How Can You Go On With Such Conviction? - Chapter 4
Title: How Can You Go On With Such Conviction?
Author: jaune_chat
Fandoms: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Characters/Relationships: Steve/Bruce, Steve/Natasha, Steve/Tony, Steve/Thor/Jane, Steve/Clint, Steve/Bucky, Sam Wilson, Darcy Lewis, James Logan (Wolverine), guest appearances by some Agents of SHIELD, Fury, and Coulson.
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 23,057
Spoilers: Uses elements through Captain America: Civil War.
Content Advisory: Alternate Universe, Alpha/Omega/Beta dynamics, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Sex Work, Identity Porn, implied past abuse, action/adventure/violence, references to mind control.
A/N: This story was written for marvel-bang. Amazing art by laughtillwecry. Thanks to brighteyed_jill for betaing!
Art: Amazing art by laughtillwecry can be found here. (Link coming soon)
Summary: Steve Rogers is a professional alpha with an unfortunately famous name. A veteran who specializes in people with top-secret clearance, he’s been having some particularly interesting clients lately. This brings him to the attention of SHIELD, who think an alpha like him could be just the person to help a very ill Asset they have. But Steve has more up his sleeve than just one set of skills when it comes to helping the people he cares for.
On Ao3 or below the cut
Steve toweled off his hair roughly, seeing the two shadows of the agents guarding the door through the frosted glass. He wondered which one had been given his kill order. Pierce couldn’t afford to let anyone outside of his own loyal circle know about his pet project in the basement, and no matter Steve’s clearance, no matter how many NDAs he signed, nothing was going to convince Pierce his secret was safe until there was a bullet in Steve’s brain. Idly he wondered how Pierce would manufacture an excuse to get him away. Likely a faked urgent call from another embedded operative, and suddenly Steve would be needed again before he’d had time to make his call to Sam. Steve would have no choice but to take some back exit to a secure underground garage, right into the welcoming arms of his executioners.
Well. He’d see about that.
He took a small bottle from his bag and sprayed himself all over, popped in the nasal flare filters, and put on his robe, holding the pheromone ampule openly in his hand. Then he opened the door and submitted himself to the pat-down by his “guards.” Keeping his expression neutral was very hard, when all he wanted to do was snarl.
--
The asset had been cleaned by the simple expedient of hosing him down. There was a mattress on the floor, and nothing else. His dark hair hung in damp tangles to his shoulders, obscuring the impersonal mask and goggles. He was nude, writhing in discomfort and pain, the metal arm flailing, the metallic sounds pinging off the walls.
“We can restrain him, if necessary,” Pierce said. “Power down the arm.”
Steve looked at the asset to avoid looking at Pierce. The man didn’t want a professional alpha. He wanted plausible deniability, a programmable fucking machine to get his secondhand prototype back up and functional. That Steve’s life was forfeit after he walked out the door was certain. No amount of NDAs would make Pierce feel safe about having Steve walking around with this knowledge. He’d seen the Asset’s body, could identify him, could identify Pierce as being in charge of the whole operation.
Steve had seen enough.
“That won’t be necessary,” Steve said, and walked through the door. It shut and locked behind him with an ominous clang.
The man’s head came up when Steve walked through the door, wary and alert even as the smell of him was thick enough to taste even through the nasal flare filters. He didn’t get up, just kept crouching on the mattress as if afraid to leave it. Steve fought down anger as he saw that despite the water from the Asset’s impromptu shower, the man was already drying from the fervency of his need as his body radiated heat. Despite that, his hole was untouched by slick, his cock barely half-hard, even as his body was flushed with need. There was such an air of neglect about him, of being left alone or denied over and over again, that Steve ached for him.
“Hey there, soldier,” Steve said, crouching down and trying a small smile, trying to give the Asset some friendliness. “I’m here to help you. My name’s Steve.”
“You don’t need to talk, just do your job,” Pierce’s voice cracked out over the intercom, most of his politician’s tone gone in favor of a military bark. Steve ignored him; if he wanted any less from Steve, he’d have to strap him to a table.
The Asset’s impersonal mask and goggles didn’t let Steve see his expression, but his body had a posture of subservience and expectation, with the tension in his muscles that seemed to be braced for something bad. That only bore out everything Pierce had revealed about the Asset’s past, testifying to years of torture and abuse that left Steve feeling sick inside on the man’s behalf. He refused to let that show, and instead closed the gap between them until they were close enough to touch, kneeling down on the mattress and raising one hand slowly.
“May I touch you?” Steve asked softly. The Asset jerked back a bit, probably in surprise, and went still. A minute went by as his blank, masked and goggled face revealed nothing, and finally nodded. Steve gently touched the man’s shoulders, one fever-hot, the other cold, articulated metal, and slowly caressed down them. That made the Asset shiver, but also lean into the touch, a muffled moan coming from behind the mask. How long had it been since anyone had treated him with a little kindness? Years? Decades?
Steve kept up the soft touches for a long time, and only gave encouraging nods when the Asset dared to shift his body to let different skin be touched. Steve listened and watched and learned, following the Asset’s desire as his long-frustrated heat ratcheted up another level. He leaned in closer as his hands descended from the Asset’s scarred back and shoulders to his muscular ass and thighs. Steve could see the Asset’s hole was hot and dry and tight, no doubt from congested slick glands from decades of repressed heats. God, what were they thinking? He could have died from this.
Steve would do everything he could to fix it.
“May I taste you? Use my tongue?” Steve asked, and got a moan of desire as the Asset stilled, thighs trembling. Steve didn’t hesitate as the Asset knelt up and presented, gently parting the Asset’s cheeks, then leaning in and swiping his tongue wetly over his hole. There was sheer relief in the Asset’s voice as Steve licked and lapped, slowly opening up the tight pucker. Damned be to Pierce, who had been sternly trying to make other comments that Steve had ignored for the past fifteen minutes, Steve used the cover to dislodge the nasal flare filters, curling them in two of his fingers to hide them. He needed to be able to know what was going on. There was a tang of metal and blood, a faint hint of musk, but none of the rich, sweet heat that should have been filling the room. Steve redoubled his efforts, getting the Asset wet and slowly, agonizingly slowly loosening him, at least enough for a finger.
Steve left off just long enough to ask again, “May I put my fingers in you? I want to ease your glands open-.”
“Yes!”
It was an actual word, short, rough, and not terribly eloquent, but it was clear speech. What followed after Steve eased his first finger into the tight passage was more of a scream. But a scream of relief as Steve found and pressed down on the first tight, swollen gland. Slick suddenly trickled out, coating Steve’s whole hand, and soon Steve could put in another finger, then another, seeking out one gland after another and coaxing them into opening. The scent was incredible; Steve felt like he was drowning in cotton-candy sweetness with the underlying tang of metal and musk. It was making it hard for him to hold back, but he would rather die than cause this man another second of pain.
“More,” the Asset said, this time his voice very soft, the word less of a demand and more of a question. His head curved back to stare at Steve through the blank goggles and mask, and Steve just smiled at him beatifically. Obedient to the command, Steve folded his thumb and pushed in deeper, the Asset’s ass swallowing his hand. After so long a dry spell, and with so much slick needing to be expressed, this was the best thing for him medically and therapeutically, and apparently personally as well. The Asset tossed his head back and forth, sometimes dropping it to the mattress, his gyrations finally catching the goggles and dislodging them to drop on the floor. When he looked back at Steve in wonder, Steve could see his eyes were blue-gray, full of gratitude and relief. He was so beautiful he made Steve’s heart ache.
“You’re doing so well. You’re so good,” Steve said warmly, and the Asset looked almost incredulous.
“Mr. Rogers,” Pierce’s voice interrupted, loud enough this time so Steve couldn’t ignore it. “Before you get carried away, the pheromone ampule, now.”
Steve nodded once, but he wasn’t going to hop to. If Pierce had wanted to do this himself, he would have already.
He ran his free hand over his neck, then leaned forward to put more strength into his thrusts from his arm inside the Asset, slick gushing down even over his elbow as he eased the congestion in those long-dormant glands. He shifted a few more times as the Asset moaned in pained relief, bracing himself on his thigh, swiping his hand across his sweaty throat, brushing his hair back into place. He lifted his hand to show the window the flash of white plastic in his palm from the pheromone ampule. He flicked the catch on the Asset’s muzzle and closed his hand in a gesture that would crush the ampule. Then he brought his hand to the Asset’s nose and mouth letting him smell and taste the scent there.
At the same time, Steve whispered a few phrases of encouragement and praise into the Asset’s ear, then ended with a more audible, “May I, please?”
The Asset nodded frantically, and Steve eased his arm out. He shifted backwards enough to line himself up, then penetrated him in a single gorgeous slick slide home.
The Asset’s breath hitched, and tears were running down his face as Steve leaned down and breathed a question in his ear.
-
Bucky was writhing against Steve, keeping his voice as quiet as he could. Their apartment walls were paper-thin, and they didn’t want to deal with neighbors banging on their doors, demanding they keep it down. It was all Steve could do to keep things together, holding onto Bucky with deceptive strength for his slight frame, draping himself over Bucky to get as much contact as he could. He could rarely get himself out of scrapes, but damn if Bucky could ever get out of Steve’s grasp. Especially now, when he would have had to have been dragged away to let go.
“I want you to,” Bucky said, turning enough to give Steve an awkward kiss. He saw a shadow on Steve’s face, an echo of some old arguments, and smiled at him instead, putting every ounce of sincerity in his baby blues as he could. “No one else for me, not ever. Come on, Alpha!”
Confidence surged in Steve’s expression, and he leaned over Bucky’s neck, breath hot exactly where Bucky wanted it. “You want me, Bucky?”
-
“Alpha, yes,” he gasped, an echo of his answer some seventy years ago, and Steve bit down hard over an old, nearly invisible bondmark on Bucky’s neck. He only had to shift his hips once before they were both gone, clenching together in orgasm, locked as one with pleasure. He could hear muffled shouts behind the glass, banging on the locked door, now mysteriously not responding to their key cards.
“Rogers!” Pierce thundered over the intercom, “Let him go immediately or it will go worse for you.”
The lights went on in the observation room, revealing his face, as well as a group of STRIKE agents waiting for orders.
“No, Secretary Pierce,” Steve spat, holding Bucky gently, his tenderness belied by the gleaming metal arm now held at an angle to protect them both from attack. “I know my own mate.”
Pierce paled, but the STRIKE team next to him aimed their guns at Steve through the glass. Steve laughed out loud; the glass was bulletproof and shatterproof. They wouldn’t have dared place the Winter Soldier in here otherwise.
A hollow boom from above broke the standoff.
“What’s going on?” Pierce demanded.
A weedier man in the corner, probably one of the technicians, glanced at his phone and winced as he talked, eyes going wide. “Sir, the computers, someone found Zola, and the lab at-.”
Pierce cut the man off with a wave and stared fixedly at Steve, realization dawning rapidly. “No… You’re him.”
Steve smiled grimly, a smile at least seventy years old.
“You’re Captain America?!”
---
Seventy years ago
The Valkyrie hit the water like a crashing train, the impact throwing Steve out of his seat and onto the deck. He could hear water rushing in and he was cold, so cold. He wished he could have said something more to Peggy. She hadn’t deserved to hear him crash. Hear him die. He missed Bucky fiercely. He would see him soon, both of them having met their end in the cold. If they could have lived, maybe things would have been different. Maybe…
The plane settled lower, tilting slowly as she slid to her final resting place. Steve couldn’t move from the shock of the impact. He didn’t want to; he didn’t have anywhere else to go. The water rushed over him, so cold it stole his breath and numbed his mind. So cold he couldn’t even twitch. So cold he could finally rest.
--
Some time later…
Scrape Soft but insistent.
Blackness. Scrape. Louder.
A distant grunt. More scraping. Light and darkness.
SCRAPE! So loud. Cracking sounds. A nearly forgotten sensation.
Warmth. It burned
He burned with it, dying a hundred more times as heat and more scraping invaded his senses. Then lightness, weight he hadn’t even been aware of coming off of him. Pale light all around him, shining through his closed eyes. Awareness. His body, cold and soaked but alive. Barely warm water on his head. And finally, sight. He squinted as an impossibly bright glare retracted down to a single small flame, held within the globe of a lamp. A dark blur behind the flame took longer to resolve, finally revealing a man in heavy winter clothing back to him, tending a fireplace with a cheerful blaze burning in it.
Steve stared at the flames for a long time, mesmerized by them, until he finally found the wherewithal to move his head examine his surroundings. The walls were rough wood, the ceiling relatively low, small windows showing white outside. The place looked like a single-roomed cabin, like Steve had seen in a few mountainous places in Europe, small, functional, and plain.
There was a bed covered with an old quilt with blankets folded at the foot in the corner, a couple chests at the foot. A table and a couple of chairs, a healthy pile of wood near the single door, a basin on a smaller table with a tiny mirror above it, a short counter and sink, some cupboards, a stove with something savory on it bubbling away in a pot. A coffee pot enameled flecked blue and white was kept warm on the stove next to it. When Steve tried to crane his head just a little to get a better look at the silhouette next to the fireplace, he felt several thuds as chunks of ice shed themselves from his body.
He looked down at himself. He was in a simple canvas cot, uniform still on, shield still in his hand, lying in a puddle of cold water with ice chunks still stuck to parts of body.
Ice? How? his mind wondered. Where?
The man turned around at the noise from Steve’s movement. He was scruffy-looking, with heavy sideburns, thick stubble across his chin, his short brown hair in strange puffed peaks on his head. He was short, strong, and looked vaguely familiar.
“Hell of a homecoming, Captain,” he said. He was speaking English, his accent American. He looked Steve up and down, nodded, grunted, and walked over to the stove. He came back with a steaming cup of black coffee he pushed into Steve’s cold hand, the one not holding his shield. Steve couldn’t detect anything wrong with the coffee, no poisons or drugs, and drank down the hot, bitter liquid gratefully, trying to place, well, anything as the frost in his mind cleared out with every swallow.
If this was an enemy, some member of HYDRA, this was certainly not their style. They didn’t go for the soft sell. And why did the man look like someone Steve knew?
The man turned back to the stove and then came back with a bowl of thick stew. The smell awakened agonizing hunger in Steve, and he couldn’t smell a thing untoward in the delicious aroma. Steve still had his uniform on, still had his shield, wasn’t restrained, and the man wasn’t between him and the door, which only had a latch, not even a lock. Steve saw no tell-tale bulges of a concealed weapon, and there was no other weapon in sight. Besides, if the man had meant to kill him, he could have done that before bringing Steve in from the cold. For the moment, Steve felt safe enough to devour the stew, and the next four helpings the man dished up without comment. He followed that with another cup of coffee before finally sitting down backwards on one of the chairs and examining Steve minutely.
“Better,” the man grunted, nodding. “You know who you are?”
“Steve Rogers.”
“Good.” The man looked begrudgingly satisfied.
“Who are you?” Steve asked.
“James Logan. My unit worked with your Commandos a few times.”
That explained the familiarity. Occasionally the Commandos had gotten support from any number of Allies and any number of military branches. James rattled off his Canadian infantry unit and rank, and Steve blinked, remembering them teaming up with the Commandos to mop up one of HYDRA’s bases. That brought a few things into focus, and a lot more questions.
“Where am I?”
“Canada. Northern Territory. About as north as you can get and still have trees. Not my land, but I’m friendly with a couple of the tribes up here, so they let me stay for a while every now and then.” Nothing in James’ face said he was lying, and the little Steve could see outside the window showed snow-covered tall pines as far as he could see. No mountains, no rocks, no icy plains that had been all he could see when he put the Valkyrie in the water-.
“How did you find me? What happened?” Steve demanded.
James leaned over to the counter and grabbed a newspaper to put in Steve’s hand. “It’s about three weeks out of date, I don’t think that’ll matter.”
Steve stared at it, ignoring the local headline in favor of the date.
January 15th, 1974
Nearly thirty years. Damn.
James took the small mirror from above the basin and showed Steve his own face. He looked back at himself, his face unlined and familiar, the same as it was when he’d gone into the ice. Steve blinked as he realized that James couldn’t possibly be as old as he should have been.
“I guess putting that plane down in the ice, plus whatever juice they put into you, stopped you from aging. I found you in a chunk of ice on the coast, and you looked too damn alive. So I dragged you back here.”
“But you-.”
“I was born different. I heal quick, don’t age the same way. By the time you were born, I could’ve been your great-grandfather. I’ve been fightin’ in damn near every war that comes around. Born to battle, I guess.”
Steve sat back in his wet uniform on the cold, sodden cot, trying to process that. Trying to understand anything. James kept talking, even if by his terse descriptions it wasn’t his usual bent.
“Last war, in Vietnam, damn clusterfuck from the beginning. I ended up showing what I was when Victor did something stupid, both of us got shot for it. Didn’t take. Ended up in a ‘special unit.’ Commander was an asshole. Left ‘em. Came here to clear my head for a little while.”
Steve had so many more questions, many of which James likely either didn’t know or wouldn’t be inclined to answer, but he tried anyway. “Did… did we win? After I went down.”
“Yeah. Drop two atomic bombs on Japan to do it. Hitler committed suicide in a bunker. We found out he’d been shipping people to camps to be worked, tortured, or gassed to death. Millions of ‘em, Jews mostly, plus anyone else he didn’t like. I helped liberate one of those camps. Still gives me nightmares. Holocaust, they called it. But we won.” James fished in a drawer until he found a cigar, and held it at the stove until it lit, puffing on it briefly before adding a pointed, “Fucking hell.”
He gave Steve more coffee and went to a chest, seemingly oblivious to Steve’s feeling of being hollowed out. God. He’d been so focused on HYDRA and had missed some of the other atrocities…
James came back with clothes and handed them to Steve. “Get dry. I’ll dig out some old newspapers, try to catch you up.”
“How were you sure I was alive?” Steve asked, not ready to face anything else yet.
“Smelled you under the ice.”
James walked off to dig through another chest. Steve wondered if he should be surprised. Or worried. But then he thought that anyone trying to pull wool over his eyes would probably try to come up with something less fantastical and more plausible.
Maybe most of him was still just numb.
Steve peeled himself out of his cold, sodden uniform, pulling on the shirt, sweater, jeans, heavy socks and boots, the last a bit too snug. They looked like something he’d seen in movies with hunters up in the woods, maybe not so surprisingly. He laid his uniform over the back of a free chair to dry for now, and reveled in the dry warmth. He hadn’t realized how cold he had had been until he felt his body actually relaxing in the crackle from the flames.
James came back, thumping a bundle of newspapers and magazines on the table, then shoved Steve aside. He used old towels to mop up the big puddle of water, tossed chunks of ice into a bucket, and nudged the wet cot closer to the fireplace to dry. He grunted in the direction of the last chair, and Steve sat, taking another swallow of warm coffee. James flung the ice out into the wintery landscape outside, then returned to the table, nodding at the papers.
“That’s the short version of your time under. I kept a few of the biggest events, enough to get you started. There were a couple smaller wars, lots of politicians, lots of good people trying to change things for the better, some who didn’t make it out, some music that got pretty big. One president got assassinated. Oh, we put a man on the moon.”
“What?!”
“Time Magazine. Front page.”
Steve could read incredibly fast when he wanted to, thanks to the serum, and he absorbed the last thirty years highlights in a few minutes as James rummaged in the clothes chest, bringing out a few more things. A blue military uniform straight out of a Civil War history book, another that could have belonged to Steve’s father, a few sets of dog tags, some medals and awards from wars he didn’t recognize.
“You pick what you carry with you,” James said, taking a brief look at his possessions before putting them back neatly. “It’s hell sometimes, and I’ve got my brother in the same damned boat.”
“Your brother-?”
“Victor’s got a bloodlust streak a mile wide. Vietnam let him take the leash off, and when we ended up in that special unit, it turned out to be a kill squad for some ambitious government prick. I was the first to go, but I know I wasn’t the last to leave. That kind of work suited Victor, not me.” James leaned over to pour himself his own cup of coffee, drinking it black and far too hot, his expression closed except for brief flashes of anger, pain, and loss. “You’ve got now. Take the time to figure out what you’re doing to do.”
“Do?”
“It’s a hard time for America. You think they need their Captain back?”
Steve was silent for a long time as he perused the papers and magazines with more care. He asked some clarifying questions and got more of James’ terse, truthful answers. James didn’t get much in the way of radio out here, but he did have a surprisingly compact record player with some of the new music that had gotten some people in such a twist.
Steve was sort of in sympathy with them, but it wasn’t all bad. At least it was music, voices that weren’t their own, singing of love and rebellion and feeling mostly removed from the ice and blood and mud and pain Steve had known.
Inside, Steve marveled at some of the advances, like television (in color!) that people could have in their homes. He quietly raged against the atrocities he hadn’t known about, hadn’t been there to try to stop or at least help. Felt shamed when he realized how many people had struggled and suffered just to be acknowledged as equals in America, and then what had been done to Dr. King… There was more, much more, and James left Steve to it. Steve couldn’t stay still for long, though, and soon joined James in cutting wood, hauling water, any of a dozen necessary tasks to keep the little cabin in shape.
That was also where he got to see James powers in action. Healing was only one of them. Steve had watched in slack-jawed surprise as James has smelled out, then hunted down a pair of rabbits for dinner one night. Not with a gun, but with bone claws that emerged from the backs of his hands, skewering them with lethal efficiency.
“I know what you’re thinking. I’m not an experiment. Told you, I was born like this. My brother too, though he’s got actual claws on his fingers. We’re not the only ones.”
“I wonder…” Steve said, once he’d managed to master his surprise. “If someone born different was where Dr. Erskine got his ideas for the serum.”
“Maybe. Not my area. Don’t really want to be a science experiment.”
Steve caught a tiny smirk on James’ lips, and laughed. It had been nearly thirty years since he’d last done that.
“So, what now?”
Steve considered the mental list he’d made, one that if it had been paper, would have been erased, scratched through, and redone so many times there would have been holes in it.
“I still have friends. They’re alive, I hope.”
James made a grunt of agreement as he gutted and skinned the rabbits, then got them ready to go into tonight’s stew. “And?”
Steve looked back at the cabin, where he knew his uniform and shield were sitting neatly on the cot by James’ fireplace. “Maybe they can help.”
James gathered up the rabbits and both of them went inside. “Help with what? You need them to tell you what to do?”
Steve didn’t let himself bristle. James was prickly, far more so than Bucky ever had been.
“They’re my friends,” he said simply.
James looked at him sideways. “And the fact you look the same?”
“They know about the serum.”
“Your funeral,” James said with a shrug, sweeping the rest of the ingredients he’s prepared into a pot and turning on the stove.
“No, they already had that.” Steve waggled a copy of the New York Times with his name at the top. “It was pretty fancy.”
James actually gave a dry laugh at that. He cracked open a window and passed Steve a beer that had been cooling in a snowdrift. “If you aren’t taking up that shield again right away, what’re you gonna do?”
Steve idly flipped through the papers before setting them back down, all thirty years’ worth of change. “I’ve got some ideas.”
Another grunt. “We’re going tomorrow. ‘Bout time I get out of here too. I’ll get you to the border. I’m done here for now.”
“What is this place, to you?”
“Where I hide until they forget about me. It’s not too hard.” James walked out to get more wood, and Steve sipped his beer, knowing James didn’t want help, he probably wanted to be alone. A moment later, something flew through the air, and Steve caught it reflexively. It was a bar of light blue soap, a little nicer than he’d had in the Army.
“I’m stoking up the bathhouse. Wash off the alpha scent before you hit the border.”
Or he’d be a walking problem. Steve knew the drill.
Tomorrow then, he was going home tomorrow.
--
Three days ago
Steve reflected it was a damn good idea that curiosity and planning had done a lot to get these five people in the same room. It would have taken the last of his resources and exposed him more than he’d like to have gotten everyone here, if a certain one-eyed, very sharp director of SHIELD hadn’t employed the biggest Captain America fanboy on the entire planet. That… had loosened up some resources.
It had not been unexpected that Director Fury already had the five people he’d been looking for already under observation. Somebody was likely going to gather together people like him, either to keep an eye on them, or get them to fight on their side. Luckily, this time, Fury was on the side of the angels. Steve had been very worried about the opposite being the case.
It turned out that Fury had not only had those five special people under observation, he’d already brought them together to fight the fights that “no one else could.” And when he’d heard why Steve wanted to talk to them, he’d only nodded.
“You’re the only one who’s had experience with these assholes, Captain. So you get first crack at HYDRA. I’ll get the Avengers together. You’ll have to convince them of what’s going on yourself.” That Fury was testing him, Steve had no doubt. But he wouldn’t back down. He hadn’t ever been able to back down.
When all five Avengers had walked in to find their one-time alpha partner in a combat-ready red-white-and-blue uniform, Steve had had a lot of explaining to do. None of it quite softened the blow of the knowledge that the Steve Rogers look-a-like professional alpha was actually nearly a hundred years old, the original Captain America, and he had a mission for them. Skepticism was healthy and warranted, even with Nick Fury’s blessing on this operation.
For better or for worse, it was time for Steve to put all his cards on the table if he wanted to be believed.
“Just like that?” Clint asked, eyes narrowed at the story he’d just been spun, from the Valkyrie’s crash to Steve waking up in Canada.
“Gabe was living in Detroit, Dum-Dum in Columbus, Jim in Sacramento. We’d exchanged addresses during the war, and I still remembered them. I tracked them down, and they got ahold of Peggy.” Steve smiled, bittersweet. “She had a husband and grandkids, and gave me the dressing down of a lifetime. Then kissed me on the cheek and we started laughing and-.” He stopped, waving the rest of the reunion away. “It was too dangerous to come back as Captain America. Vietnam wasn’t over yet, and we didn’t know what they might try to use me for. So I helped Peggy with whatever she needed, usually undercover.
“HYDRA’s ideals weren’t gone. I’d helped take down their bases, but they had their sympathizers everywhere. We tried to find out where they’d gone.”
“How’d you avoid detection?” Natasha asked.
“Hair dye and a beard, up until 2005. Then I took my own name again, just altering my birth year.”
“Hair dye and a beard is all it takes to fool the world?”
“Well, no one was looking for me,” Steve pointed out.
“Dad was,” Tony said, his voice stiff.
Steve coughed a little, and Tony looked furious for a moment before sighing.
“Are you kidding me?”
--
“It’s really you.” She reached out, touching his face with hands still somewhat callused and strong, though now more wrinkled with age. Steve bent down as she gave him a kiss on the cheek, all too aware of Daniel’s eyes on him from his seat on the opposite sofa. They weren’t accusing or jealous, but Steve had been out of the picture for thirty years. They’d had more than his remembered lifetime to become a solid couple, to love each other the way he wished he’d gotten a chance to. He smiled down at her and took her hands in his, kissing her forehead before letting her go.
“How?”
“I was frozen. The ice - I didn’t die, it just put me in suspended animation, I think it’s called. Someone found me-.”
“Who?” And there, the suspicion and fierceness in her voice and expression, that was the Peggy who must have fought her way through every short-sighted and small-minded idiot who’d ever tried to get her way at SSR. SHIELD now.
“Someone who has as much trouble dying as I do. I’m not going to name names. I’ll say he’s a friend, he knows what it’s like to be different, and he won’t tell a damn soul about me.”
“What are you going to do, Steve?” she asked. Behind her question, Steve knew she already had a dozen possible plans laid out, but she was waiting to see what he’d say. She was the old hand at this now, but she still respected him.
“I need some way to find what we missed. You told me old HYDRA members are out there, and I have to find where they’ve hidden themselves. And if they’re in plain sight, then I can’t hide forever. And I can’t do this alone. Going in guns blazing won’t work.”
“Good. I was afraid you’d try to punch your way to the truth.”
“That worked pretty well, most of the time.”
She smiled with a hint of sadness, and Steve looked away. Bucky. Daniel held her hands, rubbing a thumb over hers in an old gesture of commiseration.
“More practically,” she said, turning brisk, “is the fact that you need a new identity, and you’re going to need money. Daniel and I are well enough off, but not enough to bankroll finding HYDRA’s sympathizers on our own, or even just on your own. Also, I have a pesky feeling that you won’t age gracefully like the rest of us, which means you’re going to need a new identity every ten years or so until you decide to take up your real identity again.”
Steve opened his mouth and shut it again. Well. He hadn’t even considered that. Strange, after fighting so long to be accepted as who he was, and now he had to hide.
“I’m going to call Howard. He took your death hard, Steve. To know that you’re alive… I think it might help. He got married, you know. He has a son, seven years old. Tony.”
“Howard? Married? And kids?” Steve said, both surprised and delighted.
“He tries. Not as hard as other things, but he tries. To know he didn’t fail with you… I think that might help.”
---
HYDRA Base, now
“I don’t die so easily,” Steve said, glaring at Pierce.
“We’ll see.” More crashes and bangs from up above, more calls for help over other PA systems, and Pierce took a few moments to issues a rapid-fire series of orders with the sound to the Asset’s room turned off. Steve spent the precious time whispering encouragements and reassurances in Bucky’s ear, knowing that despite the rebonding, there was still so much that was confusing and painful in Bucky’s mind.
“It’s me, Steve. I came back. I swear I won’t let them get you again.” Bucky shuddered and relaxed, trusting on a level of instinct, even if his tortured brain didn’t have many words while still in the throes of heat.
“Alpha. Mine?”
“Yet, yours.”
“Steve.”
He squeezed his hand. “Yes, I’m here now.”
“They’ll make me hurt you!” he said, eyes wild with panic.
“No.” Steve gave him a shallow thrust against their knotted tie, and Bucky moaned, pushing back. “I can do this all day.”
A dry, rusty laugh exploded out of Bucky’s throat as the lights came back up in the observation room. Pierce was holding a red book with a black star on the cover, and Bucky snarled at the sight of it.
Slowly, with great care, Pierce began to speak random-sounding Russian words, words that made Bucky go rigid with shock and mental pain. Steve interjected his own, covering’s Bucky’s ears, telling him how strong, how loved, how beautiful he was. Loudly. Bucky kept his grip on Steve, grounding himself in his mate’s touch.
Then the ceiling caved in.
--
Three days earlier
“Wait, wait,” Tony said, putting his hands out palm first to slow the conversation down. “Upon finding out you were alive, you, Steve Rogers, whom my Dad devoted way too many hours of his life searching for, and now I know that half of that was feigned, Dad and you decided that the best way to fight for truth, justice, and the American way was with your knotted dick?”
“Sounds about right, actually,” Natasha muttered, and Tony shot her a glare.
“The other ways to get in were rank-and-file field operative, politician, or military personnel. And I was going to age out of my credentials before I ever could get a face-to-face with anyone higher up at SHIELD by any of those routes. Besides, omegas had it way worse than even me growing up. In some ways, they still do. You’ve got more laws, but a lot of attitudes haven’t changed, even if it isn’t so blatant anymore. I could help people who needed it. I could help anyone I wanted,” Steve said, sounding a little wistful at the last.
Natasha looked at Steve for a long moment, then looked back over at Clint. He nodded thoughtfully. “If we cross-reference your work location with upticks in mysterious hooded figures rescuing people from bad situations, there’s going to be a very suspiciously high correlation, isn’t there?” Natasha asked. Steve nodded without hesitation.
“I still don’t like bullies. But the job was more than that. I’m very good.”
“I say without fear of contradiction and with fond memories of lovely orgasms that we won’t argue with you on that count,” Tony said. His skepticism had gone down another half-notch. He eyed the shield Steve had flat on the desk, and reached out to touch it. Nothing felt like vibranium; the peculiar stillness of the metal was undeniable. Tony nodded sharply for Steve to go on.
“I was good enough to get the kind of money I needed to make a background able to withstand a SHIELD backstop investigation. Enough to make me look legitimate to any HYDRA operative. Enough to get me that interview with Pierce.”
“The Secretary of Defense is a HYDRA operative?” Natasha didn’t sound surprised, but then again she was a past master of sounding like whatever was best at the time.
“As one of its heads. I… specialized in military personnel in IPA. I kept my mouth shut, but my ears open, and I’m a very good listener. Once SHIELD started employing me more and more, I heard a lot. HYDRA doesn’t seem to think much of omegas, but they had some in key positions, and people under that kind of pressure didn’t dare have their heats anywhere near a base. I was on a word-of-mouth safe list.”
---
A few years’ earlier
--“All that damn work to get into flight school, and all I got for it was to be surrounded by a bunch of leering meat-heads while stuck up in a floating platform with nowhere to hide. I didn’t even want to do it, but they needed one more person in case of emergencies and I was the best candidate.”
She huffed a little, and Steve went through his usual gentling routine to try to keep everything calm while they were tied.
“Sorry about your assignment,” he said. Curious that SHIELD would put someone on a Helicarrier who didn’t want to be there. Their psychological screening process was very thorough, not only to make sure people would want to do their assignments, but would be able to work well with the people around them. SHIELD was selective enough with its candidates that it saw no need to have people distracted by interpersonal conflicts. A little petty office politicking was one thing. A hostile work environment when everyone was either a trained killer or some variety of technical genius was another. A little adjustment to a new team mix was expected, but Warrens sounded like she had been biting her tongue for a long, long time.
“If it wasn’t so important, I would have told them where to stick it, but you don’t say no to the Sec-.” She jammed her mouth shut, her body going rigid, but Steve never changed his hold.
“Bosses. Can’t live with ‘em, illegal to kill ‘em,” he said, and Warrens laughed, relaxing again. With the relaxation came more complaints; she was seemingly just happy to have a captive audience. Steve just listened. And remembered.
--
Three days ago…
“And why us?” Bruce asked. He tried to keep his expression neutral. “Did you know about us before you-?”
“Bruce, I was in Brazil following up on a lead, but I ran into you by accident, I swear. But after I realized I was being tailed after I had been with you, I made sure they saw me as someone to be trusted. Because I needed to find people to believe me…” Steve took a deep breath and looked right at Tony. “Because on December 16th, 1991, Howard and Maria Stark were killed. By HYDRA.”
Tony lost all color in his face, his hand gripping the arm of his chair until his knuckles were white. “Did they sabotage their car?”
“That would have been too easy.” Steve picked up his phone beside him and punched in a code. “I already told you I was working with Howard.” His glance at Tony, full of remorse, stopped some of the recriminations that Tony probably had on the tip of his tongue. “We had hoped to make more of the super-soldier serum and find good people who would use it wisely and well. Howard had spent years on the project, a lot of it convincing me and Peggy that we could find good people. He finished it, and was bringing it to me secretly. Somehow HYDRA had been spying on him.”
--
December 16th, 1991
“Steve?” her voice sounded sleepy and groggy.
“Peggy. Howard’s not here yet. He should have been here twenty minutes ago.”
A pause, and then, “I haven’t had any other calls.”
“I’m going after him.”
“Be careful, please.”
Steve backtracked the route on his motorcycle, heart in his throat when he smelled the tang of gasoline, oil, and fresh blood on the wind. This was the most isolated part of the route, and Steve and Howard had picked it because of that very reason, hoping to avoid as many people as possible. Under a streetlight, Steve found them. The car was crashed, but not bad enough to have staved in Howard’s skull, or crushed Maria’s throat. Tony… god, Tony was an orphan.
Steve held onto the side of the car as tears burned down his face. It was a long time before he could look in the trunk, but as he’d expected, it was empty. This was targeted. Someone had found out what Howard had been up to. Trying to think, Steve smelled the faintest whiff of gunpowder. The Starks hadn’t been shot. Steve’s head went up, and he searched around carefully. There was no brass from the shot, but up on the pole, there was a fresh scar from a detached camera mount.
Part of the reason Howard and Steve had chosen this route was because of the storage facility just off of the road, which included a good security system. The assassin had destroyed the camera, but maybe, just maybe…
Steve found the storage office undisturbed, except for the missing security tape. He smiled grimly; he had things in storage at this facility, as a convenient depot between Howard’s house and places he was investigating. And he knew the owner had a back-up in case one of the VCRs ate the tape. He kept it in a backless old filing cabinet, because he hadn’t wanted to clutter up another desk. The copy was still there. The image was poor, but what it showed was all too clear. Steve didn’t remember much of the trip back home.
Bucky was alive. And being used by HYDRA. It couldn’t be anyone else.
--
Three days ago…
Steve handed the phone to Tony, the video file ready to play. Tony took it off into a corner and watched it. Everyone waited an uncomfortably long time for Tony to come back, stiff-legged, eyes dry, cuffs damp.
“Who-,” Tony started angrily.
“The person they used as their weapon is Bucky Barnes,” Steve said flatly. “And the person who signed off on the assassination order was Alexander Pierce.”
“Jesus,” Barton said softly.
“Barnes is dead,” Natasha said.
“Captured, cyborged, brainwashed, tortured, and popped in and out of cryosleep. The Winter Soldier, the Fist of HYDRA,” Steve said, repressed sorrow and rage under his even tone. He showed a capture from the video in a side-by-side comparison to an old picture of Bucky. Aside from the long hair and severe lack of animation in his face, they were identical. “I got my hands on one of his former ‘handlers’ and asked some questions. They’ve been using him as an assassination tool for decades.”
“Why tell us this? Tony needed to know, but do you have proof positive against Pierce? What about this handler?” Natasha asked. Clint looked only a little uncomfortable, but he got why Natasha was asking. They worked best in the shadows, and for all of what Steve had claimed about Secretary Pierce, the man mostly lived in the spotlight.
“The handler, Karpov, is in a very uncomfortable but safe jail cell in Germany. But Pierce? He’s going to give me evidence of his own free will in three days,” Steve said, and every head came up in surprise. “I have it on good authority that I’ll be getting an IPA meeting with someone very high in the DoD, which is double-talk for the SecDef, for a, and I quote, ‘difficult asset.’ I’m not in SHIELD, so I’m expendable once I fix their problem. HYDRA never had many omegas in combat positions, and from what Karpov said, the ‘Asset’ was transferred to full American control only a few years ago. That’s the same time they lost one of their key scientists to old age. Bucky’s an omega. Things get lost in transport, including records and drugs.
“When they take me to him, that will be proof positive of how far HYDRA goes. And you will be able to stop them when they’re exposed.”
“Would they retaliate in public?” Bruce asked, looking worried.
“They’ll have to, against all of you, and soon,” Steve said. “Fury put you all in this Avengers Initiative, didn’t he? Against the Secretary’s advice. He knows who you are and what you can do. He wants his Winter Soldier back to lead the attack when HYDRA makes their move. All of you will have to be the first to fall; they can’t have you messing up their plans.”
Bruce looked stricken, because he knew how that would probably turn out for everyone. Tony looked furious, ready to spit nails in anger. And Thor, he just looked very, very ready. All of this talk of Earth politics had little to nothing to do with him, but Natasha must have given him a short summary of HYDRA’s greatest hits. And for a man who wanted to help protect Earth, well, making sure HYDRA never gained control was essential.
“Are you absolutely positive this Winter Soldier is Barnes?” Clint asked.
“I’m sure enough to stake my life on it.”
“And ours,” Natasha said pointedly. “If our first public debut is overthrowing SHIELD because of a HYDRA infiltration and we’re either wrong or have no proof, we are going to go down in history as America’s worst terrorists.”
“Bucky is my bondmate,” Steve said, clenching his hands together. Tony looked up out of his haze of grief and anger, briefly shaking his self-focus. “I can reach him. I can save him and take away their weapon at the same time. And if I do that, you’ll have all the proof you need.”
“That’s why you took up your name again, wasn’t it?” Tony asked.
“I’d been a spy, an agent, a vigilante. I’d freelanced as an alpha a few times, but when Howard died…” He paused, and Tony could see that his father’s death still hurt. Steve had known his dad a lot better than he had, in some ways. A part of Tony resented that, and probably always would. But there were other things to life besides resentment. “When Howard died, Peggy was retired, Daniel had died some years before, and since Howard had been funding our search on the sly, the money dried up. Jarvis couldn’t get access to those accounts without alerting Stane, and then he passed away a few years later. I freelanced as an alpha in Canada, Mexico, and a lot of Europe for over ten years, trying to stick to the plan.
“Then you were shot,” Steve said, looking at Natasha. She raised her eyebrows, and he clarified. “Trying to get the scientist out of Iran, when he was killed by the Winter Soldier. I had enough contacts to hear about it, decent rumors at least. That was my second sighting. This was no longer just HYDRA sympathizers and people with personal agendas, this meant something much more coordinated; the organization I thought I died to try to stop. I wormed my way into eastern Europe, and eventually found an ex-Soviet operative with Hydra ties, Karpov. He knew HYDRA had grown inside SHIELD. And he told me they’d moved the Winter Soldier to America after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
“Wither thou goest, love,” Bruce said softly.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “I needed to be high in SHIELD’s trust. So I used my last, best set of papers, and became myself again, mostly.”
“And what, worked your way up the ranks?” Tony said with a dangerous amount of blandness. Steve faced Tony squarely, and spoke without flinching.
“HYDRA was going to target anyone capable of taking them out, anyone with any ties to SHIELD whom they couldn’t break. I found Bruce purely as a fluke, I’ll admit, but when I realized who Natasha was, I knew I’d gotten my chance. I wanted to help, and I wanted you to know you could trust me. At least that was what I hoped. Some of the people I had as clients were HYDRA’s operatives within SHIELD. People spill secrets in heat. I listened. That’s how I found out about Pierce.
“But when I found all of you…” Steve sighed, not a sign of exasperation or weariness, but of relief. “There were so many people I’d met who I was pretty certain were enemies. You were the first who might be allies. Or… friends.”
Steve could tell, they got it. That, one way or another, to one degree or another, they forgave him his deception. Because for all Steve’s careful, long-term planning to protect people from HYDRA, he’d been going at it with little support or backup. Suddenly he had real hope, and help, and a chance of not only fulfilling a mission, not only saving a part of his past, but of finding people to stand by once again.
“What do we do now, that we may capture all of these foes in a single sweep?” Thor asked, stepping forward to clasp him on the shoulder in a warrior’s greeting. The scowl on his face didn’t bode well for HYDRA; there was no doubt that if Jane Foster wasn’t able to give them information they wanted on her space-bending wormholes or any other potentially dangerous knoweldge, they wouldn’t have any trouble crossing her off, and Thor with her. None of them were fighting just for themselves, but also for anyone even remotely attached to them.
“It means we have two days to plan how to take down HYDRA and get that sonofabitch Pierce,” Tony said tightly.
“Believe me, I wanted to go after him then and there when I realized what they’d done. Peggy talked me down. The only evidence I had of HYDRA was Bucky, and all the tape did was implicate Bucky alone as an assassin. No one else would believe some defunct World War II Nazi death cult was still around.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tony asked, his voice tight. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“I wish we would have. Peggy wanted to spare you being targeted. If you’d known, they would have gone after you. And I didn’t know if I could protect you.”
“Why not-.” Tony cut himself off and shook his head.
Steve answered the unfinished question. “You weren’t Iron Man until after I met you. I didn’t want to lose you too… I- I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.
Tony walked away and faced the door for a minute. Then walked back, eyes wiped dry.
“You know how to take them down for good?”
“Fury’s on our side. Capture Pierce, and we can use him to unlock the files on everything HYDRA was doing inside SHIELD.” He eyed Natasha as he spoke, and she smiled smugly.
“I want Pierce,” Tony said, in a tone that booked no argument.
“Leave enough eye, fingerprint, and retina to work,” Natasha reminded him.
--
Now
The STRIKE team left to protect Pierce were no fools; they started shooting immediately, but hit something metallic. Then the STRIKE members started going down, hit with arrows or a sneak attack in the dim light. Out of the gloom emerged the glow of the arc reactor in the chest plate of Iron Man. Pierce’s face went bloodless, and the book dropped from his fingers.
“Don’t move,” Tony said, his voice metallic behind his faceplate, and as uncompromising. “Natasha?”
She gave a final love-tap to one of her victims on the floor, and stepped up to press a retinal scanner to Pierce’s eye. Steve’s body finally let go of Bucky, and he disengaged enough so they could stand. Barton opened the door to Bucky’s room, tossing them bundles of clothing, armor, and weapons.
“How did you turn him?” Pierce asked, incredulous that Steve Rogers had somehow managed to suborn his prize asset while naked. “How?”
--
Earlier
Steve sat in the locker room, toweling off. The scent-blocker pill had run its course and been metabolized out of his system in ten minutes. Luckily he had brought a scent-blocking spray that would last until he got to the omega’s room, a common enough toiletry for a professional alpha who didn’t want to advertise. The guards outside the door were holding the ampule, but Steve had another concealed in his palm, this one full of plain water.
He had swapped his fake for the real one en-route, dropping the real one under the mattress. When he’d held up his hand to the window, all Pierce had seen was a flash of white plastic. He hadn’t even registered Steve running his hand over his most-scented areas of his body, and that was what he had let Bucky scent. Those lessons from Vegas had come in handy after all.
--
Now
“You boys want to put on some clothes if you want to fight evil today?” Clint asked.
Bucky arrayed himself in the reinforced, bulletproof leather of the Winter Soldier, armed to the teeth, and covered Steve’s back in easy coordination as they moved out. He didn’t move like Steve remembered him, now more purposeful, more fluid, balanced on a hair trigger of violence, but they shadowed each other as well as they ever had. It would take some getting used to, but Steve felt some part of his heart that had been frozen since his fall finally thawing.
“Nat and Tony are taking down the computer system; it went berserk when they cracked Pierce’s files. Thor and Bruce are managing the dumbfucks who tried to come in with heavy artillery while getting the rest of the civvies out. We’ve got to go after the leaders now, before they scatter.”
“We’re coming!” Steve said firmly.
“Thought you already did,” Clint said, and Bucky laughed, a short rusty thing, but a laugh, a real one. Steve wondered what Sam and Darcy would make of Bucky, and how exactly they were going to take Steve’s little misdirection on his birth year. Hopefully well enough that he’d still have an apartment to take Bucky home to.
Steve knew it would take a long time for Bucky to feel like his own person again, maybe another lifetime. And to work with the Avengers would take its own kind of persuasion. But they would do it. In time.
He’d been on a much longer journey.
But he didn’t have to do it alone anymore.
Side by side with Bucky, Steve Rogers loped down the corridor to join the rest of the Avengers.
-------
Chapter 3
Master Post
Author: jaune_chat
Fandoms: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Characters/Relationships: Steve/Bruce, Steve/Natasha, Steve/Tony, Steve/Thor/Jane, Steve/Clint, Steve/Bucky, Sam Wilson, Darcy Lewis, James Logan (Wolverine), guest appearances by some Agents of SHIELD, Fury, and Coulson.
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 23,057
Spoilers: Uses elements through Captain America: Civil War.
Content Advisory: Alternate Universe, Alpha/Omega/Beta dynamics, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Sex Work, Identity Porn, implied past abuse, action/adventure/violence, references to mind control.
A/N: This story was written for marvel-bang. Amazing art by laughtillwecry. Thanks to brighteyed_jill for betaing!
Art: Amazing art by laughtillwecry can be found here. (Link coming soon)
Summary: Steve Rogers is a professional alpha with an unfortunately famous name. A veteran who specializes in people with top-secret clearance, he’s been having some particularly interesting clients lately. This brings him to the attention of SHIELD, who think an alpha like him could be just the person to help a very ill Asset they have. But Steve has more up his sleeve than just one set of skills when it comes to helping the people he cares for.
On Ao3 or below the cut
Steve toweled off his hair roughly, seeing the two shadows of the agents guarding the door through the frosted glass. He wondered which one had been given his kill order. Pierce couldn’t afford to let anyone outside of his own loyal circle know about his pet project in the basement, and no matter Steve’s clearance, no matter how many NDAs he signed, nothing was going to convince Pierce his secret was safe until there was a bullet in Steve’s brain. Idly he wondered how Pierce would manufacture an excuse to get him away. Likely a faked urgent call from another embedded operative, and suddenly Steve would be needed again before he’d had time to make his call to Sam. Steve would have no choice but to take some back exit to a secure underground garage, right into the welcoming arms of his executioners.
Well. He’d see about that.
He took a small bottle from his bag and sprayed himself all over, popped in the nasal flare filters, and put on his robe, holding the pheromone ampule openly in his hand. Then he opened the door and submitted himself to the pat-down by his “guards.” Keeping his expression neutral was very hard, when all he wanted to do was snarl.
--
The asset had been cleaned by the simple expedient of hosing him down. There was a mattress on the floor, and nothing else. His dark hair hung in damp tangles to his shoulders, obscuring the impersonal mask and goggles. He was nude, writhing in discomfort and pain, the metal arm flailing, the metallic sounds pinging off the walls.
“We can restrain him, if necessary,” Pierce said. “Power down the arm.”
Steve looked at the asset to avoid looking at Pierce. The man didn’t want a professional alpha. He wanted plausible deniability, a programmable fucking machine to get his secondhand prototype back up and functional. That Steve’s life was forfeit after he walked out the door was certain. No amount of NDAs would make Pierce feel safe about having Steve walking around with this knowledge. He’d seen the Asset’s body, could identify him, could identify Pierce as being in charge of the whole operation.
Steve had seen enough.
“That won’t be necessary,” Steve said, and walked through the door. It shut and locked behind him with an ominous clang.
The man’s head came up when Steve walked through the door, wary and alert even as the smell of him was thick enough to taste even through the nasal flare filters. He didn’t get up, just kept crouching on the mattress as if afraid to leave it. Steve fought down anger as he saw that despite the water from the Asset’s impromptu shower, the man was already drying from the fervency of his need as his body radiated heat. Despite that, his hole was untouched by slick, his cock barely half-hard, even as his body was flushed with need. There was such an air of neglect about him, of being left alone or denied over and over again, that Steve ached for him.
“Hey there, soldier,” Steve said, crouching down and trying a small smile, trying to give the Asset some friendliness. “I’m here to help you. My name’s Steve.”
“You don’t need to talk, just do your job,” Pierce’s voice cracked out over the intercom, most of his politician’s tone gone in favor of a military bark. Steve ignored him; if he wanted any less from Steve, he’d have to strap him to a table.
The Asset’s impersonal mask and goggles didn’t let Steve see his expression, but his body had a posture of subservience and expectation, with the tension in his muscles that seemed to be braced for something bad. That only bore out everything Pierce had revealed about the Asset’s past, testifying to years of torture and abuse that left Steve feeling sick inside on the man’s behalf. He refused to let that show, and instead closed the gap between them until they were close enough to touch, kneeling down on the mattress and raising one hand slowly.
“May I touch you?” Steve asked softly. The Asset jerked back a bit, probably in surprise, and went still. A minute went by as his blank, masked and goggled face revealed nothing, and finally nodded. Steve gently touched the man’s shoulders, one fever-hot, the other cold, articulated metal, and slowly caressed down them. That made the Asset shiver, but also lean into the touch, a muffled moan coming from behind the mask. How long had it been since anyone had treated him with a little kindness? Years? Decades?
Steve kept up the soft touches for a long time, and only gave encouraging nods when the Asset dared to shift his body to let different skin be touched. Steve listened and watched and learned, following the Asset’s desire as his long-frustrated heat ratcheted up another level. He leaned in closer as his hands descended from the Asset’s scarred back and shoulders to his muscular ass and thighs. Steve could see the Asset’s hole was hot and dry and tight, no doubt from congested slick glands from decades of repressed heats. God, what were they thinking? He could have died from this.
Steve would do everything he could to fix it.
“May I taste you? Use my tongue?” Steve asked, and got a moan of desire as the Asset stilled, thighs trembling. Steve didn’t hesitate as the Asset knelt up and presented, gently parting the Asset’s cheeks, then leaning in and swiping his tongue wetly over his hole. There was sheer relief in the Asset’s voice as Steve licked and lapped, slowly opening up the tight pucker. Damned be to Pierce, who had been sternly trying to make other comments that Steve had ignored for the past fifteen minutes, Steve used the cover to dislodge the nasal flare filters, curling them in two of his fingers to hide them. He needed to be able to know what was going on. There was a tang of metal and blood, a faint hint of musk, but none of the rich, sweet heat that should have been filling the room. Steve redoubled his efforts, getting the Asset wet and slowly, agonizingly slowly loosening him, at least enough for a finger.
Steve left off just long enough to ask again, “May I put my fingers in you? I want to ease your glands open-.”
“Yes!”
It was an actual word, short, rough, and not terribly eloquent, but it was clear speech. What followed after Steve eased his first finger into the tight passage was more of a scream. But a scream of relief as Steve found and pressed down on the first tight, swollen gland. Slick suddenly trickled out, coating Steve’s whole hand, and soon Steve could put in another finger, then another, seeking out one gland after another and coaxing them into opening. The scent was incredible; Steve felt like he was drowning in cotton-candy sweetness with the underlying tang of metal and musk. It was making it hard for him to hold back, but he would rather die than cause this man another second of pain.
“More,” the Asset said, this time his voice very soft, the word less of a demand and more of a question. His head curved back to stare at Steve through the blank goggles and mask, and Steve just smiled at him beatifically. Obedient to the command, Steve folded his thumb and pushed in deeper, the Asset’s ass swallowing his hand. After so long a dry spell, and with so much slick needing to be expressed, this was the best thing for him medically and therapeutically, and apparently personally as well. The Asset tossed his head back and forth, sometimes dropping it to the mattress, his gyrations finally catching the goggles and dislodging them to drop on the floor. When he looked back at Steve in wonder, Steve could see his eyes were blue-gray, full of gratitude and relief. He was so beautiful he made Steve’s heart ache.
“You’re doing so well. You’re so good,” Steve said warmly, and the Asset looked almost incredulous.
“Mr. Rogers,” Pierce’s voice interrupted, loud enough this time so Steve couldn’t ignore it. “Before you get carried away, the pheromone ampule, now.”
Steve nodded once, but he wasn’t going to hop to. If Pierce had wanted to do this himself, he would have already.
He ran his free hand over his neck, then leaned forward to put more strength into his thrusts from his arm inside the Asset, slick gushing down even over his elbow as he eased the congestion in those long-dormant glands. He shifted a few more times as the Asset moaned in pained relief, bracing himself on his thigh, swiping his hand across his sweaty throat, brushing his hair back into place. He lifted his hand to show the window the flash of white plastic in his palm from the pheromone ampule. He flicked the catch on the Asset’s muzzle and closed his hand in a gesture that would crush the ampule. Then he brought his hand to the Asset’s nose and mouth letting him smell and taste the scent there.
At the same time, Steve whispered a few phrases of encouragement and praise into the Asset’s ear, then ended with a more audible, “May I, please?”
The Asset nodded frantically, and Steve eased his arm out. He shifted backwards enough to line himself up, then penetrated him in a single gorgeous slick slide home.
The Asset’s breath hitched, and tears were running down his face as Steve leaned down and breathed a question in his ear.
-
Bucky was writhing against Steve, keeping his voice as quiet as he could. Their apartment walls were paper-thin, and they didn’t want to deal with neighbors banging on their doors, demanding they keep it down. It was all Steve could do to keep things together, holding onto Bucky with deceptive strength for his slight frame, draping himself over Bucky to get as much contact as he could. He could rarely get himself out of scrapes, but damn if Bucky could ever get out of Steve’s grasp. Especially now, when he would have had to have been dragged away to let go.
“I want you to,” Bucky said, turning enough to give Steve an awkward kiss. He saw a shadow on Steve’s face, an echo of some old arguments, and smiled at him instead, putting every ounce of sincerity in his baby blues as he could. “No one else for me, not ever. Come on, Alpha!”
Confidence surged in Steve’s expression, and he leaned over Bucky’s neck, breath hot exactly where Bucky wanted it. “You want me, Bucky?”
-
“Alpha, yes,” he gasped, an echo of his answer some seventy years ago, and Steve bit down hard over an old, nearly invisible bondmark on Bucky’s neck. He only had to shift his hips once before they were both gone, clenching together in orgasm, locked as one with pleasure. He could hear muffled shouts behind the glass, banging on the locked door, now mysteriously not responding to their key cards.
“Rogers!” Pierce thundered over the intercom, “Let him go immediately or it will go worse for you.”
The lights went on in the observation room, revealing his face, as well as a group of STRIKE agents waiting for orders.
“No, Secretary Pierce,” Steve spat, holding Bucky gently, his tenderness belied by the gleaming metal arm now held at an angle to protect them both from attack. “I know my own mate.”
Pierce paled, but the STRIKE team next to him aimed their guns at Steve through the glass. Steve laughed out loud; the glass was bulletproof and shatterproof. They wouldn’t have dared place the Winter Soldier in here otherwise.
A hollow boom from above broke the standoff.
“What’s going on?” Pierce demanded.
A weedier man in the corner, probably one of the technicians, glanced at his phone and winced as he talked, eyes going wide. “Sir, the computers, someone found Zola, and the lab at-.”
Pierce cut the man off with a wave and stared fixedly at Steve, realization dawning rapidly. “No… You’re him.”
Steve smiled grimly, a smile at least seventy years old.
“You’re Captain America?!”
---
Seventy years ago
The Valkyrie hit the water like a crashing train, the impact throwing Steve out of his seat and onto the deck. He could hear water rushing in and he was cold, so cold. He wished he could have said something more to Peggy. She hadn’t deserved to hear him crash. Hear him die. He missed Bucky fiercely. He would see him soon, both of them having met their end in the cold. If they could have lived, maybe things would have been different. Maybe…
The plane settled lower, tilting slowly as she slid to her final resting place. Steve couldn’t move from the shock of the impact. He didn’t want to; he didn’t have anywhere else to go. The water rushed over him, so cold it stole his breath and numbed his mind. So cold he couldn’t even twitch. So cold he could finally rest.
--
Some time later…
Scrape Soft but insistent.
Blackness. Scrape. Louder.
A distant grunt. More scraping. Light and darkness.
SCRAPE! So loud. Cracking sounds. A nearly forgotten sensation.
Warmth. It burned
He burned with it, dying a hundred more times as heat and more scraping invaded his senses. Then lightness, weight he hadn’t even been aware of coming off of him. Pale light all around him, shining through his closed eyes. Awareness. His body, cold and soaked but alive. Barely warm water on his head. And finally, sight. He squinted as an impossibly bright glare retracted down to a single small flame, held within the globe of a lamp. A dark blur behind the flame took longer to resolve, finally revealing a man in heavy winter clothing back to him, tending a fireplace with a cheerful blaze burning in it.
Steve stared at the flames for a long time, mesmerized by them, until he finally found the wherewithal to move his head examine his surroundings. The walls were rough wood, the ceiling relatively low, small windows showing white outside. The place looked like a single-roomed cabin, like Steve had seen in a few mountainous places in Europe, small, functional, and plain.
There was a bed covered with an old quilt with blankets folded at the foot in the corner, a couple chests at the foot. A table and a couple of chairs, a healthy pile of wood near the single door, a basin on a smaller table with a tiny mirror above it, a short counter and sink, some cupboards, a stove with something savory on it bubbling away in a pot. A coffee pot enameled flecked blue and white was kept warm on the stove next to it. When Steve tried to crane his head just a little to get a better look at the silhouette next to the fireplace, he felt several thuds as chunks of ice shed themselves from his body.
He looked down at himself. He was in a simple canvas cot, uniform still on, shield still in his hand, lying in a puddle of cold water with ice chunks still stuck to parts of body.
Ice? How? his mind wondered. Where?
The man turned around at the noise from Steve’s movement. He was scruffy-looking, with heavy sideburns, thick stubble across his chin, his short brown hair in strange puffed peaks on his head. He was short, strong, and looked vaguely familiar.
“Hell of a homecoming, Captain,” he said. He was speaking English, his accent American. He looked Steve up and down, nodded, grunted, and walked over to the stove. He came back with a steaming cup of black coffee he pushed into Steve’s cold hand, the one not holding his shield. Steve couldn’t detect anything wrong with the coffee, no poisons or drugs, and drank down the hot, bitter liquid gratefully, trying to place, well, anything as the frost in his mind cleared out with every swallow.
If this was an enemy, some member of HYDRA, this was certainly not their style. They didn’t go for the soft sell. And why did the man look like someone Steve knew?
The man turned back to the stove and then came back with a bowl of thick stew. The smell awakened agonizing hunger in Steve, and he couldn’t smell a thing untoward in the delicious aroma. Steve still had his uniform on, still had his shield, wasn’t restrained, and the man wasn’t between him and the door, which only had a latch, not even a lock. Steve saw no tell-tale bulges of a concealed weapon, and there was no other weapon in sight. Besides, if the man had meant to kill him, he could have done that before bringing Steve in from the cold. For the moment, Steve felt safe enough to devour the stew, and the next four helpings the man dished up without comment. He followed that with another cup of coffee before finally sitting down backwards on one of the chairs and examining Steve minutely.
“Better,” the man grunted, nodding. “You know who you are?”
“Steve Rogers.”
“Good.” The man looked begrudgingly satisfied.
“Who are you?” Steve asked.
“James Logan. My unit worked with your Commandos a few times.”
That explained the familiarity. Occasionally the Commandos had gotten support from any number of Allies and any number of military branches. James rattled off his Canadian infantry unit and rank, and Steve blinked, remembering them teaming up with the Commandos to mop up one of HYDRA’s bases. That brought a few things into focus, and a lot more questions.
“Where am I?”
“Canada. Northern Territory. About as north as you can get and still have trees. Not my land, but I’m friendly with a couple of the tribes up here, so they let me stay for a while every now and then.” Nothing in James’ face said he was lying, and the little Steve could see outside the window showed snow-covered tall pines as far as he could see. No mountains, no rocks, no icy plains that had been all he could see when he put the Valkyrie in the water-.
“How did you find me? What happened?” Steve demanded.
James leaned over to the counter and grabbed a newspaper to put in Steve’s hand. “It’s about three weeks out of date, I don’t think that’ll matter.”
Steve stared at it, ignoring the local headline in favor of the date.
January 15th, 1974
Nearly thirty years. Damn.
James took the small mirror from above the basin and showed Steve his own face. He looked back at himself, his face unlined and familiar, the same as it was when he’d gone into the ice. Steve blinked as he realized that James couldn’t possibly be as old as he should have been.
“I guess putting that plane down in the ice, plus whatever juice they put into you, stopped you from aging. I found you in a chunk of ice on the coast, and you looked too damn alive. So I dragged you back here.”
“But you-.”
“I was born different. I heal quick, don’t age the same way. By the time you were born, I could’ve been your great-grandfather. I’ve been fightin’ in damn near every war that comes around. Born to battle, I guess.”
Steve sat back in his wet uniform on the cold, sodden cot, trying to process that. Trying to understand anything. James kept talking, even if by his terse descriptions it wasn’t his usual bent.
“Last war, in Vietnam, damn clusterfuck from the beginning. I ended up showing what I was when Victor did something stupid, both of us got shot for it. Didn’t take. Ended up in a ‘special unit.’ Commander was an asshole. Left ‘em. Came here to clear my head for a little while.”
Steve had so many more questions, many of which James likely either didn’t know or wouldn’t be inclined to answer, but he tried anyway. “Did… did we win? After I went down.”
“Yeah. Drop two atomic bombs on Japan to do it. Hitler committed suicide in a bunker. We found out he’d been shipping people to camps to be worked, tortured, or gassed to death. Millions of ‘em, Jews mostly, plus anyone else he didn’t like. I helped liberate one of those camps. Still gives me nightmares. Holocaust, they called it. But we won.” James fished in a drawer until he found a cigar, and held it at the stove until it lit, puffing on it briefly before adding a pointed, “Fucking hell.”
He gave Steve more coffee and went to a chest, seemingly oblivious to Steve’s feeling of being hollowed out. God. He’d been so focused on HYDRA and had missed some of the other atrocities…
James came back with clothes and handed them to Steve. “Get dry. I’ll dig out some old newspapers, try to catch you up.”
“How were you sure I was alive?” Steve asked, not ready to face anything else yet.
“Smelled you under the ice.”
James walked off to dig through another chest. Steve wondered if he should be surprised. Or worried. But then he thought that anyone trying to pull wool over his eyes would probably try to come up with something less fantastical and more plausible.
Maybe most of him was still just numb.
Steve peeled himself out of his cold, sodden uniform, pulling on the shirt, sweater, jeans, heavy socks and boots, the last a bit too snug. They looked like something he’d seen in movies with hunters up in the woods, maybe not so surprisingly. He laid his uniform over the back of a free chair to dry for now, and reveled in the dry warmth. He hadn’t realized how cold he had had been until he felt his body actually relaxing in the crackle from the flames.
James came back, thumping a bundle of newspapers and magazines on the table, then shoved Steve aside. He used old towels to mop up the big puddle of water, tossed chunks of ice into a bucket, and nudged the wet cot closer to the fireplace to dry. He grunted in the direction of the last chair, and Steve sat, taking another swallow of warm coffee. James flung the ice out into the wintery landscape outside, then returned to the table, nodding at the papers.
“That’s the short version of your time under. I kept a few of the biggest events, enough to get you started. There were a couple smaller wars, lots of politicians, lots of good people trying to change things for the better, some who didn’t make it out, some music that got pretty big. One president got assassinated. Oh, we put a man on the moon.”
“What?!”
“Time Magazine. Front page.”
Steve could read incredibly fast when he wanted to, thanks to the serum, and he absorbed the last thirty years highlights in a few minutes as James rummaged in the clothes chest, bringing out a few more things. A blue military uniform straight out of a Civil War history book, another that could have belonged to Steve’s father, a few sets of dog tags, some medals and awards from wars he didn’t recognize.
“You pick what you carry with you,” James said, taking a brief look at his possessions before putting them back neatly. “It’s hell sometimes, and I’ve got my brother in the same damned boat.”
“Your brother-?”
“Victor’s got a bloodlust streak a mile wide. Vietnam let him take the leash off, and when we ended up in that special unit, it turned out to be a kill squad for some ambitious government prick. I was the first to go, but I know I wasn’t the last to leave. That kind of work suited Victor, not me.” James leaned over to pour himself his own cup of coffee, drinking it black and far too hot, his expression closed except for brief flashes of anger, pain, and loss. “You’ve got now. Take the time to figure out what you’re doing to do.”
“Do?”
“It’s a hard time for America. You think they need their Captain back?”
Steve was silent for a long time as he perused the papers and magazines with more care. He asked some clarifying questions and got more of James’ terse, truthful answers. James didn’t get much in the way of radio out here, but he did have a surprisingly compact record player with some of the new music that had gotten some people in such a twist.
Steve was sort of in sympathy with them, but it wasn’t all bad. At least it was music, voices that weren’t their own, singing of love and rebellion and feeling mostly removed from the ice and blood and mud and pain Steve had known.
Inside, Steve marveled at some of the advances, like television (in color!) that people could have in their homes. He quietly raged against the atrocities he hadn’t known about, hadn’t been there to try to stop or at least help. Felt shamed when he realized how many people had struggled and suffered just to be acknowledged as equals in America, and then what had been done to Dr. King… There was more, much more, and James left Steve to it. Steve couldn’t stay still for long, though, and soon joined James in cutting wood, hauling water, any of a dozen necessary tasks to keep the little cabin in shape.
That was also where he got to see James powers in action. Healing was only one of them. Steve had watched in slack-jawed surprise as James has smelled out, then hunted down a pair of rabbits for dinner one night. Not with a gun, but with bone claws that emerged from the backs of his hands, skewering them with lethal efficiency.
“I know what you’re thinking. I’m not an experiment. Told you, I was born like this. My brother too, though he’s got actual claws on his fingers. We’re not the only ones.”
“I wonder…” Steve said, once he’d managed to master his surprise. “If someone born different was where Dr. Erskine got his ideas for the serum.”
“Maybe. Not my area. Don’t really want to be a science experiment.”
Steve caught a tiny smirk on James’ lips, and laughed. It had been nearly thirty years since he’d last done that.
“So, what now?”
Steve considered the mental list he’d made, one that if it had been paper, would have been erased, scratched through, and redone so many times there would have been holes in it.
“I still have friends. They’re alive, I hope.”
James made a grunt of agreement as he gutted and skinned the rabbits, then got them ready to go into tonight’s stew. “And?”
Steve looked back at the cabin, where he knew his uniform and shield were sitting neatly on the cot by James’ fireplace. “Maybe they can help.”
James gathered up the rabbits and both of them went inside. “Help with what? You need them to tell you what to do?”
Steve didn’t let himself bristle. James was prickly, far more so than Bucky ever had been.
“They’re my friends,” he said simply.
James looked at him sideways. “And the fact you look the same?”
“They know about the serum.”
“Your funeral,” James said with a shrug, sweeping the rest of the ingredients he’s prepared into a pot and turning on the stove.
“No, they already had that.” Steve waggled a copy of the New York Times with his name at the top. “It was pretty fancy.”
James actually gave a dry laugh at that. He cracked open a window and passed Steve a beer that had been cooling in a snowdrift. “If you aren’t taking up that shield again right away, what’re you gonna do?”
Steve idly flipped through the papers before setting them back down, all thirty years’ worth of change. “I’ve got some ideas.”
Another grunt. “We’re going tomorrow. ‘Bout time I get out of here too. I’ll get you to the border. I’m done here for now.”
“What is this place, to you?”
“Where I hide until they forget about me. It’s not too hard.” James walked out to get more wood, and Steve sipped his beer, knowing James didn’t want help, he probably wanted to be alone. A moment later, something flew through the air, and Steve caught it reflexively. It was a bar of light blue soap, a little nicer than he’d had in the Army.
“I’m stoking up the bathhouse. Wash off the alpha scent before you hit the border.”
Or he’d be a walking problem. Steve knew the drill.
Tomorrow then, he was going home tomorrow.
--
Three days ago
Steve reflected it was a damn good idea that curiosity and planning had done a lot to get these five people in the same room. It would have taken the last of his resources and exposed him more than he’d like to have gotten everyone here, if a certain one-eyed, very sharp director of SHIELD hadn’t employed the biggest Captain America fanboy on the entire planet. That… had loosened up some resources.
It had not been unexpected that Director Fury already had the five people he’d been looking for already under observation. Somebody was likely going to gather together people like him, either to keep an eye on them, or get them to fight on their side. Luckily, this time, Fury was on the side of the angels. Steve had been very worried about the opposite being the case.
It turned out that Fury had not only had those five special people under observation, he’d already brought them together to fight the fights that “no one else could.” And when he’d heard why Steve wanted to talk to them, he’d only nodded.
“You’re the only one who’s had experience with these assholes, Captain. So you get first crack at HYDRA. I’ll get the Avengers together. You’ll have to convince them of what’s going on yourself.” That Fury was testing him, Steve had no doubt. But he wouldn’t back down. He hadn’t ever been able to back down.
When all five Avengers had walked in to find their one-time alpha partner in a combat-ready red-white-and-blue uniform, Steve had had a lot of explaining to do. None of it quite softened the blow of the knowledge that the Steve Rogers look-a-like professional alpha was actually nearly a hundred years old, the original Captain America, and he had a mission for them. Skepticism was healthy and warranted, even with Nick Fury’s blessing on this operation.
For better or for worse, it was time for Steve to put all his cards on the table if he wanted to be believed.
“Just like that?” Clint asked, eyes narrowed at the story he’d just been spun, from the Valkyrie’s crash to Steve waking up in Canada.
“Gabe was living in Detroit, Dum-Dum in Columbus, Jim in Sacramento. We’d exchanged addresses during the war, and I still remembered them. I tracked them down, and they got ahold of Peggy.” Steve smiled, bittersweet. “She had a husband and grandkids, and gave me the dressing down of a lifetime. Then kissed me on the cheek and we started laughing and-.” He stopped, waving the rest of the reunion away. “It was too dangerous to come back as Captain America. Vietnam wasn’t over yet, and we didn’t know what they might try to use me for. So I helped Peggy with whatever she needed, usually undercover.
“HYDRA’s ideals weren’t gone. I’d helped take down their bases, but they had their sympathizers everywhere. We tried to find out where they’d gone.”
“How’d you avoid detection?” Natasha asked.
“Hair dye and a beard, up until 2005. Then I took my own name again, just altering my birth year.”
“Hair dye and a beard is all it takes to fool the world?”
“Well, no one was looking for me,” Steve pointed out.
“Dad was,” Tony said, his voice stiff.
Steve coughed a little, and Tony looked furious for a moment before sighing.
“Are you kidding me?”
--
“It’s really you.” She reached out, touching his face with hands still somewhat callused and strong, though now more wrinkled with age. Steve bent down as she gave him a kiss on the cheek, all too aware of Daniel’s eyes on him from his seat on the opposite sofa. They weren’t accusing or jealous, but Steve had been out of the picture for thirty years. They’d had more than his remembered lifetime to become a solid couple, to love each other the way he wished he’d gotten a chance to. He smiled down at her and took her hands in his, kissing her forehead before letting her go.
“How?”
“I was frozen. The ice - I didn’t die, it just put me in suspended animation, I think it’s called. Someone found me-.”
“Who?” And there, the suspicion and fierceness in her voice and expression, that was the Peggy who must have fought her way through every short-sighted and small-minded idiot who’d ever tried to get her way at SSR. SHIELD now.
“Someone who has as much trouble dying as I do. I’m not going to name names. I’ll say he’s a friend, he knows what it’s like to be different, and he won’t tell a damn soul about me.”
“What are you going to do, Steve?” she asked. Behind her question, Steve knew she already had a dozen possible plans laid out, but she was waiting to see what he’d say. She was the old hand at this now, but she still respected him.
“I need some way to find what we missed. You told me old HYDRA members are out there, and I have to find where they’ve hidden themselves. And if they’re in plain sight, then I can’t hide forever. And I can’t do this alone. Going in guns blazing won’t work.”
“Good. I was afraid you’d try to punch your way to the truth.”
“That worked pretty well, most of the time.”
She smiled with a hint of sadness, and Steve looked away. Bucky. Daniel held her hands, rubbing a thumb over hers in an old gesture of commiseration.
“More practically,” she said, turning brisk, “is the fact that you need a new identity, and you’re going to need money. Daniel and I are well enough off, but not enough to bankroll finding HYDRA’s sympathizers on our own, or even just on your own. Also, I have a pesky feeling that you won’t age gracefully like the rest of us, which means you’re going to need a new identity every ten years or so until you decide to take up your real identity again.”
Steve opened his mouth and shut it again. Well. He hadn’t even considered that. Strange, after fighting so long to be accepted as who he was, and now he had to hide.
“I’m going to call Howard. He took your death hard, Steve. To know that you’re alive… I think it might help. He got married, you know. He has a son, seven years old. Tony.”
“Howard? Married? And kids?” Steve said, both surprised and delighted.
“He tries. Not as hard as other things, but he tries. To know he didn’t fail with you… I think that might help.”
---
HYDRA Base, now
“I don’t die so easily,” Steve said, glaring at Pierce.
“We’ll see.” More crashes and bangs from up above, more calls for help over other PA systems, and Pierce took a few moments to issues a rapid-fire series of orders with the sound to the Asset’s room turned off. Steve spent the precious time whispering encouragements and reassurances in Bucky’s ear, knowing that despite the rebonding, there was still so much that was confusing and painful in Bucky’s mind.
“It’s me, Steve. I came back. I swear I won’t let them get you again.” Bucky shuddered and relaxed, trusting on a level of instinct, even if his tortured brain didn’t have many words while still in the throes of heat.
“Alpha. Mine?”
“Yet, yours.”
“Steve.”
He squeezed his hand. “Yes, I’m here now.”
“They’ll make me hurt you!” he said, eyes wild with panic.
“No.” Steve gave him a shallow thrust against their knotted tie, and Bucky moaned, pushing back. “I can do this all day.”
A dry, rusty laugh exploded out of Bucky’s throat as the lights came back up in the observation room. Pierce was holding a red book with a black star on the cover, and Bucky snarled at the sight of it.
Slowly, with great care, Pierce began to speak random-sounding Russian words, words that made Bucky go rigid with shock and mental pain. Steve interjected his own, covering’s Bucky’s ears, telling him how strong, how loved, how beautiful he was. Loudly. Bucky kept his grip on Steve, grounding himself in his mate’s touch.
Then the ceiling caved in.
--
Three days earlier
“Wait, wait,” Tony said, putting his hands out palm first to slow the conversation down. “Upon finding out you were alive, you, Steve Rogers, whom my Dad devoted way too many hours of his life searching for, and now I know that half of that was feigned, Dad and you decided that the best way to fight for truth, justice, and the American way was with your knotted dick?”
“Sounds about right, actually,” Natasha muttered, and Tony shot her a glare.
“The other ways to get in were rank-and-file field operative, politician, or military personnel. And I was going to age out of my credentials before I ever could get a face-to-face with anyone higher up at SHIELD by any of those routes. Besides, omegas had it way worse than even me growing up. In some ways, they still do. You’ve got more laws, but a lot of attitudes haven’t changed, even if it isn’t so blatant anymore. I could help people who needed it. I could help anyone I wanted,” Steve said, sounding a little wistful at the last.
Natasha looked at Steve for a long moment, then looked back over at Clint. He nodded thoughtfully. “If we cross-reference your work location with upticks in mysterious hooded figures rescuing people from bad situations, there’s going to be a very suspiciously high correlation, isn’t there?” Natasha asked. Steve nodded without hesitation.
“I still don’t like bullies. But the job was more than that. I’m very good.”
“I say without fear of contradiction and with fond memories of lovely orgasms that we won’t argue with you on that count,” Tony said. His skepticism had gone down another half-notch. He eyed the shield Steve had flat on the desk, and reached out to touch it. Nothing felt like vibranium; the peculiar stillness of the metal was undeniable. Tony nodded sharply for Steve to go on.
“I was good enough to get the kind of money I needed to make a background able to withstand a SHIELD backstop investigation. Enough to make me look legitimate to any HYDRA operative. Enough to get me that interview with Pierce.”
“The Secretary of Defense is a HYDRA operative?” Natasha didn’t sound surprised, but then again she was a past master of sounding like whatever was best at the time.
“As one of its heads. I… specialized in military personnel in IPA. I kept my mouth shut, but my ears open, and I’m a very good listener. Once SHIELD started employing me more and more, I heard a lot. HYDRA doesn’t seem to think much of omegas, but they had some in key positions, and people under that kind of pressure didn’t dare have their heats anywhere near a base. I was on a word-of-mouth safe list.”
---
A few years’ earlier
--“All that damn work to get into flight school, and all I got for it was to be surrounded by a bunch of leering meat-heads while stuck up in a floating platform with nowhere to hide. I didn’t even want to do it, but they needed one more person in case of emergencies and I was the best candidate.”
She huffed a little, and Steve went through his usual gentling routine to try to keep everything calm while they were tied.
“Sorry about your assignment,” he said. Curious that SHIELD would put someone on a Helicarrier who didn’t want to be there. Their psychological screening process was very thorough, not only to make sure people would want to do their assignments, but would be able to work well with the people around them. SHIELD was selective enough with its candidates that it saw no need to have people distracted by interpersonal conflicts. A little petty office politicking was one thing. A hostile work environment when everyone was either a trained killer or some variety of technical genius was another. A little adjustment to a new team mix was expected, but Warrens sounded like she had been biting her tongue for a long, long time.
“If it wasn’t so important, I would have told them where to stick it, but you don’t say no to the Sec-.” She jammed her mouth shut, her body going rigid, but Steve never changed his hold.
“Bosses. Can’t live with ‘em, illegal to kill ‘em,” he said, and Warrens laughed, relaxing again. With the relaxation came more complaints; she was seemingly just happy to have a captive audience. Steve just listened. And remembered.
--
Three days ago…
“And why us?” Bruce asked. He tried to keep his expression neutral. “Did you know about us before you-?”
“Bruce, I was in Brazil following up on a lead, but I ran into you by accident, I swear. But after I realized I was being tailed after I had been with you, I made sure they saw me as someone to be trusted. Because I needed to find people to believe me…” Steve took a deep breath and looked right at Tony. “Because on December 16th, 1991, Howard and Maria Stark were killed. By HYDRA.”
Tony lost all color in his face, his hand gripping the arm of his chair until his knuckles were white. “Did they sabotage their car?”
“That would have been too easy.” Steve picked up his phone beside him and punched in a code. “I already told you I was working with Howard.” His glance at Tony, full of remorse, stopped some of the recriminations that Tony probably had on the tip of his tongue. “We had hoped to make more of the super-soldier serum and find good people who would use it wisely and well. Howard had spent years on the project, a lot of it convincing me and Peggy that we could find good people. He finished it, and was bringing it to me secretly. Somehow HYDRA had been spying on him.”
--
December 16th, 1991
“Steve?” her voice sounded sleepy and groggy.
“Peggy. Howard’s not here yet. He should have been here twenty minutes ago.”
A pause, and then, “I haven’t had any other calls.”
“I’m going after him.”
“Be careful, please.”
Steve backtracked the route on his motorcycle, heart in his throat when he smelled the tang of gasoline, oil, and fresh blood on the wind. This was the most isolated part of the route, and Steve and Howard had picked it because of that very reason, hoping to avoid as many people as possible. Under a streetlight, Steve found them. The car was crashed, but not bad enough to have staved in Howard’s skull, or crushed Maria’s throat. Tony… god, Tony was an orphan.
Steve held onto the side of the car as tears burned down his face. It was a long time before he could look in the trunk, but as he’d expected, it was empty. This was targeted. Someone had found out what Howard had been up to. Trying to think, Steve smelled the faintest whiff of gunpowder. The Starks hadn’t been shot. Steve’s head went up, and he searched around carefully. There was no brass from the shot, but up on the pole, there was a fresh scar from a detached camera mount.
Part of the reason Howard and Steve had chosen this route was because of the storage facility just off of the road, which included a good security system. The assassin had destroyed the camera, but maybe, just maybe…
Steve found the storage office undisturbed, except for the missing security tape. He smiled grimly; he had things in storage at this facility, as a convenient depot between Howard’s house and places he was investigating. And he knew the owner had a back-up in case one of the VCRs ate the tape. He kept it in a backless old filing cabinet, because he hadn’t wanted to clutter up another desk. The copy was still there. The image was poor, but what it showed was all too clear. Steve didn’t remember much of the trip back home.
Bucky was alive. And being used by HYDRA. It couldn’t be anyone else.
--
Three days ago…
Steve handed the phone to Tony, the video file ready to play. Tony took it off into a corner and watched it. Everyone waited an uncomfortably long time for Tony to come back, stiff-legged, eyes dry, cuffs damp.
“Who-,” Tony started angrily.
“The person they used as their weapon is Bucky Barnes,” Steve said flatly. “And the person who signed off on the assassination order was Alexander Pierce.”
“Jesus,” Barton said softly.
“Barnes is dead,” Natasha said.
“Captured, cyborged, brainwashed, tortured, and popped in and out of cryosleep. The Winter Soldier, the Fist of HYDRA,” Steve said, repressed sorrow and rage under his even tone. He showed a capture from the video in a side-by-side comparison to an old picture of Bucky. Aside from the long hair and severe lack of animation in his face, they were identical. “I got my hands on one of his former ‘handlers’ and asked some questions. They’ve been using him as an assassination tool for decades.”
“Why tell us this? Tony needed to know, but do you have proof positive against Pierce? What about this handler?” Natasha asked. Clint looked only a little uncomfortable, but he got why Natasha was asking. They worked best in the shadows, and for all of what Steve had claimed about Secretary Pierce, the man mostly lived in the spotlight.
“The handler, Karpov, is in a very uncomfortable but safe jail cell in Germany. But Pierce? He’s going to give me evidence of his own free will in three days,” Steve said, and every head came up in surprise. “I have it on good authority that I’ll be getting an IPA meeting with someone very high in the DoD, which is double-talk for the SecDef, for a, and I quote, ‘difficult asset.’ I’m not in SHIELD, so I’m expendable once I fix their problem. HYDRA never had many omegas in combat positions, and from what Karpov said, the ‘Asset’ was transferred to full American control only a few years ago. That’s the same time they lost one of their key scientists to old age. Bucky’s an omega. Things get lost in transport, including records and drugs.
“When they take me to him, that will be proof positive of how far HYDRA goes. And you will be able to stop them when they’re exposed.”
“Would they retaliate in public?” Bruce asked, looking worried.
“They’ll have to, against all of you, and soon,” Steve said. “Fury put you all in this Avengers Initiative, didn’t he? Against the Secretary’s advice. He knows who you are and what you can do. He wants his Winter Soldier back to lead the attack when HYDRA makes their move. All of you will have to be the first to fall; they can’t have you messing up their plans.”
Bruce looked stricken, because he knew how that would probably turn out for everyone. Tony looked furious, ready to spit nails in anger. And Thor, he just looked very, very ready. All of this talk of Earth politics had little to nothing to do with him, but Natasha must have given him a short summary of HYDRA’s greatest hits. And for a man who wanted to help protect Earth, well, making sure HYDRA never gained control was essential.
“Are you absolutely positive this Winter Soldier is Barnes?” Clint asked.
“I’m sure enough to stake my life on it.”
“And ours,” Natasha said pointedly. “If our first public debut is overthrowing SHIELD because of a HYDRA infiltration and we’re either wrong or have no proof, we are going to go down in history as America’s worst terrorists.”
“Bucky is my bondmate,” Steve said, clenching his hands together. Tony looked up out of his haze of grief and anger, briefly shaking his self-focus. “I can reach him. I can save him and take away their weapon at the same time. And if I do that, you’ll have all the proof you need.”
“That’s why you took up your name again, wasn’t it?” Tony asked.
“I’d been a spy, an agent, a vigilante. I’d freelanced as an alpha a few times, but when Howard died…” He paused, and Tony could see that his father’s death still hurt. Steve had known his dad a lot better than he had, in some ways. A part of Tony resented that, and probably always would. But there were other things to life besides resentment. “When Howard died, Peggy was retired, Daniel had died some years before, and since Howard had been funding our search on the sly, the money dried up. Jarvis couldn’t get access to those accounts without alerting Stane, and then he passed away a few years later. I freelanced as an alpha in Canada, Mexico, and a lot of Europe for over ten years, trying to stick to the plan.
“Then you were shot,” Steve said, looking at Natasha. She raised her eyebrows, and he clarified. “Trying to get the scientist out of Iran, when he was killed by the Winter Soldier. I had enough contacts to hear about it, decent rumors at least. That was my second sighting. This was no longer just HYDRA sympathizers and people with personal agendas, this meant something much more coordinated; the organization I thought I died to try to stop. I wormed my way into eastern Europe, and eventually found an ex-Soviet operative with Hydra ties, Karpov. He knew HYDRA had grown inside SHIELD. And he told me they’d moved the Winter Soldier to America after the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
“Wither thou goest, love,” Bruce said softly.
“Yeah,” Steve said. “I needed to be high in SHIELD’s trust. So I used my last, best set of papers, and became myself again, mostly.”
“And what, worked your way up the ranks?” Tony said with a dangerous amount of blandness. Steve faced Tony squarely, and spoke without flinching.
“HYDRA was going to target anyone capable of taking them out, anyone with any ties to SHIELD whom they couldn’t break. I found Bruce purely as a fluke, I’ll admit, but when I realized who Natasha was, I knew I’d gotten my chance. I wanted to help, and I wanted you to know you could trust me. At least that was what I hoped. Some of the people I had as clients were HYDRA’s operatives within SHIELD. People spill secrets in heat. I listened. That’s how I found out about Pierce.
“But when I found all of you…” Steve sighed, not a sign of exasperation or weariness, but of relief. “There were so many people I’d met who I was pretty certain were enemies. You were the first who might be allies. Or… friends.”
Steve could tell, they got it. That, one way or another, to one degree or another, they forgave him his deception. Because for all Steve’s careful, long-term planning to protect people from HYDRA, he’d been going at it with little support or backup. Suddenly he had real hope, and help, and a chance of not only fulfilling a mission, not only saving a part of his past, but of finding people to stand by once again.
“What do we do now, that we may capture all of these foes in a single sweep?” Thor asked, stepping forward to clasp him on the shoulder in a warrior’s greeting. The scowl on his face didn’t bode well for HYDRA; there was no doubt that if Jane Foster wasn’t able to give them information they wanted on her space-bending wormholes or any other potentially dangerous knoweldge, they wouldn’t have any trouble crossing her off, and Thor with her. None of them were fighting just for themselves, but also for anyone even remotely attached to them.
“It means we have two days to plan how to take down HYDRA and get that sonofabitch Pierce,” Tony said tightly.
“Believe me, I wanted to go after him then and there when I realized what they’d done. Peggy talked me down. The only evidence I had of HYDRA was Bucky, and all the tape did was implicate Bucky alone as an assassin. No one else would believe some defunct World War II Nazi death cult was still around.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tony asked, his voice tight. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“I wish we would have. Peggy wanted to spare you being targeted. If you’d known, they would have gone after you. And I didn’t know if I could protect you.”
“Why not-.” Tony cut himself off and shook his head.
Steve answered the unfinished question. “You weren’t Iron Man until after I met you. I didn’t want to lose you too… I- I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.
Tony walked away and faced the door for a minute. Then walked back, eyes wiped dry.
“You know how to take them down for good?”
“Fury’s on our side. Capture Pierce, and we can use him to unlock the files on everything HYDRA was doing inside SHIELD.” He eyed Natasha as he spoke, and she smiled smugly.
“I want Pierce,” Tony said, in a tone that booked no argument.
“Leave enough eye, fingerprint, and retina to work,” Natasha reminded him.
--
Now
The STRIKE team left to protect Pierce were no fools; they started shooting immediately, but hit something metallic. Then the STRIKE members started going down, hit with arrows or a sneak attack in the dim light. Out of the gloom emerged the glow of the arc reactor in the chest plate of Iron Man. Pierce’s face went bloodless, and the book dropped from his fingers.
“Don’t move,” Tony said, his voice metallic behind his faceplate, and as uncompromising. “Natasha?”
She gave a final love-tap to one of her victims on the floor, and stepped up to press a retinal scanner to Pierce’s eye. Steve’s body finally let go of Bucky, and he disengaged enough so they could stand. Barton opened the door to Bucky’s room, tossing them bundles of clothing, armor, and weapons.
“How did you turn him?” Pierce asked, incredulous that Steve Rogers had somehow managed to suborn his prize asset while naked. “How?”
--
Earlier
Steve sat in the locker room, toweling off. The scent-blocker pill had run its course and been metabolized out of his system in ten minutes. Luckily he had brought a scent-blocking spray that would last until he got to the omega’s room, a common enough toiletry for a professional alpha who didn’t want to advertise. The guards outside the door were holding the ampule, but Steve had another concealed in his palm, this one full of plain water.
He had swapped his fake for the real one en-route, dropping the real one under the mattress. When he’d held up his hand to the window, all Pierce had seen was a flash of white plastic. He hadn’t even registered Steve running his hand over his most-scented areas of his body, and that was what he had let Bucky scent. Those lessons from Vegas had come in handy after all.
--
Now
“You boys want to put on some clothes if you want to fight evil today?” Clint asked.
Bucky arrayed himself in the reinforced, bulletproof leather of the Winter Soldier, armed to the teeth, and covered Steve’s back in easy coordination as they moved out. He didn’t move like Steve remembered him, now more purposeful, more fluid, balanced on a hair trigger of violence, but they shadowed each other as well as they ever had. It would take some getting used to, but Steve felt some part of his heart that had been frozen since his fall finally thawing.
“Nat and Tony are taking down the computer system; it went berserk when they cracked Pierce’s files. Thor and Bruce are managing the dumbfucks who tried to come in with heavy artillery while getting the rest of the civvies out. We’ve got to go after the leaders now, before they scatter.”
“We’re coming!” Steve said firmly.
“Thought you already did,” Clint said, and Bucky laughed, a short rusty thing, but a laugh, a real one. Steve wondered what Sam and Darcy would make of Bucky, and how exactly they were going to take Steve’s little misdirection on his birth year. Hopefully well enough that he’d still have an apartment to take Bucky home to.
Steve knew it would take a long time for Bucky to feel like his own person again, maybe another lifetime. And to work with the Avengers would take its own kind of persuasion. But they would do it. In time.
He’d been on a much longer journey.
But he didn’t have to do it alone anymore.
Side by side with Bucky, Steve Rogers loped down the corridor to join the rest of the Avengers.
-------
Chapter 3
Master Post