve looked deceptively unharmed. There was very little amiss below the neck; the damage from the resuscitation efforts was long gone and all that remained was just the mess of tubes and wires and electrodes. Above the neck, Steve's face was still partially obscured by the halo and the ventilator, but Natasha thought that he looked less pale and that made him look a little bit further from death's door than he had been aboard the Helicarrier.
"Jesus, Stevie," James huffed out, his voice breaking. He reached out and gently touched Steve's cheek with his right hand, then pulled it back.
"He's not quite that fragile," Peggy told him softly. "Sit down, catch up, apologize for being so appallingly tardy."
James looked over at Natasha, a maelstrom of emotions on his face, then looked back at Steve. "I think I have worse things to apologize for."
"Of course you do," Peggy agreed, pushing herself to standing and reaching for her cane. "But you know he doesn't hold any of it against you, so just pick the most recent crime and move on."
James shook his head. "I'm the reason he's here."
"Aren't you full of yourself, Bucky Barnes?" Peggy asked tartly. "You are not responsible for this and if you want to insist otherwise, you are going to have to fight everyone from Nick Fury on down for the privilege."
He didn't say anything, but Natasha didn't think he looked like he'd bought a word of what she'd said, even if he didn't protest further.
"There will be plenty of time for self-recrimination later, most of which isn't your fault, either," Peggy went on when the silence stretched. "But right now, all you need to do to make things right is be here. If you can't do that without apologizing for something, apologize to me for breaking in to my home and scaring me half to death. Although even that's optional as I got quite a few leftovers in the bargain."
Peggy had called Steve, who'd driven down to Philly before calling Clint, who'd called Natasha, who'd ended up dusting Peggy's kitchen table for prints before they'd sat down to pastrami sandwiches and wondered what kind of game was being played on them.
James tried to smile, but it didn't really work. It was close enough for Peggy to give him partial credit, though, and gesture with her free hand to the chair Natasha had pushed him toward earlier. "Sit down and stay a while, I am going to show Miss Romanova the results of Agent Gruning's pie-making adventures."
Peggy cocked an eyebrow at Natasha, as if challenging her, but Natasha, well-used to Peggy's brand of scene control by now, merely gestured for her to go first. They left without James either sitting or protesting, but he could make up his mind without them. Peggy led her past the stairs to the elevator, which had been one of the modifications made. "I try to do at least three trips up and down the stairs daily," Peggy explained as the door slid open. "But I'm slow and it's late and I'm tired."
There were two agents in the kitchen when they arrive, both dressed in jeans and t-shirts and visibly armed.They'd just finished eating dinner and reported that there was plenty more and the female asked if Peggy would like tea. Peggy smiled and said yes, thank you.
"You should eat," Peggy told Natasha once they were settled at the table.
It had been about nine hours since the burgers in DC, but Natasha replied that she'd wait for James and Peggy shook her head. "He'll be there for a while and I am not sure he'll eat later."
Amelia, the agent who was putting up water for Peggy's tea, directed Natasha to where the roast beef and potatoes and salad were in the fridge and then where the plates and microwave were. Natasha sat with her dinner as Peggy steeped her tea and ate Agent Gruning's peach pie, which sat out on the counter under a glass dome.
"Have you gotten anywhere on who did this?" Peggy asked.
Natasha, mouth full, shook her head no. "Shooter's still a ghost and we don't have chatter that rules anything in or out."
Peggy sipped her tea and Natasha ate.
"When Steve brought everyone out of captivity the first time," Peggy began after she finished her pie, "we didn't quite have the support network that exists today. We were on the front lines, in hot pursuit of the Germans across Italy. In most cases, the Army returned the rescued to duty so long as they could march and we were reasonably sure they wouldn't eat their gun."
Natasha put her fork down because this was important. Peggy did not idly wander down memory lane, at least not with her.
"We knew some of them had been experimented upon, tortured, and yet they were not treated differently except that they were brought before military intelligence panels before being assigned to new duties," Peggy went on. "Acknowledging that kind of damage was not the done thing. The men pretended that nothing was wrong and we pretended not to notice when their masks slipped."
In the other room, a television playing on at low volume, but a character screamed and the agents watching it laughed.
"Bucky Barnes was a special case from the first moment," Peggy picked up. "He was the reason Steve had done what he'd done, which would have been enough. But, we eventually realized, he had been Zola's and Schmidt's favorite test subject and, therefore, the most brutally abused. Above and beyond the physical torture of the experimentation, there had been the psychological: the lives of other prisoners had been held over his head in exchange for his compliance. He needed rest and time to distance himself from his experiences, but instead he was asked to relive them in great detail so we could take notes.
"Chester Phillips was already planning what would become the Howling Commandos and everyone knew that Steve would want Bucky with him, so we studiously ignored behavior that was almost impossible to hide and sent him off with the others. We kept it out of the reports entirely, so that even if one were inclined to read between the lines, the true depth would be impossible to fathom."
Natasha knew a little about what James had been through before he'd joined the Commandos; it had been in his file as part of the explanation for why Schmidt had recognized him immediately when he'd been recovered by HYDRA after his fall from the train and presumed death. But the notes had been sparse and none of them had dated back earlier than a year and Natasha had not been able to access all of them even with her security clearance. She'd never gotten the full story, not even after the Winter Soldier became such a priority, and she had wondered at the time how much Fury was letting Steve see, how much Steve already knew, and how much he'd intuited anyway because it had probably been no easier to hide things from him then as now.
"I don't tell these tales out of school on a whim," Peggy said once it was just them again. "Nor to establish my bona fides as someone who knew Bucky Barnes before the fall. I tell you these things because Steve is not able to help him this time. And he deserves far more than we gave him last time."
This was the second time in two days she'd been told to save James from himself because Steve wasn't there to do it and she should resent it. Part of her did because both Fury and Peggy were assuming so much about their shared past, ignorant as they were of the details of its sundering and how much it still hurt Natasha to face what had been done to him because of her. Especially if Sonia's theory was correct and it had truly been about her. She wanted to resent the way they were using her friendship with Steve as a lever to force her into action, but she had a suspicion that if she complained about it to Clint, he'd remind her that she hadn't hesitated a moment to follow Steve to Latveria to find James and this was no different, just with less chance of actual bloodshed.
"What was he like?" Natasha asked instead of pointing out the unfairness of the position she was being put in. Because if she were honest with herself, she would admit that James had meant something very special to her once and, no matter what they were now, she would not see him drown even if she didn't feel any obligation toward Steve. "You're the second person in two days to ask me to make reparations to Bucky Barnes, but I don't know who he is. I've never met him."
Peggy's wry smile faded into a fond one. "I rather suspect you did, although maybe neither of you knew it at the time."
One of the other agents passed through the kitchen, nodding at Peggy, and she nodded back.
"The Bucky I knew was not the one Steve knew," Peggy continued after a moment. "I didn't meet him until after he'd been hardened by war and then tortured by Zola and there was a shadow to him from those experiences that never quite left him. Nonetheless, I think the essentials were probably very similar, if not quite the same, and even if his personality was muted in the first weeks of our association, by the time he got to London to set up the Commandos, we all saw what we were going to get.
"He was, in many ways, Steve's opposite. His complement. He was more worldly than Steve, a realist to Steve's idealist, and he protected Steve fiercely because of that. He was brash and shrewd and far more clever than he ever let on, a little crude, and a skirt-chaser with a success rate that boggled the mind once you'd heard his pick-up lines. A tremendous heart and boundless loyalty, although he reserved those for a select few and the rest could go hang. He was the team sergeant of the Commandos for his own merits, not just because he was Steve's childhood friend or because Dugan didn't want to do it. Sound at all familiar?"
"To Agent Barton, yes," Natasha replied. "To the man I knew, not much."
To the man she had spent the last couple of days with, however, maybe a little. But she'd also seen bits of her James, too. Maybe they were not so separate after all.
Peggy thought the comparison the Clint was funny, but not for the reason Natasha expected. "Steve saw it, too, very much so."
Natasha went upstairs alone; Peggy's bedroom was on the main level and she looked tired. She asked Natasha to say goodnight to Steve for her.
"Do you think he can hear us?" Natasha asked, curious.
"At this stage of his recovery, probably not," Peggy replied. "But that's not why I do it and, besides, we could be wrong."
It was something for Natasha to think about when she got back upstairs and saw James sitting at Steve's bedside, holding Steve's left hand in his right and speaking quietly to him. He stopped talking when Natasha entered the room, although he didn't turn to her and she hadn't done anything to announce her presence.
"Telling him your secrets?" she asked lightly as she stood at the foot of the bed. James turned to look at her; he'd clearly been crying, but he looked happier -- more at peace with himself, perhaps -- than he had earlier.
"Confessing my sins," he answered. "Better to get it out of the way now."
"When he can't hear you?"
"When he can't give me that look and tell me that it doesn't matter."
"He's just going to do it later," Natasha replied and she knew it was ridiculously optimistic to say that, that they didn't know if Steve would ever open his eyes again and, if he did, if he would recognize anyone he looked at. "He's made his peace with what you did."
The others always took care to emphasize James's lack of free will as the Winter Soldier, the compulsion, but Natasha was the only one to have really known the Winter Soldier and she understood in ways that the others did not how very uncompelled it must feel for him, how unforced, and therefore how culpable he assumed himself to be.
"At least one of us did," James replied sourly. "But I'm the one who has to live with it under my skin."
Natasha nodded, since there was nothing to be said for that. "If you want to eat, there's food downstairs."
James looked about to protest, but then his stomach rumbled loudly. He makes a face. "Ratted out from within," he groused with false irritation, placing Steve's hand carefully back on the bed and standing up. "You can talk to Natasha for a while," he told Steve. "And make sure you speak up. You know how you get around pretty girls."
He didn't meet her eyes as he left the room. Natasha sat down in the chair Peggy had been using and dragged it up close to the bed so she was about level with Steve's shoulders.
"Your friends have dumped one hell of an assignment on me," she told him. "You are so lucky I like you."
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.
They arrived in DC in the evening via quinjet. James spent the flight reading notes on a SHIELD tablet: Steve's medical file (authorized by Peggy, who had been told of James's arrival before he'd even stepped foot aboard the 'Carrier), the various reports attached to Steve's shooting, and then the files on the mission to Doomstadt, which Natasha hadn't realized he was looking at until she saw James lean back with closed eyes and let the tablet rest on his lap and then she could see the scanned images of one of Steve's own AARs and made the connection after catching a few words of it. Steve, who until the end had written his post-mission thoughts out longhand (Tapper usually got a secretary to transcribe them), had written the facts as they were and had been, but he'd also given James a ringing endorsement as someone with a future as a force of good.
She wondered if Fury had sent him the file intentionally or if James had simply found it of his own accord.
SHIELD had booked them rooms in the same hotel as the investigation team was staying in and, after checking in with Rasmussen, the lead agent on the team, and setting up a schedule for the following day, they were left to their own devices.
"Do you want to come have dinner with me or do you want some time to yourself?" Natasha asked James when it was just the two of them again. "It's been a long day."
He chuffed out a humorless laugh at her understatement, then shook his head. "I don't know."
She looked at him carefully and he let her examine him, not dropping his gaze or turning away. He looked fragile, which did not make him any less deadly, and he looked lost. And he looked like he was very close to burying it all under the comforting blank mask of the Winter Soldier, who was never fragile or lost.
"We can revisit the options after dinner," she told him. "Let's go."
Over a meal at the Oval Room, she carried the conversation with relative ease. When he'd raised an eyebrow at the menu, she'd told him of how she'd come to love food, good food, since leaving the Red Room and its bioengineered meals calculated to provide maximum nutrition with minimal fuss (or taste). When he asked her if this meant that she cooked, she'd laughed and assured him that she absolutely did not. And then she took the calculated risk of telling him that Steve did, that he'd gotten pretty good at it, that cooking had become his hobby and respite away from the job along with his art.
James did not hide his interest in these details about Steve's life, so she went on to explain Steve's farmer's market adventures, including the time he'd bought half a cow and how the rest of the Avengers kept inviting themselves over for beef dinners.
"We invited ourselves over for dinner a lot, cow or no cow," she admitted. "We brought food sometimes so he could try new things, but mostly he cooked for us. He said once it was the best way he could think of to pay you back for feeding him."
Steve used to laugh when he'd talk about how James had always gotten jobs in the food industry -- stocking shelves at the supermarket, waiting tables -- so that they'd be able to supplement their meager income with whatever he could scrounge, dented cans and bruised fruit and table scraps from diners who'd never consider a doggie bag. Steve would laugh, but it had been wistful laughter, tinged with sadness and a little bit of amazement at how lucky he'd been to be taken care of like that when he'd had no right to expect that from anyone.
Here and now, James put down his knife and fork and closed his eyes to keep the tears at bay.
"He's also befriended a young female agent," Natasha went on, changing gears because she'd wanted to draw him out, not shut him down. "Or maybe she befriended him. I wasn't around when that began. Either way, they send each other photographs of their meals, although it has finally progressed to eating said meals in each other's presence."
James opened his eyes and raised his eyebrows in silent question.
"It's all very chaste and very sweet," Natasha assured, smiling at James's eyeroll. "And he blushes whenever anyone -- including Peggy -- intimates otherwise. But she's done wonders for his chopsticks skills."
"Which is sadly not a euphemism for anything," James said wryly, although the smile that accompanied his words did not yet quite reach his eyes. Natasha laughed, however.
"He's still only got eyes for Peggy," she told him and James did not look at all surprised. "Miranda, I suspect, understands that. I don't know her well enough to know if that was a relief or a disappointment."
James smiled again, this time less forced, then he sobered. "He was happy, though, right? He was okay?"
Natasha smiled. She felt more optimism looking at his concerned and hopeful expression than she had when she'd seen him board the plane in Cluj. Getting James to come in from the cold had only ever been a tiny part of the battle. Getting him to care about something more than revenge, to care about other people and see past his own pain, that was always going to have been the bigger fight.
"He was happy," she assured him, reaching out to touch his flesh-and-bone hand. "He also wanted nothing more than for you to be able to say the same."
James turned his hand so that her fingers rested on his palm and his curled around her wrist briefly, a ghost of a touch reminiscent of a far different time, before withdrawing completely. He picked up his knife and fork again and she chose to be graceful about his retreat.
"I'm gonna need a little more work than he did," James said, attention back on his pork chop.
It wasn't for her to tell him what she'd overheard Tony say to Pepper and Peggy that night aboard the Helicarrier before she'd fled: "He'd finally stopped wishing I could build him a time machine, but I'd give anything right now to have been able to punt him back to 1944 to avoid this."
"He needed a little more work than you think he did," was what she did say, leaving him to his safe distance.
Despite the occasional uncomfortable moments, she felt dinner was a positive experience, a far better alternative than leaving James to brood in his hotel room, and he seemed to feel the same. They walked back to the hotel in a companionable quietude, her arm looped in his, keeping their conversation limited to observations about their environment and what time they should meet the following morning and where.
If she felt a bit of the old pull anyway, she was more than happy to chalk it up to good food and wine and the fact that she'd been up for more than thirty-six hours with only a nap to keep her going.
James walked her back to her room and she kissed him on the cheek goodnight, mostly to get it out of her system and maybe a little to see what he would do. (Answer: look at her thoughtfully.) He didn't continue on to his room, instead turning back toward the elevator and she called after him to make sure he got a little sleep because tomorrow was going to be a very long day. He gave her a vague hand gesture that could have been "yes, I know" or "I don't care," but he never turned to face her, so she didn't know for certain.
There was a text from Clint on her phone and she answered it, telling him that they were in DC and would be flying out tomorrow and that James knew. Clint could unpack it properly.
The phone rang for her wake-up call ten minutes after she turned off the light (not really) and there was a gentle knock on her door a half-hour later, by which point she was showered and dressed and packed, if not necessarily alert.
"Did you sleep at all?" she asked James as he entered bearing coffee and what turned out to be still-warm croissants for her and a bagel for himself.
"Yes, Mom," he drawled, dropping his backpack on the floor next to the club chair and sitting down. "I went over to the World War II memorial, said hello to a few friends, then came back. It was harder than I thought, but not for the reasons I expected."
She waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't, so she finished her breakfast and looked around for where she'd kicked off her right shoe the night before.
It wouldn't be officially summer for another few days, but DC was already swampy and warm. James was still dressed in long sleeves with his pressure glove despite the heat; in someplace quieter that wasn't crawling with spies, he could probably expose the arm without drawing attention, but here there was no such option. Natasha wore a sundress; she was working, but not working and this was no weather for long pants, let alone kevlar-nomex weave.
The sniper's nest was on the roof of a mixed-use high-rise in Rosslyn, Virginia, at the very far end of the range for a good sniper using a heavy caliber bullet but still within the protective sphere of the presidential security detail. Which in turn was getting plenty of heat for missing the assassin, even if the President hadn't been the target. The hide site had been well-camouflaged and had avoided aerial surveillance; Natasha had seen the video footage and there'd been nothing to spot with the naked eye or even with heat sensors. The assassin had apparently hidden under a heat-shielding blanket that had been designed with that particular roof in mind as far as camouflage. Which meant that the shooting had been long in the planning.
James lay down in the sniper's spot now, bringing a scope on a tripod to his eye and settling in. She'd seen him like this once before and she'd seen Clint a few times since; there was a way that the best snipers had about them, the way they didn't so much relax themselves as give the impression of almost melting into the ground. It was why she'd never been a good sniper or even much of a distance shooter at all -- she could be still as a statue and patient as a grandmother, but she couldn't do this.
She and Rasmussen watched James for a few moments, but it was frankly rather boring, so they looked around at the vista and Rasmussen ended up taking her over to the other side of the roof, where they'd found evidence that the roof camera had been tampered with even though the video had been gone over frame by frame and they could find no evidence of looping or splicing going back three days before the shooting.
After about fifteen minutes, James started asking questions, not raising his voice enough to be heard from where they were standing, so they had to go back over to where he was and have him begin again. James's questions were mostly about the weather and wind speed (the day of, the week of, two weeks, a month), about when particular trees in the cemetery had been trimmed and by who and at whose order, about details that pertained to the sniper's rifle that they still had no specifics on but James (like Clint before him) was assuming had been custom-built because all of the rifles that accepted the kind of bullet that had shot Steve (Bulgarian-made anti-tank round, mass-produced and essentially untraceable) should have left a different kind of residue pattern than what had been found. Most of these questions had been asked by Clint as part of the original investigation and Rasmussen had the answers, but a few had her scribbling down notes and promising to get back to him as soon as possible.
After James got up and dusted himself off, Rasmussen explained what they were doing about tracing building access and the massive computer power required to do facial recognition on the building's camera footage -- assuming that the other cameras, including the one across the street -- had not been similarly tweaked like the one on the roof. She asked if they had any questions, gave them her card when they said no and assured them that she was great with email, then apologized because she had to get to a meeting with the Secret Service to hopefully get more out of them than Fury had because she looked less likely to bite their heads off and spit them out afterward.
"If they try to feed me bullshit again," she said with a sigh, "I will not be shy about telling them that they should stick to chasing meth-heads who try to pass counterfeit twenties at 7-11s, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt first."
After Rasmussen left, Natasha and James poked around on the roof for a little bit and then headed back downstairs, looking over the stairwell once more even though they'd gone over it with Rasmussen earlier. And then they got a taxi to the airport, the ride taking half the time Natasha had budgeted for it, and so they got lunch at the Five Guys and wandered into the newspaper stand to look at headlines. James bought himself the first Harry Potter novel because people with nothing to do on airplanes stood out and everything else had been chick lit or spy thrillers.
They were flying to Denver and then driving up; there hadn't been enough time for SHIELD to provide them with a clean vehicle, so they had to rent one and clear it themselves. They did a graceful two-person security check in the lot (she dropped the keys so that she could look under the chassis, he 'accidentally' opened the hood while checking that everything on the dash worked and got a look at the engine block) and they disabled the GPS and swept for bugs before they got to the first corner.
The drive would be almost three hours and it began quietly after Natasha called the safehouse to let them know they were en route. James turned on the radio, but he couldn't seem to find anything he liked, so he turned it off again. He'd gotten a little restless on the plane, not really reading his book and not trying to sleep, just staring out the window at the clouds and fidgeting in a way that had hardly been noticeable and yet deeply distracting at the same time. She'd suspected it was him realizing what he was flying toward -- who he was flying toward -- and didn't press, although she had told him that if he didn't still, she had a paralytic agent and she'd use it.
"Do you even know what you're looking for?" she asked him after his second attempt at the radio, curious. Steve had had trouble finding modern music that didn't make him wince or laugh. Clint and Tony had separately and together spent a lot of time trying to find something he'd like -- the two of them had surprisingly overlapping tastes -- but it turned out that nature was stronger than nurture and Steve stuck to the music that he probably would have enjoyed best if he'd lived his normal lifespan. He liked the music from the forties and fifties and sixties, the Standards that came right after the war and early pop music and some jazz (but not Miles Davis) and his iPod had a lot of Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford and The Supremes and Buddy Holly and Elvis was about as edgy as he was likely to get. Old Man Music, Tony liked to call it, but it all tended to appear on the playlists when they were over at Stark Tower for a social occasion anyway.
"Not really," he admitted, sounding a little grateful for the distraction. "I was never sent on any missions where music was something I needed to know or care about."
The Winter Soldier's work had been solitary and silent. The Black Widow's had often been neither, but she'd only decided on her own tastes relatively recently, entirely because Clint had been so absolutely appalled that she had no preferences that she felt obligated to develop them just for the sake of their working relationship. The first moment she'd ever looked at Clint and thought friend was over beers and burgers and Led Zeppelin II.
While she was curious what James would think of her affection for Seventies guitar rock, as a gesture of goodwill she pulled out her phone and found out whether Denver had a baseball team, what it was called, if they were playing, and on what station; she thought the game dull and slow, but she knew from Steve that James had been a fan. Perhaps he still was.
He gave her a look when he realized it was baseball on the radio.
"Colorado Rockies versus the Arizona Diamondbacks," she reported.
"You like baseball?" he asked, surprised and maybe, she thought, a little hopeful. Or maybe she was imagining it.
"Absolutely not," she replied firmly. "But you can take me to a Rangers game in the winter."
It was a spontaneous thing to say, to presume that he'd be around come hockey season, that he'd want to either go or go with her.
"It's a date," he said with a sly grin and Natasha, for a moment, heard both her James and Steve's Bucky in the insouciant tone. She thought he heard it, too, because he seemed startled and maybe not entirely comfortable with it and the smile faded.
They drove on in silence, only the baseball game between them, for the next fifty miles.
The overlapping layers of security at the safehouse meant that their approach had been monitored from before they'd turned off US-85 and so it was no surprise that the outside lights turned on as they came up the driveway and Natasha could see at least three agents in tactical gear on the sides of the house. They were given retinal scans before they were allowed to climb up the porch steps, where Lieutenant Commander Yondo, the detachment CO, greeted them with a nod.
"Ms. Carter and Captain Rogers are upstairs," he told them. "Second door on the right off the stairs."
The house functioned like a regular house, albeit one with combat-outpost defenses, so they entered into a foyer with an askew row of toed-off shoes, presumably whatever some of the agents wore off-duty, a pegboard for keys, and the other odds and ends that made a home look lived in. Natasha could smell food and see the kitchen down the hallway at the back of the house and then the living and dining room on the sides, but her attention was on the staircase and what came at the other end.
James gave her a quick look like he, too, was considering turning and running and she frowned at them both, steeled herself, and pushed James lightly on the arm so that he'd start climbing. They could hear Peggy's voice as they got to the top landing, telling Steve that he had visitors and who they were, commenting acerbically that Bucky clearly considered timeliness no more of a priority today than when he'd made Steve late to half of the planning meetings during the war. "Don't think we didn't know who you were really apologizing for."
There was a guard, rifle cradled in his arms as he sat with a view to both the stairs and the length of the upstairs hallway, and Natasha nodded to him as they followed Peggy's voice, then nearly walked into James's back because he was frozen outside of Steve's doorway, a look of such utter grief and guilt on his face that she had to tamp down the urge to turn away.
"Well don't just stand there, Sergeant," Peggy exhorted and James shook himself free of his stupor and took steps forward, Natasha behind him, and then stopped again.
There was an empty chair on the other side of Steve's bed from Peggy and Natasha pushed James toward it gently, not sure if he was present enough to recognize her as not an enemy. But he went unresisting. He didn't sit though, instead standing by the bedside over Steve and looking him over as if he wasn't sure Steve was real before she could see the mask drop down as he cataloged Steve's condition with a professional eye and an impassive expression.
Steve looked deceptively unharmed. There was very little amiss below the neck; the damage from the resuscitation efforts was long gone and all that remained was just the mess of tubes and wires and electrodes. Above the neck, Steve's face was still partially obscured by the halo and the ventilator, but Natasha thought that he looked less pale and that made him look a little bit further from death's door than he had been aboard the Helicarrier.
"Jesus, Stevie," James huffed out, his voice breaking. He reached out and gently touched Steve's cheek with his right hand, then pulled it back.
"He's not quite that fragile," Peggy told him softly. "Sit down, catch up, apologize for being so appallingly tardy."
James looked over at Natasha, a maelstrom of emotions on his face, then looked back at Steve. "I think I have worse things to apologize for."
"Of course you do," Peggy agreed, pushing herself to standing and reaching for her cane. "But you know he doesn't hold any of it against you, so just pick the most recent crime and move on."
James shook his head. "I'm the reason he's here."
"Aren't you full of yourself, Bucky Barnes?" Peggy asked tartly. "You are not responsible for this and if you want to insist otherwise, you are going to have to fight everyone from Nick Fury on down for the privilege."
He didn't say anything, but Natasha didn't think he looked like he'd bought a word of what she'd said, even if he didn't protest further.
"There will be plenty of time for self-recrimination later, most of which isn't your fault, either," Peggy went on when the silence stretched. "But right now, all you need to do to make things right is be here. If you can't do that without apologizing for something, apologize to me for breaking in to my home and scaring me half to death. Although even that's optional as I got quite a few leftovers in the bargain."
Peggy had called Steve, who'd driven down to Philly before calling Clint, who'd called Natasha, who'd ended up dusting Peggy's kitchen table for prints before they'd sat down to pastrami sandwiches and wondered what kind of game was being played on them.
James tried to smile, but it didn't really work. It was close enough for Peggy to give him partial credit, though, and gesture with her free hand to the chair Natasha had pushed him toward earlier. "Sit down and stay a while, I am going to show Miss Romanova the results of Agent Gruning's pie-making adventures."
Peggy cocked an eyebrow at Natasha, as if challenging her, but Natasha, well-used to Peggy's brand of scene control by now, merely gestured for her to go first. They left without James either sitting or protesting, but he could make up his mind without them. Peggy led her past the stairs to the elevator, which had been one of the modifications made. "I try to do at least three trips up and down the stairs daily," Peggy explained as the door slid open. "But I'm slow and it's late and I'm tired."
There were two agents in the kitchen when they arrive, both dressed in jeans and t-shirts and visibly armed.They'd just finished eating dinner and reported that there was plenty more and the female asked if Peggy would like tea. Peggy smiled and said yes, thank you.
"You should eat," Peggy told Natasha once they were settled at the table.
It had been about nine hours since the burgers in DC, but Natasha replied that she'd wait for James and Peggy shook her head. "He'll be there for a while and I am not sure he'll eat later."
Amelia, the agent who was putting up water for Peggy's tea, directed Natasha to where the roast beef and potatoes and salad were in the fridge and then where the plates and microwave were. Natasha sat with her dinner as Peggy steeped her tea and ate Agent Gruning's peach pie, which sat out on the counter under a glass dome.
"Have you gotten anywhere on who did this?" Peggy asked.
Natasha, mouth full, shook her head no. "Shooter's still a ghost and we don't have chatter that rules anything in or out."
Peggy sipped her tea and Natasha ate.
"When Steve brought everyone out of captivity the first time," Peggy began after she finished her pie, "we didn't quite have the support network that exists today. We were on the front lines, in hot pursuit of the Germans across Italy. In most cases, the Army returned the rescued to duty so long as they could march and we were reasonably sure they wouldn't eat their gun."
Natasha put her fork down because this was important. Peggy did not idly wander down memory lane, at least not with her.
"We knew some of them had been experimented upon, tortured, and yet they were not treated differently except that they were brought before military intelligence panels before being assigned to new duties," Peggy went on. "Acknowledging that kind of damage was not the done thing. The men pretended that nothing was wrong and we pretended not to notice when their masks slipped."
In the other room, a television playing on at low volume, but a character screamed and the agents watching it laughed.
"Bucky Barnes was a special case from the first moment," Peggy picked up. "He was the reason Steve had done what he'd done, which would have been enough. But, we eventually realized, he had been Zola's and Schmidt's favorite test subject and, therefore, the most brutally abused. Above and beyond the physical torture of the experimentation, there had been the psychological: the lives of other prisoners had been held over his head in exchange for his compliance. He needed rest and time to distance himself from his experiences, but instead he was asked to relive them in great detail so we could take notes.
"Chester Phillips was already planning what would become the Howling Commandos and everyone knew that Steve would want Bucky with him, so we studiously ignored behavior that was almost impossible to hide and sent him off with the others. We kept it out of the reports entirely, so that even if one were inclined to read between the lines, the true depth would be impossible to fathom."
Natasha knew a little about what James had been through before he'd joined the Commandos; it had been in his file as part of the explanation for why Schmidt had recognized him immediately when he'd been recovered by HYDRA after his fall from the train and presumed death. But the notes had been sparse and none of them had dated back earlier than a year and Natasha had not been able to access all of them even with her security clearance. She'd never gotten the full story, not even after the Winter Soldier became such a priority, and she had wondered at the time how much Fury was letting Steve see, how much Steve already knew, and how much he'd intuited anyway because it had probably been no easier to hide things from him then as now.
"I don't tell these tales out of school on a whim," Peggy said once it was just them again. "Nor to establish my bona fides as someone who knew Bucky Barnes before the fall. I tell you these things because Steve is not able to help him this time. And he deserves far more than we gave him last time."
This was the second time in two days she'd been told to save James from himself because Steve wasn't there to do it and she should resent it. Part of her did because both Fury and Peggy were assuming so much about their shared past, ignorant as they were of the details of its sundering and how much it still hurt Natasha to face what had been done to him because of her. Especially if Sonia's theory was correct and it had truly been about her. She wanted to resent the way they were using her friendship with Steve as a lever to force her into action, but she had a suspicion that if she complained about it to Clint, he'd remind her that she hadn't hesitated a moment to follow Steve to Latveria to find James and this was no different, just with less chance of actual bloodshed.
"What was he like?" Natasha asked instead of pointing out the unfairness of the position she was being put in. Because if she were honest with herself, she would admit that James had meant something very special to her once and, no matter what they were now, she would not see him drown even if she didn't feel any obligation toward Steve. "You're the second person in two days to ask me to make reparations to Bucky Barnes, but I don't know who he is. I've never met him."
Peggy's wry smile faded into a fond one. "I rather suspect you did, although maybe neither of you knew it at the time."
One of the other agents passed through the kitchen, nodding at Peggy, and she nodded back.
"The Bucky I knew was not the one Steve knew," Peggy continued after a moment. "I didn't meet him until after he'd been hardened by war and then tortured by Zola and there was a shadow to him from those experiences that never quite left him. Nonetheless, I think the essentials were probably very similar, if not quite the same, and even if his personality was muted in the first weeks of our association, by the time he got to London to set up the Commandos, we all saw what we were going to get.
"He was, in many ways, Steve's opposite. His complement. He was more worldly than Steve, a realist to Steve's idealist, and he protected Steve fiercely because of that. He was brash and shrewd and far more clever than he ever let on, a little crude, and a skirt-chaser with a success rate that boggled the mind once you'd heard his pick-up lines. A tremendous heart and boundless loyalty, although he reserved those for a select few and the rest could go hang. He was the team sergeant of the Commandos for his own merits, not just because he was Steve's childhood friend or because Dugan didn't want to do it. Sound at all familiar?"
"To Agent Barton, yes," Natasha replied. "To the man I knew, not much."
To the man she had spent the last couple of days with, however, maybe a little. But she'd also seen bits of her James, too. Maybe they were not so separate after all.
Peggy thought the comparison the Clint was funny, but not for the reason Natasha expected. "Steve saw it, too, very much so."
Natasha went upstairs alone; Peggy's bedroom was on the main level and she looked tired. She asked Natasha to say goodnight to Steve for her.
"Do you think he can hear us?" Natasha asked, curious.
"At this stage of his recovery, probably not," Peggy replied. "But that's not why I do it and, besides, we could be wrong."
It was something for Natasha to think about when she got back upstairs and saw James sitting at Steve's bedside, holding Steve's left hand in his right and speaking quietly to him. He stopped talking when Natasha entered the room, although he didn't turn to her and she hadn't done anything to announce her presence.
"Telling him your secrets?" she asked lightly as she stood at the foot of the bed. James turned to look at her; he'd clearly been crying, but he looked happier -- more at peace with himself, perhaps -- than he had earlier.
"Confessing my sins," he answered. "Better to get it out of the way now."
"When he can't hear you?"
"When he can't give me that look and tell me that it doesn't matter."
"He's just going to do it later," Natasha replied and she knew it was ridiculously optimistic to say that, that they didn't know if Steve would ever open his eyes again and, if he did, if he would recognize anyone he looked at. "He's made his peace with what you did."
The others always took care to emphasize James's lack of free will as the Winter Soldier, the compulsion, but Natasha was the only one to have really known the Winter Soldier and she understood in ways that the others did not how very uncompelled it must feel for him, how unforced, and therefore how culpable he assumed himself to be.
"At least one of us did," James replied sourly. "But I'm the one who has to live with it under my skin."
Natasha nodded, since there was nothing to be said for that. "If you want to eat, there's food downstairs."
James looked about to protest, but then his stomach rumbled loudly. He makes a face. "Ratted out from within," he groused with false irritation, placing Steve's hand carefully back on the bed and standing up. "You can talk to Natasha for a while," he told Steve. "And make sure you speak up. You know how you get around pretty girls."
He didn't meet her eyes as he left the room. Natasha sat down in the chair Peggy had been using and dragged it up close to the bed so she was about level with Steve's shoulders.
"Your friends have dumped one hell of an assignment on me," she told him. "You are so lucky I like you."
