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domarzioneRevenant: Chapter Seventeen and Epilogue
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.
Soon turned out to be two days, by which point SHIELD knew that the Chinese ambassador to Russia and four others (two security, two staff) had been killed in an explosion caused by a new weapon not previously fielded in any battle. Fury had pulled off a masterstroke by getting the WSC to hand the investigation over to SHIELD -- the Chinese hadn't needed too much convincing to agree that the Russians were the last people to be investigating what could very well have been a government-sanctioned assassination and to insist on an independent third party. The Russians were incensed not only because it made an international mockery of their justice system, but also because they had no love for Fury or SHIELD after the Minyar invasion. However, under the circumstances -- which included a re-mobilization of the PLA -- Putin had no choice but to go along with it. It cost him credibility, which he tried to salvage by insisting that no Avenger (especially Natasha) set foot on Russian soil.
"It works like high-velocity bubble gum," Tony explained as they sat in one of the auditoriums at 44th Street, the room full of analysts, Direct Action Service commanders, brass, and other interested parties. He'd been brought in as soon as the first forensics reports had indicated something new and strange. SHIELD had a very large, very capable unit dedicated to weapons design, production, and analysis, but there was quantity of quality and then there was Tony Stark. "You fire it at something, it sticks, and goes boom."
"It's projectile C-4," someone down front said. "Or napalm."
"Yes and no," Tony agreed, moving his head in that way he had to show that you were more wrong than right. "It's a plastic explosive, but compositionally, it's very different than C-4 or Semtex in ways I'm not going to get into in a room full of liberal arts majors. What you need to know is that there's nothing even the most modern military can field that can defend against it. A: it will stick to anything, animal, vegetable, mineral, or polymer, and it won't come off. And B: because it's programmable even after contact. It's a smart explosive. It combines the best features of a remote detonator with the best features of an RPG. It's a terrorist's dream weapon."
That got the room buzzing. On either side of Natasha, James and Clint sat up straighter, Tony's presentation suddenly transforming from comedic science-show sketch to professionally crucial briefing.
Before a much more attentive audience, Tony explained how the explosive was laced with nanites and other elements that made the explosive material controllable to a remarkable degree even after implantation so long as the target was within range -- and that range was expansive and would grow as the design improved. The explosive material was more or less untraceable now and the projectile delivery method -- Tony's layman's explanation was something like an egg or a soap bubble that would shatter on impact -- meant that implantation could be both too quick to respond to for an immediate detonation (like an RPG) or completely unnoticed and from far enough away to avoid detection.
"Nobody had to get near the embassy limo to attach it," Tony explained. "It could have been fired at the the vehicle or it could have been fired directly in front of it so that it was picked up by a wheel like gum or dog shit, nothing the driver or passengers would notice. It could have been there for weeks, it could have been there for moments. And the only reason we know it was there at all was because this was a field test, not a product roll-out. There was discontiguous spatter, which in theory either shouldn't happen or shouldn't matter but did here because it didn't detonate with the rest, which was how it was found. Everything else was burned away completely, no residue, no tiny little nanite corpses, nothing. If it weren't for that little blob, this would look like spontaneous combustion and there would have been no way to prove that the explosion was anything but an accident."
"Not just a terrorist's dream weapon, then," Clint muttered. "Jesus."
Tony went on a bit more about what it could do and what kind of launching mechanism could be used (custom job most likely, but a shotgun or grenade launcher would work in a pinch), but got quickly down to the bottom line: "This compound is incredibly expensive to develop and produce in any quantity and requires an extremely high level of technical expertise. Your Russian skinheads might be taking credit for the hit, but if they even fired the projectile, it was given to them. They couldn't afford to buy it and they sure as hell don't have the capacity to produce it themselves."
"So this was HYDRA?"
Tony shrugged. "This was someone with a lot of cash. I leave it up to you to follow the money."
Which was not strictly the truth, since Tony would be involved in the investigation in the same way he'd helped them ferret out AIM: they would give him lists of possible candidates and he would cross off names and add others. The part that truly didn't involve him was SHIELD's choice of how to handle the public statements. They had no actual evidence to support Tony's conclusion that the BR either had good connections or were someone's convenient cutouts, despite everyone believing it was true, but saying nothing continued to escalate the tension between Russia and China and, crucially, Putin's standing inside Russia, where the population was starting to get uncomfortable. It was one thing for him to be making billionaires disappear, but it was another if his means and methods of securing power put Russia on a war footing. The average man on the street in Moscow or Chelyabinsk or Volgograd wasn't inclined to die to secure anyone's legacy and the Chinese were growing increasingly tired of being picked on by a man who would be king. SHIELD did its best, strongly implying that there was a larger game afoot without explicitly saying that Putin was being framed, which did not keep troops from massing on the borders, but did keep them from crossing over.
"There has to be a response from whoever's in Perm," Clint said as they sat around Steve's dining room table. Steve and Peggy had gotten their second-hand briefing over a late lunch, which Steve had made himself because Miranda had been back at 44th Street since the day after the assassination. Stark Industries could not keep up the pretense of heavy investment in China with the possibility of a war on and Miranda had been needed as the China Desk was working around the clock -- possibly literally because of the time differences. She'd been invited over since her return to her regular duties, but as a regular guest, which still meant talking shop and cooking with Steve, but that's because of who they were and not out of any sense of obligation. "If HYDRA did this, they're going to either gloat or have a next step. If they didn't do this, they're going to want to know who did."
Natasha was still getting the raw notes from the Urals operatives, two of whom had managed to get invited into the circle of the person Nadya had recommended Natasha to, so there was some hope on that front but it was still being played close to the vest for the time being. For all that the old HYDRA, especially in its US facilities, had had a modern corporate feel to it with vending machines and recycling bins and reminders to sign up for blood pressure readings, the new Russian HYDRA was a little more feudal and far less free with its information sharing and promoting a feeling of ownership in the endeavor.
"If it is them, especially if the Red Skull is Lukin, then he's got every reason to keep his mouth shut for now," she pointed out. "The one person who needs to get the message will have gotten it and there's a lot of danger in providing any kind of proof."
Clint could only grimace agreement. He'd been speaking aspirationally, she understood that.
But three days later, they did get something useful from the agents in Perm. Not a confession of involvement, but someone using Lukin's name in the present tense and interchangeably with the Red Skull.
Two days after that, the Duma member most vocal about de-escalating the conflict with China through concessions and increased transparency in governmental operations was assassinated with another car bomb. His wife and three-year-old daughter were killed in the blast as well. The Russians absolutely refused to let SHIELD or any other international agency anywhere near the investigation. The Chinese sent three more armored battalions to the border.
"I don't want a million men dying because Putin's a pain in the ass," Fury told the people around his conference table. "Especially because this mess is largely not of his doing, at least not in the sense that would let us sleep at night while doing nothing to stop it."
Natasha exchanged a look with James and then with Clint; they all knew what this meant. "Capture or kill?" she asked, since someone had to.
"I would like a sincere and meaningful attempt made at the former," Fury replied, meeting each of their eyes in turn and holding them. "I don't mean 'enough for plausible deniability,' I mean a legit prioritizing of taking him alive. You pulled it off with Schmidt, you can do it here. We solve a lot more problems if we can perp walk Lukin than if we show pictures of his corpse."
The rest of the meeting was establishing who would be needed to plan the mission and what sort of time frame they were working with, the latter being influenced by the likelihood of a Sino-Russian war starting. "Let's call it three weeks or when the first shot is fired, whichever comes first."
As much as they wanted to get started right away, until the analyst groups got their end together and coughed up the relevant background and environmental material, there could be no strategic or tactical planning done. Natasha and James went to the movies instead, then out to dinner, then back to Brooklyn. Clint went over to Steve's to watch the game and let him and Peggy know what was happening, so it was entirely his fault that James was blindsided the next day, when he went to go visit while Natasha went to the dentist.
Steve wants to go with us. James had texted her while she'd been in the chair.
Natasha didn't bother texting back. "You told him no, right?" she asked as soon as James answered the call.
"Of course I told him no," James replied with asperity, although she could tell it was his frustration with Steve and not with her. "And Clint told him no yesterday and Peggy has told him no several times. He's being Steve about it."
Which was generally a problem with no known cure except that here they did have the power to make sure that he wasn't going to Russia. They'd have to deal with his resentment for most of the next month, granted, but after the mission was over, so would be his anger. Steve was as stubborn as they came, but he didn't hold grudges.
It took them less than a week to realize that they had perhaps underestimated the difficulties of bearing Steve's ire for the duration.
"Get dressed and get over to Riverside Park," Tony ordered Natasha through the phone at five-thirty Tuesday morning. "And bring Barnes if he's there, I'll need the backup."
It took a second for the fog to clear -- she'd been sleeping -- before she parsed the words. "Do we need to call it in?"
Because sometimes shit happened where SHIELD was not the first to know about it.
"We can't call it in," Tony replied, deeply bemused and just as deeply annoyed. "Because Steve Rogers is dead and therefore there's no reason for him to be running in the park before dawn."
"Oh, shit," she bit out, reaching over to push at James's shoulder, but all he did was grunt and roll away from her. "Do you know where he is?"
"I'm a couple thousand feet over his position," Tony replied and Natasha realized he was in the suit. "He's got the inducer, thankfully, and I put a tracker in it from the start. For this and other reasons."
"I'll call you back when we're on the move," Natasha said, ending the call and turning so she could kick James awake. "Get up. Steve's running in the park."
James blinked stupidly at her for a moment. "I'm not sure whether to start laughing or pack my pistol," he finally said, then threw the covers back and got out of bed.
They were on the street in five minutes and Natasha was already on the phone with Tony, who said that Steve was up by the Boat Basin Cafe and continuing north. "Do you think he's going as far north as 125th?" she asked. "We can't catch up to him on foot and we'll miss him at 96th if we try for a cab or the subway."
"I've got Clint on his mountain bike moving north to intercept," Tony replied. "What I'm hoping to do is have him turn Steve around and into you."
Natasha used hand gestures to tell James to head west, toward Riverside Park and not east toward West End Avenue or the subway. "Sounds like a plan," she agreed.
"Yeah, well, let's see if I'm better at corralling a rampaging Captain America than I was with the Living Laser," Tony said sourly.
He was. Clint, through Tony, reported when he'd caught up to Steve and then, five minutes later, that Steve was heading back downtown "not with me."
Natasha and James waited on a park bench that faced the Hudson. James was the one who pointed out that they had no idea what Steve looked like with the inducer and he could be any of the early-morning runners going by if Clint didn't stay close.
"Not to be all insensitive, but look for the angry black man," Tony replied. "There are only two settings on the inducer that won't draw attention doing a five minute mile and he chose the first one. I can turn him into the koala when he gets close if you need me to."
Natasha said not to bother, they'd position themselves well and count on Steve being the one to react to their presence. Steve might try to blow by them, but they'd know who he was. And, besides, they knew where he was going even if he got by them. Which he didn't.
"What the fuck were you thinking?" James asked in a barely-contained shout as Steve slowed to a jog as he approached. Clint rolled to a stop near Natasha, sensing as she had that this was a job for James, at least the first go-round.
Steve's features might be different, but the expressions were all his and Natasha knew the angry, stubborn look well.
"We had this conversation in 1943," James said in a quieter but no less furious voice because they were not alone and they were in a public place. "And clearly we are going to have it again. But not here and not with the same result. Let's go."
He started walking -- stalking -- toward the nearest uphill path that would lead them back to street level, expecting Steve to follow, which he did. Natasha had to jog to catch up, Clint walking his bike next to her. It took them more than twenty minutes to get back to Stark Tower, by which time Tony had returned, stripped off both the armor and whatever he'd worn under it, and was dressed in jeans and a Misfits t-shirt when he met them in the gym, which was where James had led all of them without a word. Tony raised an eyebrow at Natasha, who could only shrug in response because she had no idea what James was planning.
"Turn off the inducer and go get your shield," James ordered flatly. "You want to prove whatever it is you want to prove, you'll do it against me."
His left arm turned to metal in the blink of an eye and when Natasha looked at his face, she could see both the desperation of Bucky Barnes and the cold cruelty of the Winter Soldier.
Steve exhaled loudly as he shut off the inducer and returned to his familiar form. "Buck, I--"
"Do it!" James barked out, pointing to the door with his armored hand. "You want to prove that you should go to Perm? Go get your goddamned shield because I will break your jaw if I have to, Steve, to get it through your thick skull that you aren't ready yet. There's more at stake than your ego, so let's get that out of the way now."
Natasha didn't think that whatever this was about, Steve's ego was at the bottom of it. It was part of it, absolutely, possibly a big part. But something else was going on and she didn't know what it was and she wasn't sure if James did, either. He was unreadable to her here, angry and afraid, so while she thought he was poking Steve to get a useful response, she wasn't sure. This could just as well be about their war as Perm, for either of them.
"It's not about my ego," Steve insisted angrily, but he went to go get his shield anyway. They heard voices from outside the gym door and Natasha wasn't surprised to see Peggy in her robe with her walker appear a moment later. Clint ran over to bring her a chair and while Natasha couldn't hear them talking, she knew he was explaining what had gone on this morning already. Peggy's expression was stormy as she stared at James, willing him to turn to her and maybe talk to her, but he kept his back to her, to all of them, flexing his metal hand a few times before crossing over to the far corner and emptying his pockets on to the table -- knife, wallet, handkerchief -- and taking the pistol out from the holster in the small of his back.
Natasha went over to where Clint and Peggy were, since James was clearly in no mood to be talked to or talked down. Tony waited a few moments before he, too, followed.
"He's not going to actually break Steve, is he?" Tony asked, sounding like he genuinely didn't know the answer. "I know that's probably the only way we keep him from pulling this again tomorrow morning, but..."
Natasha had no answer. She didn't think James wanted to hurt Steve, but he was also clearly goading him into something.
"It's a brothers thing," Clint said as the silence stretched. "They're not saying what we think they're saying."
"I think they're saying most of what we think they're saying," Tony protested, but weakly. Clint was the only one of them with a sibling.
Steve returned, unhappy but carrying his shield. He walked like a condemned man to the middle of the mats in the section set up for sparring. Natasha didn't get a good enough look at his face as he passed to see if the dominant expression was remorse or resignation.
James turned away from the table and started walking toward him, head down until he was actually on the mats and then he had eyes only for Steve.
"This isn't about my ego," Steve repeated as James stopped a few feet away.
"Of course it is," James replied wryly, the smile on his face not at all amused. "This is about you knowing best, about you forcing the outcome you want by whatever means necessary. I told you, Stevie, we've had this discussion before. I know how it goes. I am not going to let you win it again."
And then quicker than even Natasha could register the motion, James's left fist was flying toward's Steve's face. Steve barely got the shield up in time to block the blow with the top edge of it, a loud metal clank resounding around the room.
"You wanna change your answer, Barton, before the blood starts splashing around?" Tony asked as Steve shifted into a defensive posture and James moved to attack again.
This was not a fair fight, which both men understood. James was a better hand-to-hand combatant than Steve even were Steve at peak conditioning, which would have evened the odds somewhat. Here, he was slow, entirely on defense for more reasons than he clearly did not want to be fighting at all, barely keeping up even as it was obvious to everyone that James was pulling his punches.
"What are you trying to prove?" James asked, not even winded. Steve was starting to sweat again, blinking it out of his eyes. "That you're in fighting form? You're not. You can barely keep up with my fist -- what are you going to do against a bullet?"
"That's not--" Steve broke off to defend himself again against another blow from James's metal arm, this one coupled with a leg sweep that put Steve on his ass.
"You can probably do it if you push hard enough," James continued, stepping back so Steve could get up again. Natasha had been sparring with James for months; she could see how easy he was going and she was sure Steve could see it, too, which added to the insult. "Force your way on to the roster. You are that good of a tactician and we both know that you are ruthless when you need to be. When you want to be." He started another attack, then deked, leaving Steve open and exposed, but instead of kicking or punching Steve in the solar plexus, he just shoved him with an open hand, hard enough to make him stumble and fall back over because he'd already been off balance. "Are you willing to risk Natasha's life so you can get what you want? Risk Clint's? Risk mine?"
"I already have!" Steve cried out from the floor, pushing himself back up to standing with a little difficulty. "I'm the reason you were on that train. I'm the reason you have that!" He pointed at James's metal arm, hanging loosely at his side.
Next to Clint, Peggy made a noise that was less surprise than realization. She understood what the real story was now. Natasha could see the shape of it, but she wasn't as quick or as historied and didn't know exactly what it was yet.
"No you're not," James barked out. "You're the reason I didn't die on Zola's table in Italy. Everything else that happened, everything else, is on me. Me. Don't you fucking take my choices away from me, Steve. I've had enough of that in my life. I chose to join the Commandos. I chose to follow you on to that train. And if you try to take the blame for the Winter Soldier, I will crack your skull back open and you can spend another year wearing diapers and eating applesauce. That's not on either of us."
"What's the blame version of a daisy chain?" Tony asked. Natasha didn't understand the expression, but Tony wasn't expecting an answer, so she didn't say anything.
"You want to go to Perm to repent for old sins," James went on in a less angry, quieter tone. "You don't have to. You got nothing you need to apologize for. We're even. We're always even because we never started keeping count."
Which was bullshit as far as James went, Natasha knew very well, but it was bullshit for both of them, clearly, so it balanced out. They would always think they owed the other, would always take the blame for what had been done on their behalf out of faith and friendship and family. Natasha didn't understand any of it, how could she? But Clint, the closest thing she had to a family, was watching James and Steve with knowing eyes and, if you knew where to look for it, wistfulness. He and Barney were not likely to ever be able to have their own version of this and she knew how much it bothered him still.
"Now why the hell are you really doing this?" James asked, all anger gone from his voice. He reached out and Steve didn't flinch as James took hold of his jaw and tilted his head up so that he was looking at James instead of at the floor. "Because this is Grade A stupid, even for you when you get one of your ideas."
Steve closed his eyes for a moment, but opened them again before he spoke. "I want to make sure you come home."
Natasha could see in James's face the exact moment he realized that Steve wasn't talking about James living or dying. It destroyed him. And then he pulled himself back together a heartbeat later and smiled, using his grip on Steve's jaw to pull him closer so that their foreheads touched, holding them there for a long moment before pulling back. "Where the hell else am I going to go?"
"Told ya," Clint said to Tony as he leaned over to help Peggy stand up. "You got any breakfast grub in this joint, Stark?"
Half an hour later, they were sitting in Tony's dining room as Marcel produced a neverending stack of lemon ricotta pancakes and a bottomless pot of strong coffee to go with the fresh fruit and sausages. Steve, freshly washed and still looking one part defiant to three parts embarrassed, was eating with an appetite that everyone else mocked as their choice of penalty for the early morning theatrics.
"Breakfast was fantastic," Clint told the table after they'd all finished eating and were working on their last cups of coffee. "But we are not fucking doing this tomorrow or the day after. Solid copy, Rogers?"
Steve nodded.
James would probably have liked to stick around Steve for a while -- Steve definitely would have liked it, Natasha thought -- but they were due at 44th Street for a mission planning meeting. So they went back to Natasha's place, showered and changed, and spent the next ten hours staring at a map of Perm and trying to build a network of faces and names of people who were known HYDRA operatives within Perm. It was an ongoing task, thankfully handled by other people, but Natasha (with her contacts) and especially James (with his experience) were occasionally called in to contribute. At the end of a long day, she kissed James on the cheek and told him to go to Steve's; they had talked about going to try a new Peruvian restaurant, but James's heart wasn't going to be in it and she was frankly exhausted. She spent the evening on the couch with a glass of sancerre and a novel, going to bed early because it was all going to start up again the next day, hopefully without the pre-dawn crisis.
The following week, Steve threw the shield for the first time since he'd been shot, in the expansive grounds surrounding a farmhouse in the middle of Pennsylvania. It ricocheted off two trees and came screaming back and Steve caught it easily and with a satisfied smile on his face.
"Really?" Clint asked with asperity. "You couldn't make it wobble or hit wrong or have to chase it down the first time out?"
The farmhouse was Tony's, bought through half a dozen shell companies by Pepper in the days after Tony had been rescued from Afghanistan. She'd thought he would need someplace quiet to recover, someplace away from the media and the temptations and demands of Stark Industries. "He did need it," Pepper told Natasha as she'd handed over the keys. "But events overtook us."
Tony had never actually been to the farmhouse, although Pepper had used it as a retreat a few times, as had Colonel Rhodes. Nobody knew about it, it had no connection to Stark Industries -- Pepper had used Tony's own money for it -- and there was plenty of space to make noise and run around. Which was more or less what Steve and James and Clint planned to do.
"And you," Pepper had added dryly. "Don't blame the boys for everything."
There'd been an attempt to turn it into a full Avengers social event, but that had not come to pass. Thor was home while Bruce had a web conference that weekend that he had been looking forward to for months and the farmhouse did not have a great signal. Which had more or less been Tony's excuse, since he had been living in his workshop almost since the assassination in Moscow trying to come up with something to defeat the explosive used to assassinate the Chinese ambassador because there was no way HYDRA didn't have more of that stuff. "He's the happy kind of obsessive," Steve had assured them. "It's a puzzle, not a penance."
They had conveniently neglected to tell Fury about it -- as they had Steve's little Hudson River escap(ad)e -- with the justification that if two Avengers and the Winter Soldier couldn't protect Captain America, there was a lot more wrong to the picture. Although Natasha wasn't alone in hoping that the topic of conversation never came up. They would be there three days, which even in their strange lives wasn't always enough time to get into really quality trouble.
It was fun, in no small part because Steve was functionally independent and away from Stark Tower, which Natasha suspected had started to feel like a gilded cage to him. It was a place that he'd had to be because of his infirmities and it was a place he couldn't leave without pomp and circumstance -- or subterfuge. Steve didn't resent Tony or Pepper, quite the opposite -- Natasha thought that those relationships had been strengthened during his time there. But that didn't change the fact that Steve had been in someone's care for the last fifteen months and he was ready to stand on his own once more and still he couldn't.
It was three days of much more outdoor activity than Natasha would ever have chosen for a retreat on her own, but it worked. They ran and shot and sparred, but they also took walks and sat lazily and while Steve handled the main of the meal prep, everyone else contributed, too. Natasha got to spend time with Clint without it them having their passports in their pockets or their weapons out, the two of them getting surprisingly high-quality time washing and drying dishes after dinner. Natasha also got time with Steve, which had been rare. They'd spent a lot of time together since he'd returned to New York, but usually with other people around. One-on-one time had been almost an accident and Natasha missed it as intent. Once upon a time, she and Steve had explored the city together, going to a museum or a restaurant (or both), reacquainting themselves with old favorites and making new discoveries and learning about each other along the way. But those were activities Steve was currently barred from -- at least as they'd once enjoyed them -- and Natasha felt bad sometimes for not finding new ways to reinforce the old connections.
But there they were, sitting on the porch shucking corn and shelling peas while James and Clint were somewhere on the property one-upping each other with rifles and targets.
"Would you consider staying out here for a while?" Natasha asked, using her fingernail to slice open a pea pod and then running her thumb down the pod so that the peas fell in the bowl between her feet.
It would be a fight with Fury, absolutely, but Steve had more leverage now. He couldn't do everything he'd once been able to do, but he might in the future and still, even before then, he didn't need anyone's help anymore.
Steve made a complicated face. "A little while, maybe," he replied. "But when I said I wanted to be my own man again, I think I meant some place with more people."
They were miles from everything and everyone here; Pepper had chosen well and the financial crisis since she'd done so had only increased the isolation through foreclosure and lack of development.
"Farmer's market's a little more authentic here," she teased, but she understood. He was no more a country mouse than she was, much to Clint's disappointment.
"After a couple of years among the hipsters, I'm comfortable with the poseurs," he replied with a mischievous smile, reaching for another ear of corn. "At least they eat well."
"I'll tell James to start packing," Natasha said with a smile.
"Nah," Steve scoffed. "Even if Fury was prepared to give me my freedom, I wouldn't be going back. First, Buck needs it more than I do right now and it's probably got more of his stuff in it than mine by this point."
As Steve had improved, the rest of his art supplies and his cookbooks and kitchen supplies had joined the books and clothes and knickknacks in his Stark Tower apartment. What was left was the furniture -- which Steve hadn't chosen in the first place -- and some of the memorabilia and photos that Steve had insisted he hadn't wanted but only because he wanted James to have them, to see them and remember that life.
"You are assuming that James has done anything like buy stuff," Natasha told him ruefully. Affectionately, but ruefully. "It looks like your place, just more spare."
"Blank canvas," Steve assured. "He'll fill it in once he figures out what he likes. Took me time, too, but I caught up."
Natasha hadn't spent an awful lot of time at Steve's in the earliest days of their association to have seen the progress as it had occurred. She'd been out in the field a lot, as often as she could, because she'd wanted to get away from the Avengers and what they represented: a new world order where she wasn't nearly as relevant, as useful as she had once been. Against the Chitauri, she'd been an acrobat with a pair of pistols up against something so far out of her league there'd been no comparable. She hadn't been scared of them, but she'd been terrified of what they meant and what might happen to her if this was the future of global threats. What could she be if the Black Widow was no longer an essential player in the global political game? So she went about proving herself still necessary and needed, taking assignment after assignment so she could be in control of things again. So she could matter. What down time she'd had, she'd spent with Clint, who'd only accepted so much help as he'd recovered from his own experiences and had largely sought the same recovery methods as she had -- work and more work.
"I don't think I've exactly been the best role model there," she admitted wryly, dropping another empty pea pod in the bowl she was using as a garbage. Steve had spent a good deal of time working on that with her, although she hadn't ever considered herself to be his project. She didn't think he considered her his project, either. Steve respected his friends as they were, no matter what he might wish for them in the privacy of his own heart.
"You've been good for him in other ways," he assured. From anyone else, that would have been a wink-wink-nudge-nudge comment about sex, but Steve, who was not nearly as pure of thought as popular legend held, meant it entirely in its broader sense.
"I have," she agreed with a smile because false modesty did not suit her and James, for all that she loved him, had been and would be a lot of otherwise uncredited work.
They continued their tasks in silence, Steve finishing with the corn and moving on to carrots, before she spoke again. "What was the second reason?"
"Hm?"
"You said that the first reason you weren't going to evict James was that he needed the anchor more than you did," she prompted. "What was the second?"
Steve smiled, a bit shyly she thought, and a bit sadly and she realized before he started speaking that this wasn't going to be about fresh starts and picking out his own couch this time.
"It's not good for Peggy," Steve said. "Even with all new furniture -- and it would all have to be new, she couldn't ever use the kitchen stools and the couch is too deep for her now -- there would have to be too much work done on the place to make it for two people. Or more, if we have to bring someone in later on."
Natasha was pretty sure this was the first time Steve had spoken of his plans out loud to anyone but Peggy -- if he'd even said anything to her yet. James would have said something if Steve had told him, she thought. It wasn't the kind of thing Steve would ask for a vow of silence for and James, at least the sentimentalist hiding deep in a corner of his heart where neither war nor Zola nor Schmidt nor Department X could reach, would have been happy to share it.
"What does Peggy think?" Natasha asked, since this would not have been the first time Steve had tried to make plans for Peggy only to be firmly shot down upon actual presentation. But all of those plans had been Before. Before Steve's shooting, before Peggy had packed up her own life to be with Steve, before the consequences of her advanced age had meant a real decline instead of being an occasional annoyance, before the two of them had spent more than a year together in a way that age and ego and time had never allowed.
Steve smiled and she realized he'd been worried about her response. "There are plenty of one-story houses inside city limits. She'd like a backyard."
The isolation of Wyoming had been trying for Peggy at times, Natasha knew, but she'd enjoyed the peace of it.
"When are you going to tell James that you and Peggy are going to be shacking up in sin?" she asked lightly so that it wouldn't come off as chiding. She knew it would be soon because he'd want to tell James himself and he'd never ask her to keep a secret from him.
"Who said anything about living in sin?" Steve asked in return, raising his chin in challenge even though Natasha could see the amusement in his eyes. "I'm a gentleman and I've asked for the lady's hand."
Which shocked Natasha but did not really surprise her, although something must have shown on her face because Steve reacted, so she shook her head. "And what did the lady say?"
"The lady said she'd think about it," Steve admitted with a self-deprecating grin, but it quickly melted into something far sadder. "She's still worried about me, about holding me back. I don't know what I else I can tell her to get her to believe that she isn't. That I'm exactly where I want to be when it comes to her."
Once upon a time, that had been exactly the problem, at least as far as Peggy saw it. She still saw it that way, but had difficult relationship with her ability to change Steve's mind. As they all did.
"I think the fact that she's agreeing to let you stick around speaks volumes," Natasha said, dropping the last empty pea pod into the discard bowl.
Steve smiled at her and offered her a peeled carrot, which she accepted, biting off the tip and spitting it into the discard bowl. She ate the rest as Steve finished the carrots and moved on to apples. Clint had been the one to find the sign for the u-pick apple orchard -- he'd brought his mountain bike because he hated running for exercise -- and they'd gone yesterday afternoon, coming back with far too many apples but having thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The only one who'd ever picked fruit before had been Clint and he'd joked that he'd never done it legally, only pilfering after dark during his circus days or on the run in the Middle East. So he was the expert, they'd told him, and he should share his wisdom. "The only wisdom I have to share is that there are consequences to living on fresh figs," had been the reply.
James and Clint returned before Steve had finished his pile of peeled apples (which wasn't actually a pile, since all of his peeled produce was going into a bucket of water), still giving each other grief for their shooting -- nevermind that their worst shots were still impossible shots for most everyone else -- and then demanding dinner, which got half-peeled apple tossed at them.
Tuesday morning, however, it was back to work at 44th Street, the 'family tree' of HYDRA-in-Perm having grown in their absence and a test-run with a quinjet in Utah having given them a good idea of how close they could land to a house or a populated area without detection, since using an actual airstrip within Perm was impossible. They were treating the entire city as hostile and monitored, which was overstating the case, but probably not by much and they didn't have the time to make a finer distinction. Perm was held by two opposing forces -- the Russian government and HYDRA -- and neither wanted SHIELD there, although the former was capable of looking the other way in a warped case of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.'
Lukin's compound was in the sparsely populated northern part of the Leninsky district, on the right bank of the Kama but not near the river. It was surrounded by forest and had exactly one road that led to it. Repeated satellite overflights and local intelligence reports, both eyeball accounts and second-hand, indicated that the security was reflective of the position HYDRA held in the region: enough to be taken seriously, but nothing like what they'd seen at Minyar. Lukin was not worried about the Russian Army storming the place, not with such limited access routes and an entirely sympathetic population.
"The population of Minyar was sympathetic, too, and they still had Triple-A," Clint pointed out during that particular briefing.
There was no artillery at the compound, anti-aircraft or ground-oriented, they were assured. Clint exchanged a look with Natasha to indicate how much faith he placed in that promise and she could do nothing but shrug in return.
In the evening, with Fury's permission, they took copies of the planning material over to Steve's, since he was their best tactical and strategic planner. Steve enjoyed the involvement, enjoyed putting in the work during the day to assess and improve upon what he'd been given, and Natasha wasn't the only one who'd suggested that they find a way for Steve to at least view the briefings in real time, remotely by necessity. The camera that was set up in the rear of the team room was for Fury, the analysts were told. James usually was the one who had to take credit for Steve's suggestions and improvements, mostly because the credulity of what the Winter Soldier was capable of was essentially boundless and his role in the raid at the Powell SHIELD base was known. (Clint, whose role in the attack on the Helicarrier while under Loki's control could possibly have stood as his credentials, had been quieter than usual and Natasha was grateful that no analyst was stupid enough to bring that up because Clint tended not to roll with those punches the way James had learned to.) James understood the power of myth and was not shy about using it within SHIELD as he did during his missions, but in this case he was amused because the myth that was being drawn upon was not just that of the Winter Soldier, but also that of James Barnes, team sergeant of the Howling Commandos. "They don't get that my job there was mostly making sure everyone survived Steve's crazy ideas," he'd said with a shake of his head, then held up his left arm. "A task at which I proved only partially successful."
There'd initially been some concern -- at least among those who'd known about Steve's pre-dawn run -- that the increased involvement in the Perm mission would either upset Steve or give him new energy to try some other way to prove his fitness for it. But that turned out not to be the case. The demons that had been driving that urge had been exorcised on the mats in the gym and Steve had never really been fueled by vengeance. Which was not to say that he wasn't in possession of the desire, just that he was generally the master of it.
"Of course I want to see Lukin pay," he admitted during a lunch at his apartment. It was just the two of them and Peggy, James staying at 44th Street to work on something with Zubov and Clint being temporarily dispatched to Algeria to handle a matter that had nothing to do with HYDRA. "Not as much for shooting me, but for what he did to the people I care about and to everyone else who has been hurt by his quest for power. I won't shed a tear if he dies and I won't think less of whoever kills him. And if he ends up rotting in a jail cell like Schmidt, that's okay, too, because I think powerlessness, for people like him, is crueler than death. I want to see that happen, but I don't need to see it. I trust you guys to get it done."
Even if Steve had come to terms, there was still a discussion about who exactly was going on the mission. SHIELD's Direct Action Service had teams that were regional specialists and thus there were two teams that were populated by Russian and Slavic languages speakers, but there was also a list of teams that could and couldn't work with the Avengers and the Eastern European teams were both on the latter list. Even though this wasn't a proper Avengers mission, all of the compatibility problems couldn't be laid at Tony or Thor or Bruce's feet. There'd already been tension with Malcolm, the team leader initially assigned to the mission, and Clint had suggested bringing in Corrales instead because his team was the most used to dealing with them and they weren't planning on chatting with Lukin's people, so the language handicap wouldn't matter and the fact that Corrales had probably led more HYDRA raids than Malcolm and Possler combined did. Fury hadn't said no, but Malcolm's team was still assigned to the mission for now and thus Malcolm was still pushing for more inclusion in all phases of the operation while also accusing them of trying to get his men killed at every opportunity.
When two of Malcolm's people were seriously injured in a hang fire accident on the range, Fury called Clint, Natasha, and James into his office. "So help me God, if any of you are responsible for this, I will exact a suitable and lasting punishment."
They hadn't done anything. The investigation quickly showed that every cartridge in Bellavia's clip was defective in a fashion that could only have happened during production and turned out not to be the only rifle ammo affected, so this was a canary in a coal mine accident, not sabotage.
Corrales still warily asked if they'd blown off Bellavia's hand to get him on board, but he was joking. He wasn't joking about asking for a Russian cheat-sheet for his men, both phrases they would use ("drop your weapons" and "lie down on the ground") and phrases they were likely to hear, "including any warnings of impending self-detonation."
The mission planning moved smoothly more because of the influx of fresh intelligence, including photos of the compound's perimeter security station and a whole lot of pilfered FSB material, than because of the change in support teams, although that didn't hurt. Which was not to say that having someone so familiar with their methods -- and their past hijinks -- was without its own complications.
Corrales had been kidding around when he asked what the secret mission was this time -- he'd helped them sneak into Latveria the other year -- and it had taken all of Natasha's professional training to not react to the question. She justified her denial to herself by saying that technically, there wasn't any secret mission here beyond apprehending Lukin, but she still disliked lying by omission to a man she genuinely respected.
It was Clint's turn a few mornings later after James had finished explaining Steve's latest suggestions. "It's a very Captain Rogers kind of move," Corrales said approvingly, not even looking up from where he was taking notes. "Appropriate considering we're going after the guy who killed him."
"It's a Commandos thing," Clint replied blandly, since some kind of response was required.
"He's not going to figure it out, is he?" James asked over a dinner later that night.
"No killing Corrales to keep our secrets," Tony warned. He'd been pried out of the workshop by Pepper with JARVIS's and Natasha's help because she hadn't been in New York in more than a week and would be leaving again in a few days and didn't consider sitting by Tony's workbench to be quality relationship time. "We like Corrales."
"Says the guy who shot his team twice with the barf cannon," Clint retorted. James looked over at Natasha as everyone else laughed, she indicated that she'd explain later.
"We like him because he's forgiving," Tony replied loftily.
"Corrales is more likely to accept that you learned something from Steve than that the long-dead Captain America is the Wizard of Oz secretly doing our mission planning," Clint assured, reaching out to serve himself more stuffed tomatoes.
"What about Steve learning something from me?" James asked with mock outrage.
"I'm the man with the plan," Steve explained with equally mock gentleness as he patted James's hand. James responded by trying to drive his fork into Steve's hand until he pulled it away.
While they'd been sitting in offices on 44th Street figuring out what they wanted to do, a SHIELD team had been building a mockup of Lukin's compound in New Mexico, in a corner of Gila National Forest that had terrain similar to that of Perm. The compound wasn't a HYDRA base as they'd gotten used to them, was more like a warlord's estate in any number of countries with housing for the underlings and a presumed weapons and vehicle stash, but with the main machinery of business offsite. This was not the new HYDRA world headquarters, was in fact the ghost of some Party bigwig's dacha, heavily modified since then but still retaining a lot of the elements that made it identifiable as someone's vacation home. Or, perhaps more accurately, someone's idea of a vacation home. There was the main house, two stories, no sign of a basement, a barn that had been converted into a barracks, and a stable-turned-garage. There was a stream at the rear of the compound, which only had the kind of fencing that would be sufficient to keep out local fauna and not present any problem to a determined adult human, but local observation said that there were motion detectors of the kind that James had defeated on their infiltration into Latveria and for which he'd provided lessons to all parties because they had examples, which were in use for the exercise. There were no perimeter guard patrols, but there was a security station at a strategic location near the entrance and response time from that point was very fast.
All of the agents playing Lukin and his people were Russian speakers, to maintain the possibility of a foul-up caused by language barriers, and Possler's team and part of Malcolm's were the key players. Malcolm himself got to be Lukin, which made everyone joke that the likelihood of it being 'capture' and not 'kill' were very low. They went through three test runs in three days, spending each evening going over what worked and what didn't while the carpenters re-build the walls that had been blown up or shot to pieces during the drills. Natasha didn't have a lot to contribute to the planning refinements, just as she'd been somewhat limited in her contributions during the design. This wasn't her area of expertise; if she was going to get into a heavily fortified compound, she was going to either be invited in under false pretenses or go over a wall herself like a cat burglar. Her role in the assault was to be part of the advance scout team, let the others do the heavy lifting as required, and try to acquire as much documentation and other intelligence as circumstances allowed. She'd shown no offense at being excluded from the main battle plans and nobody had offered her any apologies or excuses.
They were only going to be back in New York for two days before they left again. They would be staging in northern Kazakhstan to minimize the actual flight time over Russian territory after mission launch; the camp was isolated but well-provisioned and well-defended, a holdover from the preparations for the Minyar assault years ago.
Natasha treated her time off as she would any time off before a mission -- she relaxed, she treated herself well without over-indulging, she made sure everything was prepared in case she never got to come home. She spent most of the time with James, but not all of it -- they both needed a little time to themselves. They spent the last evening at Tony's, because he insisted that it was a pre-Russian Invasion tradition, and none of them felt like pointing out that once was hardly a tradition because they knew what he really meant. Everyone was there, including Bruce, who'd come in to town while they'd been in New Mexico to do one of his periodic tours of duty in the labs at 44th Street. "I called Jane Foster, but Thor's still not back from whatever he got dragged off to do. I think she's starting to get a little worried," Tony explained.
"You should have invited her," Pepper told him.
"I did!" Tony insisted. "She was at a delicate point in her experiment. I told her I understood and to make sure she took a shower this week."
Marcel, as always, thrilled to having a larger audience than usual and dinner was sublime from the ossetra caviar appetizers and squash velouté to the braised beef cheek main course and a cheese course complemented by apple preserves made from the apples they'd brought back from Pennsylvania. It was a warm evening, so they went outside to the deck for coffee and dessert. They hadn't talked about the mission at all during dinner, but away from the table and with full bellies and a stunning view of Manhattan at night, they were freer with their choices. Tony told them about the 'war room' he was setting up so that all of the ones left behind could watch, although Bruce wasn't sure he would and Pepper said that she would not even if she could have. She was going to be in transit for part of the mission running time, on a flight to Ghana to open a corporate office, Stark Industries' new African hub.
"It looks too much like a video game," Pepper explained, waving away Tony's pointing out that he could send the feed to her jet. "And then I hear voices that I recognize belonging to people that I care about and I can't. I can't live through that vicariously, safe and terrified. I would do it if it helped, if my being there meant something to someone--" she looked over at Tony and Natasha could see in her face her fear every time Tony put on the armor for combat, "--but in this case, it wouldn't. None of you would be helped or soothed knowing I was watching. You won't be thinking about it at all."
Which was the truth, for better or for worse.
Thirty-nine hours later, they were sitting in a pre-fab building in Kazakhstan going through the final mission briefing. The latest satellite feeds had indicated significantly more traffic coming in and out of the compound, which was interesting and probably relevant -- intercepted chatter from the Russians said that they thought another attack was imminent -- but so long as they were leaving and not increasing the manpower inside the walls, it wasn't enough to force a change in plans. They were going in at night, when the population of the compound, estimated at twenty people, would be at its lowest.
Weather at mission time was deteriorating, but the quinjet pilots were confident that they would be able to launch and land without difficulty and assured them that they would be able to hide in the air even if the winds stayed up because they'd be above it. The flight to Perm was still bumpy and nerve-wracking. The quinjets put them down in a clearing a kilometer from the western border of the compound, which meant a kilometer of trudging through dense, uneven, rocky forest with only a quarter moon amplified by night vision goggles to see by. Natasha, one of three serving as vanguard, understood the absolute necessity of it, but still she hated it, hated the lack of depth perception, the way she couldn't avoid getting smacked in the face or goggles by branches, the way she rolled her ankle because of baseball-sized rocks she couldn't see, all of it. But then it was done and they were at the picket fence and then Prideaux and Casimir were working in tandem to trick the motion sensors into thinking that all was quiet on the western front.
Once the motion detectors were defeated, they had another twenty meters of forest to get through until they hit the clearing that was the compound. The barracks were to their left and the garage to the right and the right side of the house was directly in front of them. They didn't have anything on the interior of the house, which meant going room to room and then hoping that there hadn't been heavy modifications inside, such as the panic room that had saved Peggy and Steve from Belova. Natasha moved alongside the lee of the garage so she could see the entirety of the compound and there was nothing happening, that the extra guests had all gone, so she keyed her mic twice to signal to the rest of the team that it was safe to proceed as Casimir and Prideaux went to the pair of double-door entrances to the barn/barracks and secured them with simple bicycle u-locks. During the planning, it had caused no end of hilarity that HYDRA could be defeated by spending $50 at Walmart.
When everyone arrived, they split into three pre-sorted teams, with James, Clint and Natasha attached to one each so that there would be a Russian speaker with each group. Natasha was with Corrales's group as they made their way to the rear entrance of the house and Clint's team took the front entrance. James's unit was going to secure the guard station and would serve as a reserve if (when) things got chaotic. Back at the start, Natasha had asked why she was going in while James was staying outside, not because she resented the danger, but because it seemed prudent to put the best people at the work to the task. The answer had been blunt: James was the most efficient killer on the team, so he was the reserve because if he was needed, they would need that efficiency to salvage whatever they could.
The back door faced the front door, with the entry room in between. The door wasn't locked and they opened it quickly -- creaky hinges could be defeated by speed -- without letting it hit anything. They encountered two guards, both neutralized with silenced pistols before they could raise an alarm. With both teams inside, Clint, who held overall mission command, indicated that his team would take the upstairs while Corrales (and Natasha) would secure the first floor. With HYDRA's love of basement complexes well known, they went room to room checking every single door expecting one to lead to something more, but nothing did. They found one more man at a bank of computers and telephones, presumably on overnight communications duty, and two sleeping in a rear bedroom, and all were taken care of before they knew what was happening. With the floor secure, and no noises coming from upstairs indicating trouble -- there were no noises at all -- Corrales signaled Clint and James, stationed men to watch for reinforcements, and took everyone else but Natasha upstairs to support Clint's team, since they had more rooms to cover and, probably more of those rooms would be occupied. The house was not a home; Lukin's wife and children were in Andorra, their new home, and the place did not even have the comforting accretions of a unit in residence the way the agents in Wyoming had made their duty station domestic.
Natasha stayed downstairs to work on the secondary objective, which was data acquisition. She went back to the room where they'd found the communications setup and, moving aside the corpse of the man who'd attended them, stuck flash drives in the computers -- self-installing programs would take care of the data-raiding for them by uploading everything to SHIELD -- and started looking for portable hard drives and flash drives and CD-ROMs or whatever else could be packed up and taken. She worked quickly but quietly, sacrificing speed for noise discipline. She put what she found in her backpack, leaving the flash drives, which would destroy themselves when they were done, to do their work. They'd found Lukin's office and that was her next stop, pulling out a flash drive for his laptop and then leaving the program to run while she went through file cabinets and desk drawers, skimming folder names and loose papers to find anything of interest and photographing whatever wasn't obviously useless, which excluded practically nothing because once upon a time, they'd cut HYDRA off at the knees by means of shipping labels and Home Depot receipts.
When Zucker came in to check on her, she got him started on photographing the contents of the last drawer of the file cabinet while she moved on to the garbage can. They were both still there when Clint uttered the magic words over their radios: "Beetlejuice is secure."
Tony had been the one to suggest the codename for Lukin and Clint had thought it hilarious, so even when everyone else saw the movie and thought it a horrible choice, Clint used his command authority to make sure it stuck.
Natasha confirmed that she'd heard and James, still outside with his team confirmed as well. Clint radioed that they were bringing him downstairs and Natasha urged Zucker to work faster, since they only had until it was time to take Lukin out of the house to finish. And then she pulled out her pry bar to get into the one locked drawer in the desk, prepared to empty the entire contents into her backpack.
The only thing in it was a purple velvet bag, inside of which was the Red Skull mask. "Bullseye," she muttered.
"Don't think he works in Russia, ma'am," Zucker replied cheekily.
They heard footsteps on the stairs, a herd of them as everyone was moving without concern of discovery, and Natasha took a look around the room to see if she'd missed anything. She'd given it a proper search before she'd started photographing, so there wasn't. "Let's go," she told Zucker, who was on the last pages of his drawer.
Lukin, looking rumpled and in his pajamas but proud and unaffected by his situation, which was 'surrounded by men who wanted to kill him,' was not surprised to see Natasha and called her several disgusting names in greeting. Clint slapped his face. "Watch it," he warned Lukin, sticking a finger in his face. "We don't need you intact. We don't even need you alive. You are the man who killed Captain America and all of these gentlemen worked with and respected that man, so all they really need is a pretext. I will translate every word out of your mouth if it will give them one."
Lukin sneered. "None of you will shoot a prisoner."
"But I will," James said, stepping out of the shadows of the doorway to the dining room. Natasha hadn't even known he was there and startled a little, but Lukin took an involuntary step back, only to be pushed forward again by Ramos and Pahk. "Got any more magic words for me, Boss?"
He'd put a Russian accent on the last word and wore a cruel smile on his face. This was the Winter Soldier and Natasha could allow herself the satisfaction of watching how Lukin lost his insouciance when that cold gaze was fixed on him not as lord and master, but as target. He was the one who'd lost his grip on the tiger's tail and he knew it. Part of Natasha enjoyed his fear, his very legitimate fear, that James would kill him where he stood. But mostly, she was afraid for James, about what doing this -- facing Lukin, whether or not he killed him -- would do to him. This was why Steve had wanted to go, for this moment, to make sure that James was able to come away from it intact. James had promised him that he would, but Natasha wasn't sure if that was a promise he could keep now that it was here.
James pulled out his .45 and had it at Lukin's forehead before anyone could register that he'd drawn.
Natasha looked over at Clint; both of them were too far away to do anything, as was Corrales, who was watching Natasha for a cue. She shook her head minutely. They had to show James a little faith that everything he'd been through in the last year-plus since he'd come in from the cold mattered, that he'd changed enough to not want to give up what he'd gotten back for the sake of revenge. He knew that Steve would welcome him back even if he pulled the trigger, that Natasha would not end their relationship if he killed Lukin, but it would change things and not for the better. She had to hope that that mattered to him more than his pain and his anger.
"I could splatter your brains across everyone's face and they'd only complain about the mess," James told Lukin in Russian, pushing the muzzle of the gun harder against Lukin's forehead so that it pushed his head back. "They know what you did to me, what you did to Steve Rogers, what you tried to do to Peggy Carter. We invaded a country to get to you. So that I could get to you. They won't even have to say you were shot trying to escape. They'll leave you headless in your pajamas, handcuffs on, lying in a pool of piss and blood for your minions to find."
He stood like that, his face so close to Lukin's, his expression devoid of any and all emotion, even anger. And then he holstered the gun and took a step back and the Winter Soldier disappeared, leaving Sergeant James Barnes wearing his clothes and Natasha to exhale and an indent in the skin of Lukin's forehead.
"But that would be too easy for you," he continued in English. "So you'll get to rot in a prison cell like Schmidt, your every move decided by someone else after having that privilege for far too long. The Chinese will definitely want you. I think Baron von Doom would enjoy your company again, too. He might even reopen Paklena Kapuja just to keep you close."
Paklena Kapuja was an infamous prison from the Communist era, the Latverian version of Lubyanka. The Dooms had shut it down when they'd been brought back in the early '90s. There was no chance of Lukin ending up there, however appropriate it might be. Or China. Lukin, were he thinking clearly, would realize that, but he wasn't, still rattled by seeing the Winter Soldier.
Clint drew Natasha's attention and indicated via gesture that the quinjets were late, caught up in the weather like they'd promised they wouldn't be. They were supposed to land in the compound's courtyard, which meant that the team and Lukin could wait in the house, but it also meant that they were sitting ducks. They could have triggered a silent alarm, or there could have been phone or email communication that should have been transmitted or received or anyone in the barracks could have woken up and realized that they were locked in and called in reinforcements or tried to escape.
"Put him in a chair and tie him to it," Clint ordered, gesturing for Corrales and James to come to him so he could tell them about the delay, leaving Natasha to supervise the prisoner.
Lukin regained a little bit of his brio with James out of sight, sitting regally as he was tied at arm and ankle to a dining room chair. Natasha understood it, both as theater and as actual confidence. Lukin was a master spy and while he'd been genuinely rattled by seeing James, he was no amateur and had recovered. He was confident that he could outfox Fury -- for that was who he would be dealing with -- and he had a Soviet-era disdain for the softness of American captivity. Prison life would not be hard on him, not compared to what would have happened in a place like Lubyanka or Paklena Kapuja, and he assumed that his greatest physical threat would be getting fat on the high-starch diet. He could leverage what he knew -- and he knew a lot -- into comforts and privileges and he could amuse himself toying with his interrogators and playing games with SHIELD. He might not even have to give up his external power -- he had gotten to Schmidt, after all, and his network could get to him, allowing him to continue to be a world player from Supermax or wherever he was put for the crime of orchestrating the murder of Captain America.
"You're assuming too much," Natasha told him in Russian and he looked at her, curious and disdainful of what she might presume to read of his thoughts. But his thoughts weren't terribly unique or hard to read. "You're already dead. We don't need to parade you down the courthouse steps for the masses. They've already celebrated your death. We can just throw you in a hole and take you out when we feel like it. There isn't going to be a trial and you won't be getting your one hour a day of sunshine and three square meals. This is a most extraordinary rendition and if the Americans have learned anything, they've learned how to do that. Fury will take what he wants from you and then give you to whoever will make you hurt the most and he'll do it with clean hands and a joyous heart."
Lukin snorted dismissively, but she could see that her words had gotten through. The arrogance was a bit more theatrical and a bit less genuine now. She smiled as she kept in motion around the entry room, since Lukin wanted her in his line of sight. He didn't think she was going to do anything to him, which was both foolish and correct, but he clearly felt better when he could see where she was, so she went to where he couldn't, standing behind his chair and then moving again so he'd have to guess whether she'd be appearing on his left or right. It was seemingly petty, but she knew from experience -- both having done this before and having been the one in the chair -- that it had a reasonably good cumulative effect, like Chinese water torture, a low-grade unsettled feeling that could be used for more important things. Lukin would know it too, but that was the beauty of it: it didn't matter.
"They say ten minutes, but it could be twenty," Clint told her on one of her passes. "Thunderstorm's pushing through. It'll move quickly, they said, but it's bad fucking timing."
Natasha nodded. "Do we stay here or go back to the secondary extraction point?" Which was the clearing where they'd been dropped off.
Clint made a face to indicate that both choices were bad. "We should go," he said. "If we're gonna have to trip and tumble our way through the forest again, I'd rather do it before anyone's shooting at us and Barnes is getting really itchy being here any longer than we have to. Not that I'm happy with it, but he's really rabbity. I don't think anyone's gonna firebomb this place with Lukin inside, but..."
"But this is still HYDRA and dying for the cause is good for everyone, whether they want to or not," Natasha finished. "Let's go, then."
Explaining the plan to everyone was quick; they would go back the way they came, Pahk and Ramos would take Lukin, and everyone would watch their surroundings. Clint went over to Lukin, who was now being cut free and forced to standing, but he directed his words at Pahk and Ramos. "Gag him. If he tries anything, and I mean anything, you shoot him in the head and leave his corpse to rot. We don't need him alive."
Then he looked at Lukin. "Do you understand just how little I value your safety?" he asked. Lukin nodded once.
They left the house through the back door, which put them a little closer to the path back through the woods, but also left them more exposed to the barn-turned-barracks. The compound had floodlights, but they'd been off when they arrived, so unless the barracks population had night vision -- possible, they didn't know where the armory was -- the advantage of being able to see in the dark stayed with the SHIELD team. A quarter moon, even high in a starry sky, didn't do much. There were two windows in the barn, both high up off of the ground, and Casimir, walking point with Prideaux and Natasha, quietly announced over the radio that it was open where it had once been closed.
"Nothing--wait, there's a head poking out," Casimir reported.
"Blow it off," Clint ordered. "Keep them ducking."
Casimir took a knee and squeezed off a round almost in one motion. The shot was loud in the quiet of the dark and they started moving faster, Casimir staying in position to watch the window as the others passed him by, tapping him on the shoulder as they did, running to the side of the stable and pressing against the wall. Once they were all present and accounted for by the stable, Natasha, Casimir and Prideaux began the process again, this time from the stable to the treeline. It would be about twenty-five meters, all but the first few over open ground.
They moved slowly, looking right, left, and up as they scouted the terrain and it was all clear until Natasha, with her eyes on the barn's rear window, saw motion and then heard a thump and then a cry of pain.
"Jumper out of the back window," Natasha said quietly. "Looks like he broke his leg on impact."
"See 'im," Prideaux acknowledged.
The window was probably a good seven meters off the ground, too far to drop if you didn't know what you were doing. The jumper was struggling to his feet and Prideaux put a bullet in his chest as soon as it was in view.
"Another looky-loo," Natasha said calmly, raising her rifle sight to her goggles -- a miserable way to get a look -- and squeezing off a three-round burst because she didn't trust her accuracy under the circumstances. But she made her target and he slumped where she'd shot him, half-in and half-out of the window.
"Corbette, can you get a grenade in that window?" Corrales asked from somewhere behind her. Closer than she'd thought, though, because she could hear the movement as Corbette jogged up.
"Only one way to find out, sir," Corbette replied and Natasha heard the sound of a mortar round being loaded into the launcher. She didn't bother to watch the shot, keeping her eyes on the rest of her sector, since it would either white out the goggles or blow her regular night vision if she looked at it with naked eyes. She could still see the explosion out of the corner of her vision and heard shouting.
"They're bailing out the front," someone reported.
"Get going," Clint ordered. "Full title to the trees. Go, go, go!"
Natasha and Prideaux started moving again, running into and through the open ground with bootsteps behind them until they hit the trees. There were a couple of shouts of "Ow! Fuck!" as the barn occupants started to fire on them again and they had to stop and shoot back. The SHIELD team was all wearing armor -- Natasha and James had kept their costumes, but Clint had chosen to wear a kevlar DAS tactical uniform -- which meant that the bullets were far more likely to bruise than bleed so long as they didn't hit flesh. If Lukin got hit, he was out of luck, but they'd already made it clear that they didn't care by not bringing an extra armored vest for him.
The firefight was fairly brief as far as those things went. Once in the safety of the shadow of the trees, they did a quick pat-down of their battle-buddies to check for wounds because adrenaline could mask even serious injuries. James ran his hands over her with professional speed, not even a single reassuring touch. She did the same for him, up until she got to his head, when she took a hold of his jaw so that she could look in his eyes and see what -- who -- was there. The answer was complicated, but satisfactory.
"Mister Barnes?" Pincus, Corrales's XO was right next to them. "Commander, turn around."
Corrales had been reaching for his Camelbak but froze, not moving until James came up to him and raised his goggles and looked where Pincus's flashlight was pointing. Natasha, on the other side of the men, raised her goggles as well. Clint had been moving along the line making sure everyone was okay and making sure no one was coming after them, but now he jogged up to them, looking at Natasha through his goggles. She shook her head slightly, she didn't know.
"How bad is it?" Corrales asked, voice steady, as James took Pincus's flashlight and shone it around Corrales's back and shoulders. "I thought the armor got all of it, but it was up by the collar and something splashed and it was probably me."
Even from the angle at which she was standing, Corrales had turned enough that Natasha could see clearly and felt nauseated at the realization.
James sucked on his teeth loudly. "The good news is that you're not bleeding," he said. "The bad news is that you weren't shot with a regular round."
The nanite-laced explosive used to assassinate the Chinese ambassador had been bright pink, which was why Tony kept calling it bubble gum. It was the same bright pink that covered Corrales from his helmet to the middle of his back.
There was a wave of grief and shock through the team after James told Corrales -- and Clint -- what had happened. Natasha looked over at Lukin and, even gagged, she could see his satisfaction. It reminded her of Loki on the day Thor had taken him back to Asgard.
"Barton, get everyone the hell out of here. I don't know what the blast radius is and we don't know how fast any of them can get to the detonator," James said calmly as he gestured for Corrales to take off his helmet. "If it's just on the gear, we'll be right behind you."
If it was on Corrales's skin, there was no hope, he didn't have to say. Natasha moved over to James's side, taking the flashlight so that he had both hands free to work.
There were protests -- nobody wanted to leave Corrales to die alone, there was no guarantee there was anyone left alive to find the detonator -- but Corrales shut them all up with a single "Hey!" as he and James worked to undo the straps on the armored vest.
"This is not a fucking democracy," Corrales said forcefully. "I appreciate it, boys, I do. But there is not going to be another mass funeral. You follow Agent Barton to the extraction point and get the fuck home with what we came here for."
Clint didn't look too happy himself, Natasha saw.
"This is why both of us were smart enough not to become officers," James told Clint in Russian as he got the last strap undone and started working on all of the radios and grenades and other dangling bits that had to come off before the vest could be removed. "Officers get stuck doing shit things like leaving other people to risk their lives and then take the blame themselves when it goes badly."
James might have been talking theoretically, but Natasha didn't doubt he was thinking of Steve.
"This is the cost of getting to keep Beetlejuice as a code name," James went on, detaching the last grenade and pulling off the vest, throwing to the side as if that would be far enough (it wouldn't and they knew it wouldn't). "Go."
Clint called him several names in Arabic, but then ordered everyone to get moving now. He shot Natasha a look, but she shook her head. This was more than a one-man job and if they were going to save Corrales, they would need the extra hands. Clint nodded and followed the rest of the men into the trees and toward safety. Natasha debated whether to put the goggles back on to stand guard, but she didn't think she could do that and still hold the flashlight for James. They were already violating light and noise discipline a thousand ways, so if anyone was going to come, they probably already would have and, she thought, she would be able to hear them. But either the rest of Lukin's men were dead or injured or they knew what they'd done and wanted to be far away when the bomb went off.
"What did you tell him?" Corrales asked and Natasha could hear the fear in his voice now, controlled still, but not as tightly in check without his men present.
"I told him that being an officer sucked, but he got stuck doing it anyway," James replied as he gestured for Natasha to come closer with the flashlight. She did and they could see the pink splotches on Corrales's neck, on the collar of the tactical shirt and then on the skin itself.
"It's enough to kill you, but not anyone else," James told Corrales bluntly as he pulled out his combat knife. "I'm going to cut it off; it'll hurt like a motherfucker and you'll bleed like a stuck pig, but you'll get to keep your head."
Corrales nodded. "Do it."
"Not to sound like the voice of God, although it's not completely inappropriate," Tony's voice began, emerging from the front pocket of James's vest where his phone -- his turned off phone -- was stored, and scaring the three of them into jumping. "But I gave you that EMP for a reason, Barnes, and it wasn't for threatening Dummy."
James frowned as he pulled the phone out of the pocket, saw that it was audio only, and put it back in. "I thought you said that you weren't sure the stuff would stay inert with an EMP."
Natasha had skimmed most of the documentation on the nanite explosive; there had been only so many tests they could run with the tiny sample they had and they were still trying to recreate a larger supply to do more. Zapping it with an EMP hadn't been one of the tests they could do with the original sample, so Tony had had to guess as to the possible outcomes.
"I'm not sure," Tony agreed. "But it can't hurt to try and it may buy you some time to flay Corrales alive. Key word being 'alive.'"
James put his hand over the spots on Corrales's neck and shirt. There was no light or heat, but Corrales shivered and then James took his hand away.
"Don't forget the helmet and vest," Natasha reminded him and James turned and held his hand out. Again, she saw nothing, but James wiggled his fingers and dropped his arm, turning back to Corrales.
James had Corrales sit on the ground and knelt behind him, Natasha standing behind the both of them so she could hold the flashlight. She had her gun in the other hand, just in case. Which didn't lessen the risk to Corrales; they had no idea what the nanites had been programmed to do nor did they know if there was anyone alive who had a detonator, which would have a range of more than a kilometer out here. There could be more than one and it could be coming with the reinforcements.
They were lucky that the collars of the tactical shirts were cotton blend and could be cut away easily with a combat knife. There was a dime-sized splotch on the kevlar part of the shirt, but James took out another knife and scraped it off, throwing the explosive-tainted knife with practiced ease into the darkness and Natasha couldn't even hear it hit the ground, it had landed so far away.
"Get something to bite down on," James said as he pulled out a couple of field dressings. Skinning a living creature was bloody, messy work.
Corrales leaned forward to where the items discarded from his vest were lying and picked out one of his own field dressings, which was still rolled up. He also took the laminated photo of his family, his wife and four children, kissed it, and held it in his hand as he bit down on the dressing. He cried out at the first cut and Natasha bit her lip in sympathy, forced to watch so that she could keep the flashlight in place. James worked as quickly as he could, trying not to dig too deeply, but the blood was pouring and it got slippery and hard to see what he was doing and he had to pour water on the area, which made it hurt worse.
In Natasha's ear, Clint reported that the quinjets were ready and he was going to load everyone into one and the second would come down when they were ready. Natasha acknowledged, but didn't give a time estimate or how likely it was that it would be three of them.
"Everyone else is clear," she reported, since Corrales had lost his radio and James wasn't going to be paying attention to his. She wasn't sure Corrales heard her through the pain, but if he did, this would make it easier for him.
James rinsed the area again once he was finished and Natasha could see a palm-sized irregular patch of raw flesh before it was covered over first with a giant waterproof adhesive bandage, which probably wouldn't stick because of the water and blood, and then the old-school wraparound pressure dressing, which had to go around Corrales's neck like a mummy wrap or a noose. Neither bandage did the whole job, but together they would work long enough to get Corrales to safety. James pulled him up to standing by the arm and they exchanged a look; Natasha couldn't see Corrales's face, but she saw James's and understood that it had been about a life saved.
"Let's go," she exhorted as James bent down to collect Corrales's rifle and radio and other important items; grenades and protein bars could stay behind. They'd had to throw away his NVGs because the strap had been tarred by the explosive, so James had Corrales put his hand on his shoulder and follow along like a blind man with his head down so he didn't get smacked in the face with anything while Natasha brought up the rear.
She radioed Clint that they were on the move and he said that the second quinjet would drop down in five and be waiting for them, but to hurry up because they could see three SUVs speeding toward the compound.
"Reinforcements are on their way," Natasha warned. "Theirs, not ours."
They were in the thick of the woods when they heard an explosion behind them and Natasha had to turn away from the fireball visible even though the trees so it didn't white out the goggles.
"Oh, God," Corrales muttered, stunned with the realization of what had nearly been. "That was my gear, wasn't it?"
"Stark," James said, not slowing down, "if you're still listening, that's a 'no' on the EMP as permanent deactivator."
The quinjet was waiting in the clearing, as promised, and James pulled out his flashlight to signal friendlies on approach, to which the response was a dropped ramp. The engines were spinning up for takeoff before it closed again and the pilot was radioing their status as they lurched into the air with less grace than usual but greater speed.
Natasha confirmed with Clint that they were three and underway as James dug through the jet's first aid kit. "You want morphine?" he asked Corrales, holding up a syringe and vial.
"Not unless you want to carry me all the way to Medical once we get to the Helicarrier," Corrales replied with a weak smile.In the cabin's light he was pale and looked wrecked for more reasons than that he'd just been skinned alive. "Shit knocks me out for hours."
"Kind of the point," James replied wryly, but put it back and took out a cold pack, cracking it so that it would activate. "This should numb it a little."
The flight back to the 'Carrier was going to be about three hours because they were going to burn fuel all the way back; the other jet would take a little longer because it had more weight. Corrales lay down on one of the benches and positioned the cold pack so that he could lie on his back without needing to hold it; the adrenaline of getting a death sentence and then having it lifted, however painfully, was over and he was crashing, understandably. Natasha and James shared the other one, shoulders touching but leaning against the bulkhead instead of each other, and Natasha closed her eyes.
"Hey, Barnes," Tony piped up from his phone again. "Someone wants to talk to you."
James sighed, but he was smiling as he did so. "Someone is a worrywart and also is not going on speakerphone."
Steve had had good reason to worry and James knew that, too, but Natasha thought that Corrales's peril had purged a lot of the lingering darkness that had shadowed James even after he'd had his showdown with Lukin. He had such a long history with Lukin, such an ugly one, and he wasn't ever going to put what Lukin had done to him and those he cared about behind him. But having to focus on Corrales, on saving Corrales -- and their team -- instead of on wanting to kill Lukin, that had required more James Barnes than the Winter Soldier and that, she thought, made the difference. James would probably tell her otherwise, but this was what she chose to believe.
"Buck?"
"Speakerphone, Jesus Christ!" James yelled, pulling the phone out his pocket with hands that were still covered in Corrales's blood. He'd rinsed them off, but in the dark and cursorily and there was still red under his fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. He was pushing the speaker button, but it was grayed out because Tony had commandeered the thing from a distance. "Stark, I am going to smash this thing into little pieces and buy an iPhone."
Across from them, Corrales had turned, eyes alert. Of course he'd recognized the voice, or at least he thought he had, especially in that context of just that one word. The situation was possibly salvageable, but it would mean lying to Corrales by commission now instead of by omission.
"You think I can't take over an iPhone?" Tony asked happily. "Please, their code's child's play."
James made a frustrated noise and sat back. "Well, Captain Clandestine has successfully blown his cover, so you might as well say hello to everyone. Jesus, Steve, you are just never going to run out of ways to sneak out of safety, are you?"
Corrales was staring, shock and delight on his face. Natasha leaned forward and she could see the pilot still had her cans on, so she probably hadn't heard a thing. Natasha had flown quinjets enough to know that all hell could be breaking loose in the rear and the pilot could still be oblivious. Loud conversation wasn't audible over the engines with the headphones on.
"It's Corrales," Tony retorted. "If he was going to do a heel turn on us, it would have been long ago. We've certainly given him cause."
Corrales laughed, mostly because it was true but also because Captain America wasn't dead.
"It's Corrales now," James shot back, not ready to give up, even if he'd given in. "It's gonna be someone else tomorrow. And I am not even going to stay in the room when Fury rips you a new one."
Fury was going to shit housebricks, Natasha agreed, but if he hadn't already figured out that Steve was chomping at the bit to make progress on the return to a normal life, well, it was about time he did.
"Your righteous indignation would work a lot better if you didn't have such a track record of being an accomplice," Peggy said and James, realizing he was being ganged up on, handed the phone over to Natasha and crossed his arms as if to remove himself from the proceedings. But they were trapped in the rear of a jet for the next two and a half hours and there was nowhere to run especially if Tony wouldn't let them turn the phone off -- he could probably make it work without a battery, too. Besides, she knew he really didn't mind at all.
"Mister Barnes is withdrawing from the field of combat," Natasha announced. "Tony, take the phone off speaker so people can have real conversations."
She handed it back to James, who talked to Steve and Peggy, judging by the side of the conversation she could hear. It wasn't a fully revelatory talk -- there were some answers Steve was going to have to pry out of James face-to-face and without anyone else able to hear -- but James did admit that he'd been close to not heeding his better angels. Then he got up and crossed over to Corrales, handing him the phone. Corrales did more listening than speaking, but he spent the entire time smiling. Natasha got up to take the phone from him when he started to rise himself, then seemed to think better of it.
"You okay?" Steve asked her.
"Yeah," she answered, meaning it. "It was a little more adventurous than planned, but, hey, we got what we came for and we left with everyone we arrived with and you aren't allowed to complain about those missions."
Which wasn't what Steve was asking and he knew she'd avoided the answer, but maybe that had been an answer on its own.
"I'll see you guys when you get back."
"You do realize that there are more than thirteen colonies for you to visit now, right?"
Natasha looked up from her magazine to see Tony standing behind James and Steve as they pored over maps.
"Yes, Tony," Steve replied dryly. "We were up all night reading about that newfangled thing called the Louisiana Purchase."
The road trip had not yet been officially approved because Fury was still about a half-dozen levels beyond "really fucking pissed" (Clint's estimation, since he'd been the one who'd had to do all of the after-action reportage after Perm and thus he'd been the convenient target for Fury's anger about Steve's 'cavalier approach to his safety'). But it would be approved, either before or after the fact because Fury probably understood that Steve was going to go with or without permission and, short of throwing Steve in a hole about as deep as the one Aleksander Lukin was currently occupying, there was very little he could do about that.
"When we first came up with the idea," James added, wide-eyed innocent look on his face, "the Grand Canyon was just a little divot. We've been told it's much bigger now."
Tony, sensing that he was not going to get the best lines in this conversation, sniffed and retreated. Over to the living room area, where Natasha was reading about Marc Bolan and Peggy was typing out a scathing review of a book on Amazon. Peggy was not, as a rule, an internet assassin, but Death Comes to Pemberley had apparently struck a sore nerve.
He dropped down heavily on the other end of the couch that Natasha was curled up on with the posture and expression of 'please entertain me' that Natasha knew well and could only hope to wait out by ignoring. Pepper had left for California yesterday and was thus unavailable to intercede and Tony was always reluctant to bother Peggy because she was not shy about reminding him that she'd once seen him "scoop poo out of his diaper" if he was annoying her. Natasha couldn't imagine any other situation where she was considered the least dangerous option in the room, but these were the Avengers and their friends and thus normal rules did not apply. Which was why Tony was still watching her, hoping she'd look up so he could engage her. Natasha could wait him out, so long as he didn't escalate into poking at her feet. He'd been antsy since before Pepper left, so maybe it was something else, but she was prepared to accept simple cabin fever, for values of cabin that encapsulated one of the most exciting cities on Earth. This was Tony, after all.
"Sir, Doctor Marquand on Line One," JARVIS announced.
Tony didn't react for a long moment, then sighed and got up. "I'll take it in the workshop."
"He should go out to see Pepper," Steve said after Tony left. "They haven't had much time together this month and she's going to be out there for at least a week. He doesn't need to stay here and look after me when he wants to travel. It's driving him crazy."
"The bubble gum bomb is driving him crazy," James corrected, pulling out a map from the bottom of the heap. The idea of a road trip was something the two of them had talked about in the 1940's, a running fantasy they'd developed as they made their way across Europe. California, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, other places that seemed exotic to two young men who'd never left New York City until they'd worn a uniform. Steve had been to almost all of these places before he'd gotten to Europe, but the USO tour schedule hadn't left him much time to sightsee. He'd had more time since he'd come out of the ice and made use of it, but the Grand Canyon would still be a novelty to both of them. "But he should still go to California. And bring Dummy with him."
Tony used to go out to California and spend time in either Malibu or Atherton just for the hell of it, but he hadn't gone out there except when necessary since Steve had moved back to New York. Pepper had been talking about spending at least part of the winter there this year -- she wasn't a fan of the cold except for the odd ski vacation -- and while it was still only fall, Natasha thought she'd get her wish. It would be one more way things were slowly inching their way back toward what things had been like Before.
Although the biggest reason things would always be different was currently insisting that going through Kansas was the best route.
"Have you ever been to Kansas?" Steve asked, exasperated. Or at least pretending to be. He was too excited for anyone to take his frustration with James's ideas seriously.
"It's very boring," Clint said as he came in. He'd been at 44th Street doing yet more follow-up work to the Perm mission. All three of them -- four of them counting Corrales, whose neck was recovering well after surgery, although there would always be scarring -- had been closeted for days at a time to break that morning's work down, but Clint had to take point because of his status as mission commander. He was, unsurprisingly, the most vocal about getting Steve back on an active roster so that this could be his job again. "But I mostly only knew a very tiny patch of it. On the other hand, I know that patch very well."
His cell at the Disciplinary Barracks in Leavenworth, a place he'd been remanded to because of her and a place he was only free from because of Steve. Just because they didn't keep score didn't mean that they forgot.
"If you're going west, go north the way out and south the way back so you don't get snowed on -- or snowed in," Clint said more seriously as he dropped down on the couch where Tony had been. "But you're welcome to use my place if you are in the area."
"There's a shop in Cheyenne that makes perfect scones," Peggy offered, still working on her review. "The blackcurrant ones are superb, but I think the plain ones are best."
"We are not going to Cheyenne for scones," James replied flatly. "I am perfectly happy to never see Wyoming again. There's no there there."
"Says the guy who wants to go to Kansas," Steve retorted, taking the map out of James's hand.
Tony came back about ten minutes later holding a bottle of Manhattan Special. For all that he'd teased the guys about it being bottled by Jesus's disciples, he'd become fond of it to the point that there were bottles being drunk that hadn't originated in Steve's fridge.
"We should have our first batch of the bubble gum bomb within three weeks," he announced, giving Clint the stink-eye for taking his spot, then dropping down on the loveseat. "Marquand figured out what they did to the nanite sheathing to keep the suspension from gumming them up. That was the last piece of the puzzle."
After Perm, there had been two main focuses of attention: Lukin and the HYDRA he had left behind. The latter problem was turning out to be both very easy and very hard. The easy part was that the Russian HYDRA was more or less not SHIELD's problem anymore. Lukin's HYDRA was turning out to have been a Tsardom and, as a result, had been headless since his capture. Which for Putin was nothing short of a lifesaver. The papers Natasha had brought back and the files she'd uploaded off of the computers painted a picture of an organization that had been surprisingly close to taking over the country, forcing another series of showdowns with China and then with the US, completely eroding Putin's power and then staging an organized opposition candidacy to take the presidency and prime minister's chair through legal means. Lukin, unlike Putin, had never intended to take either job, instead standing a series of puppets and proxies to effect his will without resorting to making a mockery of the occasionally arbitrary election process. HYDRA would remain a popular movement with a militant wing, focused on Russia with a longer-term plan of extending her borders not by invasion, but by example -- and some careful propaganda and assassination. But that was all in the past now. HYDRA still present and popular, especially in the Urals and points east, but without Lukin's leadership, they were lacking the cleverness and slipperiness that made them a threat as well as a presence. The Russia Desk was of the opinion that Putin would crush them eventually -- later rather than sooner, but he'd win in the end.
The hard part was the bubble gum bomb (which had a more official-sounding name for paperwork, but nobody used it and "bubble gum bomb" cropped up plenty of times in documentation), which had remained an enigma. SHIELD scientists had had trouble recreating it in any quantities, so there was still no reliable book on how it worked or how it could be defeated, which had been Tony's frustration for the last couple of months. They also didn't know who had originally created it for Lukin's HYDRA, nor how much of it was still out there, let alone who had it. There had been nothing about it in Lukin's files, just some emails that had obviously been executive summaries written in layman's terms. The men most likely to have those answers were both supposedly on the plane that had killed Lukin and hadn't been found since. There was evidence that one of them might have actually been on the plane, which in turn remained a mystery largely unsolved. These would be questions asked of Lukin, of course, but nobody really expected answers. He wasn't like Schmidt, jealous of his power and legacy and willing to double-cross anyone who threatened either. He was like Putin, willing to play a long game and patient enough to wait out the threats to that.
Lukin was currently residing in a SHIELD black site near Gioa Tauro in Italy. The Italians would be apoplectic if they knew about it -- their courts had already charged CIA agents involved in extraordinary rendition -- but that part of Calabria was ruled completely by the 'Ndrangheta, whose dislike of HYDRA had hardened into Latverian-style intolerance after the events at Lamazia Terme. (James, the instigator of those events as the Winter Soldier, took his role with equanimity. Clint, who'd spent a month in the hospital because of those same events, did the same.) There was no way Rome would find out and even less chance that Lukin would get help. Meanwhile, the location had easy access for SHIELD interrogators, who thus far hadn't gotten much. There had been discussions about whether either Natasha or James or both should be included in the rotation of questioners; Natasha would do it if asked, although she was not chomping at the bit for a chance. James wanted nothing to do with Lukin and was privately afraid that he would be put in a position where he could not refuse to help. He wasn't sure if he could emerge from another confrontation intact. "I think he'd try to destroy me. I'm about the only thing he can still break." Natasha and Steve had both vowed to keep that from happening and Natasha did not think that the road trip was as much about Steve's continued confinement as he insisted it was.
"Did Fury give you the Dangerous Toys talk yet?" Natasha asked Tony, tossing the magazine on the coffee table. "It was on the to-do list. I saw it."
Tony beamed at her, the deeply satisfied smile of someone who got genuine pleasure out of ruining Nick Fury's day. "I got the abridged version," he confirmed. "And because it was not the Full Version or the Full Version with Appendices, there will be no conveniently placed pieces of ABC Hubba Bubba left anywhere on the Helicarrier command deck."
"ABC?" Natasha asked just as Steve and James both said "It's Hubba Hubba."
Tony threw his arms up and looked at Clint with exasperation, but Clint was too busy cracking up. "Do you ever feel like we need the universal translator like in Farscape? Just give them a little shot of nanites and suddenly they understand when we talk to them?"
"ABC is for 'already been chewed,'" Peggy explained, since Clint was still snickering and Tony was drowning his sorrows in coffee soda. "And Hubba Bubba is a gum, not the phrase I used to get frosty over when it was aimed in my direction."
"I liked that phrase," James said with a smile of fond reminiscence. "I got good results with it."
Both Steve and Peggy gave him looks of disbelief. James shrugged. "What can I say? It's all in the delivery."
"Don't deliver it to me," Natasha told him, but she already knew she'd be hearing it at least once in bed.
Dinner was upstairs, courtesy of Marcel, whose feud with Eric Ripert seemed to be over because there was a succulent tagine on the menu instead of the continued recreations and reimaginings of Le Bernardin's menu. ("I'm thinking we get him to pick a fight with Redzepi next," Tony had told Natasha early on in the squabble.) They discussed Steve and James's itinerary, including the relative necessity of Kansas, which Natasha could tell James was insisting upon entirely to be contrary.
"Remember you swore a blood oath to Pepper that you'd be back for Thanksgiving," Peggy reminded them when the list got too long.
"I'm looking forward to this," James admitted as he and Natasha walked uptown to her apartment that night. "It's... not anything I thought I could have in my life. And that includes the part where I get to come back here to you."
He smiled at her and squeezed her hand, which he'd already been holding.
"I might not be here when you get back," she teased. "I could be working."
He shook his head, recognizing her avoidance for what it was. She was remarkably bad at saying the words and possibly even worse at hearing them. She'd never really wanted to -- never really needed to -- tell a friend or a lover how much they meant to her. Clint had somehow always been able to read her like a book, even when they'd been on opposite sides. Steve had taken the time to learn her language. James... even back when he'd been her first James, the light sneaking through the cracks in the Winter Soldier's armor, he had been able to speak from the heart. Thankfully for her, he also saw what was in hers clearly enough without her having to force the words to come. She tried to say by deed, which he accepted as a workable, if partial, solution.
"I spent so long not having a life at all, not even being human," he went on as they deftly navigated Columbus Circle. "And then once I was human, I was a wreck of one. I'm still a wreck, but a functional one, I guess. And I've got everything I wanted anyway. I don't want to ruin it."
"You've fallen in with very stubborn people," she assured him. "And they are as grateful to have found you as you them."
He stopped walking, smiled, and in the middle of Central Park West, with taxis speeding at them, pulled her in for a kiss.
"I was talking about Steve," she said against his lips, but she couldn't keep the smile off her face.
"The hell you were," he retorted, smiling back.
"Come on," she said, dragging him out of the street and on to the curb. "Let's go."
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.
Soon turned out to be two days, by which point SHIELD knew that the Chinese ambassador to Russia and four others (two security, two staff) had been killed in an explosion caused by a new weapon not previously fielded in any battle. Fury had pulled off a masterstroke by getting the WSC to hand the investigation over to SHIELD -- the Chinese hadn't needed too much convincing to agree that the Russians were the last people to be investigating what could very well have been a government-sanctioned assassination and to insist on an independent third party. The Russians were incensed not only because it made an international mockery of their justice system, but also because they had no love for Fury or SHIELD after the Minyar invasion. However, under the circumstances -- which included a re-mobilization of the PLA -- Putin had no choice but to go along with it. It cost him credibility, which he tried to salvage by insisting that no Avenger (especially Natasha) set foot on Russian soil.
"It works like high-velocity bubble gum," Tony explained as they sat in one of the auditoriums at 44th Street, the room full of analysts, Direct Action Service commanders, brass, and other interested parties. He'd been brought in as soon as the first forensics reports had indicated something new and strange. SHIELD had a very large, very capable unit dedicated to weapons design, production, and analysis, but there was quantity of quality and then there was Tony Stark. "You fire it at something, it sticks, and goes boom."
"It's projectile C-4," someone down front said. "Or napalm."
"Yes and no," Tony agreed, moving his head in that way he had to show that you were more wrong than right. "It's a plastic explosive, but compositionally, it's very different than C-4 or Semtex in ways I'm not going to get into in a room full of liberal arts majors. What you need to know is that there's nothing even the most modern military can field that can defend against it. A: it will stick to anything, animal, vegetable, mineral, or polymer, and it won't come off. And B: because it's programmable even after contact. It's a smart explosive. It combines the best features of a remote detonator with the best features of an RPG. It's a terrorist's dream weapon."
That got the room buzzing. On either side of Natasha, James and Clint sat up straighter, Tony's presentation suddenly transforming from comedic science-show sketch to professionally crucial briefing.
Before a much more attentive audience, Tony explained how the explosive was laced with nanites and other elements that made the explosive material controllable to a remarkable degree even after implantation so long as the target was within range -- and that range was expansive and would grow as the design improved. The explosive material was more or less untraceable now and the projectile delivery method -- Tony's layman's explanation was something like an egg or a soap bubble that would shatter on impact -- meant that implantation could be both too quick to respond to for an immediate detonation (like an RPG) or completely unnoticed and from far enough away to avoid detection.
"Nobody had to get near the embassy limo to attach it," Tony explained. "It could have been fired at the the vehicle or it could have been fired directly in front of it so that it was picked up by a wheel like gum or dog shit, nothing the driver or passengers would notice. It could have been there for weeks, it could have been there for moments. And the only reason we know it was there at all was because this was a field test, not a product roll-out. There was discontiguous spatter, which in theory either shouldn't happen or shouldn't matter but did here because it didn't detonate with the rest, which was how it was found. Everything else was burned away completely, no residue, no tiny little nanite corpses, nothing. If it weren't for that little blob, this would look like spontaneous combustion and there would have been no way to prove that the explosion was anything but an accident."
"Not just a terrorist's dream weapon, then," Clint muttered. "Jesus."
Tony went on a bit more about what it could do and what kind of launching mechanism could be used (custom job most likely, but a shotgun or grenade launcher would work in a pinch), but got quickly down to the bottom line: "This compound is incredibly expensive to develop and produce in any quantity and requires an extremely high level of technical expertise. Your Russian skinheads might be taking credit for the hit, but if they even fired the projectile, it was given to them. They couldn't afford to buy it and they sure as hell don't have the capacity to produce it themselves."
"So this was HYDRA?"
Tony shrugged. "This was someone with a lot of cash. I leave it up to you to follow the money."
Which was not strictly the truth, since Tony would be involved in the investigation in the same way he'd helped them ferret out AIM: they would give him lists of possible candidates and he would cross off names and add others. The part that truly didn't involve him was SHIELD's choice of how to handle the public statements. They had no actual evidence to support Tony's conclusion that the BR either had good connections or were someone's convenient cutouts, despite everyone believing it was true, but saying nothing continued to escalate the tension between Russia and China and, crucially, Putin's standing inside Russia, where the population was starting to get uncomfortable. It was one thing for him to be making billionaires disappear, but it was another if his means and methods of securing power put Russia on a war footing. The average man on the street in Moscow or Chelyabinsk or Volgograd wasn't inclined to die to secure anyone's legacy and the Chinese were growing increasingly tired of being picked on by a man who would be king. SHIELD did its best, strongly implying that there was a larger game afoot without explicitly saying that Putin was being framed, which did not keep troops from massing on the borders, but did keep them from crossing over.
"There has to be a response from whoever's in Perm," Clint said as they sat around Steve's dining room table. Steve and Peggy had gotten their second-hand briefing over a late lunch, which Steve had made himself because Miranda had been back at 44th Street since the day after the assassination. Stark Industries could not keep up the pretense of heavy investment in China with the possibility of a war on and Miranda had been needed as the China Desk was working around the clock -- possibly literally because of the time differences. She'd been invited over since her return to her regular duties, but as a regular guest, which still meant talking shop and cooking with Steve, but that's because of who they were and not out of any sense of obligation. "If HYDRA did this, they're going to either gloat or have a next step. If they didn't do this, they're going to want to know who did."
Natasha was still getting the raw notes from the Urals operatives, two of whom had managed to get invited into the circle of the person Nadya had recommended Natasha to, so there was some hope on that front but it was still being played close to the vest for the time being. For all that the old HYDRA, especially in its US facilities, had had a modern corporate feel to it with vending machines and recycling bins and reminders to sign up for blood pressure readings, the new Russian HYDRA was a little more feudal and far less free with its information sharing and promoting a feeling of ownership in the endeavor.
"If it is them, especially if the Red Skull is Lukin, then he's got every reason to keep his mouth shut for now," she pointed out. "The one person who needs to get the message will have gotten it and there's a lot of danger in providing any kind of proof."
Clint could only grimace agreement. He'd been speaking aspirationally, she understood that.
But three days later, they did get something useful from the agents in Perm. Not a confession of involvement, but someone using Lukin's name in the present tense and interchangeably with the Red Skull.
Two days after that, the Duma member most vocal about de-escalating the conflict with China through concessions and increased transparency in governmental operations was assassinated with another car bomb. His wife and three-year-old daughter were killed in the blast as well. The Russians absolutely refused to let SHIELD or any other international agency anywhere near the investigation. The Chinese sent three more armored battalions to the border.
"I don't want a million men dying because Putin's a pain in the ass," Fury told the people around his conference table. "Especially because this mess is largely not of his doing, at least not in the sense that would let us sleep at night while doing nothing to stop it."
Natasha exchanged a look with James and then with Clint; they all knew what this meant. "Capture or kill?" she asked, since someone had to.
"I would like a sincere and meaningful attempt made at the former," Fury replied, meeting each of their eyes in turn and holding them. "I don't mean 'enough for plausible deniability,' I mean a legit prioritizing of taking him alive. You pulled it off with Schmidt, you can do it here. We solve a lot more problems if we can perp walk Lukin than if we show pictures of his corpse."
The rest of the meeting was establishing who would be needed to plan the mission and what sort of time frame they were working with, the latter being influenced by the likelihood of a Sino-Russian war starting. "Let's call it three weeks or when the first shot is fired, whichever comes first."
As much as they wanted to get started right away, until the analyst groups got their end together and coughed up the relevant background and environmental material, there could be no strategic or tactical planning done. Natasha and James went to the movies instead, then out to dinner, then back to Brooklyn. Clint went over to Steve's to watch the game and let him and Peggy know what was happening, so it was entirely his fault that James was blindsided the next day, when he went to go visit while Natasha went to the dentist.
Steve wants to go with us. James had texted her while she'd been in the chair.
Natasha didn't bother texting back. "You told him no, right?" she asked as soon as James answered the call.
"Of course I told him no," James replied with asperity, although she could tell it was his frustration with Steve and not with her. "And Clint told him no yesterday and Peggy has told him no several times. He's being Steve about it."
Which was generally a problem with no known cure except that here they did have the power to make sure that he wasn't going to Russia. They'd have to deal with his resentment for most of the next month, granted, but after the mission was over, so would be his anger. Steve was as stubborn as they came, but he didn't hold grudges.
It took them less than a week to realize that they had perhaps underestimated the difficulties of bearing Steve's ire for the duration.
"Get dressed and get over to Riverside Park," Tony ordered Natasha through the phone at five-thirty Tuesday morning. "And bring Barnes if he's there, I'll need the backup."
It took a second for the fog to clear -- she'd been sleeping -- before she parsed the words. "Do we need to call it in?"
Because sometimes shit happened where SHIELD was not the first to know about it.
"We can't call it in," Tony replied, deeply bemused and just as deeply annoyed. "Because Steve Rogers is dead and therefore there's no reason for him to be running in the park before dawn."
"Oh, shit," she bit out, reaching over to push at James's shoulder, but all he did was grunt and roll away from her. "Do you know where he is?"
"I'm a couple thousand feet over his position," Tony replied and Natasha realized he was in the suit. "He's got the inducer, thankfully, and I put a tracker in it from the start. For this and other reasons."
"I'll call you back when we're on the move," Natasha said, ending the call and turning so she could kick James awake. "Get up. Steve's running in the park."
James blinked stupidly at her for a moment. "I'm not sure whether to start laughing or pack my pistol," he finally said, then threw the covers back and got out of bed.
They were on the street in five minutes and Natasha was already on the phone with Tony, who said that Steve was up by the Boat Basin Cafe and continuing north. "Do you think he's going as far north as 125th?" she asked. "We can't catch up to him on foot and we'll miss him at 96th if we try for a cab or the subway."
"I've got Clint on his mountain bike moving north to intercept," Tony replied. "What I'm hoping to do is have him turn Steve around and into you."
Natasha used hand gestures to tell James to head west, toward Riverside Park and not east toward West End Avenue or the subway. "Sounds like a plan," she agreed.
"Yeah, well, let's see if I'm better at corralling a rampaging Captain America than I was with the Living Laser," Tony said sourly.
He was. Clint, through Tony, reported when he'd caught up to Steve and then, five minutes later, that Steve was heading back downtown "not with me."
Natasha and James waited on a park bench that faced the Hudson. James was the one who pointed out that they had no idea what Steve looked like with the inducer and he could be any of the early-morning runners going by if Clint didn't stay close.
"Not to be all insensitive, but look for the angry black man," Tony replied. "There are only two settings on the inducer that won't draw attention doing a five minute mile and he chose the first one. I can turn him into the koala when he gets close if you need me to."
Natasha said not to bother, they'd position themselves well and count on Steve being the one to react to their presence. Steve might try to blow by them, but they'd know who he was. And, besides, they knew where he was going even if he got by them. Which he didn't.
"What the fuck were you thinking?" James asked in a barely-contained shout as Steve slowed to a jog as he approached. Clint rolled to a stop near Natasha, sensing as she had that this was a job for James, at least the first go-round.
Steve's features might be different, but the expressions were all his and Natasha knew the angry, stubborn look well.
"We had this conversation in 1943," James said in a quieter but no less furious voice because they were not alone and they were in a public place. "And clearly we are going to have it again. But not here and not with the same result. Let's go."
He started walking -- stalking -- toward the nearest uphill path that would lead them back to street level, expecting Steve to follow, which he did. Natasha had to jog to catch up, Clint walking his bike next to her. It took them more than twenty minutes to get back to Stark Tower, by which time Tony had returned, stripped off both the armor and whatever he'd worn under it, and was dressed in jeans and a Misfits t-shirt when he met them in the gym, which was where James had led all of them without a word. Tony raised an eyebrow at Natasha, who could only shrug in response because she had no idea what James was planning.
"Turn off the inducer and go get your shield," James ordered flatly. "You want to prove whatever it is you want to prove, you'll do it against me."
His left arm turned to metal in the blink of an eye and when Natasha looked at his face, she could see both the desperation of Bucky Barnes and the cold cruelty of the Winter Soldier.
Steve exhaled loudly as he shut off the inducer and returned to his familiar form. "Buck, I--"
"Do it!" James barked out, pointing to the door with his armored hand. "You want to prove that you should go to Perm? Go get your goddamned shield because I will break your jaw if I have to, Steve, to get it through your thick skull that you aren't ready yet. There's more at stake than your ego, so let's get that out of the way now."
Natasha didn't think that whatever this was about, Steve's ego was at the bottom of it. It was part of it, absolutely, possibly a big part. But something else was going on and she didn't know what it was and she wasn't sure if James did, either. He was unreadable to her here, angry and afraid, so while she thought he was poking Steve to get a useful response, she wasn't sure. This could just as well be about their war as Perm, for either of them.
"It's not about my ego," Steve insisted angrily, but he went to go get his shield anyway. They heard voices from outside the gym door and Natasha wasn't surprised to see Peggy in her robe with her walker appear a moment later. Clint ran over to bring her a chair and while Natasha couldn't hear them talking, she knew he was explaining what had gone on this morning already. Peggy's expression was stormy as she stared at James, willing him to turn to her and maybe talk to her, but he kept his back to her, to all of them, flexing his metal hand a few times before crossing over to the far corner and emptying his pockets on to the table -- knife, wallet, handkerchief -- and taking the pistol out from the holster in the small of his back.
Natasha went over to where Clint and Peggy were, since James was clearly in no mood to be talked to or talked down. Tony waited a few moments before he, too, followed.
"He's not going to actually break Steve, is he?" Tony asked, sounding like he genuinely didn't know the answer. "I know that's probably the only way we keep him from pulling this again tomorrow morning, but..."
Natasha had no answer. She didn't think James wanted to hurt Steve, but he was also clearly goading him into something.
"It's a brothers thing," Clint said as the silence stretched. "They're not saying what we think they're saying."
"I think they're saying most of what we think they're saying," Tony protested, but weakly. Clint was the only one of them with a sibling.
Steve returned, unhappy but carrying his shield. He walked like a condemned man to the middle of the mats in the section set up for sparring. Natasha didn't get a good enough look at his face as he passed to see if the dominant expression was remorse or resignation.
James turned away from the table and started walking toward him, head down until he was actually on the mats and then he had eyes only for Steve.
"This isn't about my ego," Steve repeated as James stopped a few feet away.
"Of course it is," James replied wryly, the smile on his face not at all amused. "This is about you knowing best, about you forcing the outcome you want by whatever means necessary. I told you, Stevie, we've had this discussion before. I know how it goes. I am not going to let you win it again."
And then quicker than even Natasha could register the motion, James's left fist was flying toward's Steve's face. Steve barely got the shield up in time to block the blow with the top edge of it, a loud metal clank resounding around the room.
"You wanna change your answer, Barton, before the blood starts splashing around?" Tony asked as Steve shifted into a defensive posture and James moved to attack again.
This was not a fair fight, which both men understood. James was a better hand-to-hand combatant than Steve even were Steve at peak conditioning, which would have evened the odds somewhat. Here, he was slow, entirely on defense for more reasons than he clearly did not want to be fighting at all, barely keeping up even as it was obvious to everyone that James was pulling his punches.
"What are you trying to prove?" James asked, not even winded. Steve was starting to sweat again, blinking it out of his eyes. "That you're in fighting form? You're not. You can barely keep up with my fist -- what are you going to do against a bullet?"
"That's not--" Steve broke off to defend himself again against another blow from James's metal arm, this one coupled with a leg sweep that put Steve on his ass.
"You can probably do it if you push hard enough," James continued, stepping back so Steve could get up again. Natasha had been sparring with James for months; she could see how easy he was going and she was sure Steve could see it, too, which added to the insult. "Force your way on to the roster. You are that good of a tactician and we both know that you are ruthless when you need to be. When you want to be." He started another attack, then deked, leaving Steve open and exposed, but instead of kicking or punching Steve in the solar plexus, he just shoved him with an open hand, hard enough to make him stumble and fall back over because he'd already been off balance. "Are you willing to risk Natasha's life so you can get what you want? Risk Clint's? Risk mine?"
"I already have!" Steve cried out from the floor, pushing himself back up to standing with a little difficulty. "I'm the reason you were on that train. I'm the reason you have that!" He pointed at James's metal arm, hanging loosely at his side.
Next to Clint, Peggy made a noise that was less surprise than realization. She understood what the real story was now. Natasha could see the shape of it, but she wasn't as quick or as historied and didn't know exactly what it was yet.
"No you're not," James barked out. "You're the reason I didn't die on Zola's table in Italy. Everything else that happened, everything else, is on me. Me. Don't you fucking take my choices away from me, Steve. I've had enough of that in my life. I chose to join the Commandos. I chose to follow you on to that train. And if you try to take the blame for the Winter Soldier, I will crack your skull back open and you can spend another year wearing diapers and eating applesauce. That's not on either of us."
"What's the blame version of a daisy chain?" Tony asked. Natasha didn't understand the expression, but Tony wasn't expecting an answer, so she didn't say anything.
"You want to go to Perm to repent for old sins," James went on in a less angry, quieter tone. "You don't have to. You got nothing you need to apologize for. We're even. We're always even because we never started keeping count."
Which was bullshit as far as James went, Natasha knew very well, but it was bullshit for both of them, clearly, so it balanced out. They would always think they owed the other, would always take the blame for what had been done on their behalf out of faith and friendship and family. Natasha didn't understand any of it, how could she? But Clint, the closest thing she had to a family, was watching James and Steve with knowing eyes and, if you knew where to look for it, wistfulness. He and Barney were not likely to ever be able to have their own version of this and she knew how much it bothered him still.
"Now why the hell are you really doing this?" James asked, all anger gone from his voice. He reached out and Steve didn't flinch as James took hold of his jaw and tilted his head up so that he was looking at James instead of at the floor. "Because this is Grade A stupid, even for you when you get one of your ideas."
Steve closed his eyes for a moment, but opened them again before he spoke. "I want to make sure you come home."
Natasha could see in James's face the exact moment he realized that Steve wasn't talking about James living or dying. It destroyed him. And then he pulled himself back together a heartbeat later and smiled, using his grip on Steve's jaw to pull him closer so that their foreheads touched, holding them there for a long moment before pulling back. "Where the hell else am I going to go?"
"Told ya," Clint said to Tony as he leaned over to help Peggy stand up. "You got any breakfast grub in this joint, Stark?"
Half an hour later, they were sitting in Tony's dining room as Marcel produced a neverending stack of lemon ricotta pancakes and a bottomless pot of strong coffee to go with the fresh fruit and sausages. Steve, freshly washed and still looking one part defiant to three parts embarrassed, was eating with an appetite that everyone else mocked as their choice of penalty for the early morning theatrics.
"Breakfast was fantastic," Clint told the table after they'd all finished eating and were working on their last cups of coffee. "But we are not fucking doing this tomorrow or the day after. Solid copy, Rogers?"
Steve nodded.
James would probably have liked to stick around Steve for a while -- Steve definitely would have liked it, Natasha thought -- but they were due at 44th Street for a mission planning meeting. So they went back to Natasha's place, showered and changed, and spent the next ten hours staring at a map of Perm and trying to build a network of faces and names of people who were known HYDRA operatives within Perm. It was an ongoing task, thankfully handled by other people, but Natasha (with her contacts) and especially James (with his experience) were occasionally called in to contribute. At the end of a long day, she kissed James on the cheek and told him to go to Steve's; they had talked about going to try a new Peruvian restaurant, but James's heart wasn't going to be in it and she was frankly exhausted. She spent the evening on the couch with a glass of sancerre and a novel, going to bed early because it was all going to start up again the next day, hopefully without the pre-dawn crisis.
The following week, Steve threw the shield for the first time since he'd been shot, in the expansive grounds surrounding a farmhouse in the middle of Pennsylvania. It ricocheted off two trees and came screaming back and Steve caught it easily and with a satisfied smile on his face.
"Really?" Clint asked with asperity. "You couldn't make it wobble or hit wrong or have to chase it down the first time out?"
The farmhouse was Tony's, bought through half a dozen shell companies by Pepper in the days after Tony had been rescued from Afghanistan. She'd thought he would need someplace quiet to recover, someplace away from the media and the temptations and demands of Stark Industries. "He did need it," Pepper told Natasha as she'd handed over the keys. "But events overtook us."
Tony had never actually been to the farmhouse, although Pepper had used it as a retreat a few times, as had Colonel Rhodes. Nobody knew about it, it had no connection to Stark Industries -- Pepper had used Tony's own money for it -- and there was plenty of space to make noise and run around. Which was more or less what Steve and James and Clint planned to do.
"And you," Pepper had added dryly. "Don't blame the boys for everything."
There'd been an attempt to turn it into a full Avengers social event, but that had not come to pass. Thor was home while Bruce had a web conference that weekend that he had been looking forward to for months and the farmhouse did not have a great signal. Which had more or less been Tony's excuse, since he had been living in his workshop almost since the assassination in Moscow trying to come up with something to defeat the explosive used to assassinate the Chinese ambassador because there was no way HYDRA didn't have more of that stuff. "He's the happy kind of obsessive," Steve had assured them. "It's a puzzle, not a penance."
They had conveniently neglected to tell Fury about it -- as they had Steve's little Hudson River escap(ad)e -- with the justification that if two Avengers and the Winter Soldier couldn't protect Captain America, there was a lot more wrong to the picture. Although Natasha wasn't alone in hoping that the topic of conversation never came up. They would be there three days, which even in their strange lives wasn't always enough time to get into really quality trouble.
It was fun, in no small part because Steve was functionally independent and away from Stark Tower, which Natasha suspected had started to feel like a gilded cage to him. It was a place that he'd had to be because of his infirmities and it was a place he couldn't leave without pomp and circumstance -- or subterfuge. Steve didn't resent Tony or Pepper, quite the opposite -- Natasha thought that those relationships had been strengthened during his time there. But that didn't change the fact that Steve had been in someone's care for the last fifteen months and he was ready to stand on his own once more and still he couldn't.
It was three days of much more outdoor activity than Natasha would ever have chosen for a retreat on her own, but it worked. They ran and shot and sparred, but they also took walks and sat lazily and while Steve handled the main of the meal prep, everyone else contributed, too. Natasha got to spend time with Clint without it them having their passports in their pockets or their weapons out, the two of them getting surprisingly high-quality time washing and drying dishes after dinner. Natasha also got time with Steve, which had been rare. They'd spent a lot of time together since he'd returned to New York, but usually with other people around. One-on-one time had been almost an accident and Natasha missed it as intent. Once upon a time, she and Steve had explored the city together, going to a museum or a restaurant (or both), reacquainting themselves with old favorites and making new discoveries and learning about each other along the way. But those were activities Steve was currently barred from -- at least as they'd once enjoyed them -- and Natasha felt bad sometimes for not finding new ways to reinforce the old connections.
But there they were, sitting on the porch shucking corn and shelling peas while James and Clint were somewhere on the property one-upping each other with rifles and targets.
"Would you consider staying out here for a while?" Natasha asked, using her fingernail to slice open a pea pod and then running her thumb down the pod so that the peas fell in the bowl between her feet.
It would be a fight with Fury, absolutely, but Steve had more leverage now. He couldn't do everything he'd once been able to do, but he might in the future and still, even before then, he didn't need anyone's help anymore.
Steve made a complicated face. "A little while, maybe," he replied. "But when I said I wanted to be my own man again, I think I meant some place with more people."
They were miles from everything and everyone here; Pepper had chosen well and the financial crisis since she'd done so had only increased the isolation through foreclosure and lack of development.
"Farmer's market's a little more authentic here," she teased, but she understood. He was no more a country mouse than she was, much to Clint's disappointment.
"After a couple of years among the hipsters, I'm comfortable with the poseurs," he replied with a mischievous smile, reaching for another ear of corn. "At least they eat well."
"I'll tell James to start packing," Natasha said with a smile.
"Nah," Steve scoffed. "Even if Fury was prepared to give me my freedom, I wouldn't be going back. First, Buck needs it more than I do right now and it's probably got more of his stuff in it than mine by this point."
As Steve had improved, the rest of his art supplies and his cookbooks and kitchen supplies had joined the books and clothes and knickknacks in his Stark Tower apartment. What was left was the furniture -- which Steve hadn't chosen in the first place -- and some of the memorabilia and photos that Steve had insisted he hadn't wanted but only because he wanted James to have them, to see them and remember that life.
"You are assuming that James has done anything like buy stuff," Natasha told him ruefully. Affectionately, but ruefully. "It looks like your place, just more spare."
"Blank canvas," Steve assured. "He'll fill it in once he figures out what he likes. Took me time, too, but I caught up."
Natasha hadn't spent an awful lot of time at Steve's in the earliest days of their association to have seen the progress as it had occurred. She'd been out in the field a lot, as often as she could, because she'd wanted to get away from the Avengers and what they represented: a new world order where she wasn't nearly as relevant, as useful as she had once been. Against the Chitauri, she'd been an acrobat with a pair of pistols up against something so far out of her league there'd been no comparable. She hadn't been scared of them, but she'd been terrified of what they meant and what might happen to her if this was the future of global threats. What could she be if the Black Widow was no longer an essential player in the global political game? So she went about proving herself still necessary and needed, taking assignment after assignment so she could be in control of things again. So she could matter. What down time she'd had, she'd spent with Clint, who'd only accepted so much help as he'd recovered from his own experiences and had largely sought the same recovery methods as she had -- work and more work.
"I don't think I've exactly been the best role model there," she admitted wryly, dropping another empty pea pod in the bowl she was using as a garbage. Steve had spent a good deal of time working on that with her, although she hadn't ever considered herself to be his project. She didn't think he considered her his project, either. Steve respected his friends as they were, no matter what he might wish for them in the privacy of his own heart.
"You've been good for him in other ways," he assured. From anyone else, that would have been a wink-wink-nudge-nudge comment about sex, but Steve, who was not nearly as pure of thought as popular legend held, meant it entirely in its broader sense.
"I have," she agreed with a smile because false modesty did not suit her and James, for all that she loved him, had been and would be a lot of otherwise uncredited work.
They continued their tasks in silence, Steve finishing with the corn and moving on to carrots, before she spoke again. "What was the second reason?"
"Hm?"
"You said that the first reason you weren't going to evict James was that he needed the anchor more than you did," she prompted. "What was the second?"
Steve smiled, a bit shyly she thought, and a bit sadly and she realized before he started speaking that this wasn't going to be about fresh starts and picking out his own couch this time.
"It's not good for Peggy," Steve said. "Even with all new furniture -- and it would all have to be new, she couldn't ever use the kitchen stools and the couch is too deep for her now -- there would have to be too much work done on the place to make it for two people. Or more, if we have to bring someone in later on."
Natasha was pretty sure this was the first time Steve had spoken of his plans out loud to anyone but Peggy -- if he'd even said anything to her yet. James would have said something if Steve had told him, she thought. It wasn't the kind of thing Steve would ask for a vow of silence for and James, at least the sentimentalist hiding deep in a corner of his heart where neither war nor Zola nor Schmidt nor Department X could reach, would have been happy to share it.
"What does Peggy think?" Natasha asked, since this would not have been the first time Steve had tried to make plans for Peggy only to be firmly shot down upon actual presentation. But all of those plans had been Before. Before Steve's shooting, before Peggy had packed up her own life to be with Steve, before the consequences of her advanced age had meant a real decline instead of being an occasional annoyance, before the two of them had spent more than a year together in a way that age and ego and time had never allowed.
Steve smiled and she realized he'd been worried about her response. "There are plenty of one-story houses inside city limits. She'd like a backyard."
The isolation of Wyoming had been trying for Peggy at times, Natasha knew, but she'd enjoyed the peace of it.
"When are you going to tell James that you and Peggy are going to be shacking up in sin?" she asked lightly so that it wouldn't come off as chiding. She knew it would be soon because he'd want to tell James himself and he'd never ask her to keep a secret from him.
"Who said anything about living in sin?" Steve asked in return, raising his chin in challenge even though Natasha could see the amusement in his eyes. "I'm a gentleman and I've asked for the lady's hand."
Which shocked Natasha but did not really surprise her, although something must have shown on her face because Steve reacted, so she shook her head. "And what did the lady say?"
"The lady said she'd think about it," Steve admitted with a self-deprecating grin, but it quickly melted into something far sadder. "She's still worried about me, about holding me back. I don't know what I else I can tell her to get her to believe that she isn't. That I'm exactly where I want to be when it comes to her."
Once upon a time, that had been exactly the problem, at least as far as Peggy saw it. She still saw it that way, but had difficult relationship with her ability to change Steve's mind. As they all did.
"I think the fact that she's agreeing to let you stick around speaks volumes," Natasha said, dropping the last empty pea pod into the discard bowl.
Steve smiled at her and offered her a peeled carrot, which she accepted, biting off the tip and spitting it into the discard bowl. She ate the rest as Steve finished the carrots and moved on to apples. Clint had been the one to find the sign for the u-pick apple orchard -- he'd brought his mountain bike because he hated running for exercise -- and they'd gone yesterday afternoon, coming back with far too many apples but having thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The only one who'd ever picked fruit before had been Clint and he'd joked that he'd never done it legally, only pilfering after dark during his circus days or on the run in the Middle East. So he was the expert, they'd told him, and he should share his wisdom. "The only wisdom I have to share is that there are consequences to living on fresh figs," had been the reply.
James and Clint returned before Steve had finished his pile of peeled apples (which wasn't actually a pile, since all of his peeled produce was going into a bucket of water), still giving each other grief for their shooting -- nevermind that their worst shots were still impossible shots for most everyone else -- and then demanding dinner, which got half-peeled apple tossed at them.
Tuesday morning, however, it was back to work at 44th Street, the 'family tree' of HYDRA-in-Perm having grown in their absence and a test-run with a quinjet in Utah having given them a good idea of how close they could land to a house or a populated area without detection, since using an actual airstrip within Perm was impossible. They were treating the entire city as hostile and monitored, which was overstating the case, but probably not by much and they didn't have the time to make a finer distinction. Perm was held by two opposing forces -- the Russian government and HYDRA -- and neither wanted SHIELD there, although the former was capable of looking the other way in a warped case of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.'
Lukin's compound was in the sparsely populated northern part of the Leninsky district, on the right bank of the Kama but not near the river. It was surrounded by forest and had exactly one road that led to it. Repeated satellite overflights and local intelligence reports, both eyeball accounts and second-hand, indicated that the security was reflective of the position HYDRA held in the region: enough to be taken seriously, but nothing like what they'd seen at Minyar. Lukin was not worried about the Russian Army storming the place, not with such limited access routes and an entirely sympathetic population.
"The population of Minyar was sympathetic, too, and they still had Triple-A," Clint pointed out during that particular briefing.
There was no artillery at the compound, anti-aircraft or ground-oriented, they were assured. Clint exchanged a look with Natasha to indicate how much faith he placed in that promise and she could do nothing but shrug in return.
In the evening, with Fury's permission, they took copies of the planning material over to Steve's, since he was their best tactical and strategic planner. Steve enjoyed the involvement, enjoyed putting in the work during the day to assess and improve upon what he'd been given, and Natasha wasn't the only one who'd suggested that they find a way for Steve to at least view the briefings in real time, remotely by necessity. The camera that was set up in the rear of the team room was for Fury, the analysts were told. James usually was the one who had to take credit for Steve's suggestions and improvements, mostly because the credulity of what the Winter Soldier was capable of was essentially boundless and his role in the raid at the Powell SHIELD base was known. (Clint, whose role in the attack on the Helicarrier while under Loki's control could possibly have stood as his credentials, had been quieter than usual and Natasha was grateful that no analyst was stupid enough to bring that up because Clint tended not to roll with those punches the way James had learned to.) James understood the power of myth and was not shy about using it within SHIELD as he did during his missions, but in this case he was amused because the myth that was being drawn upon was not just that of the Winter Soldier, but also that of James Barnes, team sergeant of the Howling Commandos. "They don't get that my job there was mostly making sure everyone survived Steve's crazy ideas," he'd said with a shake of his head, then held up his left arm. "A task at which I proved only partially successful."
There'd initially been some concern -- at least among those who'd known about Steve's pre-dawn run -- that the increased involvement in the Perm mission would either upset Steve or give him new energy to try some other way to prove his fitness for it. But that turned out not to be the case. The demons that had been driving that urge had been exorcised on the mats in the gym and Steve had never really been fueled by vengeance. Which was not to say that he wasn't in possession of the desire, just that he was generally the master of it.
"Of course I want to see Lukin pay," he admitted during a lunch at his apartment. It was just the two of them and Peggy, James staying at 44th Street to work on something with Zubov and Clint being temporarily dispatched to Algeria to handle a matter that had nothing to do with HYDRA. "Not as much for shooting me, but for what he did to the people I care about and to everyone else who has been hurt by his quest for power. I won't shed a tear if he dies and I won't think less of whoever kills him. And if he ends up rotting in a jail cell like Schmidt, that's okay, too, because I think powerlessness, for people like him, is crueler than death. I want to see that happen, but I don't need to see it. I trust you guys to get it done."
Even if Steve had come to terms, there was still a discussion about who exactly was going on the mission. SHIELD's Direct Action Service had teams that were regional specialists and thus there were two teams that were populated by Russian and Slavic languages speakers, but there was also a list of teams that could and couldn't work with the Avengers and the Eastern European teams were both on the latter list. Even though this wasn't a proper Avengers mission, all of the compatibility problems couldn't be laid at Tony or Thor or Bruce's feet. There'd already been tension with Malcolm, the team leader initially assigned to the mission, and Clint had suggested bringing in Corrales instead because his team was the most used to dealing with them and they weren't planning on chatting with Lukin's people, so the language handicap wouldn't matter and the fact that Corrales had probably led more HYDRA raids than Malcolm and Possler combined did. Fury hadn't said no, but Malcolm's team was still assigned to the mission for now and thus Malcolm was still pushing for more inclusion in all phases of the operation while also accusing them of trying to get his men killed at every opportunity.
When two of Malcolm's people were seriously injured in a hang fire accident on the range, Fury called Clint, Natasha, and James into his office. "So help me God, if any of you are responsible for this, I will exact a suitable and lasting punishment."
They hadn't done anything. The investigation quickly showed that every cartridge in Bellavia's clip was defective in a fashion that could only have happened during production and turned out not to be the only rifle ammo affected, so this was a canary in a coal mine accident, not sabotage.
Corrales still warily asked if they'd blown off Bellavia's hand to get him on board, but he was joking. He wasn't joking about asking for a Russian cheat-sheet for his men, both phrases they would use ("drop your weapons" and "lie down on the ground") and phrases they were likely to hear, "including any warnings of impending self-detonation."
The mission planning moved smoothly more because of the influx of fresh intelligence, including photos of the compound's perimeter security station and a whole lot of pilfered FSB material, than because of the change in support teams, although that didn't hurt. Which was not to say that having someone so familiar with their methods -- and their past hijinks -- was without its own complications.
Corrales had been kidding around when he asked what the secret mission was this time -- he'd helped them sneak into Latveria the other year -- and it had taken all of Natasha's professional training to not react to the question. She justified her denial to herself by saying that technically, there wasn't any secret mission here beyond apprehending Lukin, but she still disliked lying by omission to a man she genuinely respected.
It was Clint's turn a few mornings later after James had finished explaining Steve's latest suggestions. "It's a very Captain Rogers kind of move," Corrales said approvingly, not even looking up from where he was taking notes. "Appropriate considering we're going after the guy who killed him."
"It's a Commandos thing," Clint replied blandly, since some kind of response was required.
"He's not going to figure it out, is he?" James asked over a dinner later that night.
"No killing Corrales to keep our secrets," Tony warned. He'd been pried out of the workshop by Pepper with JARVIS's and Natasha's help because she hadn't been in New York in more than a week and would be leaving again in a few days and didn't consider sitting by Tony's workbench to be quality relationship time. "We like Corrales."
"Says the guy who shot his team twice with the barf cannon," Clint retorted. James looked over at Natasha as everyone else laughed, she indicated that she'd explain later.
"We like him because he's forgiving," Tony replied loftily.
"Corrales is more likely to accept that you learned something from Steve than that the long-dead Captain America is the Wizard of Oz secretly doing our mission planning," Clint assured, reaching out to serve himself more stuffed tomatoes.
"What about Steve learning something from me?" James asked with mock outrage.
"I'm the man with the plan," Steve explained with equally mock gentleness as he patted James's hand. James responded by trying to drive his fork into Steve's hand until he pulled it away.
While they'd been sitting in offices on 44th Street figuring out what they wanted to do, a SHIELD team had been building a mockup of Lukin's compound in New Mexico, in a corner of Gila National Forest that had terrain similar to that of Perm. The compound wasn't a HYDRA base as they'd gotten used to them, was more like a warlord's estate in any number of countries with housing for the underlings and a presumed weapons and vehicle stash, but with the main machinery of business offsite. This was not the new HYDRA world headquarters, was in fact the ghost of some Party bigwig's dacha, heavily modified since then but still retaining a lot of the elements that made it identifiable as someone's vacation home. Or, perhaps more accurately, someone's idea of a vacation home. There was the main house, two stories, no sign of a basement, a barn that had been converted into a barracks, and a stable-turned-garage. There was a stream at the rear of the compound, which only had the kind of fencing that would be sufficient to keep out local fauna and not present any problem to a determined adult human, but local observation said that there were motion detectors of the kind that James had defeated on their infiltration into Latveria and for which he'd provided lessons to all parties because they had examples, which were in use for the exercise. There were no perimeter guard patrols, but there was a security station at a strategic location near the entrance and response time from that point was very fast.
All of the agents playing Lukin and his people were Russian speakers, to maintain the possibility of a foul-up caused by language barriers, and Possler's team and part of Malcolm's were the key players. Malcolm himself got to be Lukin, which made everyone joke that the likelihood of it being 'capture' and not 'kill' were very low. They went through three test runs in three days, spending each evening going over what worked and what didn't while the carpenters re-build the walls that had been blown up or shot to pieces during the drills. Natasha didn't have a lot to contribute to the planning refinements, just as she'd been somewhat limited in her contributions during the design. This wasn't her area of expertise; if she was going to get into a heavily fortified compound, she was going to either be invited in under false pretenses or go over a wall herself like a cat burglar. Her role in the assault was to be part of the advance scout team, let the others do the heavy lifting as required, and try to acquire as much documentation and other intelligence as circumstances allowed. She'd shown no offense at being excluded from the main battle plans and nobody had offered her any apologies or excuses.
They were only going to be back in New York for two days before they left again. They would be staging in northern Kazakhstan to minimize the actual flight time over Russian territory after mission launch; the camp was isolated but well-provisioned and well-defended, a holdover from the preparations for the Minyar assault years ago.
Natasha treated her time off as she would any time off before a mission -- she relaxed, she treated herself well without over-indulging, she made sure everything was prepared in case she never got to come home. She spent most of the time with James, but not all of it -- they both needed a little time to themselves. They spent the last evening at Tony's, because he insisted that it was a pre-Russian Invasion tradition, and none of them felt like pointing out that once was hardly a tradition because they knew what he really meant. Everyone was there, including Bruce, who'd come in to town while they'd been in New Mexico to do one of his periodic tours of duty in the labs at 44th Street. "I called Jane Foster, but Thor's still not back from whatever he got dragged off to do. I think she's starting to get a little worried," Tony explained.
"You should have invited her," Pepper told him.
"I did!" Tony insisted. "She was at a delicate point in her experiment. I told her I understood and to make sure she took a shower this week."
Marcel, as always, thrilled to having a larger audience than usual and dinner was sublime from the ossetra caviar appetizers and squash velouté to the braised beef cheek main course and a cheese course complemented by apple preserves made from the apples they'd brought back from Pennsylvania. It was a warm evening, so they went outside to the deck for coffee and dessert. They hadn't talked about the mission at all during dinner, but away from the table and with full bellies and a stunning view of Manhattan at night, they were freer with their choices. Tony told them about the 'war room' he was setting up so that all of the ones left behind could watch, although Bruce wasn't sure he would and Pepper said that she would not even if she could have. She was going to be in transit for part of the mission running time, on a flight to Ghana to open a corporate office, Stark Industries' new African hub.
"It looks too much like a video game," Pepper explained, waving away Tony's pointing out that he could send the feed to her jet. "And then I hear voices that I recognize belonging to people that I care about and I can't. I can't live through that vicariously, safe and terrified. I would do it if it helped, if my being there meant something to someone--" she looked over at Tony and Natasha could see in her face her fear every time Tony put on the armor for combat, "--but in this case, it wouldn't. None of you would be helped or soothed knowing I was watching. You won't be thinking about it at all."
Which was the truth, for better or for worse.
Thirty-nine hours later, they were sitting in a pre-fab building in Kazakhstan going through the final mission briefing. The latest satellite feeds had indicated significantly more traffic coming in and out of the compound, which was interesting and probably relevant -- intercepted chatter from the Russians said that they thought another attack was imminent -- but so long as they were leaving and not increasing the manpower inside the walls, it wasn't enough to force a change in plans. They were going in at night, when the population of the compound, estimated at twenty people, would be at its lowest.
Weather at mission time was deteriorating, but the quinjet pilots were confident that they would be able to launch and land without difficulty and assured them that they would be able to hide in the air even if the winds stayed up because they'd be above it. The flight to Perm was still bumpy and nerve-wracking. The quinjets put them down in a clearing a kilometer from the western border of the compound, which meant a kilometer of trudging through dense, uneven, rocky forest with only a quarter moon amplified by night vision goggles to see by. Natasha, one of three serving as vanguard, understood the absolute necessity of it, but still she hated it, hated the lack of depth perception, the way she couldn't avoid getting smacked in the face or goggles by branches, the way she rolled her ankle because of baseball-sized rocks she couldn't see, all of it. But then it was done and they were at the picket fence and then Prideaux and Casimir were working in tandem to trick the motion sensors into thinking that all was quiet on the western front.
Once the motion detectors were defeated, they had another twenty meters of forest to get through until they hit the clearing that was the compound. The barracks were to their left and the garage to the right and the right side of the house was directly in front of them. They didn't have anything on the interior of the house, which meant going room to room and then hoping that there hadn't been heavy modifications inside, such as the panic room that had saved Peggy and Steve from Belova. Natasha moved alongside the lee of the garage so she could see the entirety of the compound and there was nothing happening, that the extra guests had all gone, so she keyed her mic twice to signal to the rest of the team that it was safe to proceed as Casimir and Prideaux went to the pair of double-door entrances to the barn/barracks and secured them with simple bicycle u-locks. During the planning, it had caused no end of hilarity that HYDRA could be defeated by spending $50 at Walmart.
When everyone arrived, they split into three pre-sorted teams, with James, Clint and Natasha attached to one each so that there would be a Russian speaker with each group. Natasha was with Corrales's group as they made their way to the rear entrance of the house and Clint's team took the front entrance. James's unit was going to secure the guard station and would serve as a reserve if (when) things got chaotic. Back at the start, Natasha had asked why she was going in while James was staying outside, not because she resented the danger, but because it seemed prudent to put the best people at the work to the task. The answer had been blunt: James was the most efficient killer on the team, so he was the reserve because if he was needed, they would need that efficiency to salvage whatever they could.
The back door faced the front door, with the entry room in between. The door wasn't locked and they opened it quickly -- creaky hinges could be defeated by speed -- without letting it hit anything. They encountered two guards, both neutralized with silenced pistols before they could raise an alarm. With both teams inside, Clint, who held overall mission command, indicated that his team would take the upstairs while Corrales (and Natasha) would secure the first floor. With HYDRA's love of basement complexes well known, they went room to room checking every single door expecting one to lead to something more, but nothing did. They found one more man at a bank of computers and telephones, presumably on overnight communications duty, and two sleeping in a rear bedroom, and all were taken care of before they knew what was happening. With the floor secure, and no noises coming from upstairs indicating trouble -- there were no noises at all -- Corrales signaled Clint and James, stationed men to watch for reinforcements, and took everyone else but Natasha upstairs to support Clint's team, since they had more rooms to cover and, probably more of those rooms would be occupied. The house was not a home; Lukin's wife and children were in Andorra, their new home, and the place did not even have the comforting accretions of a unit in residence the way the agents in Wyoming had made their duty station domestic.
Natasha stayed downstairs to work on the secondary objective, which was data acquisition. She went back to the room where they'd found the communications setup and, moving aside the corpse of the man who'd attended them, stuck flash drives in the computers -- self-installing programs would take care of the data-raiding for them by uploading everything to SHIELD -- and started looking for portable hard drives and flash drives and CD-ROMs or whatever else could be packed up and taken. She worked quickly but quietly, sacrificing speed for noise discipline. She put what she found in her backpack, leaving the flash drives, which would destroy themselves when they were done, to do their work. They'd found Lukin's office and that was her next stop, pulling out a flash drive for his laptop and then leaving the program to run while she went through file cabinets and desk drawers, skimming folder names and loose papers to find anything of interest and photographing whatever wasn't obviously useless, which excluded practically nothing because once upon a time, they'd cut HYDRA off at the knees by means of shipping labels and Home Depot receipts.
When Zucker came in to check on her, she got him started on photographing the contents of the last drawer of the file cabinet while she moved on to the garbage can. They were both still there when Clint uttered the magic words over their radios: "Beetlejuice is secure."
Tony had been the one to suggest the codename for Lukin and Clint had thought it hilarious, so even when everyone else saw the movie and thought it a horrible choice, Clint used his command authority to make sure it stuck.
Natasha confirmed that she'd heard and James, still outside with his team confirmed as well. Clint radioed that they were bringing him downstairs and Natasha urged Zucker to work faster, since they only had until it was time to take Lukin out of the house to finish. And then she pulled out her pry bar to get into the one locked drawer in the desk, prepared to empty the entire contents into her backpack.
The only thing in it was a purple velvet bag, inside of which was the Red Skull mask. "Bullseye," she muttered.
"Don't think he works in Russia, ma'am," Zucker replied cheekily.
They heard footsteps on the stairs, a herd of them as everyone was moving without concern of discovery, and Natasha took a look around the room to see if she'd missed anything. She'd given it a proper search before she'd started photographing, so there wasn't. "Let's go," she told Zucker, who was on the last pages of his drawer.
Lukin, looking rumpled and in his pajamas but proud and unaffected by his situation, which was 'surrounded by men who wanted to kill him,' was not surprised to see Natasha and called her several disgusting names in greeting. Clint slapped his face. "Watch it," he warned Lukin, sticking a finger in his face. "We don't need you intact. We don't even need you alive. You are the man who killed Captain America and all of these gentlemen worked with and respected that man, so all they really need is a pretext. I will translate every word out of your mouth if it will give them one."
Lukin sneered. "None of you will shoot a prisoner."
"But I will," James said, stepping out of the shadows of the doorway to the dining room. Natasha hadn't even known he was there and startled a little, but Lukin took an involuntary step back, only to be pushed forward again by Ramos and Pahk. "Got any more magic words for me, Boss?"
He'd put a Russian accent on the last word and wore a cruel smile on his face. This was the Winter Soldier and Natasha could allow herself the satisfaction of watching how Lukin lost his insouciance when that cold gaze was fixed on him not as lord and master, but as target. He was the one who'd lost his grip on the tiger's tail and he knew it. Part of Natasha enjoyed his fear, his very legitimate fear, that James would kill him where he stood. But mostly, she was afraid for James, about what doing this -- facing Lukin, whether or not he killed him -- would do to him. This was why Steve had wanted to go, for this moment, to make sure that James was able to come away from it intact. James had promised him that he would, but Natasha wasn't sure if that was a promise he could keep now that it was here.
James pulled out his .45 and had it at Lukin's forehead before anyone could register that he'd drawn.
Natasha looked over at Clint; both of them were too far away to do anything, as was Corrales, who was watching Natasha for a cue. She shook her head minutely. They had to show James a little faith that everything he'd been through in the last year-plus since he'd come in from the cold mattered, that he'd changed enough to not want to give up what he'd gotten back for the sake of revenge. He knew that Steve would welcome him back even if he pulled the trigger, that Natasha would not end their relationship if he killed Lukin, but it would change things and not for the better. She had to hope that that mattered to him more than his pain and his anger.
"I could splatter your brains across everyone's face and they'd only complain about the mess," James told Lukin in Russian, pushing the muzzle of the gun harder against Lukin's forehead so that it pushed his head back. "They know what you did to me, what you did to Steve Rogers, what you tried to do to Peggy Carter. We invaded a country to get to you. So that I could get to you. They won't even have to say you were shot trying to escape. They'll leave you headless in your pajamas, handcuffs on, lying in a pool of piss and blood for your minions to find."
He stood like that, his face so close to Lukin's, his expression devoid of any and all emotion, even anger. And then he holstered the gun and took a step back and the Winter Soldier disappeared, leaving Sergeant James Barnes wearing his clothes and Natasha to exhale and an indent in the skin of Lukin's forehead.
"But that would be too easy for you," he continued in English. "So you'll get to rot in a prison cell like Schmidt, your every move decided by someone else after having that privilege for far too long. The Chinese will definitely want you. I think Baron von Doom would enjoy your company again, too. He might even reopen Paklena Kapuja just to keep you close."
Paklena Kapuja was an infamous prison from the Communist era, the Latverian version of Lubyanka. The Dooms had shut it down when they'd been brought back in the early '90s. There was no chance of Lukin ending up there, however appropriate it might be. Or China. Lukin, were he thinking clearly, would realize that, but he wasn't, still rattled by seeing the Winter Soldier.
Clint drew Natasha's attention and indicated via gesture that the quinjets were late, caught up in the weather like they'd promised they wouldn't be. They were supposed to land in the compound's courtyard, which meant that the team and Lukin could wait in the house, but it also meant that they were sitting ducks. They could have triggered a silent alarm, or there could have been phone or email communication that should have been transmitted or received or anyone in the barracks could have woken up and realized that they were locked in and called in reinforcements or tried to escape.
"Put him in a chair and tie him to it," Clint ordered, gesturing for Corrales and James to come to him so he could tell them about the delay, leaving Natasha to supervise the prisoner.
Lukin regained a little bit of his brio with James out of sight, sitting regally as he was tied at arm and ankle to a dining room chair. Natasha understood it, both as theater and as actual confidence. Lukin was a master spy and while he'd been genuinely rattled by seeing James, he was no amateur and had recovered. He was confident that he could outfox Fury -- for that was who he would be dealing with -- and he had a Soviet-era disdain for the softness of American captivity. Prison life would not be hard on him, not compared to what would have happened in a place like Lubyanka or Paklena Kapuja, and he assumed that his greatest physical threat would be getting fat on the high-starch diet. He could leverage what he knew -- and he knew a lot -- into comforts and privileges and he could amuse himself toying with his interrogators and playing games with SHIELD. He might not even have to give up his external power -- he had gotten to Schmidt, after all, and his network could get to him, allowing him to continue to be a world player from Supermax or wherever he was put for the crime of orchestrating the murder of Captain America.
"You're assuming too much," Natasha told him in Russian and he looked at her, curious and disdainful of what she might presume to read of his thoughts. But his thoughts weren't terribly unique or hard to read. "You're already dead. We don't need to parade you down the courthouse steps for the masses. They've already celebrated your death. We can just throw you in a hole and take you out when we feel like it. There isn't going to be a trial and you won't be getting your one hour a day of sunshine and three square meals. This is a most extraordinary rendition and if the Americans have learned anything, they've learned how to do that. Fury will take what he wants from you and then give you to whoever will make you hurt the most and he'll do it with clean hands and a joyous heart."
Lukin snorted dismissively, but she could see that her words had gotten through. The arrogance was a bit more theatrical and a bit less genuine now. She smiled as she kept in motion around the entry room, since Lukin wanted her in his line of sight. He didn't think she was going to do anything to him, which was both foolish and correct, but he clearly felt better when he could see where she was, so she went to where he couldn't, standing behind his chair and then moving again so he'd have to guess whether she'd be appearing on his left or right. It was seemingly petty, but she knew from experience -- both having done this before and having been the one in the chair -- that it had a reasonably good cumulative effect, like Chinese water torture, a low-grade unsettled feeling that could be used for more important things. Lukin would know it too, but that was the beauty of it: it didn't matter.
"They say ten minutes, but it could be twenty," Clint told her on one of her passes. "Thunderstorm's pushing through. It'll move quickly, they said, but it's bad fucking timing."
Natasha nodded. "Do we stay here or go back to the secondary extraction point?" Which was the clearing where they'd been dropped off.
Clint made a face to indicate that both choices were bad. "We should go," he said. "If we're gonna have to trip and tumble our way through the forest again, I'd rather do it before anyone's shooting at us and Barnes is getting really itchy being here any longer than we have to. Not that I'm happy with it, but he's really rabbity. I don't think anyone's gonna firebomb this place with Lukin inside, but..."
"But this is still HYDRA and dying for the cause is good for everyone, whether they want to or not," Natasha finished. "Let's go, then."
Explaining the plan to everyone was quick; they would go back the way they came, Pahk and Ramos would take Lukin, and everyone would watch their surroundings. Clint went over to Lukin, who was now being cut free and forced to standing, but he directed his words at Pahk and Ramos. "Gag him. If he tries anything, and I mean anything, you shoot him in the head and leave his corpse to rot. We don't need him alive."
Then he looked at Lukin. "Do you understand just how little I value your safety?" he asked. Lukin nodded once.
They left the house through the back door, which put them a little closer to the path back through the woods, but also left them more exposed to the barn-turned-barracks. The compound had floodlights, but they'd been off when they arrived, so unless the barracks population had night vision -- possible, they didn't know where the armory was -- the advantage of being able to see in the dark stayed with the SHIELD team. A quarter moon, even high in a starry sky, didn't do much. There were two windows in the barn, both high up off of the ground, and Casimir, walking point with Prideaux and Natasha, quietly announced over the radio that it was open where it had once been closed.
"Nothing--wait, there's a head poking out," Casimir reported.
"Blow it off," Clint ordered. "Keep them ducking."
Casimir took a knee and squeezed off a round almost in one motion. The shot was loud in the quiet of the dark and they started moving faster, Casimir staying in position to watch the window as the others passed him by, tapping him on the shoulder as they did, running to the side of the stable and pressing against the wall. Once they were all present and accounted for by the stable, Natasha, Casimir and Prideaux began the process again, this time from the stable to the treeline. It would be about twenty-five meters, all but the first few over open ground.
They moved slowly, looking right, left, and up as they scouted the terrain and it was all clear until Natasha, with her eyes on the barn's rear window, saw motion and then heard a thump and then a cry of pain.
"Jumper out of the back window," Natasha said quietly. "Looks like he broke his leg on impact."
"See 'im," Prideaux acknowledged.
The window was probably a good seven meters off the ground, too far to drop if you didn't know what you were doing. The jumper was struggling to his feet and Prideaux put a bullet in his chest as soon as it was in view.
"Another looky-loo," Natasha said calmly, raising her rifle sight to her goggles -- a miserable way to get a look -- and squeezing off a three-round burst because she didn't trust her accuracy under the circumstances. But she made her target and he slumped where she'd shot him, half-in and half-out of the window.
"Corbette, can you get a grenade in that window?" Corrales asked from somewhere behind her. Closer than she'd thought, though, because she could hear the movement as Corbette jogged up.
"Only one way to find out, sir," Corbette replied and Natasha heard the sound of a mortar round being loaded into the launcher. She didn't bother to watch the shot, keeping her eyes on the rest of her sector, since it would either white out the goggles or blow her regular night vision if she looked at it with naked eyes. She could still see the explosion out of the corner of her vision and heard shouting.
"They're bailing out the front," someone reported.
"Get going," Clint ordered. "Full title to the trees. Go, go, go!"
Natasha and Prideaux started moving again, running into and through the open ground with bootsteps behind them until they hit the trees. There were a couple of shouts of "Ow! Fuck!" as the barn occupants started to fire on them again and they had to stop and shoot back. The SHIELD team was all wearing armor -- Natasha and James had kept their costumes, but Clint had chosen to wear a kevlar DAS tactical uniform -- which meant that the bullets were far more likely to bruise than bleed so long as they didn't hit flesh. If Lukin got hit, he was out of luck, but they'd already made it clear that they didn't care by not bringing an extra armored vest for him.
The firefight was fairly brief as far as those things went. Once in the safety of the shadow of the trees, they did a quick pat-down of their battle-buddies to check for wounds because adrenaline could mask even serious injuries. James ran his hands over her with professional speed, not even a single reassuring touch. She did the same for him, up until she got to his head, when she took a hold of his jaw so that she could look in his eyes and see what -- who -- was there. The answer was complicated, but satisfactory.
"Mister Barnes?" Pincus, Corrales's XO was right next to them. "Commander, turn around."
Corrales had been reaching for his Camelbak but froze, not moving until James came up to him and raised his goggles and looked where Pincus's flashlight was pointing. Natasha, on the other side of the men, raised her goggles as well. Clint had been moving along the line making sure everyone was okay and making sure no one was coming after them, but now he jogged up to them, looking at Natasha through his goggles. She shook her head slightly, she didn't know.
"How bad is it?" Corrales asked, voice steady, as James took Pincus's flashlight and shone it around Corrales's back and shoulders. "I thought the armor got all of it, but it was up by the collar and something splashed and it was probably me."
Even from the angle at which she was standing, Corrales had turned enough that Natasha could see clearly and felt nauseated at the realization.
James sucked on his teeth loudly. "The good news is that you're not bleeding," he said. "The bad news is that you weren't shot with a regular round."
The nanite-laced explosive used to assassinate the Chinese ambassador had been bright pink, which was why Tony kept calling it bubble gum. It was the same bright pink that covered Corrales from his helmet to the middle of his back.
There was a wave of grief and shock through the team after James told Corrales -- and Clint -- what had happened. Natasha looked over at Lukin and, even gagged, she could see his satisfaction. It reminded her of Loki on the day Thor had taken him back to Asgard.
"Barton, get everyone the hell out of here. I don't know what the blast radius is and we don't know how fast any of them can get to the detonator," James said calmly as he gestured for Corrales to take off his helmet. "If it's just on the gear, we'll be right behind you."
If it was on Corrales's skin, there was no hope, he didn't have to say. Natasha moved over to James's side, taking the flashlight so that he had both hands free to work.
There were protests -- nobody wanted to leave Corrales to die alone, there was no guarantee there was anyone left alive to find the detonator -- but Corrales shut them all up with a single "Hey!" as he and James worked to undo the straps on the armored vest.
"This is not a fucking democracy," Corrales said forcefully. "I appreciate it, boys, I do. But there is not going to be another mass funeral. You follow Agent Barton to the extraction point and get the fuck home with what we came here for."
Clint didn't look too happy himself, Natasha saw.
"This is why both of us were smart enough not to become officers," James told Clint in Russian as he got the last strap undone and started working on all of the radios and grenades and other dangling bits that had to come off before the vest could be removed. "Officers get stuck doing shit things like leaving other people to risk their lives and then take the blame themselves when it goes badly."
James might have been talking theoretically, but Natasha didn't doubt he was thinking of Steve.
"This is the cost of getting to keep Beetlejuice as a code name," James went on, detaching the last grenade and pulling off the vest, throwing to the side as if that would be far enough (it wouldn't and they knew it wouldn't). "Go."
Clint called him several names in Arabic, but then ordered everyone to get moving now. He shot Natasha a look, but she shook her head. This was more than a one-man job and if they were going to save Corrales, they would need the extra hands. Clint nodded and followed the rest of the men into the trees and toward safety. Natasha debated whether to put the goggles back on to stand guard, but she didn't think she could do that and still hold the flashlight for James. They were already violating light and noise discipline a thousand ways, so if anyone was going to come, they probably already would have and, she thought, she would be able to hear them. But either the rest of Lukin's men were dead or injured or they knew what they'd done and wanted to be far away when the bomb went off.
"What did you tell him?" Corrales asked and Natasha could hear the fear in his voice now, controlled still, but not as tightly in check without his men present.
"I told him that being an officer sucked, but he got stuck doing it anyway," James replied as he gestured for Natasha to come closer with the flashlight. She did and they could see the pink splotches on Corrales's neck, on the collar of the tactical shirt and then on the skin itself.
"It's enough to kill you, but not anyone else," James told Corrales bluntly as he pulled out his combat knife. "I'm going to cut it off; it'll hurt like a motherfucker and you'll bleed like a stuck pig, but you'll get to keep your head."
Corrales nodded. "Do it."
"Not to sound like the voice of God, although it's not completely inappropriate," Tony's voice began, emerging from the front pocket of James's vest where his phone -- his turned off phone -- was stored, and scaring the three of them into jumping. "But I gave you that EMP for a reason, Barnes, and it wasn't for threatening Dummy."
James frowned as he pulled the phone out of the pocket, saw that it was audio only, and put it back in. "I thought you said that you weren't sure the stuff would stay inert with an EMP."
Natasha had skimmed most of the documentation on the nanite explosive; there had been only so many tests they could run with the tiny sample they had and they were still trying to recreate a larger supply to do more. Zapping it with an EMP hadn't been one of the tests they could do with the original sample, so Tony had had to guess as to the possible outcomes.
"I'm not sure," Tony agreed. "But it can't hurt to try and it may buy you some time to flay Corrales alive. Key word being 'alive.'"
James put his hand over the spots on Corrales's neck and shirt. There was no light or heat, but Corrales shivered and then James took his hand away.
"Don't forget the helmet and vest," Natasha reminded him and James turned and held his hand out. Again, she saw nothing, but James wiggled his fingers and dropped his arm, turning back to Corrales.
James had Corrales sit on the ground and knelt behind him, Natasha standing behind the both of them so she could hold the flashlight. She had her gun in the other hand, just in case. Which didn't lessen the risk to Corrales; they had no idea what the nanites had been programmed to do nor did they know if there was anyone alive who had a detonator, which would have a range of more than a kilometer out here. There could be more than one and it could be coming with the reinforcements.
They were lucky that the collars of the tactical shirts were cotton blend and could be cut away easily with a combat knife. There was a dime-sized splotch on the kevlar part of the shirt, but James took out another knife and scraped it off, throwing the explosive-tainted knife with practiced ease into the darkness and Natasha couldn't even hear it hit the ground, it had landed so far away.
"Get something to bite down on," James said as he pulled out a couple of field dressings. Skinning a living creature was bloody, messy work.
Corrales leaned forward to where the items discarded from his vest were lying and picked out one of his own field dressings, which was still rolled up. He also took the laminated photo of his family, his wife and four children, kissed it, and held it in his hand as he bit down on the dressing. He cried out at the first cut and Natasha bit her lip in sympathy, forced to watch so that she could keep the flashlight in place. James worked as quickly as he could, trying not to dig too deeply, but the blood was pouring and it got slippery and hard to see what he was doing and he had to pour water on the area, which made it hurt worse.
In Natasha's ear, Clint reported that the quinjets were ready and he was going to load everyone into one and the second would come down when they were ready. Natasha acknowledged, but didn't give a time estimate or how likely it was that it would be three of them.
"Everyone else is clear," she reported, since Corrales had lost his radio and James wasn't going to be paying attention to his. She wasn't sure Corrales heard her through the pain, but if he did, this would make it easier for him.
James rinsed the area again once he was finished and Natasha could see a palm-sized irregular patch of raw flesh before it was covered over first with a giant waterproof adhesive bandage, which probably wouldn't stick because of the water and blood, and then the old-school wraparound pressure dressing, which had to go around Corrales's neck like a mummy wrap or a noose. Neither bandage did the whole job, but together they would work long enough to get Corrales to safety. James pulled him up to standing by the arm and they exchanged a look; Natasha couldn't see Corrales's face, but she saw James's and understood that it had been about a life saved.
"Let's go," she exhorted as James bent down to collect Corrales's rifle and radio and other important items; grenades and protein bars could stay behind. They'd had to throw away his NVGs because the strap had been tarred by the explosive, so James had Corrales put his hand on his shoulder and follow along like a blind man with his head down so he didn't get smacked in the face with anything while Natasha brought up the rear.
She radioed Clint that they were on the move and he said that the second quinjet would drop down in five and be waiting for them, but to hurry up because they could see three SUVs speeding toward the compound.
"Reinforcements are on their way," Natasha warned. "Theirs, not ours."
They were in the thick of the woods when they heard an explosion behind them and Natasha had to turn away from the fireball visible even though the trees so it didn't white out the goggles.
"Oh, God," Corrales muttered, stunned with the realization of what had nearly been. "That was my gear, wasn't it?"
"Stark," James said, not slowing down, "if you're still listening, that's a 'no' on the EMP as permanent deactivator."
The quinjet was waiting in the clearing, as promised, and James pulled out his flashlight to signal friendlies on approach, to which the response was a dropped ramp. The engines were spinning up for takeoff before it closed again and the pilot was radioing their status as they lurched into the air with less grace than usual but greater speed.
Natasha confirmed with Clint that they were three and underway as James dug through the jet's first aid kit. "You want morphine?" he asked Corrales, holding up a syringe and vial.
"Not unless you want to carry me all the way to Medical once we get to the Helicarrier," Corrales replied with a weak smile.In the cabin's light he was pale and looked wrecked for more reasons than that he'd just been skinned alive. "Shit knocks me out for hours."
"Kind of the point," James replied wryly, but put it back and took out a cold pack, cracking it so that it would activate. "This should numb it a little."
The flight back to the 'Carrier was going to be about three hours because they were going to burn fuel all the way back; the other jet would take a little longer because it had more weight. Corrales lay down on one of the benches and positioned the cold pack so that he could lie on his back without needing to hold it; the adrenaline of getting a death sentence and then having it lifted, however painfully, was over and he was crashing, understandably. Natasha and James shared the other one, shoulders touching but leaning against the bulkhead instead of each other, and Natasha closed her eyes.
"Hey, Barnes," Tony piped up from his phone again. "Someone wants to talk to you."
James sighed, but he was smiling as he did so. "Someone is a worrywart and also is not going on speakerphone."
Steve had had good reason to worry and James knew that, too, but Natasha thought that Corrales's peril had purged a lot of the lingering darkness that had shadowed James even after he'd had his showdown with Lukin. He had such a long history with Lukin, such an ugly one, and he wasn't ever going to put what Lukin had done to him and those he cared about behind him. But having to focus on Corrales, on saving Corrales -- and their team -- instead of on wanting to kill Lukin, that had required more James Barnes than the Winter Soldier and that, she thought, made the difference. James would probably tell her otherwise, but this was what she chose to believe.
"Buck?"
"Speakerphone, Jesus Christ!" James yelled, pulling the phone out his pocket with hands that were still covered in Corrales's blood. He'd rinsed them off, but in the dark and cursorily and there was still red under his fingernails and in the creases of his knuckles. He was pushing the speaker button, but it was grayed out because Tony had commandeered the thing from a distance. "Stark, I am going to smash this thing into little pieces and buy an iPhone."
Across from them, Corrales had turned, eyes alert. Of course he'd recognized the voice, or at least he thought he had, especially in that context of just that one word. The situation was possibly salvageable, but it would mean lying to Corrales by commission now instead of by omission.
"You think I can't take over an iPhone?" Tony asked happily. "Please, their code's child's play."
James made a frustrated noise and sat back. "Well, Captain Clandestine has successfully blown his cover, so you might as well say hello to everyone. Jesus, Steve, you are just never going to run out of ways to sneak out of safety, are you?"
Corrales was staring, shock and delight on his face. Natasha leaned forward and she could see the pilot still had her cans on, so she probably hadn't heard a thing. Natasha had flown quinjets enough to know that all hell could be breaking loose in the rear and the pilot could still be oblivious. Loud conversation wasn't audible over the engines with the headphones on.
"It's Corrales," Tony retorted. "If he was going to do a heel turn on us, it would have been long ago. We've certainly given him cause."
Corrales laughed, mostly because it was true but also because Captain America wasn't dead.
"It's Corrales now," James shot back, not ready to give up, even if he'd given in. "It's gonna be someone else tomorrow. And I am not even going to stay in the room when Fury rips you a new one."
Fury was going to shit housebricks, Natasha agreed, but if he hadn't already figured out that Steve was chomping at the bit to make progress on the return to a normal life, well, it was about time he did.
"Your righteous indignation would work a lot better if you didn't have such a track record of being an accomplice," Peggy said and James, realizing he was being ganged up on, handed the phone over to Natasha and crossed his arms as if to remove himself from the proceedings. But they were trapped in the rear of a jet for the next two and a half hours and there was nowhere to run especially if Tony wouldn't let them turn the phone off -- he could probably make it work without a battery, too. Besides, she knew he really didn't mind at all.
"Mister Barnes is withdrawing from the field of combat," Natasha announced. "Tony, take the phone off speaker so people can have real conversations."
She handed it back to James, who talked to Steve and Peggy, judging by the side of the conversation she could hear. It wasn't a fully revelatory talk -- there were some answers Steve was going to have to pry out of James face-to-face and without anyone else able to hear -- but James did admit that he'd been close to not heeding his better angels. Then he got up and crossed over to Corrales, handing him the phone. Corrales did more listening than speaking, but he spent the entire time smiling. Natasha got up to take the phone from him when he started to rise himself, then seemed to think better of it.
"You okay?" Steve asked her.
"Yeah," she answered, meaning it. "It was a little more adventurous than planned, but, hey, we got what we came for and we left with everyone we arrived with and you aren't allowed to complain about those missions."
Which wasn't what Steve was asking and he knew she'd avoided the answer, but maybe that had been an answer on its own.
"I'll see you guys when you get back."
Epilogue
"You do realize that there are more than thirteen colonies for you to visit now, right?"
Natasha looked up from her magazine to see Tony standing behind James and Steve as they pored over maps.
"Yes, Tony," Steve replied dryly. "We were up all night reading about that newfangled thing called the Louisiana Purchase."
The road trip had not yet been officially approved because Fury was still about a half-dozen levels beyond "really fucking pissed" (Clint's estimation, since he'd been the one who'd had to do all of the after-action reportage after Perm and thus he'd been the convenient target for Fury's anger about Steve's 'cavalier approach to his safety'). But it would be approved, either before or after the fact because Fury probably understood that Steve was going to go with or without permission and, short of throwing Steve in a hole about as deep as the one Aleksander Lukin was currently occupying, there was very little he could do about that.
"When we first came up with the idea," James added, wide-eyed innocent look on his face, "the Grand Canyon was just a little divot. We've been told it's much bigger now."
Tony, sensing that he was not going to get the best lines in this conversation, sniffed and retreated. Over to the living room area, where Natasha was reading about Marc Bolan and Peggy was typing out a scathing review of a book on Amazon. Peggy was not, as a rule, an internet assassin, but Death Comes to Pemberley had apparently struck a sore nerve.
He dropped down heavily on the other end of the couch that Natasha was curled up on with the posture and expression of 'please entertain me' that Natasha knew well and could only hope to wait out by ignoring. Pepper had left for California yesterday and was thus unavailable to intercede and Tony was always reluctant to bother Peggy because she was not shy about reminding him that she'd once seen him "scoop poo out of his diaper" if he was annoying her. Natasha couldn't imagine any other situation where she was considered the least dangerous option in the room, but these were the Avengers and their friends and thus normal rules did not apply. Which was why Tony was still watching her, hoping she'd look up so he could engage her. Natasha could wait him out, so long as he didn't escalate into poking at her feet. He'd been antsy since before Pepper left, so maybe it was something else, but she was prepared to accept simple cabin fever, for values of cabin that encapsulated one of the most exciting cities on Earth. This was Tony, after all.
"Sir, Doctor Marquand on Line One," JARVIS announced.
Tony didn't react for a long moment, then sighed and got up. "I'll take it in the workshop."
"He should go out to see Pepper," Steve said after Tony left. "They haven't had much time together this month and she's going to be out there for at least a week. He doesn't need to stay here and look after me when he wants to travel. It's driving him crazy."
"The bubble gum bomb is driving him crazy," James corrected, pulling out a map from the bottom of the heap. The idea of a road trip was something the two of them had talked about in the 1940's, a running fantasy they'd developed as they made their way across Europe. California, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, other places that seemed exotic to two young men who'd never left New York City until they'd worn a uniform. Steve had been to almost all of these places before he'd gotten to Europe, but the USO tour schedule hadn't left him much time to sightsee. He'd had more time since he'd come out of the ice and made use of it, but the Grand Canyon would still be a novelty to both of them. "But he should still go to California. And bring Dummy with him."
Tony used to go out to California and spend time in either Malibu or Atherton just for the hell of it, but he hadn't gone out there except when necessary since Steve had moved back to New York. Pepper had been talking about spending at least part of the winter there this year -- she wasn't a fan of the cold except for the odd ski vacation -- and while it was still only fall, Natasha thought she'd get her wish. It would be one more way things were slowly inching their way back toward what things had been like Before.
Although the biggest reason things would always be different was currently insisting that going through Kansas was the best route.
"Have you ever been to Kansas?" Steve asked, exasperated. Or at least pretending to be. He was too excited for anyone to take his frustration with James's ideas seriously.
"It's very boring," Clint said as he came in. He'd been at 44th Street doing yet more follow-up work to the Perm mission. All three of them -- four of them counting Corrales, whose neck was recovering well after surgery, although there would always be scarring -- had been closeted for days at a time to break that morning's work down, but Clint had to take point because of his status as mission commander. He was, unsurprisingly, the most vocal about getting Steve back on an active roster so that this could be his job again. "But I mostly only knew a very tiny patch of it. On the other hand, I know that patch very well."
His cell at the Disciplinary Barracks in Leavenworth, a place he'd been remanded to because of her and a place he was only free from because of Steve. Just because they didn't keep score didn't mean that they forgot.
"If you're going west, go north the way out and south the way back so you don't get snowed on -- or snowed in," Clint said more seriously as he dropped down on the couch where Tony had been. "But you're welcome to use my place if you are in the area."
"There's a shop in Cheyenne that makes perfect scones," Peggy offered, still working on her review. "The blackcurrant ones are superb, but I think the plain ones are best."
"We are not going to Cheyenne for scones," James replied flatly. "I am perfectly happy to never see Wyoming again. There's no there there."
"Says the guy who wants to go to Kansas," Steve retorted, taking the map out of James's hand.
Tony came back about ten minutes later holding a bottle of Manhattan Special. For all that he'd teased the guys about it being bottled by Jesus's disciples, he'd become fond of it to the point that there were bottles being drunk that hadn't originated in Steve's fridge.
"We should have our first batch of the bubble gum bomb within three weeks," he announced, giving Clint the stink-eye for taking his spot, then dropping down on the loveseat. "Marquand figured out what they did to the nanite sheathing to keep the suspension from gumming them up. That was the last piece of the puzzle."
After Perm, there had been two main focuses of attention: Lukin and the HYDRA he had left behind. The latter problem was turning out to be both very easy and very hard. The easy part was that the Russian HYDRA was more or less not SHIELD's problem anymore. Lukin's HYDRA was turning out to have been a Tsardom and, as a result, had been headless since his capture. Which for Putin was nothing short of a lifesaver. The papers Natasha had brought back and the files she'd uploaded off of the computers painted a picture of an organization that had been surprisingly close to taking over the country, forcing another series of showdowns with China and then with the US, completely eroding Putin's power and then staging an organized opposition candidacy to take the presidency and prime minister's chair through legal means. Lukin, unlike Putin, had never intended to take either job, instead standing a series of puppets and proxies to effect his will without resorting to making a mockery of the occasionally arbitrary election process. HYDRA would remain a popular movement with a militant wing, focused on Russia with a longer-term plan of extending her borders not by invasion, but by example -- and some careful propaganda and assassination. But that was all in the past now. HYDRA still present and popular, especially in the Urals and points east, but without Lukin's leadership, they were lacking the cleverness and slipperiness that made them a threat as well as a presence. The Russia Desk was of the opinion that Putin would crush them eventually -- later rather than sooner, but he'd win in the end.
The hard part was the bubble gum bomb (which had a more official-sounding name for paperwork, but nobody used it and "bubble gum bomb" cropped up plenty of times in documentation), which had remained an enigma. SHIELD scientists had had trouble recreating it in any quantities, so there was still no reliable book on how it worked or how it could be defeated, which had been Tony's frustration for the last couple of months. They also didn't know who had originally created it for Lukin's HYDRA, nor how much of it was still out there, let alone who had it. There had been nothing about it in Lukin's files, just some emails that had obviously been executive summaries written in layman's terms. The men most likely to have those answers were both supposedly on the plane that had killed Lukin and hadn't been found since. There was evidence that one of them might have actually been on the plane, which in turn remained a mystery largely unsolved. These would be questions asked of Lukin, of course, but nobody really expected answers. He wasn't like Schmidt, jealous of his power and legacy and willing to double-cross anyone who threatened either. He was like Putin, willing to play a long game and patient enough to wait out the threats to that.
Lukin was currently residing in a SHIELD black site near Gioa Tauro in Italy. The Italians would be apoplectic if they knew about it -- their courts had already charged CIA agents involved in extraordinary rendition -- but that part of Calabria was ruled completely by the 'Ndrangheta, whose dislike of HYDRA had hardened into Latverian-style intolerance after the events at Lamazia Terme. (James, the instigator of those events as the Winter Soldier, took his role with equanimity. Clint, who'd spent a month in the hospital because of those same events, did the same.) There was no way Rome would find out and even less chance that Lukin would get help. Meanwhile, the location had easy access for SHIELD interrogators, who thus far hadn't gotten much. There had been discussions about whether either Natasha or James or both should be included in the rotation of questioners; Natasha would do it if asked, although she was not chomping at the bit for a chance. James wanted nothing to do with Lukin and was privately afraid that he would be put in a position where he could not refuse to help. He wasn't sure if he could emerge from another confrontation intact. "I think he'd try to destroy me. I'm about the only thing he can still break." Natasha and Steve had both vowed to keep that from happening and Natasha did not think that the road trip was as much about Steve's continued confinement as he insisted it was.
"Did Fury give you the Dangerous Toys talk yet?" Natasha asked Tony, tossing the magazine on the coffee table. "It was on the to-do list. I saw it."
Tony beamed at her, the deeply satisfied smile of someone who got genuine pleasure out of ruining Nick Fury's day. "I got the abridged version," he confirmed. "And because it was not the Full Version or the Full Version with Appendices, there will be no conveniently placed pieces of ABC Hubba Bubba left anywhere on the Helicarrier command deck."
"ABC?" Natasha asked just as Steve and James both said "It's Hubba Hubba."
Tony threw his arms up and looked at Clint with exasperation, but Clint was too busy cracking up. "Do you ever feel like we need the universal translator like in Farscape? Just give them a little shot of nanites and suddenly they understand when we talk to them?"
"ABC is for 'already been chewed,'" Peggy explained, since Clint was still snickering and Tony was drowning his sorrows in coffee soda. "And Hubba Bubba is a gum, not the phrase I used to get frosty over when it was aimed in my direction."
"I liked that phrase," James said with a smile of fond reminiscence. "I got good results with it."
Both Steve and Peggy gave him looks of disbelief. James shrugged. "What can I say? It's all in the delivery."
"Don't deliver it to me," Natasha told him, but she already knew she'd be hearing it at least once in bed.
Dinner was upstairs, courtesy of Marcel, whose feud with Eric Ripert seemed to be over because there was a succulent tagine on the menu instead of the continued recreations and reimaginings of Le Bernardin's menu. ("I'm thinking we get him to pick a fight with Redzepi next," Tony had told Natasha early on in the squabble.) They discussed Steve and James's itinerary, including the relative necessity of Kansas, which Natasha could tell James was insisting upon entirely to be contrary.
"Remember you swore a blood oath to Pepper that you'd be back for Thanksgiving," Peggy reminded them when the list got too long.
"I'm looking forward to this," James admitted as he and Natasha walked uptown to her apartment that night. "It's... not anything I thought I could have in my life. And that includes the part where I get to come back here to you."
He smiled at her and squeezed her hand, which he'd already been holding.
"I might not be here when you get back," she teased. "I could be working."
He shook his head, recognizing her avoidance for what it was. She was remarkably bad at saying the words and possibly even worse at hearing them. She'd never really wanted to -- never really needed to -- tell a friend or a lover how much they meant to her. Clint had somehow always been able to read her like a book, even when they'd been on opposite sides. Steve had taken the time to learn her language. James... even back when he'd been her first James, the light sneaking through the cracks in the Winter Soldier's armor, he had been able to speak from the heart. Thankfully for her, he also saw what was in hers clearly enough without her having to force the words to come. She tried to say by deed, which he accepted as a workable, if partial, solution.
"I spent so long not having a life at all, not even being human," he went on as they deftly navigated Columbus Circle. "And then once I was human, I was a wreck of one. I'm still a wreck, but a functional one, I guess. And I've got everything I wanted anyway. I don't want to ruin it."
"You've fallen in with very stubborn people," she assured him. "And they are as grateful to have found you as you them."
He stopped walking, smiled, and in the middle of Central Park West, with taxis speeding at them, pulled her in for a kiss.
"I was talking about Steve," she said against his lips, but she couldn't keep the smile off her face.
"The hell you were," he retorted, smiling back.
"Come on," she said, dragging him out of the street and on to the curb. "Let's go."
