Freezer Burn (47/?)
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
“Well that wasn’t so bad for East Oakland,” Ramos announced as he took a long draught from his water bottle. “Kind of ugly for anywhere else, but you gotta grade ‘em on a curve here.”
Steve grimaced agreement. A fair bit of the pre-mission prep work always focused on the environmental concerns, which in this case boiled down to having to stage a raid on a heavily-guarded warehouse in the middle of a crime-riddled neighborhood. The building, rented by one of Trident’s subsidiaries as both storage and a locus of their charitable efforts, was in an area the police had described in uniformly unflattering terms and had been the subject of several break-in attempts early on in its current incarnation, but upgraded security had made it a less promising target and it had been largely left alone since. This had been viewed by the police as a reasonable response at the time, but SHIELD interest in the building as a possible HYDRA location put a whole new spin on the tale.
“I don’t think this was what OPD had in mind when they warned us about the quantity of firearms in the area,” Steve said as he slipped the shield’s straps through his arms and shouldered it, shifting his own water bottle between hands to do so. Even with the doors open and the few windows blown out, the air was close and reeked of gunpowder with underlying notes of ozone and something chemical that made his throat burn. “They probably thought a few would be outside.”
They had been spotted on approach - it was impossible to do any kind of urban assault without witnesses, even in the dark of night - but there hadn’t been so much as a bottle broken in warning, let alone any kind of confrontation.
Ramos chuckled darkly. “Nah, they understood that the local criminal element would be so happy to see us take out this place that they’d grease our path. It’s bad for their business as cockroaches to have a bright light on all the time.”
Steve took another sip of water. “Speaking of the lights, where are ours?”
The problem with cutting the power to a raid target prior to the assault, of course, was getting power back on. Especially, in this case, when the actual lines had been cut.
“It’s a little early for rolling blackout season,” Ramos mused. “Five gets you ten Riccardi hooked the generator up backward again. Someone with an extra brain cell should go help him out.”
With that, he left Steve to survey the aftermath in a room lit only by the building’s emergency generator and the portable floodlights SHIELD had brought. The space he was in was the loading dock, complete with rolling corrugated steel doors and concrete trailer bays. Steve and three others had spent the first part of the fight pinned in the leftmost one because the blueprints they’d been working off of had been outdated, something there’d been no way to verify beforehand. Once the power was restored, they’d be able to roll up the gates and get some more fresh air inside, but for the time being, the only ventilation were the fire doors and a pizza-sized hole in the far wall from one of the blaster cannons.
The warehouse was supposed to be split between offices and storage; the former was for the charity and the latter split between the charity and VCTI’s business concern. How much of that was true and how much, like the blueprints, was just what VCTI and Trident had told the City of Oakland was yet undetermined. Nobody had gone through the building yet except to do a sweep for hostiles and then, with Saskatchewan very much on their minds, a bomb-sniffing dog. They’d found nothing, thankfully, but SHIELD was still using cell phone jammers just in case, with the added advantage that none of the growing crowd outside could take pictures or shoot video or, if one of the bad guys had escaped, report back what was going on.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Corrales coming up the ramp closest to him, two waters bottles in hand.
“How’s the wing?” he asked, accepting the bottle from Corrales, who’d been grazed by one of the plasma weapons. His right upper arm was bandaged underneath the flap of his body armor, which in turn was melted and singed.
“A lot better than the armor, thank God,” Corrales replied with a shudder. “I don’t think I’m going to be eating pork for a bit, though.”
A loud click that had Corrales reaching for his rifle and Steve for his shield, but then came the flicker of overhead lights. A few strobes later and they could finally see the room in full light, which made it both less spooky and far scarier than the shadows cast by the portable lights.
“Welp, you may not know when we’re coming, but you certainly know where we’ve been,” Corrales sighed happily as they surveyed the mess. With the overhead lights on, the overturned crates and blood spatter and smashed shelving told its own story. A good story as far as the good guys went, but not necessarily the one that they were most eager to hear.
“You ready to take a tour?” Steve asked. Corrales nodded, then radioed his XO, Pincus, to let him know that they were going to be moving toward him and not to shoot. Steve’s team had taken the rear and Corrales’s the front and they were mostly still local to those areas.
Casimir had just figured out how to activate the motor on the bay doors and so they waited for the noise to die down before telling Jablonsky, who was more or less Steve’s XO, where they were going and to radio Steve when Clint, who’d been up on the roof across the street, arrived.
Steve drained his first water bottle and tossed it in a somehow-still-upright recycling bin as they passed it.
The blocked-off path that had ruined Steve’s easy ingress into the loading dock turned out to be far from the only unreported structural change to the building. More than a year into chasing HYDRA, their secrets were far easier to reveal and so it was with the stairwell to a subterranean level that was absolutely not supposed to be there.
“Fuck,” Corrales spit out as they stood outside the doorway that led downstairs. “I’d have lost the arm entirely if that had been the payment needed to keep this from turning into another Detroit.”
Corrales had been in Detroit the night of the raids; he’d been with a combined unit of SHIELD and Detroit SWAT and they’d lost half their number in a single explosion and then five more on the exfil under fire.
Steve was pretty sure that there would be no one downstairs - they’d have come up during the initial assault - but he accepted a flashbang grenade from Corrales anyway and tossed it down the stairs to see if it provoked any kind of response. It didn’t.
He radioed Jablonsky and told him to send two men to their position to guard the entrance just in case; they’d explore in full later once they had more men free. The rest of the tour was mercifully anticlimactic, showing offices and storage space separated by temporary walls. The contents were mostly pedestrian stuff - office supplies, school notebooks and reading and math primers and tied-up stacks of pamphlets about medical care and free lunch programs, wire crates full of basketballs, boxes of baby formula that actually were boxes of baby formula.
And then they found the room full of boxes of Saplings, which were Trident’s smallest green-energy generators. (“From tiny beginnings, great things can grow.”) On the face of it, there was nothing wrong with this - Trident had been pushing into California’s energy market for a long time and had been using Stark Industries’ post-Triple Bombings fall to establish themselves even further. But these were still packed in their shrink-wrapped loading pallets and tucked into the bottom of one was a bill of lading with the port of origination being Shenzhen and the port of destination being Conakry, Guinea and no information whatsoever about being offloaded anywhere in North America, let alone the Port of Oakland.
Steve thought of Miranda, who’d made an extremely similar passage during her time as Operative Baker, from Shaanxi to Guinea-Bissau. She hadn’t stopped in California, had gone the other way around the world, on a cargo ship. But the coincidence was almost too strong and the lack of any way to build a connection frustrated him.
Clint found them there, whistling when he saw the Trident logo on the sides of the boxes. “Any chance they’re full of HYDRA tech?”
Steve tore the plastic wrapping on one pallet and opened one of the boxes. It was full of leaf-green parts, which was the hallmark of the Sapling, but Steve would be the first to admit that he wouldn’t know past that. Corrales and Clint readily confessed that they had no more of a clue.
“Still don’t know how they’re here,” Corrales pointed out. “Even if Trident or VCTI wanted to reroute them totally legally, you just can’t saunter into a US port and offload goods meant for somewhere else without paperwork.” He held up the paper. “This is not the packing slip that gets tucked inside, this is what you have to show Customs and there’s nothing on here for a North American offloading.”
In the end, it just became something else to report to Ops back aboard the Helicarrier, along with the discovery of the basement that they still hadn’t searched and the general state of the affair, which was that the building was secure and local LEOs were taking over perimeter security, allowing SHIELD to focus on the interior. The distant, tinny voice at Ops - Steve could hear bits of the conversation through Corrales’s fancy jammer-proof communicator - had nothing useful to say about the bill of lading except that they’d forward the details to the China and West Africa Desks and to the department that served as intermediaries between the rest of SHIELD and Operatives Able, Baker, and Dog, the three HYDRA moles who’d lived long enough to be safely extracted. (Charlie and Easy had been killed; there were at least three others still active but nobody knew how many or where.)
“You know, we can cut at least a dozen people out of that loop with a single call,” Clint said while Corrales was still over on the far side of the room, which had had better reception, talking with Pincus over the radio to organize the expedition downstairs. He gestured with his chin to the utility pocket where Steve kept his phone.
Steve shook his head. “It’s nothing that won’t keep for a few hours and I’m not going to put her at risk of exposure - or of Fury finding out if she gives us something actionable.” He’d have to get outside the jammer radius to make the call and there was way to do that or to make the call itself without witnesses. “They still want her very dead, preferably slowly and painfully.”
Clint nodded, accepting the answer. “But maybe next time you send her a picture of your beefsteak, you slip in a little something...” he trailed off, making a vague hand gesture.
“Do I want to pretend that I didn’t hear that?” Corrales asked, eyes wide and innocent. “Please tell me yes. I’m not sure I’m ready for Captain America sexting.”
Clint exploded into laughter and Steve turned away, blushing in embarrassment. When he turned back to explain, Corrales was smiling and held up a hand to stop him.
“I know there is a context that makes it all innocent and possibly even professionally relevant,” he told Steve. “But I don’t want to know what it is because this is much better.”
They left the room to return to the entrance to the basement, by which point Pincus had organized a detachment of troops to join them. They were mostly Steve’s team and he didn’t think this was the luck of the draw, not when Corrales gestured for Steve to lead the way. He’d been favoring his arm a little and had taken nothing stronger than an aspirin for what were probably some non-trivial burns.
The basement, thankfully, turned out to be just a basement and not the entrance into an underground city of tunnels and trouble. They found rooms that served as barracks and armory and chow hall and gym, but mostly the place was lab space, modern and well-lit and clean - and cleaned-out.
“Someone knew we were coming,” Jablonsky said from a crouch by Steve’s feet, holding up a latex glove with a pen before dropping it into an evidence envelope. “They cleaned out in a hurry, but they cleaned out.”
SHIELD’s forensics team would be going through the place anyway, so once they determined that there was nothing there that would lead them directly to another site either inside the city or close enough that they could get there right away, Steve and Corrales started the process of transitioning from active secure assault site to leaving it to the techs and the platoons of regular field agents who’d watch over them.
They made it back to the airport by mid-morning. As they were boarding the plane, Steve found Corrales, who was no longer able to hide how much pain he was in. “Why don’t you take whatever they gave you to knock you out,” he suggested, since while Corrales had stuck to the over-the-counter medication, he’d also undoubtedly been handed something much stronger. “Pincus’ll make sure we behave.”
Corrales smiled. “Pincus will asleep before we fold up the landing gear.” Steve cocked an eyebrow and Corrales gave him a one-shouldered shrug. “But you’ll do in a pinch. Thanks.”
“It’s awesome and I won’t hear a bad word said against it.”
Bruce shook his head at Clint. “You hate helicopters because you think they’re going to kill you, but you’re not only willing to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft, you’re eager to do so from an altitude that requires an oxygen mask and carries the real risk of freezing your balls off. How does that work?”
“I am a man of many facets,” Clint replied loftily. Next to him, Tapper snorted.
“Jumping out of perfectly good aircraft is actually a lot of fun,” Steve piped up. Across from him, Clint nodded at the wisdom displayed. “It’s the closest some of us get to flying.”
“If you want to fly, I’ll make a baby bjorn for the suit,” Tony offered, not looking up from the tablet he was doing whatever he was doing on. “You can be strapped in back or front, although you should probably ride in the back. Robin Hood over there can ride up front, I can see over his head no problem.”
“Who are you calling short?” Clint asked incredulously.
Steve smiled. It felt normal, this bickering around a SHIELD conference table. Something that hadn’t happened in a very long time in this configuration - still short a full complement with Natasha still not cleared and Thor back in Asgard - but it was better than it had been. Even if, Steve knew, they had not been brought together for any kind of good news.
Tapper had called all of them in turn to tell them that Fury wanted a meeting; Steve’s version had been ameliorated by a rundown of who’d been contacted and, ominously, how Steve thought Tony might take another chop in his still-rough seas. The answer was that it depended on how big the wave, but Tony had actually been out in the Iron Man suit twice in the last few days - Pepper’s suggestion - and while he wasn’t not drinking, he was drinking a lot less and interacting with the world a lot more. “Is this going to undo all that?” Steve had asked. “Because if it will, then I don’t care what Fury wants, I’ll make sure Tony’s unavailable.”
Tony had leveled out lately after a few weeks of extremes - the revelation of Trident’s duplicity had brought a high, Stark Industries being named in another lawsuit related to the Triple Bombings had brought an episode of deep despair and an ER trip, the official public connection of VCTI and Trident to a HYDRA base in Oakland had brought another high, a fight with Pepper had threatened another low - and Steve was determined to make sure that this steady (steadier) path continued. Fury’s primary concern wasn’t Tony’s health, which was unpleasant to think about but as it should be. That didn’t mean that it shouldn’t be a consideration.
Tapper, who kept abreast of Tony’s status surprisingly well, assured Steve that while this would not go down easy for any of them, he didn’t think it would cause a lasting problem. “And if I’m wrong, then know that this wasn’t a decision made lightly: this is that important.”
Hill showed up, yawning as she sat down next to Tapper, and kept her attention on her coffee mug and tablet. The briefer, an analyst introduced as Spiegelman, came in next and did not sit down, instead setting up his laptop and the projector and then standing awkwardly at the front of the room. Spiegelman wasn’t a young man, but Steve supposed that even senior analysts got a little jumpy before briefing the top two people in SHIELD and then most of the Avengers.
Fury stormed in five minutes after the meeting was supposed to have begun, one of his assistants - he had a varying pool of aides who reported to Hsiang - in tow carrying a sheaf of papers.
“Let’s get on with this,” Fury growled.
“We finished processing the forensic evidence from Oakland last week,” Spiegelman began, nervousness gone. “HYDRA’s sanitizing efforts minimized the quantity and quality of what we were able to recover, but they did leave us enough to work with.”
What followed was a swift and understandable overview of what had been found and why it mattered or did not. There were a couple of theories about why the Saplings had been present, one of which was the more benign black marketing scenario and the other had SHIELD liaising with several federal agencies to investigate the Port of Oakland.
“We also know how they knew to clear out in the first place,” Spiegelman went on, since he could tell, as could Steve, that Fury was about to ask. “We told them.”
The screen changed from a schematic of the Oakland site - a real one, not the faulty ones that had been used to plan the raids - to a photo of Maya Hansen.
“Doctor Maya Hansen, head of FuturePharm’s nanotechnology unit, for those of you who did not already know,” Spiegelman said. “Her fingerprints and DNA were found onsite, in the basement laboratories.”
Steve took a moment to let the shock roll through him before looking over at Tony, who was still frozen, and then over at Bruce, who looked back at him with wide, surprised eyes. Steve didn’t know what his own face showed; he felt it in the pit of his stomach that Maya, sarcastic, brilliant, so eager to help improve life for people Maya, was working for HYDRA. How could she justify that? The same way the professors and scientists and celebrities on the petitions did, with their ends-justify-the-means, can’t-make-an-omelet-without-cracking-a-few-eggs false chagrin that their beautiful utopia would come at a brutal and expensive cost? Maya wouldn’t be the first or the hundredth otherwise smart person who’d accepted HYDRA’s false promises despite evidence and history showing them otherwise, but he’d almost have preferred it if she hadn’t lied to them about it.
“Are you sure?” Bruce asked, rubbing his jaw with his hand. “This wasn’t a plant or a lab error?”
Spiegelman, to his credit, recognized the critical tone for what it was and did not get defensive. “We’re sure. I’ll be happy to provide all supporting documentation for-“
“She gave them Extremis,” Tony said, still sounding dazed. “She gave HYDRA Extremis.”
There was a silent pause then, a collective moment to appreciate the impact of what this meant - and what it could mean.
“Very probably,” Spiegelman agreed. “We’re still reconstructing her true history, but involvement with HYDRA seems to predate the Extremis project - at least the government contract. So, yes.”
Tony leaned forward and addressed himself to Fury. “I need to see everything on this, everything the DoD has, everything FuturePharm has, everything she has socked away on flash drives hidden in her lingerie drawer. I need to know how close she is. Please.”
Fury, sitting impassively, didn’t give anything away, but Tony didn’t give him a chance to refuse.
“Extremis will work,” he pressed on. “And it will work a lot faster without the safety straps of ethics and regulations holding it back. HYDRA will kill thousands making this work. And then we’ll be screwed because it will work brilliantly. It’s the perfect cheat code for this game of empires Schmidt is playing. They won’t need the killer robots or giant spiders or mecha cockroaches. They’ll have an army of endlessly customizable cannon fodder, led by the Red Skull, back and better than ever and effectively immortal.
“I need to see how it works so that I can figure out how break it. You don’t have anything in your arsenal that can stop this. Other than me.”
Everyone’s eyes were on Fury and Tony.
“The DoD has already given us all of the project files,” Fury said. “We’ll get the rest when we apprehend Hansen. You’ll have access to whatever you need. On the condition that you work here.”
Tony shook his head as he sat back. “I’d rather-“
“You have been on restricted clearance since the week after the Triple Bombings,” Fury cut him off, voice calm. “Which you have not even noticed because you’ve been in an alcoholic stupor for almost all of that time. You will work here precisely because it’s less convenient and less comfortable and because it guarantees me at least a few hours of sobriety. Which you cannot offer me in any other environment. Our understanding still holds, Stark: you’re here because I need you, not because I trust you.”
Tony looked like he wasn’t sure whether to storm off or escalate the argument, hurt and angry both. Steve felt for him, but he understood Fury’s reasoning. Tony worked best at home, but that usually involved a tumbler full of something at his elbow and sometimes a whole bottle. Sometimes more, especially when he was upset or frustrated by his lack of progress and he would be both with this. Tony had been trying to reverse-engineer what little Maya had shown him of the Extremis project since they’d gotten back from Austin and he’d been stymied, alternately impressed and outraged at being outsmarted (“don’t say it like that”) by a colleague he’d always respected but never considered quite his peer. Tony didn’t think he had true peers.
Steve caught motion out of the corner of his eye and looked over at Bruce, who was shifting in his seat; he wasn’t sure if Bruce was uncomfortable and upset or preparing to enter the fray and, if it was the former, whether someone needed to intercede before the Other Guy showed up. Fury’s words had been aimed at Tony, but they’d long applied to Bruce and while Bruce would occasionally joke about it, nobody would ever confuse that with his actually being amused.
“We’ll work here,” Bruce finally said and Steve relaxed minutely. “We’ll need a couple of analysts for grunt work and some more processing power than what I’ve got in my lab.”
“You already have enough to take over most governments,” Fury replied, but not in a challenging way. “Make up a list.”
Tony wasn’t quite ready to concede, his eyes still burning with the need to defend himself - or at least get the last word in.
“Throw in a couple of real chairs,” Steve told Bruce. Tony’s attention flicked over to him and Steve could see that Tony knew exactly what Steve was doing, didn’t particularly care for it, but wasn’t going to challenge him, too. “Ones with backs and padding that aren’t those weird kneeling things you like.”
“You’re not going to be sitting around much, Cap,” Hill warned. “You’re leading the mission to bring in Hansen and you’re still going to Venezuela next week.”
Steve nodded, relieved. He’d have asked to be in on it if he hadn’t been assigned the mission; he didn’t need to lead it, but he needed to be there. To look her in the eye and take back in anger what he’d offered in gratitude.
“I’d like to go, too,” Tony said, making it sound like less of a demand than it could have been. Tony Stark didn’t beg or plead, but he could drop the imperious tone and the effect, if he chose, could be almost the same. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do to clear Iron Man for active duty.”
Fury shook his head no. “I understand the personal stakes, Stark, but you can’t go for the same reason you can’t be close to any of the other Trident-related ops. Everything you touch in public becomes tainted by the insinuation that SHIELD is acting as a proxy in the war between Trident and Stark Industries. I will not have our effectiveness hampered because we are fighting rumors as well as enemies. I will not allow our integrity to be questioned.”
Tony exhaled slowly, accepting the reasoning, as he had before, but not liking it. “Can I talk to her once she’s in-house?”
Fury gave him a smile that Steve thought wicked. “Absolutely.”
Spiegelman, forgotten during the confrontation between Fury and Tony, continued his briefing after a ‘get on with it’ gesture from Hill. The rest of the details were somewhat anticlimactic and mostly were a list of the various ways Maya Hansen’s life was being deconstructed. It was over in twenty minutes because Fury had somewhere else to be and swept out again, aide in his wake, and Hill told Spiegelman to wrap it up.
“Apparently she’s not as creeped out by Tarleton as she said she was,” Bruce mused once it was the four of them again, Tapper racing off because his phone had sixteen messages on it in the half-hour it had been off during the meeting. (“This had better not be something you guys did,” he’d warned as he’d fled.)
“Apparently she’s not a lot of things she said she was,” Clint retorted. He’d been the only one not to have met Maya before; he’d been aware of Tony’s joining the trip to Austin, but hadn’t been too interested in the details beyond what Maya was like once Steve had told him it was a science thing where everyone had talked funny but somehow it was all still English.
“I didn’t think I’d ever know someone who fell for this crap,” Tony said, still sounding a little shocky and distracted.
“You know lots of people who have fallen for this crap,” Bruce pointed out. “You’ve met almost every single name on every single petition that circulates in the academic and corporate worlds. You’ve fired people for signing those petitions.”
Tony shook his head. “I haven’t fired anyone personally in years,” he said. “And the people who sign those petitions are morons not worth my time remembering who they are. But Maya was worth knowing. She was someone I was happy to know and you cannot imagine how small that category is. Pepper is going to be crushed.”
“Pepper liked her?” Steve prompted, because after the last several months, he’d developed a very good sense of what Tony’s edge of true despair looked like. And today, of all days, when Tony had sworn good behavior for the right reasons, Steve didn’t want Tony dancing close enough to that edge to fall in.
Tony lost the unfocused look and beamed. “Pepper loved her. She used to write down and commit to memory all of the different ways Maya used to shoot down my attempts to get her back into bed.”
Steve didn’t think Tony saw Bruce indicate to Clint that Clint owed him five dollars.
“You’ll be okay with this?” he asked instead, since this was going to be coming up.
“I’m going to have a small wake for the death of a friendship,” Tony replied, not misinterpreting the question but choosing not to make anything of it, which was its own (good enough) answer. “And you are all welcome to join me. But then I am going to start working on destroying Maya Hansen and everything she thinks she stands for because I refuse to allow such a brilliant, brilliant idea as Extremis to be lost.”
He looked Steve straight in the eye. “I’m done being a victim. It’s boring. Maya Hansen could have changed the world for good. I’m going to make sure she doesn’t change it for evil and then I’m going to do with Extremis what she should have done in the first place.”
Steve nodded once, acknowledging the spoken answer and the unspoken one.
“Is there going to be food at this wake?” Clint asked. “Because I could eat.”
“In great quantity and variety,” Tony assured. “And we can even lay in a six-pack of that tooth-cracker of an IPA that you insist on drinking.”
Pepper, vivacious in a way she hadn’t been in a long time and without the tiny bit of tension by her eyes that used to accompany the smile she had for Tony’s impromptu parties, cornered Steve during cocktails and hors d’oeuvres before dinner, dismayed still by the news about Maya. “I respected her greatly as a strong, bright woman in a field that fears strong, bright women and tries to destroy them. She had great aplomb - has, I suppose, I shouldn’t use the past tense - and great wit and humor. And she respected me, which wasn’t very common among either Tony’s colleagues or the women he interacted with.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve said, meaning it.
“Me, too,” Pepper said, then clapped her hands on her knees. “And here you are with an empty glass and me with an empty plate. Let’s remedy both at once, shall we?”
The arrest of Maya Hansen for providing material support for terrorism was planned out like every other HYDRA raid Steve had been a part of, right down to cutting the power in her townhouse before breaching. Steve had dismissed the idea of taking her at work out of hand; there was too much damage she could do, including destroying Extremis entirely, before she was secured. The drive to and from FuturePharm was complicated by dense traffic patterns, so while a pre-dawn home invasion was not his first choice, it would have to do.
He asked for and received a female agent; his anger at Maya did not extend to unnecessarily abusing her dignity. They would be coming for her while she was in bed; Agent Sunohara could supervise Maya’s getting dressed and handle the other related tasks. His consideration was not rewarded, however. Maya was defiant, angry, and unrepentant.
“You are on the wrong side, Cap,” she told him as she was shackled after she’d put on her shoes and coat. “What emerges out of the chrysalis is going to be beautiful.”
“No it won’t,” he replied, nodding to Jablonsky to get their transport readied. “It will be ugly because that’s all it’s made up of. Death, destruction, and the madness of a few crackpots who think they’re gods.”
Steve left Jablonsky to take Maya back to the plane with most of the team, instead taking a detachment to join the unit of regular field agents that had been sent directly to FuturePharm to secure the nanotech unit in general and Project Extremis in particular. The company president, a fellow named Preston, was waiting nervously in his office with Gunderson, the field team leader, and had been cooperative and terrified, rightly concerned that his future and his company had just become the next victims of HYDRA and Maya Hansen. Steve apologized for this, but Preston was neither inclined to blame Steve or SHIELD nor able to take comfort in sympathy.
Gunderson’s team would be staying in Texas to be doing the real work - searching Maya’s home and office and dismantling the Extremis lab in a way that it could be reassembled aboard the Helicarrier for Tony and Bruce. As such, Steve made sure Gunderson had what she thought she needed for the job and understood that she could ask for anything else and be assured that she’d get it.
The flight back to the Helicarrier was quiet.
He made his report to Hill after depositing Maya in the brig and then changed and went home, not really wanting to be around the Helicarrier and the triumphant hum that coursed through its decks. Bringing in Maya hadn’t been a victory; losing her to HYDRA had been a defeat and this had merely staunched that bleeding.
Pepper had given him a beautiful Vietnamese cookbook the other month and while he’d enjoyed reading the stories and recipes and looking at the pictures, it had all seemed so foreign and complicated that he’d never made anything out of it. He pulled it out today, made lists of ingredients, and went to the Chinese market a couple blocks over to see what he could come up with. And then ate it with his chopsticks after taking a picture that looked like something trying to climb out of the La Brea Tar Pits because the caramel sauce tasted a lot better than it photographed. He spent the evening at his drafting table, sketching and then painting a street scene from his memories, Braun’s Grocery on Van Brunt (it was now a wine bar) with the piles of apples out front and the signs in the windows where all the prices were in cents.
He couldn’t avoid the Helicarrier for long, however, and Maya Hansen even less. He had no reason to be in on her interrogation and no desire to finagle an invite into either the session or the observation room, but he couldn’t stop Tony from talking about it when he stopped by to see how he and Bruce were doing in their newly upgraded lair. They’d gotten remote access to all of FuturePharm’s files before Steve and Maya had gotten back to New York and the physical files and samples and other contents of the bunker room had flown overnight and landed the next morning. The search of Maya’s townhouse had thus far not revealed anything of note, but the computer people were still going through her laptop and desktop and other electronics.
“She’s not an idiot,” Tony said when Steve asked how likely it was that any smoking gun would be found. “She’ll have all of it stored in the cloud somewhere, but there’s a point where everyone gets lazy and doesn’t erase their tracks as thoroughly as they should because they judge the likelihood of discovery to be much lower than the inconvenience of having to jump through the hoops to get access again. Also, she has consumer home internet and the telecomm industry tends to fold like wet paper in cases like this. So, yeah, they’ll get it sooner than later.”
Tony was adapting well to having to come to the Helicarrier daily; he was taking work home with him and Fury knew it, but keeping that from happening hadn’t been the point of the exercise, so nobody said anything. He’d brought his own preferred toys, had Marcel pack lunches for him and Bruce so that they didn’t have to eat commissary food, and had probably hacked the entire Helicarrier (again) because that was the only explanation for a few events. He was still energized by Extremis, but in a different way than he had been before Maya Hansen’s true colors had been revealed. He wanted to rescue it.
Steve thought Tony might want to rescue Maya, too, but he didn’t. He was angry with her, hurt and betrayed and probably a little cut by the exchange the two had where Maya told him that she wouldn’t take moralizing from a man who had lived as he had, squandered money and intellect as he had, and built baby hospitals to assuage the guilt of building bombs. (“I told her that she might have had a point on the first two, but she knew better than to try for the third. Not when she accepted my blood money to do research.”) But, as he’d tell anyone who’d ask, he’d mourned her at the wake and now he was moving on. It wasn’t that simple - couldn’t be that simple - but it was easier for Tony to pretend that it was.
“Dad talked about you a lot,” Tony told him over lunch the week after Maya had been arrested. Bruce had gone to Manhattan for a lunch date with an old colleague, so it was just the two of them. “But he also talked about Abraham Erskine a lot. They worked together so closely for so long and Dad respected the hell out of him, not only for his genius, but for his courage. And the fact that he was kind and good and had an unerring instinct about people, which is how you got picked but also how Dad got picked.”
Steve, mouth full of moussaka, could only cock an eyebrow.
“FDR wanted nothing to do with Dad, wanted him nowhere near the important parts of the war effort,” Tony began, spearing a radish. “They hated each other, lots of reasons. Dad kept trying to do stuff, get involved, and FDR rather infamously said that if Howard Stark wanted to fight Japs and Nazis, he could enlist as a private in the infantry just like everyone else. Which was why there were still Stark Expos after 1941 - Dad coming up with all sorts of new stuff just to spite the President, make him look petty for excluding the brightest mind in the country just because they hated each other’s politics.”
Steve, who’d heard versions of the story from Howard and others, nodded and swallowed. “I met Doctor Erskine at the Expo.”
He had always wondered at that little bit of serendipity.
“Erskine was there to see Dad,” Tony explained. “Which I think he did after he stamped your enlistment papers. Dad liked to say that he was the better recruit for the evening, but he didn’t believe it.”
Steve smiled. “Howard hid that doubt very well.”
“I’m sure,” Tony agreed with a roll of his eyes because, even now, so long after Howard’s passing, father and son had a complicated relationship. “But the bottom line is that he thought that you and Erskine were two of the greatest men he’d ever known and that losing the both of you were the two greatest individual tragedies of the war, not only for who you were as men, but what you represented as far as the future. HYDRA and the Nazis were all about strength and power and genius, but you two were that mixed with goodness instead of evil and were thus proof that power didn’t always have to corrupt. It was about as philosophical and maudlin as Dad ever got.”
He paused, taking a sip of what might not have been pure seltzer water, but Steve wasn’t going to challenge him on it.
“You and I both looked at Maya and saw someone following in Abraham Erskine’s footsteps,” Tony said, eyes on his lunch. “But she wasn’t. What Erskine ran from, she ran toward. And I don’t think you can forgive her any more than I can, but you’re not the vengeful type. I am. I want to take this from her and spite her with it by turning it into something amazing without having to make a deal with the devil to do so.”
Steve didn’t think that was all of it - Tony wanting to pay back HYDRA for using his tech was the elephant in the room - but he was willing to accept that it was most of it.
“I’m really okay with that kind of vengeance,” Steve told him instead.
Tony gave him a dazzling smile.
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
“Well that wasn’t so bad for East Oakland,” Ramos announced as he took a long draught from his water bottle. “Kind of ugly for anywhere else, but you gotta grade ‘em on a curve here.”
Steve grimaced agreement. A fair bit of the pre-mission prep work always focused on the environmental concerns, which in this case boiled down to having to stage a raid on a heavily-guarded warehouse in the middle of a crime-riddled neighborhood. The building, rented by one of Trident’s subsidiaries as both storage and a locus of their charitable efforts, was in an area the police had described in uniformly unflattering terms and had been the subject of several break-in attempts early on in its current incarnation, but upgraded security had made it a less promising target and it had been largely left alone since. This had been viewed by the police as a reasonable response at the time, but SHIELD interest in the building as a possible HYDRA location put a whole new spin on the tale.
“I don’t think this was what OPD had in mind when they warned us about the quantity of firearms in the area,” Steve said as he slipped the shield’s straps through his arms and shouldered it, shifting his own water bottle between hands to do so. Even with the doors open and the few windows blown out, the air was close and reeked of gunpowder with underlying notes of ozone and something chemical that made his throat burn. “They probably thought a few would be outside.”
They had been spotted on approach - it was impossible to do any kind of urban assault without witnesses, even in the dark of night - but there hadn’t been so much as a bottle broken in warning, let alone any kind of confrontation.
Ramos chuckled darkly. “Nah, they understood that the local criminal element would be so happy to see us take out this place that they’d grease our path. It’s bad for their business as cockroaches to have a bright light on all the time.”
Steve took another sip of water. “Speaking of the lights, where are ours?”
The problem with cutting the power to a raid target prior to the assault, of course, was getting power back on. Especially, in this case, when the actual lines had been cut.
“It’s a little early for rolling blackout season,” Ramos mused. “Five gets you ten Riccardi hooked the generator up backward again. Someone with an extra brain cell should go help him out.”
With that, he left Steve to survey the aftermath in a room lit only by the building’s emergency generator and the portable floodlights SHIELD had brought. The space he was in was the loading dock, complete with rolling corrugated steel doors and concrete trailer bays. Steve and three others had spent the first part of the fight pinned in the leftmost one because the blueprints they’d been working off of had been outdated, something there’d been no way to verify beforehand. Once the power was restored, they’d be able to roll up the gates and get some more fresh air inside, but for the time being, the only ventilation were the fire doors and a pizza-sized hole in the far wall from one of the blaster cannons.
The warehouse was supposed to be split between offices and storage; the former was for the charity and the latter split between the charity and VCTI’s business concern. How much of that was true and how much, like the blueprints, was just what VCTI and Trident had told the City of Oakland was yet undetermined. Nobody had gone through the building yet except to do a sweep for hostiles and then, with Saskatchewan very much on their minds, a bomb-sniffing dog. They’d found nothing, thankfully, but SHIELD was still using cell phone jammers just in case, with the added advantage that none of the growing crowd outside could take pictures or shoot video or, if one of the bad guys had escaped, report back what was going on.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Corrales coming up the ramp closest to him, two waters bottles in hand.
“How’s the wing?” he asked, accepting the bottle from Corrales, who’d been grazed by one of the plasma weapons. His right upper arm was bandaged underneath the flap of his body armor, which in turn was melted and singed.
“A lot better than the armor, thank God,” Corrales replied with a shudder. “I don’t think I’m going to be eating pork for a bit, though.”
A loud click that had Corrales reaching for his rifle and Steve for his shield, but then came the flicker of overhead lights. A few strobes later and they could finally see the room in full light, which made it both less spooky and far scarier than the shadows cast by the portable lights.
“Welp, you may not know when we’re coming, but you certainly know where we’ve been,” Corrales sighed happily as they surveyed the mess. With the overhead lights on, the overturned crates and blood spatter and smashed shelving told its own story. A good story as far as the good guys went, but not necessarily the one that they were most eager to hear.
“You ready to take a tour?” Steve asked. Corrales nodded, then radioed his XO, Pincus, to let him know that they were going to be moving toward him and not to shoot. Steve’s team had taken the rear and Corrales’s the front and they were mostly still local to those areas.
Casimir had just figured out how to activate the motor on the bay doors and so they waited for the noise to die down before telling Jablonsky, who was more or less Steve’s XO, where they were going and to radio Steve when Clint, who’d been up on the roof across the street, arrived.
Steve drained his first water bottle and tossed it in a somehow-still-upright recycling bin as they passed it.
The blocked-off path that had ruined Steve’s easy ingress into the loading dock turned out to be far from the only unreported structural change to the building. More than a year into chasing HYDRA, their secrets were far easier to reveal and so it was with the stairwell to a subterranean level that was absolutely not supposed to be there.
“Fuck,” Corrales spit out as they stood outside the doorway that led downstairs. “I’d have lost the arm entirely if that had been the payment needed to keep this from turning into another Detroit.”
Corrales had been in Detroit the night of the raids; he’d been with a combined unit of SHIELD and Detroit SWAT and they’d lost half their number in a single explosion and then five more on the exfil under fire.
Steve was pretty sure that there would be no one downstairs - they’d have come up during the initial assault - but he accepted a flashbang grenade from Corrales anyway and tossed it down the stairs to see if it provoked any kind of response. It didn’t.
He radioed Jablonsky and told him to send two men to their position to guard the entrance just in case; they’d explore in full later once they had more men free. The rest of the tour was mercifully anticlimactic, showing offices and storage space separated by temporary walls. The contents were mostly pedestrian stuff - office supplies, school notebooks and reading and math primers and tied-up stacks of pamphlets about medical care and free lunch programs, wire crates full of basketballs, boxes of baby formula that actually were boxes of baby formula.
And then they found the room full of boxes of Saplings, which were Trident’s smallest green-energy generators. (“From tiny beginnings, great things can grow.”) On the face of it, there was nothing wrong with this - Trident had been pushing into California’s energy market for a long time and had been using Stark Industries’ post-Triple Bombings fall to establish themselves even further. But these were still packed in their shrink-wrapped loading pallets and tucked into the bottom of one was a bill of lading with the port of origination being Shenzhen and the port of destination being Conakry, Guinea and no information whatsoever about being offloaded anywhere in North America, let alone the Port of Oakland.
Steve thought of Miranda, who’d made an extremely similar passage during her time as Operative Baker, from Shaanxi to Guinea-Bissau. She hadn’t stopped in California, had gone the other way around the world, on a cargo ship. But the coincidence was almost too strong and the lack of any way to build a connection frustrated him.
Clint found them there, whistling when he saw the Trident logo on the sides of the boxes. “Any chance they’re full of HYDRA tech?”
Steve tore the plastic wrapping on one pallet and opened one of the boxes. It was full of leaf-green parts, which was the hallmark of the Sapling, but Steve would be the first to admit that he wouldn’t know past that. Corrales and Clint readily confessed that they had no more of a clue.
“Still don’t know how they’re here,” Corrales pointed out. “Even if Trident or VCTI wanted to reroute them totally legally, you just can’t saunter into a US port and offload goods meant for somewhere else without paperwork.” He held up the paper. “This is not the packing slip that gets tucked inside, this is what you have to show Customs and there’s nothing on here for a North American offloading.”
In the end, it just became something else to report to Ops back aboard the Helicarrier, along with the discovery of the basement that they still hadn’t searched and the general state of the affair, which was that the building was secure and local LEOs were taking over perimeter security, allowing SHIELD to focus on the interior. The distant, tinny voice at Ops - Steve could hear bits of the conversation through Corrales’s fancy jammer-proof communicator - had nothing useful to say about the bill of lading except that they’d forward the details to the China and West Africa Desks and to the department that served as intermediaries between the rest of SHIELD and Operatives Able, Baker, and Dog, the three HYDRA moles who’d lived long enough to be safely extracted. (Charlie and Easy had been killed; there were at least three others still active but nobody knew how many or where.)
“You know, we can cut at least a dozen people out of that loop with a single call,” Clint said while Corrales was still over on the far side of the room, which had had better reception, talking with Pincus over the radio to organize the expedition downstairs. He gestured with his chin to the utility pocket where Steve kept his phone.
Steve shook his head. “It’s nothing that won’t keep for a few hours and I’m not going to put her at risk of exposure - or of Fury finding out if she gives us something actionable.” He’d have to get outside the jammer radius to make the call and there was way to do that or to make the call itself without witnesses. “They still want her very dead, preferably slowly and painfully.”
Clint nodded, accepting the answer. “But maybe next time you send her a picture of your beefsteak, you slip in a little something...” he trailed off, making a vague hand gesture.
“Do I want to pretend that I didn’t hear that?” Corrales asked, eyes wide and innocent. “Please tell me yes. I’m not sure I’m ready for Captain America sexting.”
Clint exploded into laughter and Steve turned away, blushing in embarrassment. When he turned back to explain, Corrales was smiling and held up a hand to stop him.
“I know there is a context that makes it all innocent and possibly even professionally relevant,” he told Steve. “But I don’t want to know what it is because this is much better.”
They left the room to return to the entrance to the basement, by which point Pincus had organized a detachment of troops to join them. They were mostly Steve’s team and he didn’t think this was the luck of the draw, not when Corrales gestured for Steve to lead the way. He’d been favoring his arm a little and had taken nothing stronger than an aspirin for what were probably some non-trivial burns.
The basement, thankfully, turned out to be just a basement and not the entrance into an underground city of tunnels and trouble. They found rooms that served as barracks and armory and chow hall and gym, but mostly the place was lab space, modern and well-lit and clean - and cleaned-out.
“Someone knew we were coming,” Jablonsky said from a crouch by Steve’s feet, holding up a latex glove with a pen before dropping it into an evidence envelope. “They cleaned out in a hurry, but they cleaned out.”
SHIELD’s forensics team would be going through the place anyway, so once they determined that there was nothing there that would lead them directly to another site either inside the city or close enough that they could get there right away, Steve and Corrales started the process of transitioning from active secure assault site to leaving it to the techs and the platoons of regular field agents who’d watch over them.
They made it back to the airport by mid-morning. As they were boarding the plane, Steve found Corrales, who was no longer able to hide how much pain he was in. “Why don’t you take whatever they gave you to knock you out,” he suggested, since while Corrales had stuck to the over-the-counter medication, he’d also undoubtedly been handed something much stronger. “Pincus’ll make sure we behave.”
Corrales smiled. “Pincus will asleep before we fold up the landing gear.” Steve cocked an eyebrow and Corrales gave him a one-shouldered shrug. “But you’ll do in a pinch. Thanks.”
“It’s awesome and I won’t hear a bad word said against it.”
Bruce shook his head at Clint. “You hate helicopters because you think they’re going to kill you, but you’re not only willing to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft, you’re eager to do so from an altitude that requires an oxygen mask and carries the real risk of freezing your balls off. How does that work?”
“I am a man of many facets,” Clint replied loftily. Next to him, Tapper snorted.
“Jumping out of perfectly good aircraft is actually a lot of fun,” Steve piped up. Across from him, Clint nodded at the wisdom displayed. “It’s the closest some of us get to flying.”
“If you want to fly, I’ll make a baby bjorn for the suit,” Tony offered, not looking up from the tablet he was doing whatever he was doing on. “You can be strapped in back or front, although you should probably ride in the back. Robin Hood over there can ride up front, I can see over his head no problem.”
“Who are you calling short?” Clint asked incredulously.
Steve smiled. It felt normal, this bickering around a SHIELD conference table. Something that hadn’t happened in a very long time in this configuration - still short a full complement with Natasha still not cleared and Thor back in Asgard - but it was better than it had been. Even if, Steve knew, they had not been brought together for any kind of good news.
Tapper had called all of them in turn to tell them that Fury wanted a meeting; Steve’s version had been ameliorated by a rundown of who’d been contacted and, ominously, how Steve thought Tony might take another chop in his still-rough seas. The answer was that it depended on how big the wave, but Tony had actually been out in the Iron Man suit twice in the last few days - Pepper’s suggestion - and while he wasn’t not drinking, he was drinking a lot less and interacting with the world a lot more. “Is this going to undo all that?” Steve had asked. “Because if it will, then I don’t care what Fury wants, I’ll make sure Tony’s unavailable.”
Tony had leveled out lately after a few weeks of extremes - the revelation of Trident’s duplicity had brought a high, Stark Industries being named in another lawsuit related to the Triple Bombings had brought an episode of deep despair and an ER trip, the official public connection of VCTI and Trident to a HYDRA base in Oakland had brought another high, a fight with Pepper had threatened another low - and Steve was determined to make sure that this steady (steadier) path continued. Fury’s primary concern wasn’t Tony’s health, which was unpleasant to think about but as it should be. That didn’t mean that it shouldn’t be a consideration.
Tapper, who kept abreast of Tony’s status surprisingly well, assured Steve that while this would not go down easy for any of them, he didn’t think it would cause a lasting problem. “And if I’m wrong, then know that this wasn’t a decision made lightly: this is that important.”
Hill showed up, yawning as she sat down next to Tapper, and kept her attention on her coffee mug and tablet. The briefer, an analyst introduced as Spiegelman, came in next and did not sit down, instead setting up his laptop and the projector and then standing awkwardly at the front of the room. Spiegelman wasn’t a young man, but Steve supposed that even senior analysts got a little jumpy before briefing the top two people in SHIELD and then most of the Avengers.
Fury stormed in five minutes after the meeting was supposed to have begun, one of his assistants - he had a varying pool of aides who reported to Hsiang - in tow carrying a sheaf of papers.
“Let’s get on with this,” Fury growled.
“We finished processing the forensic evidence from Oakland last week,” Spiegelman began, nervousness gone. “HYDRA’s sanitizing efforts minimized the quantity and quality of what we were able to recover, but they did leave us enough to work with.”
What followed was a swift and understandable overview of what had been found and why it mattered or did not. There were a couple of theories about why the Saplings had been present, one of which was the more benign black marketing scenario and the other had SHIELD liaising with several federal agencies to investigate the Port of Oakland.
“We also know how they knew to clear out in the first place,” Spiegelman went on, since he could tell, as could Steve, that Fury was about to ask. “We told them.”
The screen changed from a schematic of the Oakland site - a real one, not the faulty ones that had been used to plan the raids - to a photo of Maya Hansen.
“Doctor Maya Hansen, head of FuturePharm’s nanotechnology unit, for those of you who did not already know,” Spiegelman said. “Her fingerprints and DNA were found onsite, in the basement laboratories.”
Steve took a moment to let the shock roll through him before looking over at Tony, who was still frozen, and then over at Bruce, who looked back at him with wide, surprised eyes. Steve didn’t know what his own face showed; he felt it in the pit of his stomach that Maya, sarcastic, brilliant, so eager to help improve life for people Maya, was working for HYDRA. How could she justify that? The same way the professors and scientists and celebrities on the petitions did, with their ends-justify-the-means, can’t-make-an-omelet-without-cracking-a-few-eggs false chagrin that their beautiful utopia would come at a brutal and expensive cost? Maya wouldn’t be the first or the hundredth otherwise smart person who’d accepted HYDRA’s false promises despite evidence and history showing them otherwise, but he’d almost have preferred it if she hadn’t lied to them about it.
“Are you sure?” Bruce asked, rubbing his jaw with his hand. “This wasn’t a plant or a lab error?”
Spiegelman, to his credit, recognized the critical tone for what it was and did not get defensive. “We’re sure. I’ll be happy to provide all supporting documentation for-“
“She gave them Extremis,” Tony said, still sounding dazed. “She gave HYDRA Extremis.”
There was a silent pause then, a collective moment to appreciate the impact of what this meant - and what it could mean.
“Very probably,” Spiegelman agreed. “We’re still reconstructing her true history, but involvement with HYDRA seems to predate the Extremis project - at least the government contract. So, yes.”
Tony leaned forward and addressed himself to Fury. “I need to see everything on this, everything the DoD has, everything FuturePharm has, everything she has socked away on flash drives hidden in her lingerie drawer. I need to know how close she is. Please.”
Fury, sitting impassively, didn’t give anything away, but Tony didn’t give him a chance to refuse.
“Extremis will work,” he pressed on. “And it will work a lot faster without the safety straps of ethics and regulations holding it back. HYDRA will kill thousands making this work. And then we’ll be screwed because it will work brilliantly. It’s the perfect cheat code for this game of empires Schmidt is playing. They won’t need the killer robots or giant spiders or mecha cockroaches. They’ll have an army of endlessly customizable cannon fodder, led by the Red Skull, back and better than ever and effectively immortal.
“I need to see how it works so that I can figure out how break it. You don’t have anything in your arsenal that can stop this. Other than me.”
Everyone’s eyes were on Fury and Tony.
“The DoD has already given us all of the project files,” Fury said. “We’ll get the rest when we apprehend Hansen. You’ll have access to whatever you need. On the condition that you work here.”
Tony shook his head as he sat back. “I’d rather-“
“You have been on restricted clearance since the week after the Triple Bombings,” Fury cut him off, voice calm. “Which you have not even noticed because you’ve been in an alcoholic stupor for almost all of that time. You will work here precisely because it’s less convenient and less comfortable and because it guarantees me at least a few hours of sobriety. Which you cannot offer me in any other environment. Our understanding still holds, Stark: you’re here because I need you, not because I trust you.”
Tony looked like he wasn’t sure whether to storm off or escalate the argument, hurt and angry both. Steve felt for him, but he understood Fury’s reasoning. Tony worked best at home, but that usually involved a tumbler full of something at his elbow and sometimes a whole bottle. Sometimes more, especially when he was upset or frustrated by his lack of progress and he would be both with this. Tony had been trying to reverse-engineer what little Maya had shown him of the Extremis project since they’d gotten back from Austin and he’d been stymied, alternately impressed and outraged at being outsmarted (“don’t say it like that”) by a colleague he’d always respected but never considered quite his peer. Tony didn’t think he had true peers.
Steve caught motion out of the corner of his eye and looked over at Bruce, who was shifting in his seat; he wasn’t sure if Bruce was uncomfortable and upset or preparing to enter the fray and, if it was the former, whether someone needed to intercede before the Other Guy showed up. Fury’s words had been aimed at Tony, but they’d long applied to Bruce and while Bruce would occasionally joke about it, nobody would ever confuse that with his actually being amused.
“We’ll work here,” Bruce finally said and Steve relaxed minutely. “We’ll need a couple of analysts for grunt work and some more processing power than what I’ve got in my lab.”
“You already have enough to take over most governments,” Fury replied, but not in a challenging way. “Make up a list.”
Tony wasn’t quite ready to concede, his eyes still burning with the need to defend himself - or at least get the last word in.
“Throw in a couple of real chairs,” Steve told Bruce. Tony’s attention flicked over to him and Steve could see that Tony knew exactly what Steve was doing, didn’t particularly care for it, but wasn’t going to challenge him, too. “Ones with backs and padding that aren’t those weird kneeling things you like.”
“You’re not going to be sitting around much, Cap,” Hill warned. “You’re leading the mission to bring in Hansen and you’re still going to Venezuela next week.”
Steve nodded, relieved. He’d have asked to be in on it if he hadn’t been assigned the mission; he didn’t need to lead it, but he needed to be there. To look her in the eye and take back in anger what he’d offered in gratitude.
“I’d like to go, too,” Tony said, making it sound like less of a demand than it could have been. Tony Stark didn’t beg or plead, but he could drop the imperious tone and the effect, if he chose, could be almost the same. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do to clear Iron Man for active duty.”
Fury shook his head no. “I understand the personal stakes, Stark, but you can’t go for the same reason you can’t be close to any of the other Trident-related ops. Everything you touch in public becomes tainted by the insinuation that SHIELD is acting as a proxy in the war between Trident and Stark Industries. I will not have our effectiveness hampered because we are fighting rumors as well as enemies. I will not allow our integrity to be questioned.”
Tony exhaled slowly, accepting the reasoning, as he had before, but not liking it. “Can I talk to her once she’s in-house?”
Fury gave him a smile that Steve thought wicked. “Absolutely.”
Spiegelman, forgotten during the confrontation between Fury and Tony, continued his briefing after a ‘get on with it’ gesture from Hill. The rest of the details were somewhat anticlimactic and mostly were a list of the various ways Maya Hansen’s life was being deconstructed. It was over in twenty minutes because Fury had somewhere else to be and swept out again, aide in his wake, and Hill told Spiegelman to wrap it up.
“Apparently she’s not as creeped out by Tarleton as she said she was,” Bruce mused once it was the four of them again, Tapper racing off because his phone had sixteen messages on it in the half-hour it had been off during the meeting. (“This had better not be something you guys did,” he’d warned as he’d fled.)
“Apparently she’s not a lot of things she said she was,” Clint retorted. He’d been the only one not to have met Maya before; he’d been aware of Tony’s joining the trip to Austin, but hadn’t been too interested in the details beyond what Maya was like once Steve had told him it was a science thing where everyone had talked funny but somehow it was all still English.
“I didn’t think I’d ever know someone who fell for this crap,” Tony said, still sounding a little shocky and distracted.
“You know lots of people who have fallen for this crap,” Bruce pointed out. “You’ve met almost every single name on every single petition that circulates in the academic and corporate worlds. You’ve fired people for signing those petitions.”
Tony shook his head. “I haven’t fired anyone personally in years,” he said. “And the people who sign those petitions are morons not worth my time remembering who they are. But Maya was worth knowing. She was someone I was happy to know and you cannot imagine how small that category is. Pepper is going to be crushed.”
“Pepper liked her?” Steve prompted, because after the last several months, he’d developed a very good sense of what Tony’s edge of true despair looked like. And today, of all days, when Tony had sworn good behavior for the right reasons, Steve didn’t want Tony dancing close enough to that edge to fall in.
Tony lost the unfocused look and beamed. “Pepper loved her. She used to write down and commit to memory all of the different ways Maya used to shoot down my attempts to get her back into bed.”
Steve didn’t think Tony saw Bruce indicate to Clint that Clint owed him five dollars.
“You’ll be okay with this?” he asked instead, since this was going to be coming up.
“I’m going to have a small wake for the death of a friendship,” Tony replied, not misinterpreting the question but choosing not to make anything of it, which was its own (good enough) answer. “And you are all welcome to join me. But then I am going to start working on destroying Maya Hansen and everything she thinks she stands for because I refuse to allow such a brilliant, brilliant idea as Extremis to be lost.”
He looked Steve straight in the eye. “I’m done being a victim. It’s boring. Maya Hansen could have changed the world for good. I’m going to make sure she doesn’t change it for evil and then I’m going to do with Extremis what she should have done in the first place.”
Steve nodded once, acknowledging the spoken answer and the unspoken one.
“Is there going to be food at this wake?” Clint asked. “Because I could eat.”
“In great quantity and variety,” Tony assured. “And we can even lay in a six-pack of that tooth-cracker of an IPA that you insist on drinking.”
Pepper, vivacious in a way she hadn’t been in a long time and without the tiny bit of tension by her eyes that used to accompany the smile she had for Tony’s impromptu parties, cornered Steve during cocktails and hors d’oeuvres before dinner, dismayed still by the news about Maya. “I respected her greatly as a strong, bright woman in a field that fears strong, bright women and tries to destroy them. She had great aplomb - has, I suppose, I shouldn’t use the past tense - and great wit and humor. And she respected me, which wasn’t very common among either Tony’s colleagues or the women he interacted with.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve said, meaning it.
“Me, too,” Pepper said, then clapped her hands on her knees. “And here you are with an empty glass and me with an empty plate. Let’s remedy both at once, shall we?”
The arrest of Maya Hansen for providing material support for terrorism was planned out like every other HYDRA raid Steve had been a part of, right down to cutting the power in her townhouse before breaching. Steve had dismissed the idea of taking her at work out of hand; there was too much damage she could do, including destroying Extremis entirely, before she was secured. The drive to and from FuturePharm was complicated by dense traffic patterns, so while a pre-dawn home invasion was not his first choice, it would have to do.
He asked for and received a female agent; his anger at Maya did not extend to unnecessarily abusing her dignity. They would be coming for her while she was in bed; Agent Sunohara could supervise Maya’s getting dressed and handle the other related tasks. His consideration was not rewarded, however. Maya was defiant, angry, and unrepentant.
“You are on the wrong side, Cap,” she told him as she was shackled after she’d put on her shoes and coat. “What emerges out of the chrysalis is going to be beautiful.”
“No it won’t,” he replied, nodding to Jablonsky to get their transport readied. “It will be ugly because that’s all it’s made up of. Death, destruction, and the madness of a few crackpots who think they’re gods.”
Steve left Jablonsky to take Maya back to the plane with most of the team, instead taking a detachment to join the unit of regular field agents that had been sent directly to FuturePharm to secure the nanotech unit in general and Project Extremis in particular. The company president, a fellow named Preston, was waiting nervously in his office with Gunderson, the field team leader, and had been cooperative and terrified, rightly concerned that his future and his company had just become the next victims of HYDRA and Maya Hansen. Steve apologized for this, but Preston was neither inclined to blame Steve or SHIELD nor able to take comfort in sympathy.
Gunderson’s team would be staying in Texas to be doing the real work - searching Maya’s home and office and dismantling the Extremis lab in a way that it could be reassembled aboard the Helicarrier for Tony and Bruce. As such, Steve made sure Gunderson had what she thought she needed for the job and understood that she could ask for anything else and be assured that she’d get it.
The flight back to the Helicarrier was quiet.
He made his report to Hill after depositing Maya in the brig and then changed and went home, not really wanting to be around the Helicarrier and the triumphant hum that coursed through its decks. Bringing in Maya hadn’t been a victory; losing her to HYDRA had been a defeat and this had merely staunched that bleeding.
Pepper had given him a beautiful Vietnamese cookbook the other month and while he’d enjoyed reading the stories and recipes and looking at the pictures, it had all seemed so foreign and complicated that he’d never made anything out of it. He pulled it out today, made lists of ingredients, and went to the Chinese market a couple blocks over to see what he could come up with. And then ate it with his chopsticks after taking a picture that looked like something trying to climb out of the La Brea Tar Pits because the caramel sauce tasted a lot better than it photographed. He spent the evening at his drafting table, sketching and then painting a street scene from his memories, Braun’s Grocery on Van Brunt (it was now a wine bar) with the piles of apples out front and the signs in the windows where all the prices were in cents.
He couldn’t avoid the Helicarrier for long, however, and Maya Hansen even less. He had no reason to be in on her interrogation and no desire to finagle an invite into either the session or the observation room, but he couldn’t stop Tony from talking about it when he stopped by to see how he and Bruce were doing in their newly upgraded lair. They’d gotten remote access to all of FuturePharm’s files before Steve and Maya had gotten back to New York and the physical files and samples and other contents of the bunker room had flown overnight and landed the next morning. The search of Maya’s townhouse had thus far not revealed anything of note, but the computer people were still going through her laptop and desktop and other electronics.
“She’s not an idiot,” Tony said when Steve asked how likely it was that any smoking gun would be found. “She’ll have all of it stored in the cloud somewhere, but there’s a point where everyone gets lazy and doesn’t erase their tracks as thoroughly as they should because they judge the likelihood of discovery to be much lower than the inconvenience of having to jump through the hoops to get access again. Also, she has consumer home internet and the telecomm industry tends to fold like wet paper in cases like this. So, yeah, they’ll get it sooner than later.”
Tony was adapting well to having to come to the Helicarrier daily; he was taking work home with him and Fury knew it, but keeping that from happening hadn’t been the point of the exercise, so nobody said anything. He’d brought his own preferred toys, had Marcel pack lunches for him and Bruce so that they didn’t have to eat commissary food, and had probably hacked the entire Helicarrier (again) because that was the only explanation for a few events. He was still energized by Extremis, but in a different way than he had been before Maya Hansen’s true colors had been revealed. He wanted to rescue it.
Steve thought Tony might want to rescue Maya, too, but he didn’t. He was angry with her, hurt and betrayed and probably a little cut by the exchange the two had where Maya told him that she wouldn’t take moralizing from a man who had lived as he had, squandered money and intellect as he had, and built baby hospitals to assuage the guilt of building bombs. (“I told her that she might have had a point on the first two, but she knew better than to try for the third. Not when she accepted my blood money to do research.”) But, as he’d tell anyone who’d ask, he’d mourned her at the wake and now he was moving on. It wasn’t that simple - couldn’t be that simple - but it was easier for Tony to pretend that it was.
“Dad talked about you a lot,” Tony told him over lunch the week after Maya had been arrested. Bruce had gone to Manhattan for a lunch date with an old colleague, so it was just the two of them. “But he also talked about Abraham Erskine a lot. They worked together so closely for so long and Dad respected the hell out of him, not only for his genius, but for his courage. And the fact that he was kind and good and had an unerring instinct about people, which is how you got picked but also how Dad got picked.”
Steve, mouth full of moussaka, could only cock an eyebrow.
“FDR wanted nothing to do with Dad, wanted him nowhere near the important parts of the war effort,” Tony began, spearing a radish. “They hated each other, lots of reasons. Dad kept trying to do stuff, get involved, and FDR rather infamously said that if Howard Stark wanted to fight Japs and Nazis, he could enlist as a private in the infantry just like everyone else. Which was why there were still Stark Expos after 1941 - Dad coming up with all sorts of new stuff just to spite the President, make him look petty for excluding the brightest mind in the country just because they hated each other’s politics.”
Steve, who’d heard versions of the story from Howard and others, nodded and swallowed. “I met Doctor Erskine at the Expo.”
He had always wondered at that little bit of serendipity.
“Erskine was there to see Dad,” Tony explained. “Which I think he did after he stamped your enlistment papers. Dad liked to say that he was the better recruit for the evening, but he didn’t believe it.”
Steve smiled. “Howard hid that doubt very well.”
“I’m sure,” Tony agreed with a roll of his eyes because, even now, so long after Howard’s passing, father and son had a complicated relationship. “But the bottom line is that he thought that you and Erskine were two of the greatest men he’d ever known and that losing the both of you were the two greatest individual tragedies of the war, not only for who you were as men, but what you represented as far as the future. HYDRA and the Nazis were all about strength and power and genius, but you two were that mixed with goodness instead of evil and were thus proof that power didn’t always have to corrupt. It was about as philosophical and maudlin as Dad ever got.”
He paused, taking a sip of what might not have been pure seltzer water, but Steve wasn’t going to challenge him on it.
“You and I both looked at Maya and saw someone following in Abraham Erskine’s footsteps,” Tony said, eyes on his lunch. “But she wasn’t. What Erskine ran from, she ran toward. And I don’t think you can forgive her any more than I can, but you’re not the vengeful type. I am. I want to take this from her and spite her with it by turning it into something amazing without having to make a deal with the devil to do so.”
Steve didn’t think that was all of it - Tony wanting to pay back HYDRA for using his tech was the elephant in the room - but he was willing to accept that it was most of it.
“I’m really okay with that kind of vengeance,” Steve told him instead.
Tony gave him a dazzling smile.