fic: Revenant (16/17)

[domarzione]

Revenant: Chapter Sixteen
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.

---

"We've already called the Israelis," Hill said as the video of the Red Skull played on. "Schmidt is in his cell."

Natasha finally unfroze from her shock and retrieved the chair James had sent careening into her and then into the wall. James was still standing, eyes glued to the screen, and didn't notice. "Is it still Schmidt?"

Hill made a face. "It still seems to be, as far as they can tell. Matthias Kuersteiner is hardly likely to lie for the man whose held him hostage for more than fifty years."

Kuersteiner was the man whose body and identity Schmidt had stolen in the 1960s when he'd agreed to vacate the body of young Andreas von Strucker, where he'd wound up after using the Tesseract against Steve. There had been no way to save Kuersteiner from continuing to share Schmidt's fate -- even if they had a way to separate out the two consciousnesses, which they did not, they had nowhere to put the one they removed. All they could do was apologize, which was a very meager act indeed, and quietly close his missing person file, giving his remaining family the closure they'd been lacking.

James and Clint spoke almost at once. "I would."

The two of them shared a look that Natasha saw because she was physically between them, but one she could not understand in its entirety and prayed she never would. She'd been lied to during her childhood in Department X's care, made to believe things about herself that weren't true, but she'd never had to experience what James and Clint had, to be prisoners in their own bodies, forced to betray their friends and their principles and utterly helpless to do anything about it.

"If Schmidt found a way to get out of his head," James said, some invisible conversation having made him the spokesman of the pair, "if he promised to leave Kuersteiner alone, then Kuersteiner would do anything to make that happen. He'd sit in that prison cell and rot, pretending to be Schmidt, for the rest of his life if his silence meant he got to do it alone."

One of the analysts looked like they might want to question the point and Natasha prayed he kept his mouth shut. But then Fury spoke and the problem was solved.

"Barton, I want you on a flight to Israel today," he said. "Make sure it's Schmidt and then see if he'll tell you who is borrowing his identity. My guess is that while he wouldn't mind if one of his old lieutenants took up the reins of power, he's going to mind a lot if they do so wearing his old face."

Natasha touched James's hand to draw his attention and gesture that he sit down again. He did, but his eyes remained on the screen. Once upon a time, Natasha knew, while Zola had been James's primary torturer, Johann Schmidt had been there at the prison in Italy, too, trying out his own ideas on how to improve his version of Erskine's formula on prisoners like James. And later on, he'd been the one to claim the amnesiac James for his own, giving him an arm but not a name and turning him into a HYDRA weapon before the Russians had ever met him. Everyone thought Steve had the most history with Schmidt and maybe, in terms of years and prestige, he did, but James's was more brutal by far.

"We are running the audio through voice recognition," Hill began, "but if we turn up the volume--" she broke off while the probie at the laptop did just that, "--you'll notice that there are masking filters applied. I'm assured that we can reverse that, but until then we're using speech patterns as well as seeing what we can get for a map of the real face underneath. That mask is pretty form-fitting, but a minor prosthesis or filler in the right spot and we'll never get an ID through facial rec."

Natasha had done work on the Red Skull and HYDRA, especially after Steve's body had been found in the ice -- it had been natural to wonder if the Red Skull could have survived as well, especially because they hadn't known, until Steve told them, that Johann Schmidt had disappeared from the plane before the crash. The Red Skull talking on the screen looked, to Natasha's admittedly novice eyes, like the real thing. James had actually seen it up close, however, and judging by how rattled he was, the resemblance was probably very close indeed.

"We're including Lukin in this?" Zubov, one of the analysts from the Russia Desk, asked.

"We are," Hill agreed. "Mister Barnes, do you have much experience listening to Lukin speak English?"

James didn't quite startle, but his attention clearly hadn't been fully -- or even mostly -- on the conversation around him. "No," he said. "He spoke Russian to me and Latverian to his staff. Sometimes he spoke English on the phone, but I don't remember it being notable and I didn't pay much attention when he did."

"We have experts on Lukin," Zubov assured. Natasha had worked with him on several occasions and thought him to be the most useful of the Russia Desk section heads. "We'll have them sit through the video."

"Good," Hill replied, then turned to the head of the HYDRA task force. "Sanchez, you'll have your people look it over as well, see if anyone thinks he looks familiar."

There was more, but it didn't involve action for either Natasha or James, just requirements that they be available to answer questions, him more than her, and a vague warning that one or both of them might be sent abroad to chase down leads. Natasha waited until the analysts and aides left and it was just her and James and Clint with Fury and Hill because there would be more to discuss that other ears should not be allowed to hear.

"You should double whatever you're doing for Steve and Peggy's protection," James said as soon as the door was closed. It wasn't a suggestion and James's tone and his posture, even while sitting, made it very clear that he was in no mood to be disagreed with. "Whoever that is, Lukin or not, he isn't going to stop with just the mask."

There was a chance that whoever was underneath the mask was just using it as a shorthand for respectability within the HYDRA ranks, a callback to their first and most successful leader meant to unify and not as any kind of symbolism or return to first principles. But that was unlikely. Whoever was under that mask was going to use whatever they could to strengthen their connection to the first Red Skull and that, for better or for worse, revolved around Captain America and the people he'd left behind. If it were Lukin under the mask, that would include James, but if it weren't, then Peggy Carter was alone at the top of the list.

"We'll double the detail and have a sit-down with Stark about building security," Fury agreed readily, but James didn't relax at all. Natasha suspected he wouldn't until Steve and Peggy were in front of him, safe, and then he'd only relax into the comfort of guard duty. "You may need to talk to Ms. Carter yourself about her appointment book because she isn't too inclined to do what I tell her to do."

It was after dawn by the time Natasha and James got outside, close enough to the start of the civilian workday that the streets were already crowded and there were long lines for the coffee carts.

"Come on," Natasha exhorted, pulling on his arm so that he'd follow her west, toward the subway that would take them to her place, rather than east and the short walk to Stark Tower. "Steve's not even up yet and you haven't been to bed. It'll keep for a few hours."

Steve was probably up and waiting impatiently for his physical therapist to show up so he could get into the pool for his morning session, but James really needed to sleep for a little while.

James looked like he was going to argue with her, but then he gave in and let her drag him toward Broadway. When they got back to her apartment, she shooed him toward the bedroom but went to her laptop herself, writing a couple of quick emails to Sonia and a few other contacts about whether they'd heard anything about a new Red Skull. When she got to the bedroom, James was lying on top of the blankets still in his street clothes. He opened his eyes quickly enough that she knew he hadn't been even in a light doze.

"What's with you?" she asked, sitting on her side of the bed and pulling her knees up. She had told him his first night here that she didn't have a side, that she owned the bed and thus all sides were hers, so he'd claimed the side closer to the door, the more vulnerable side, and she'd let him. "What happened this week?"

She'd spent the night in Brooklyn on Monday, but conflicting schedules had kept them from so much as a shared meal since then. He'd seemed fine, but all they'd had since then were texts and so long as she wasn't getting one-word answers out of him, it wasn't a medium that lent itself to nuance. But she'd spoken to Steve and Peggy, too, and they absolutely would have said something if James had been off.

"That's the thing," he admitted, voice rough with exhaustion, wry expression on his face. "Nothing happened. It's been a completely normal week, for whatever counts as normal in my completely ridiculous life. Yesterday was fine. I looked at some Macedonian wreckage pictures with the analysts. I had dinner with Steve and we watched the Mets game. Peggy asked me if I could take her to Philly next month. I went home and made the connection at Fulton with, like, thirty seconds of wait time. I had a beer and watched the last two periods of Hawks-Kings game. And sometime during the third, I completely freaked out. I don't know why. But I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep until I was really tired, so after the game I started reading and then it was four AM and my phone rang."

Natasha had watched him closely as he'd spoken and she looked him over carefully now. He seemed more bewildered and frustrated than anything; the lingering tension she could attribute easily to seeing the Red Skull. He didn't look or sound on the verge of a breakdown -- or a breakthrough. She knew what he looked like when the weight of his world grew too much for him and this wasn't that. She also knew he'd been given anti-anxiety medication and had not taken a single pill; she knew better than to suggest he do so.

"Do you think you can sleep now?" she asked instead, reaching out to touch his face with her hand. He reached up and held her hand against his stubbly cheek, then turned and kissed it before letting it go.

"Are you offering to help?" he asked in reply, expression clearly stating what he was implying.

She rolled her eyes at him. But then he looked so hopeful that she had to laugh.

"I was going to get some work done while you rested," she began, but in a tone that James would know meant that she could be convinced to change her plans. He half-sat up and reached for her and she let him pull her down and do just that.

It was noon-ish when they got out of bed again. It felt both indulgent and necessary. Natasha checked her email while James was in the shower and Sonia wasn't the only one alarmed at the idea of any Red Skull roaming around. James talked to Peggy while Natasha showered and found out that yes, she and Steve had been told and James and Natasha were invited over for lunch to discuss things.

"I'm not surprised," Steve said as they sat around in the kitchen, watching him cook a frittata. He'd diced the veggies by himself -- slowly, carefully -- and now stood unaided at the stove with a spatula in his hand. He was still limited in what he could do on his own, but he was starting to do things on his own and that, in turn, had brought about a whole lot of other progress, mostly emotional. Steve was far less moody and much more Steve, even in the face of his continued disabilities. Which were diminishing for more reasons than just his willingness to work through them; his brain was still healing in the physical sense, too. "It makes sense that they'd use the iconography."

"The question is what else they're using," Peggy said, gesturing for James to get plates and set the table. "Once we get that, we will understand what they hope to gain by it besides more followers."

"It's a social media world," Natasha pointed out, reaching out to snag a pepper piece off of the cutting board, easily dodging Steve's swat because he'd not intended to hit her. "Depending on who is under the mask, getting more followers might be the sole purpose of the exercise."

She didn't think it was, but she'd encountered too many too-bright would-be power players who'd confused accruing notoriety with actually having power or knowing what to do with it. They had to keep it as an option, if only one that was more aspirational than likely.

"It'll be interesting if it does turn out to be Lukin," Steve said, focus entirely on the cutting board he was moving from the island to next to the stove. He waited until he'd set it down before continuing. "We never really got the full story about him and Schmidt."

James came back into the kitchen area and leaned against the fridge, on the opposite side of the stove from where Steve was arranging his ingredients. "I'm not sure 'interesting' is the word I'd use."

Steve looked at him carefully, like he was judging James's frame of mind, which he probably was. "Because you have a very peculiar vocabulary," he told James, smirking at James's frown.

They did this more often now, tease each other, verbal pokes -- and sometimes more physical pokes. Like brothers. It always made Natasha smile because it had taken them both so long to get to this point, over such different routes, and yet here they were. She snuck a look over to Peggy, who was slicing the baguette, and Peggy was smiling, too.

"Lukin knew who Schmidt was, but not vice-versa," Natasha said once James and Steve were done sticking their tongues out at each other. "Schmidt knew Karpov had control of the Winter Soldier, but didn't know enough about Karpov to realize his connections to both Lukin and Putin. He thought James had been set free at some point after Karpov's death and turned to organized crime because that's what so many others did. He had no idea he'd been set up by Lukin because he didn't know there was a Lukin to set him up."

The explanation was mostly for Peggy and James, since she knew that Steve had read those files many times, had watched the interrogation videos over and over, especially anything to do with the Winter Soldier.

"I don't know what Lukin knew about Schmidt," James said before anyone could ask. He had been asked a ton of questions about Lukin's motives and opinions over the months he'd been home, having to explain over and over again that he hadn't been Lukin's lieutenant or his confidante or anything that would give him insight into Lukin's plans on a grand scale. He'd been a specialist, a very unique one and the fact that he'd never been idle said enough about Lukin's activities, but, as he'd constantly told his questioners, he had never been Lukin's confessor. "He must have known enough to get me in position, but he didn't exactly explain why he wanted me there."

Steve finished what he was doing on the stove and asked James to open the oven so he could finish it in the broiler. James put the pan in himself because, as he'd put it, this was lunch, not OT, and he was hungry and didn't want to wait for Steve to start again if he dropped it.

"If it's not Lukin, are there any leads?" Steve asked as they waited. He was leaning against the countertop, arms crossed against his chest, and Natasha was struck by how normal it all looked -- this could have been Steve at any point before his shooting, looking thoughtful and relaxed as he made a meal for his friends and they discussed the craziness of the world they were a part of. "We've arrested or killed most of Schmidt's top guys, but there were a few still in the wild -- at least the last time I was involved."

He said the last part without emphasis and in the same tone he'd use to speak of something that had happened while he'd been in the ice. "It's just another lost year," he'd told Natasha the first time he'd caught her waiting for him to react. "I have so many, I can't let this one be special."

"They're mostly still in the wild," Natasha assured. Steve was pushing to be kept current on what was going on, mostly by asking his friends for informal briefings, but she didn't think he'd done any backreading on what he'd missed. "Bregnoff and Staudevan got pulled in, Girardi got himself killed in Malta, everyone else is pretty much where you left them. As for the new suspects, we have a few, but most of them have ties to Lukin because he was the one consolidating power until Doom spooked him. If it's someone new, not affiliated with either Schmidt or Lukin, we don't have a clue."

When the timer went off, James pointed a finger at Steve, who was reaching for the potholders. "Don't you even think about it," he warned, grabbing them out from under Steve's reach. He carried it straight to the table, leaving Natasha to take the bread and salad and leave Steve and Peggy to get themselves to the table. James came back to help Peggy and Steve made the walk himself. He was less steady over open ground than he was in the confines of the kitchen, but he made it without incident, even if he grasped the chair back hard once he got close enough.

Lunch, by unspoken agreement, was a break from work. They talked about Steve and Peggy's upcoming adventure at the Met, which Fury was still insisting wasn't going to happen despite knowing full well that it was. Pepper and Tony were taking Peggy and Steve to the Corot and Turner exhibit during the sponsor previews, which would give them space and privacy. Steve was going to use the inducer, although there was still some argument about what he would look like, and both he and Peggy would be in wheelchairs. It was a risk and there would need to be security precautions taken, but they were both looking forward to it unabashedly. It would be Steve's first trip outside since he'd gotten back to New York, his first activity that wasn't directly related to his rehab since he'd been shot, and Natasha was almost blown away by the degree of want he was showing, although she shouldn't have been.

"You should come," Peggy told James, who waved his fork in refusal because his mouth was full.

"I got dragged to the Brooklyn Museum a million times when we were kids," he said once he'd swallowed. "Every damned weekend unless I found something better for us to do. Then I was going with him to the Met because they got something new he wanted to see and he needed it for school and I was working in Manhattan. The war didn't even slow him down. What happens when we get to London? Stark's got stashes of booze and food that wasn't in cans and girls to enjoy both with, but the Man with a Plan over there was dragging me off to any place that still had pictures on the walls and then a few places where the fancy stuff was being hidden. I have been subjected to as much culture as I need to be."

Steve was grinning broadly at the rant, Peggy's smile was only slightly more restrained, and even James was having a hard time keeping a straight face. Natasha happened to know that while James was never going to be a culture vulture, he was not nearly the lowbrow ignoramus he claimed to be. He knew more about art than could have been acquired by indifferent osmosis and he was well-read considering how little time he'd actually had for such an activity in his lifetime. Books had been the Winter Soldier's sole companions during his assignments, she suspected.

"You could have said no," Steve pointed out. "The Mills Brothers weren't exactly going to follow me into the museum and nobody was going to bother me in London."

James made a face as he stabbed a cucumber slice. "I had an obligation," he said. "Especially in London. Who else was going to keep you distracted so that the boys could have their fun?"

"Is that what we're calling it?" Peggy asked dryly. James and Steve exchanged a look that had the both of them near to bursting with laughter.

Natasha asked about Miranda, since she wasn't around.

"She's back at her real job this week," Steve replied with a smirk. He knew better than to think that Miranda's time with him -- and Peggy -- was out of obligation or requirement regardless of the arrangements made to assure its existence. "Whatever she's doing to backstop her visits here doesn't require her presence at Stark Industries, so... It's good for her, though. She's been doing her best to keep track of her real work while she's here, but I don't think she minds being able to give it her full attention for a few days instead of sitting with a Starkpad while I'm finger painting or relearning how to type."

Peggy snorted. "What he really means to say is that he doesn't mind at all that noodle soup and the resulting chopsticks practice have been pushed back."

Steve made a noise of protest, but it was drowned out by James's and Natasha's laughter.

"I'm looking forward to it," Peggy continued, undeterred. "We've ordered the beef bones for stock and we're going to make the noodles ourselves."

Peggy and Miranda got on like gangbusters for more reasons than it was frequently the two of them against Steve's intractability. Peggy, despite the difference in age and circumstance, was in many ways a good role model and mentor for Miranda in a way that Natasha could never have been even if she'd tried. Both women had jumped in feet-first to incredibly dangerous situations for which they'd had insufficient training and less support and if Miranda hadn't continued on with field operations, Peggy was still someone to talk to and learn from and admire. Peggy enjoyed it, too, differently than the way she'd enjoyed the attentions of the security detail in Wyoming; it was growing into a friendship and, Natasha suspected, both of them could use one more friend. When Miranda's cover story ended, Natasha hoped that they came up with a way for Miranda to still visit, even after hours.

After lunch, James and Natasha stayed until it was time for Steve's afternoon PT session, which was also unofficially Peggy's naptime -- Peggy still insisted that she did not nap, merely rested her eyes.

James went back to 44th Street for his regular appointment with Doctor Soo, which Natasha knew would be more necessary than usual considering James's reaction to the reappearance by the Red Skull and this week's disquiet. She told him to call her afterward if he wanted to have dinner, since it was completely unpredictable whether he'd need company or want to go home and be alone but she knew that framing it in those terms was counterproductive.

Before everything had happened this morning, Natasha had planned to spend the day running errands and so she took care of those now, returning to her apartment in the late afternoon with groceries and dry cleaning and a watch with a new battery. Her email inbox was full, but not with anything to do with the Red Skull beyond expressions of shock and disgust. Her contacts weren't really in the HYDRA (or HYDRA-adjacent) business and anyone she'd asked would have to reach out to their networks and all of that took time.

James called her while she was in the shower after a run in Riverside Park and he sounded drained but not edgy on the message telling her that he was going to go home, so she let him be. She'd call him back later to make sure he was still okay. She took care of some casework unrelated to Lukin or HYDRA, re-submitted the expenses for Amsterdam and Lille, and spent the evening watching the Red Skull video and doing background reading and viewing, pulling out her old notes from the days when Fury had had her chasing the ghost of Johann Schmidt (before he turned out to be real, too).

Clint emailed the next day, to Fury and Hill with Natasha and James in the CC, that Schmidt was absolutely still in his cell and was "pretty fucking irate" about someone else using his "true face," even in the service of HYDRA. He'd need a few days to interview Schmidt, who wasn't interested in helping defeat HYDRA, but was sufficiently angered by the impersonator that he was willing to talk. "He wants his posterity intact, damn the consequences." In the meanwhile, the Israelis were investigating all of Schmidt's visitors -- he didn't have social visiting rights, but historians could apply for permission to interview him -- to see if any of them had been more than they'd seemed. "It's not like they hadn't done background checks on everyone and the interviews looked like The Silence of the Lambs with Schmidt in a plexiglass box," Clint wrote. "But not everyone flies their freak flag as proudly as he did and HYDRA did gangbusters among the academy set."

Clint ended up being gone more than a week because while Schmidt liked to talk, the Israelis had also come up with a lead of their own. One of the historians who'd been cleared to speak to Schmidt had been a Russian ("An actual Russian, not one of the hundred thousand Russians living here.") doing research on HYDRA's role in Operation Barbarossa and Valeri Ilyich Atyushkov, it turned out, had ties to Lukin. "As in Lukin paid for his education," Clint explained during a conference call. "We don't know the actual depth of his connection -- if Lukin's the guy's real father, if he knew the guy's father, if he killed the guy's father -- but there is one. We're gonna watch the tapes of his interview, see what kind of questions he asked or if there was any kind of secret messaging going on."

"I'll ask around about Atyushkov," Natasha offered, writing out the name on her notes. Next to her, James had done the same. He had been taking notes in both Russian and English, depending on the content, and also drawing an abstract maze of a design that had been abandoned as soon as Clint's call had been connected. His handwriting was equally bad in both languages, but not as atrocious as Clint's.

"Is there any chance that Schmidt sanctioned Lukin's ascendancy within HYDRA?" Hill asked.

Clint made a noise and Natasha could see in her mind the expression on his face. "He was was pretty bonkers about there being a new Red Skull," he replied. "I think if he'd been tutoring Lukin, he'd have seen this as a betrayal and ratted him out right away. And no, I don't think he was faking the bonkers part. He was ranting and pounding on the glass for hours after I told him."

"Whatever else Atyushkov is, he's also a legitimate academic," Zubov-from-the-Russia-Desk piped up. He was sitting across from Natasha typing away on his laptop. "He's got six monographs out and a slew of articles, very prolific. Area of specialization is the Soviet pushback at the end of the war, specifically the Upper Silesian Offensive."

James had been slouching in his seat, but he sat up like a bolt.

"Something to add, Mister Barnes?" Fury prompted when James said nothing.

"I got taken by the Russians outside Oppeln," James said after a moment, eye still on his notepad. "HYDRA was all over the area at that point, trying to salvage what they could from their Silesian bases."

After the Commandos' early success in destroying HYDRA's bases -- from the map Steve had seen in Italy -- Schmidt had moved the bulk of HYDRA's operations east, figuring with typical Nazi bias that the Slavs on the Eastern Front, already dead and dying in uncountable numbers, would prove less of a threat to his goals than the Allies.

"Atyushkov wouldn't be the first historian to be studying the HYDRA angle of German-Soviet combat," Zubov said slowly as he typed quickly. "But almost all of the work done so far has focused on earlier periods, when Schmidt was still alive -- or, shall we say, in his original chassis? There has been practically nothing on the Post-Schmidt period and, as my colleague Doctor Sanchez will confirm, most of what was written was Soviet propaganda and completely discredited."

Sanchez nodded. "Anything worth reading has come out in the last ten years or so and has been mostly science histories -- technology studies of the Tesseract weapons used on the Eastern Front and some medical histories of surviving test subjects and, more usually, the mass graves found at HYDRA sites in Poland."

Natasha looked over at James then, along with almost everyone else in the room, and he bore it stoically, staring unseeingly at one of the monitors behind Zubov's head.

"So one of us is reading Atyushkov's books," Clint summarized. He couldn't see anything -- this was an audio-only conference call -- but it wouldn't be hard to imagine what the scene around the table in New York would look like and how much James would appreciate a change in focus. "And that person is not going to be me."

None of the texts had been translated into English, although a few had been translated into German and Polish. Which wouldn't exclude Clint, whose Russian had become near-fluent after partnering with Natasha, from being a candidate. But the task was going to be split between analysts who had the languages and the historical expertise, although Natasha was unsurprised when James asked for copies as well. Fury looked unhappy when he did, but gave Zubov a tiny nod when Zubov looked to him before agreeing.

"Does any of this indicate that Lukin's still alive?" Peggy asked Natasha as they watched Steve and Tony bicker about what to put on the pizzas Steve was making. Miranda, wielding a ladle from the tomato sauce, ended the argument by pointing to the far side of the kitchen island and Tony went meekly, snatching a green pepper ring in defiance as he did so, while Steve was ordered back to grating cheese. Someone, either Pepper or Peggy or both, had clearly told Miranda that both men were surprisingly biddable when ordered around by strong women.

"Not definitively," Natasha replied, swirling a carrot stick in the homemade ranch dressing. "It certainly sounds like Atyushkov was researching on behalf of Lukin for the purpose of whatever he is doing with HYDRA, but the interview with Schmidt was last year and the books go back up to fifteen years. There's nothing that says that yes, Aleksander Lukin is under the mask, even if it's sounding more and more likely."

The facial recognition software had said that the Red Skull in the video could be Lukin, but it hadn't given a degree of certainty that made it definitive. And the audio track had turned into an even bigger failure because it turned out that the voice had been dubbed. The Red Skull might or might not have been lip synching, but even with the distorting filters removed, there was no way to tell who he was by voice or intonation.

Tony was now opening a can, griping at Miranda about being a billionaire technologist stuck using a manual can opener because Steve, even when his hands made operating it difficult, had refused an electric opener. "Let the Star Spangled Man work on his dexterity and do it."

"He's the man with the plan," Miranda replied, still holding ladle and gesturing with it. "You're the man with the can. And the can opener, oh master of technology."

"Is the connection to Lukin why Bucky is off working up an appetite?" Peggy asked, sipping at her iced tea to hide her smile. And her pride in her protégé, Natasha suspected.

James had promised that he meant to keep their lunch date at Stark Tower, but he wanted some time to himself before showing up. Natasha wasn't sure whether she should be hurt or worried that his response to other parts of his past than his actions as the Winter Soldier tended to send him off by himself instead of turning to her, but he wasn't pretending that nothing was wrong and he would answer a question if she asked it. He was talking, she thought, to Doctor Soo, and that was probably doing him more good. He wasn't pulling away, even if he wasn't sharing, and Natasha had too many parts of her own life that she wasn't eager to lay open for inspection for her to make an issue out of his choices, even if she wished he chose otherwise.

"Lukin's pet historian was researching the time and place where James went from being HYDRA's toy to the Soviets'," Natasha said, which Peggy could decipher as an answer. "Whether it was for the HYDRA context or whether it had anything to do with James himself, nobody knows."

There would be nothing on the Winter Soldier in any of Atyushkov's books; as far as the official Russian history of the Winter Soldier went, he had been created by the Soviets, not captured in Poland wearing HYDRA insignias and easily identifiable as an American POW.

"The parts of his story where he was powerless, where he was a victim, they still distress him more than the parts where he was a perpetrator," Peggy sighed. "I don't think I'll ever decide if that's better or worse."

Steve and Miranda were explaining to Tony -- who had opened his can -- why they needed both fresh mozzarella and the mass-produced kind from the supermarket and whether they should add the asiago and the pecorino ("Wait, are we actually wondering if there's such a thing as too much cheese?") when Pepper appeared. She had a break in her schedule for lunch today, which was not always a given, and, like the rest of them, tended to visit with Steve when she was free for a meal.

"Pep," Tony whined, pointing at Miranda, who was now holding the pepper rings so she could coordinate placement with Steve, who was on sausage detail. "I don't like her, she's bossy."

Pepper smiled indulgently at Tony, then turned to Miranda. "I think we might keep you."

James turned up as the second pie -- pepperoni and canned mushrooms -- was going in to the oven. He was carrying a couple of sixpacks of what turned out to be a brand of coffee soda that he and Steve had drunk as kids. "Let me tell you, we could have gotten cases of the stuff for what it costs for a bottle now," James said with disgruntlement as he put the Manhattan Special in the freezer to cool it faster.

"Oh my God, are we outnumbered by cranky old people?" Tony gasped, counting heads by turning and pointing at people in turn. The last one he counted was Miranda. "Okay, so you are the tie-breaking vote between 'prime of life' and 'birthday greeting from Willard Scott.' You can stay."

"Why thank you so much," Miranda replied, extra syrup in her drawl.

James got out of the way in the kitchen and came over to Natasha, presenting himself for inspection as he always did when he ran off after something upset him. (It was another reason she didn't confront him about it.) He looked like himself and she smiled as he approached, leaning forward to kiss her cheek. After saying hello to Peggy -- who did not comment on his scenic route from 44th Street -- he stayed by Natasha's chair, his right arm across the back and his body next to hers.

Lunch conversation was the museum trip, scheduled for the following Monday. Fury had given in to the inevitable and, with a six-person security detail and the inducer set to 'Old Man Steve,' the evening was a go. Steve would be a friend of Peggy's, if anyone asked. There was also a discussion about movies and television and what sort of a pool party Steve's aquatic therapy was turning into now that both Miranda and Peggy were getting in the pool. Miranda was swimming laps ("I have to do something to balance out all the food I'm eating here!") and Peggy had started her own fitness program under the guidance of Candice, the physical therapist. They all tended to forget that Peggy was being looked after, too, because up until now, Steve had required much more care. But now they were almost even -- Steve was better in some aspects, Peggy in others -- and the gap would only grow. Peggy's ninety-eighth birthday party had been last month and she'd started using Steve's discarded walker while Steve was throwing a frisbee in PT with the hope, and perhaps the expectation, that he would be able to throw the shield once more.

Neither Natasha nor James were around when the museum trip occurred; Natasha was in Madrid and James was in Prague, both of them meeting with contacts who had indicated that they had information on Lukin's associates, if not the man himself. Natasha's trip was a sequence of conversations with contacts, but from what she gleaned, James's trip was more a sequence of surveillance ops; he still functioned as the Winter Soldier when out in the field and that man was not one who got his information sitting in cafes enjoying tapas and wine. Regardless of means, the results were largely the same: breadcrumbs, which was better than nothing, but still just morsels. James returned with photographs of three men he said were moderately high up in Lukin's organizational food chain -- not high enough to have ordered the Winter Soldier around, but high enough that James would have gotten in trouble for putting them in danger. Meanwhile, Natasha got the lowdown on Yuri Revchenko, a Kronas VP who had been Lukin's most trusted man on the board. He had stayed on after Lukin's initial arrest and had generally been assumed to be Lukin's proxy; Doom had tried to get rid of him, but he had lacked the votes until after Lukin's presumed death and Kronas was preparing for reorganization under its new ownership. Revchenko had accepted his severance package and disappeared to parts unknown; if he had gone to Lukin's side, he had not been one of the men to be photographed boarding the ill-fated Gulfstream. But Natasha now knew where he was, or at least where he was supposed to be: Singapore. She wasn't going to be following up on that personally, that's what regular-flavor field agents were for, but that didn't mean she was going back to New York.

"I think it's time to start taking the Perm rumors seriously," Sonia said in an email. "There's too much smoke for there not to be any fire."

The Urals region of Russia had long been a HYDRA-friendly area, for reasons both practical and very particularly Russian. It was far enough from Moscow to matter in terms of reach and resentment, a convenient place to exile those out of favor and still demand production from everyone else. It was where generations of Soviet leaders had buried their enemies and hidden their secrets, including Minyar. Perm and Ufa had both been mentioned early on as places Lukin might flee to before he'd ever broken his house arrest in Latveria; they had both turned heavily to HYDRA's favor years ago, back when Schmidt had been cementing alliances within Russia. The region's welcome had been one of the reasons Putin had been willing to sell Minyar to HYDRA: it had gotten to the point that he hadn't been sure that he could hold it in what had more or less become enemy territory.

Sonia didn't have eyewitnesses who had seen Lukin or any of the other dead men walking, but she did have chatter that said that someone important to HYDRA had turned up in Perm. The FSB was certainly looking for someone, but to no success because anyone in the position to know did not give their loyalties to Moscow. Natasha kept that in mind even as she submitted a request to go to Perm. Fury asked her if she wanted backup and she said no without asking if by backup he meant James. Despite his performance in Latveria, this really wasn't his sort of mission for the same reason Madrid hadn't been his sort of mission (or Clint's) and she was comfortable working alone. Which was just as well, since James wanted to continue in Prague and see where his leads went.

She flew to Ufa rather than Perm; it would give her a sense of the region's sensitivity and she might find out what she needed without ever traveling north, where the risks of discovery would be greater even if Lukin were dead and nobody was in Perm. She stayed for more than a week, wandering into mosques and churches and cultural centers. The Bashkirs and Tatars were overtly in support of HYDRA -- Natasha saw the odd flag openly displayed -- but the ethnic Russians were pro-HYDRA as well, if less demonstratively. It was a curious mix of Russian fatalism and HYDRA aspirationalism, unsurprising and familiar right down to the part where everyone thought it was new and different and better. She saw a memorial to the valiant defenders who had perished at Minyar during the SHIELD invasion the other year and graffiti celebrating the death of Captain America, which she did not bother photographing, and a mural featuring the Red Skull preaching about a New Russia, which she did. She crashed a party for the faculty and graduate students of Political Science at the Bashkir State University, where she heard more of the same, just with extra bullshit. This was a Poli Sci gathering, after all. There was a lot of talk about Latveria and Doom -- both widely reviled for more than the usual reasons -- and speculation about Lukin, whether he was actually alive or whether the rumors were just that and there would be 'sightings' of him for the next fifty years. It was not very informative right up until it turned into a gold mine.

"I don't think I've seen you around," a young man said to her, right in her face. He was a graduate student, she thought, and had been drinking heavily, but not so heavily that he didn't have control of himself or hadn't noticed she didn't belong. There was an edge to his voice that was a little too... curious. That hadn't been just a cheesy pick-up line. "You're not in the department. I know everyone in the department and you are far too beautiful to even be dating one of our merry band of outcasts. So who are you really?"

Natasha slammed back the rest of the vodka in her glass she'd been nursing -- this was Russia, no shotglasses here -- and reached past other bodies to dump the glass on the bar. She smiled and leaned in to her questioner, noting that he matched the motion automatically. "FSB," she whispered loudly in his ear. "I'm here to see which one of you will lead me to the Red Skull."

The man laughed and Natasha leaned back as if pleased with herself. "Very funny. FSB agents are even uglier than academics and you don't smell of piss or brimstone."

She shrugged modestly and admitted that she was a student at MGIMO but didn't want anyone to know because she'd be accused of slumming.

"Probably for the best," her interolocutor agreed as he gestured for the bartender to give them both another round. "Especially here -- drunkenness and jealousy make a marriage that produces ugly children."

Two juice glasses of vodka were produced, one handed over to her, and then a plate of pickles materialized. She chose a modestly-sized cornichon and they saluted each other with their glasses, drank, and ate their pickles.

Seemingly reassured by his friendliness, she went on to say that she was in Ufa because of some advice a visiting lecturer had given her at a gathering like this one. "Very off the record," she emphasized, putting a finger to her lips. "He said that this was where the future of Russian politics was being born and if I really believed as I did, then I should come here and see for myself instead of sitting in Moscow with the old guard and their dying wisdom."

This was not very subtle as far as leading a prospective source, but he wasn't very sober, he was very interested in her breasts, and between the two of those, she didn't need to be subtle. She just needed not to be caught in a lie. Her instincts had said that he'd be useful, so finding out how useful as quickly as possible was best -- if he was a poseur, she could move on to the next candidate.

"Who told you this?" he asked, again with something in his voice that made it not an idle question although he was pretending it was. "Sending someone to the Urals from Moscow hasn't historically been a favor."

Natasha gave him a thoughtful look before confessing that it had been Atyushkov, who did teach in Moscow but had been an occasional visitor to Perm and Ufa despite having no family or ties to the Urals. "He's a historian who--"

"I know who he is," her 'friend' assured, a smile on his face, like he'd found a fellow traveler. Which, perhaps, he thought he had.

"I'm glad," she said, then smiled coyly. "Because I still don't know who you are."

Gennadiy Petrovich Kusnetsov bowed with a flourish, then led her over to where the chafing dishes were lined up on tables. "We should eat if we're going to drink and still make sense."

Once armed with plates of food, they started talking about the new Russian HYDRA and how it was better and different than what had been introduced by Schmidt, who'd had the temerity to believe that he could conquer Russia when his old boss, Hitler, had so completely failed. "We're going to do it right this time by having it a little bit less aimed at the ploughman," Gena mused. "We learned our lesson about any revolution that starts off by shooting all of the intellectuals."

Natasha didn't think Russia had learned anything of the sort, but she smiled in agreement anyway.

He asked her questions then about HYDRA's presence in Moscow -- which she could answer because she'd done her research -- and specifically at MGIMO, which she had to BS, but well enough that it raised no further questions. They were joined by a couple of friends of Gena's, whom he vouched for and, more importantly, whom he vouched her to. They spoke confidently and expansively on HYDRA's philosophical platform, which was not all that different than the gnostic-socialist veneer over bloodthirsty tyranny that Schmidt's version had campaigned on. But it was different and better because it had been put out by a Russian for Russians and none of that Nazi claptrap. None of Natasha's new friends seemed to notice that the same old elitism and same old bloodymindedness remained -- even against some of the same 'problem populations' that had historically been the first to go. The New HYDRA had a Russian flavor to it, granted, but that just meant it sounded a little more like Stalin and a little less like Hitler.

"How long are you here?" Gena asked. There was a meeting on Tuesday for local HYDRA deputies and she would do well to meet them and build her connections.

"What she should do is go up to Perm," Nadya insisted instead. "We're not nothing, but there, there is where everything is."

Did she think she could get Artyushkov to write her a letter of introduction? That could get her in all the way to the top.

Natasha admitted she wasn't sure, pointing out that it had taken a lot of vodka for either of them to feel free enough to risk speaking of HYDRA or Lukin in the shadow of the Kremlin and there was no guarantee that Artyushkov remembered the conversation, let alone her name.

Instead, Nadya pulled out her smartphone and shot off an email to one of her counterparts in Perm, giving them Natasha's (cover) name and email (one of several she used for situations like this) and saying that Natasha would be in Perm next week and could she visit with them and introduce herself.

Natasha stayed until the party broke up but declined an offer to go over to Vadik's apartment for a continuation of the gathering, citing too much alcohol and not enough sleep. She let them walk her 'home,' which was a hotel of very modest means, and she stayed there for an hour before slipping out the rear and on to her actual hotel, which was across town and less impoverished. It took her until almost dawn to get back and she was tired, but she pulled out her laptop and initiated a secure connection and started passing on names and places and her conclusion that she was pretty damned sure Lukin was alive, well, and living in Perm. And then she crashed.

When she woke up, there were messages from Zubov with follow-up questions to her admittedly spare initial report and from Fury telling her to come home, her mission was complete. If Lukin was in Perm, there was no way she was going to be able to meet up with even the junior varsity HYDRA council without being recognized and endangering both herself and the mission; SHIELD had plenty of operatives who could go to Russia and take care of the next phases of observation and infiltration.

Getting out of Ufa would take a few days; she'd spook her new friends if she disappeared directly. She met Gena and Nadya for coffee two days later and, while she was there, got a phone call from her brother (James, enjoying the role playing far too much) telling her that their mother had gone into the hospital with another gallstone attack and they were going to take it out this time and she needed to come home because Mom was being a drama queen and quite sure that she was going to die in the hospital and didn't want to do so without seeing her daughter. They had a mild argument, but Natasha gave in at the end and said she would change her ticket back to Moscow to today.

When she got back to New York, she had to sit in the conference room and debrief with Fury, Hill, James, Clint, and a dozen analysts plus the supervisory agent who was going to be controlling the agents going to Perm. It took forever, but once it was done, Clint and James took her to Stark Tower because Steve had been holding off on Prime Rib Night until she got back. Miranda wasn't around to help -- she'd been invited, but had a prior engagement -- so it became a group effort, with Natasha only drafted into scrubbing potatoes and washing vegetables in deference to her long day.

Once the meat was in the oven, Natasha got the replay of the museum trip ("Seriously, we should have brought restraints for the wheelchairs. Neither of them would actually stay in them.") and tentative plans for the next outing, this time for lunch or a trip to the park because the weather was gorgeous now almost every day and Steve could go no further than the penthouse deck without protection and the inducer.

"I don't want this to be the rest of my life," Steve said as they sat in the living room with the spectacular panoramic views of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and Jersey. There was wine and cheese and vegetables and fruits, although Tony was on duty to refill glasses and James to fetch things from the kitchen and check on the food because while Steve could get around fine on his own unassisted, two intense PT sessions a day meant he was tired by the end of it. "I don't want to live like a movie star or the President. I'm going to be able to live on my own at some point, sooner than later, and when that point comes, I don't want to do it in hiding."

Steve was getting closer to that point every day. He was walking faster and with surer steps even over open ground, he could carry things when he walked and didn't need to watch his hands to make sure that they were doing what he wanted them to do. His PT sessions were no longer strictly about regaining normal function, but with an eye toward what he'd been able to do as Captain America. He wasn't talking about putting on the uniform and wielding the shield again, but Natasha couldn't be the only one wondering if he wasn't thinking about it. And wondering what, if anything, could be done if Steve decided that he didn't want to live with the restrictions imposed upon him anymore.

"I think I should be insulted," Tony mused. "But I have better security than the President and better digs than most movie stars."

Tony wasn't actually insulted; he understood that how he lived was not how the rest of them wanted to and, if you caught him at the right moment -- or simply asked Pepper -- then he would admit that he found life in the spotlight occasionally claustrophobic and that Iron Man was a response to that as much as it was to all of the other stated reasons.

Natasha spent most of the next three days at 44th Street doing follow-up with the Russia Desk and the HYDRA task force. The next five were spent split between 44th Street, Stark Tower, and Roosevelt Hospital's VIP ward because Peggy's general malaise had been complicated by an irregular heartbeat and the medical staff assigned to her and Steve had wanted more intense monitoring than the setup at Stark Tower currently allowed. Steve was with her, wearing the inducer, and everyone else took their turns because unlike Steve's room back in Wyoming, there were limits on duration and quantity of visitors here. She was in good spirits, all considering, but Steve was brittle and somber when she wasn't watching him and James stayed close to him. James was a different man from when he'd needed his arm twisted before he promised Peggy he'd look after Steve after her death, but Natasha didn't doubt that the conversation was on his mind. They talked about it obliquely once, late at night after they'd spent the evening with Steve at Stark Tower. "He's going to do something stupid when she dies," he said quietly in the dark, the 'and I'm either going to be the one chasing him down afterward or possibly along for the ride' went unsaid. "You'll have help," she assured.

Peggy was released on the sixth day, but more or less put on bed rest, or at least couch rest. She was not to be gallivanting around town or making any more trips down to Philly for the time being. The picnic in the park was put on hold, possibly to be relocated to the penthouse deck.

James finally went on his return trip to Prague; he'd been meant to go the week previous to follow up on more of Lukin's old associates, but he'd waited until Tony was back from his own business trip because Steve was still edgy even with Peggy back in her usual seat watching him draw and Miranda back from her HR-mandated retreat to make hummingbird cake.

"You want the unvarnished truth?" Clint asked Fury after a quick meeting with Hill and the HYDRA and Russia task force had ended and Fury had asked how Steve was doing.

"I get enough bullshit during the day, so yes," Fury replied.

"He's stir-crazy," Clint said. "And the only reason you shouldn't be working on a draft of your 'Captain America isn't dead after all' speech is because Peggy got sick. Her hospital stay probably bought you his compliance for another couple of months, longer if she relapses or anything else happens. But don't build your house on that foundation. He might not be running twenty miles an hour yet, but the parts of him that can screw you up are working just fine and Barnes will gladly help him."

Fury nodded, although his frown clearly communicated that he didn't think that James was going to be the only one. Not when Clint and Natasha had gone into Latveria with him against orders simply because they'd thought it had been the right thing to do.

Natasha was at Steve's that afternoon, although all of them were actually out on the penthouse deck. Steve was doing his PT session on one of the lower levels, Peggy was reading a book on her Starkpad with the new gooseneck-armed holder Tony had built for her, Miranda was reluctantly in the shade ("can't tan on company time") working on China Desk assignments, and Tony, wearing sunglasses and a hideous Hawaiian shirt, was building something on one of the tables, Dummy holding a wire basket full of tools and parts that he seemed to move capriciously out of Tony's range or offer to Miranda judging by Tony's griping. Natasha was on a lounger in the sun, enjoying herself under SPF 50 protection, reading the reports of the agents in Perm and Ufa. A new message popped up, from Sonia. "What is your paramour up to?" To which Natasha had no answer because James hadn't come back yet, although so long as Fury or Hill wasn't asking the same question, it couldn't be that bad. Unless they didn't know, which was entirely possible. Natasha messaged back that she needed more context and got back a link from the English-language Zagreb newspaper about the suspicious suicide of Nikolai Kovalic, local entrepreneur (translation: mobster) who had been rumored to have been Lukin's host while hiding in the city. "Reverting to old habits?" was the comment on the link. Natasha didn't think that was the case, but she also had no idea if this would be the only corpse James was leaving behind as a souvenir. She doubted that Fury knew how James was getting his intelligence, but she wasn't going to say anything -- to Fury, at least.

"Stop showing off, Rogers!" Tony called out and everyone looked up (or down, technically) to find Steve doing a handstand. Steve responded by laughing, but he quickly lost his balance after that and toppled over, landing in a heap and then righting himself. With his hair at all angles and a boyish smile on his face as he sat on his mat in the sun, he looked like a proud kindergartener. He'd made another jump forward in the last couple of days, the extent of which was still being determined, but if he was now doing handstands, that was a pretty good benchmark.

Candice's next trick for Steve was a less exciting set of yoga moves, so they all returned their attention to what they'd been doing.

"Holy shit!" Miranda squawked a few minutes later. "Pardon my French."

Natasha looked over to where Miranda was staring at her laptop, but then she looked down at her own tablet because she'd gotten a message from SHIELD. There was little chance the two events were unrelated. "That's not good," she murmured. She hoped this wasn't something James had done, although she suspected she'd be getting a phone call if that were the case.

"Junior agent reports first," Peggy announced, looking over at Miranda. At the other end of the table from Miranda, Tony looked up from what he was doing, but only for a moment. He was still listening, of course. Tony's obliviousness to world events, especially world events his friends were likely to be tossed into headfirst, was entirely feigned.

"Russian nationalists just assassinated the Chinese ambassador in Moscow," Miranda said as she skimmed her screen. "They blew up his car with some kind of projectile. Not an RPG, but definitely launched. Tverskaya Street near the Kremlin."

Tverskaya wasn't that near the Kremlin, but Natasha knew what had been meant.

So did Peggy, who must have had to memorize the map of Moscow back during the Cold war. "Vlad is going to have a tough time explaining this one away," she laughed darkly. "Which, I presume, will be the point. Is this Lukin telling his old mate that he's alive?"

It was certainly at the top of Natasha's list of possibilities and, as she skimmed the email sent to her, at the top of the Russia Desk's.

"Or Barnes is up to his old tricks and wants to goose Lukin into showing himself to deny it," Tony offered, attention back on his tinkering. "But I think he'd blow up a Russian if that's what he was fixing to do."

Natasha made a dismissive noise, but in light of the message from Sonia, she didn't protest as hard as she could have.

"The Belyye Rytsari are taking credit," she said instead. "Putin had promised to get rid of them entirely. It will look very bad that he hasn't."

After the original set of bombings in China and the subsequent ramp-up of arms and hostilities, Putin had had to expend almost all of his political capital to settle things back down. It had been exhausting and wasteful and embarrassing, all of which Lukin had intended when he'd instigated the attacks, but Putin had triumphed in the end by essentially guaranteeing future peace through his absolute control of Russia's political infrastructure and military. He'd promised to crack down on the nationalist groups and there'd been many public arrests and trials, some of them of the old Soviet style of show trials and more than a few incidental arrests of opposition activists, reporters, and the odd artist who had made Putin's list of personal enemies -- including anyone Putin thought might have aided Lukin at any point, especially with hiding the Winter Soldier. The gulags had been filled, which had placated the Chinese enough to get the PLA moved off the borders and the international money flowing again.

But the murder of the Chinese ambassador by one of the most noxious of the nationalist groups -- they were little more than skinheads, adopting not only Nazi iconography, but also picking up white robes from the KKK -- within a mile of the Kremlin was going to stir everything back up again, at best prove Putin a liar and at worst put Russia and China back on a prelude to war. It was an embarrassment for Putin.

There was nothing to do but wait for details at this point -- the ambassador's car was probably still smoldering -- so she accepted Tony's offer of dinner, which was made early enough that drinks and hors d'oeuvres were a necessary preliminary. Steve -- freshly washed -- joined them and both he and Tony wheedled Miranda into agreeing to stay, promising she wouldn't have to cook. Clint was found on the LIE, driving back from Mattituck, and he'd see how he felt once he got through the traffic closer to the city, but yes, he'd probably show up and no, he hadn't heard anything about Moscow because he hadn't checked his email.

"Awesome," he said when he was told. "I could have told him that sentencing the children's cartoonist to three years' labor wasn't going to make his problems go away."

Natasha finally heard from James after she'd gotten home from dinner, which was still the middle of the night in Eastern Europe. "You're up late," she said.

"Had to take care of some stuff," James replied, sounding tired.

"So I've been hearing," Natasha said, stopping the kettle from whistling as soon as it started. "I've been getting postcards from interested parties."

James made a noise that might have been disgust or frustration depending on the look on his face, which she couldn't see.

"None of those postcards have been from 44th Street," she continued, "but I wouldn't count on them not knowing."

This time, James laughed, humorless and hollow, and Natasha suddenly understood. She hadn't gotten any phone calls from Fury because Fury was the one who'd given James his orders.

"I see," she said. She wondered who else other than Kovalic had been on the request list. Which might not have been a hit list, just a 'it doesn't matter if they survive the encounter' list, although the end result was going to be the same because it was neater that way and Fury would know that.

"Does it bother you?" James asked, more wary than curious but definitely both.

"Professionally, no, of course not," she replied quickly. She went into the living room, leaving the tea to steep. "Personally, I think I've earned the right to worry about you and how you handle the return to that kind of work."

James's relationship with his history was a living thing, changing and growing, and while he'd stopped believing that the Winter Soldier was the most important part of that history, Natasha wasn't sure she'd have gone so far as to say that he was ready to relive any of that time, even for the 'right' reasons. Which might or might not include James still believing that he had to do what Fury asked or risk the life he'd built for himself here.

"You've earned the right to a lot more than that," James said meaningfully. "I'm... it's bothering me less than I thought, which I think freaks me out a little. I don't feel different now than I used to and I thought I would."

"Now that you're defending your country again?" She turned on the ceiling fan because it wasn't warm enough for the AC.

"Nah, it was never about that -- never really about that," James scoffed. "Even when I was in uniform, back when Steve was still a skinny kid at Cooper Union, I knew better. You don't fight for your country or your generals or stuff like that. You fight for the guys next to you. I'm not doing this for some greater good. I'm doing this so that Steve can get his apartment back. And I thought it would feel different than doing it because I'd been ordered to. But it didn't."

Natasha thought before she spoke, since this wasn't the time for platitudes or casual comments.

"We all become someone else when we do this sort of work," she said slowly. "It's a skin we put on to protect what's good about us, keep it clean and safe. It makes sense that the Winter Soldier is the skin you'd wear -- there's no one better. You shouldn't look at that and wonder why it doesn't feel different. You should look at who you are when you slip that skin off after it's over. Before, there was nothing but that skin, nothing but the Winter Soldier. Now... well, now there's you."

James was silent for a moment that started to stretch. She could hear his breathing, but finally he spoke.

"You never fail to amaze me," he said. She could hear his smile.

"I'm offended your standards are so low that I constantly surpass them," she replied, since both of them could speak obliquely. "Are you coming home soon? You're missing Steve doing handstands on the tops of tall buildings."

"I'm missing a lot more than that," James replied. "I'll be back soon."