Freezer Burn (50/50)
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
Natasha materialized at his side as he left the re-energized battle behind him. “You’re not the only one who has ghosts to hunt down in this house of horrors.”
She had picked up a pair of HYDRA blaster rifles in the tank room and given one to him and they made their way quickly down the hallway, knocking down anyone who stood in their way. They were drawing larger crowds, clearly heading in the right direction but also farther from support, until they turned a corner and straight into a blaster cannon volley. Steve pulled Natasha behind him with his free arm and threw up the shield in time, but the force was so strong that it sent both of them flying into the far wall, him against her and her against the wall and he could hear her grunt of pain as they crumpled to the ground, surrounded by HYDRA troops wearing a very familiar red device on their left biceps: the stylized death’s head of the Red Skull’s personal guard.
It was yet another layer of jagged edges of past and present to rip open old wounds and create new ones. Seeing clones of himself lying helpless and innocent and dead, walking through the maze of old labs, worrying about his teammates and how many more SHIELD agents were going to die because of the absurd, awful game he and Schmidt had resumed after decades on hiatus.
"Been a while, boys," Steve murmured, although he knew it was loud enough for Natasha to hear him because she turned slightly. "I wonder how many of your grandfathers dreamt of this moment."
Because Schmidt's personal guards were not going to be recruits from Nepal or Macedonia or Chad; underneath the reflective face shields, Steve would bet much that they were good Aryan boys, maybe a little Argentine blood mixed in, but German-speaking and direct descendants of the HYDRA that had served the Reich. Schmidt wouldn't trust his protection to anyone who couldn't prove loyalty going back generations.
They were marched as prisoners down the corridor and past the blaster cannon, the first of three, and then another phalanx of the guard. Steve considered trying to make a break for it and knew that Natasha was considering the same, but decided against it because while he was sure that the guardsmen weren’t going to kill him, he could not say the same for Natasha and while she might not care, he did.
Also, it was much easier to get in to face Schmidt this way.
The room they were led into was large and brightly lit and freshly painted and yet it still smelled of old death underneath the new paint and the same chlorine-saline air as the tank room. There were guards, but past the guards was another clone tank - Steve couldn’t see if it was occupied and was a little relieved for it - and a pair of empty hospital beds, between which was a table upon which the Gundestrup Cauldron rested.
A man in a lab coat over a shirt and tie crossed the room behind the guards and Steve froze when he saw him. And when the man saw Steve, he froze, too, but only for a moment and then he smiled and adjusted his glasses.
“Captain Rogers,” Johann Schmidt greeted him warmly, like an old friend he had not seen in decades. “I’m glad you still recognize me despite the change in costuming.”
Natasha’d been fussing, but she stilled at the words. Steve could only spare a quick glance at her, though. Not enough to try to communicate, not enough to make sure that she was all right. Not with Schmidt standing in front of him after all of this time.
Schmidt approached them, walking with the same stride he'd always had. He was a fit man for someone who must be in his seventies, looking younger and energetic and the glasses seemed to be the only concession to time.
Steve breathed deeply through his nose, steadying himself. This shouldn't be disturbing; he was the same as he'd been since the serum had changed him and Schmidt was an old man. An old man surrounded by guards, but Steve had found himself in worse spots before. He'd voluntarily put himself in worse spots before. He'd gone up against Schmidt without any training or clue what he was supposed to be doing, wearing his USO costume and carrying a shield that couldn't even stop the rubber stage bullets without denting.
But it was disturbing. Scary, even. Possibly because he'd been in worse spots, because he had done this before and knew what Schmidt was about and what lengths he'd go to to get what he wanted and how much he enjoyed rubbing Steve's face in it. Ignorance was bliss, after all, and it was always harder the second time (and the third and...) to steel himself for this battle that he had always felt unprepared for. Because unlike Schmidt, he would not go to any length to win and they both knew that.
“Yes,” Schmidt said as if agreeing with Steve’s unspoken thoughts. “Time and fate have treated us very cavalierly, have they not? But I shall regain the upper hand, because it is my destiny, and you shall sacrifice yourself to help me, because that is yours.”
Steve forced himself to smile and shake his head. “Not this time.”
Schmidt looked at him indulgently, which in his current form made him look grandfatherly. Benign. “This time there will be no surprises, no mistakes, no loose ends that will unravel my plans. I have made the most of my lessons, Captain. I paid a very steep price to learn them. I did not understand the nature of the cube, did not appreciate the ultimate power I held in my hand - oh, I thought I did, but it was a time for hubris, was it not?
“This time, I have planned carefully. Patiently. Thoughtfully. The cauldron does not have the raw power of the cube, but it has instead a distinct function, one that can be understood and mastered. And instead of the meek, faithless Zola to assist me, I have the ambitious Tarleton, whose loyalty can be safely bought and kept. I will not fail this time.”
“I won’t let you win,” Steve gritted out. “I’ll stop you. We’ll stop you.”
Schmidt’s smile turned cold. “No, my dear boy, you will not. Because the most important lesson I learned is to make sure that you are dead before I begin. And because I know that despite the fact that you hold yourself apart - how could you not, surrounded by such lesser creatures? - that you do still draw them to you like moths to a flame, I will kill you in such a fashion that they will not even notice that the flame has gone to a different candle.”
Steve shook his head. “Everyone saw the cloning tanks.”
“Those everyones are going to die, too,” Schmidt replied, amused by his own drollery. “And then who will be left who would even be able to tell that you weren’t quite yourself? Virginia Potts, who will be grief-stricken by the loss of her lover and focused on saving his legacy? Peggy Carter, an old woman in frail health whose death nobody would even question so long as it appeared natural? You have made it very easy for me. You always have.”
Steve schooled his face to impassive, but he knew Schmidt could see that his words were making their marks.
A mechanical noise from the behind the wall of guards and Steve expected one of the AIM mechas to appear, but it both was and was not. George Tarleton looked nothing like the photos Steve had seen of him, not the early pictures from Stark Industries or the later ones from Trident. Tarleton didn’t quite look like a man anymore at all. He sat in a wheelchair that had no wheels, instead seemed to be a regular chair with repulsors, but what was so striking was his head, which was shaved and a metal plate attached to one side, like the back of Steve’s stereo back home with outputs and inputs and a tiny red light.
Next to him, Natasha bit off a curse.
"A clever solution to a terrible problem," Schmidt said as they watched Tarleton move around. He was initially hard to identify as a Parkinson's patient, his hands were steady and deft as they worked the machines around the beds, but then Steve could see the terrible tremors that made his legs twitch even in the braces they'd been strapped into. "A clever solution, but an imperfect one. He may have control of his legs or of his arms, but not both at once. His body is a prison, Rogers, more so than mine is to me."
Steve looked over at Schmidt. "Why don't you get him a new body to use? You've got the cauldron."
He meant it facetiously, at least in part, but Schmidt took it as a serious question.
"He has earned the reward," Schmidt admitted, "but he will not take it. He chooses diminishment and frailty and death. It's not a choice that I understand, but it is one I will respect despite its inconveniences to me."
Of course Schmidt wouldn't understand it, but Steve did. It's why neither Tony nor Bruce would make a different choice if offered to them: the sense of self, imperfections and all, was too strongly tied to the body. Even if those bodies betrayed them, even if those bodies actively tried to kill them. Steve didn't think either would admit the temptation was there -- they'd done their best to hide it when they'd first found out about Andreas von Strucker -- but he understood why they'd ultimately refuse. It was the same reason why sometimes he missed being the old Steve Rogers, the one without broad muscles or healthy lungs, who'd made his friends and his way on far different terms than how he had to conduct himself now.
"Why did you wait this long?" Steve asked. "To change bodies. You've known how to do it without the cube for decades. Why risk the infirmity of age or even death when you could have picked another twenty-something off the street?"
Schmidt smiled. "Are you fishing for a compliment, Captain? That you are worth the wait? You are, absolutely. You are as close as I could come to my old self and for that I would have waited even longer than I did.
"But the fact of the matter is that sharing a mind with someone is a difficult thing, something I did not properly appreciate when I was with the Strucker child. Andreas was a toddler when I moved in, he was weak and could not fight for control and remained subordinate to me throughout our association. Matthias, whose skin I wear now, was an adult, more or less fully formed, and not as pliable. The fight with him has never ceased. It has grown less tiring as the years have gone by, but it is energy I no longer wish to dedicate if it is no longer necessary. A clone -- of you, of anyone else -- provides me with space I will not have to share."
Steve shook his head. It was a reasonable answer to a question that was both practical and insane. "Will Matthias survive?"
Schmidt shrugged. "I don't see why not," he replied. "And now a question for you: where is the cube?"
Steve smiled. "You never figured that one out, did you? All those raids and you never even got close."
It had long been their only victory, at least once they recognized it as such: HYDRA had not only never found the cube, but they'd never even realized it wasn't on Earth.
"The visit to the plane, was that you hoping it was there or trying to scare us into moving it?" he asked. "It didn't work. The cube is beyond your reach. Even if you end up wearing my face."
Which was probably a bluff -- Thor had long made half-serious offers of visits to Asgard -- but not one he thought Schmidt could call.
Tarleton finished up whatever he was doing and the chair floated over to them. "We're ready," he said. "It's time to begin the process."
Schmidt, in German, gave orders to one of his guards to update him on the fight in the tank room and the location and status of the other Avengers.
Steve stole a look over at Natasha, who wasn't looking back at him. She was instead looking past him, behind him, to something or someone he couldn't see without turning enough to draw the physical attentions -- and rifle muzzles -- of the guards watching him.
The guard reported back that everyone was still in the tank room and that additional troops had been summoned to ensure this.
"Well then," Schmidt said, clapping his hands together once. "Let us begin. Doctor Chaudoury, please begin the preparation of the clone."
There was a noise that sounded like flushing water and Steve realized that they were draining the clone tank, but his attention was drawn to movement in the left corner of his peripheral vision, someone walking toward them. The person Natasha had been transfixed by.
Not transfixed, he saw as he watched her face. She wasn't surprised or shocked; she was trying to draw his -- and he was a he, from the height and breadth -- attention and make eye contact.
Finally, the figure drew close enough for Steve to make out that it was a man with shaggy dark hair in his face and his hands jammed into the front pockets of the hoodie he had drawn over his head. A well-armed man judging by the bulges under the hoodie and the pistol at his hip.
"{Why are you here, Yasha?}", she hissed as he came to stand behind them.
"{Why are you?}" he bit back, barely audible for all of Steve's enhanced hearing and the fact that he was a foot away.
"Yes, Yasha," Schmidt turned back from where he'd been watching the preparations that Steve still couldn't fully see through the forest of guards. "Why are you here? You are not needed yet. I appreciate the urge to reunite with your comrade, but there must be a precise order to things."
"{Fucking Nazis,}" Yasha muttered, but disappeared silently the way he'd came. Steve wondered if Yasha knew he was being literal.
"Friend of yours?" he asked Natasha, who answered with a tight grimace.
"Maybe once," she said sadly. "Maybe more recently than I realized. Maybe never at all."
Steve wondered who Yasha had been to her once. He hoped they both lived long enough for her to refuse to answer.
They waited, surrounded by guards and with Yasha somewhere behind them, while the cloning tank was drained and the body removed and dried and examined. Once Schmidt was satisfied with his future home, he told his lieutenant to take Natasha back to the tank room.
“Make sure everyone knows,” Steve told Natasha before she was dragged away. “Send someone to the surface so that Fury knows.”
Natasha looked to protest, to assure him that the Avengers would come for him, but he silenced her with a look. They both knew that there was no guarantee of what the Avengers would find when they got to him. This was the Monster Factory, after all.
He turned back to Schmidt once the door closed behind Natasha and her phalanx of guards. This was between them, had been from the start.
He hoped he didn’t look as scared as he felt. But he felt it, the fear, that this was how it would end. He’d never minded the idea of dying for a good cause - he’d never had a death wish, never gotten too reckless or taken his improved physical prowess for granted. He had never wanted to die, but he had wanted to be where he could make a difference and those places were dangerous.
He didn’t want to die here, in a Russian cave that was a legacy of a war he’d never seen, at the hand of Johann Schmidt for such a stupid, vain, reason as a madman wanting to live forever and rule the world. He didn’t want Peggy to have to be told once more that he was never coming home - or being visited by a Schmidt who wore his face but carried his own grudges against the woman who foiled so many HYDRA plans over the better part of fifty years. He didn’t wake up in the future to die because of unfinished business from the past.
“Bring him here,” Tarleton’s voice said - Steve couldn’t see him and didn’t know where ‘here’ was, but it turned out to be a reinforced A-frame, like the easel he had at home, except made of metal and with a supporting structure that looked like it was grounded in concrete. “Strip.”
Steve tilted his head. “Pardon?”
“Strip off your clothes, Captain Rogers,” Schmidt said as he came around the circle of guards and appeared in a gap between them at Steve’s right. “I will need them.”
He gestured that Steve should start with the cowl. Steve didn’t budge and Schmidt sighed.
“We can do this with or without your cooperation, Captain.”
Steve smirked. He didn’t feel like being cooperative, but if the alternative was to get killed and then stripped, he’d go the burlesque route. He started by unshouldering the shield, which for some reason they’d left him with even as they’d taken his firearms, and placed it gently on the ground at his feet. Then came the gloves, dropped inside the shield, and then the cowl, pulling it back and running his fingers through his hair on instinct to smooth it back down. It was enough progress to satisfy Schmidt, who disappeared again behind the wall of guards.
Steve unzipped the shirt and let it fall open, revealing the unit t-shirt he’d gotten from one of the 7th Special Forces Group ODAs he’d worked with during his missions in South America. He made to pull off the uniform top by twisting down to reach behind and pull at the left wrist with his right hand, but instead he dropped down and picked up the shield, kicking out at the shins of the guards and pushing out with the shield as the shock of his move radiated out. It quickly devolved into a rugby scrum because the guards were under orders not to shoot him yet, but then quickly ended because as well-trained as they were, Steve was better. He emerged from the pile, pushing off one grasping hand with his foot to go for the door. But he never made it because he’d launched himself directly into Yasha’s fist.
Normally a roundhouse punch, even a really good one, didn’t bother him too much. He’d feel it if the guy was big enough that putting his hips into it mattered, but mostly it stung and then stopped. Yasha’s did more than sting; it knocked him flat on his keester and made him feel for his teeth with his tongue, stunning him long enough for Schmidt’s guards to start pulling themselves apart and putting themselves together.
Steve sprung to his feet, peripheral attention on Schmidt’s guards and his primary focus on Yasha, who still had his hood up but held his arms loosely at his sides, ready to go. With his hands out of his pockets, it was easy to see that Yasha’s left hand was not flesh but a prosthetic and one made for rough stuff at that.
“That punch should have knocked you out,” Yasha said with no Russian accent whatsoever, which didn’t surprise Steve in the slightest after listening to Natasha switch between a dozen languages. That he had a Brooklyn accent maybe did, but there were hundreds of thousands of Russians living in New York City and most of them were in Brooklyn. Yasha might have been Red Room, or he could have been a guy Natasha knew from New York who’d been recruited by HYDRA. “It might have even killed you.”
Steve grimaced. “Hard head,” he answered, deking left and moving right and throwing out his shield arm to push Yasha back and away. The shield connected with a muted clang that could only be metal on metal, but Yasha did end up off-balance and Steve pushed harder, pivoting on his foot to get more access to the door. But Yasha reached out and got enough of him to bring him down again, half-throwing him to the floor. Whatever that arm of his was made of, it gave him tremendous strength and Steve pushed off his hands and knees, ready to leap for the door, but instead he was dropped back to the ground and the last thing he felt was the side of a metal hand slamming into the back of his neck and then nothing more.
“-not ready yet. It has to build up its charge; we can’t afford to use it prematurely.”
Steve heard voices but could not guess context. Couldn’t really focus at all, feeling sloppy and loose in body and mind, a dim memory telling him that this was what alcohol used to do to him before. He focused on his breathing, slow and steady and clear, full and easy and not the short breaths of an asthmatic in a polluted city. Not before. He tried to move his hands, flex his fingers, and found that he could do that but it made noise, a metal rattling and he forced his eyes open to look but closed them again because the world was too bright and too blurry and moving too fast. He let his head hang, not wanting to make the motion worse, not sure he had the strength to hold it up.
He was cold and his teeth were numb and he felt like he needed to puke, felt it rising in his chest and he let it come, knowing that this was the only way he’d feel better. He felt it splatter on his feet and it disgusted him, but not enough to try to move away. He wasn’t sure he could, hanging there like a soggy scarecrow, wretched and dizzy.
Voices, too far away to make out, and then water thrown at his feet. He opened one eye enough to see a mop moving, see that he was naked, and then closed it again because the world was starting to spin once more.
A hand grabbed his hair at the forehead and pushed his head back.
“Drink,” a voice commanded softly. A voice he recognized so well and obeyed automatically because Bucky was always looking after him, even now. He drank, accepting the first sip of water to rinse out his mouth and then spit, the glass returned to his lips so that he could drink more. “Not so fast, you’ll bring it right back up.”
Steve chuffed out a ghost of a laugh. Bucky’s “and I’m not cleaning up your sick a second time tonight” was implied and understood.
He finished the water, slowly, and a cloth wiped at his mouth when he did.
“If you want anything useful out of him before you kill him, you’re going to have to lower the dosage,” Bucky said. “It may be horse tranquilizer, but it’s for larger horses than this one.”
Steve opened his eyes again because why would Bucky say such a thing?
Bucky, wearing Yasha’s blue hoodie turned back to him, annoyed confusion on his face. “Who the hell is Bucky?”
On the other side of the room, there was laughter.
He knew he went back to sleep, although he couldn’t say how he knew that and he couldn’t say for how long, but when he woke up again, he wasn’t as wasted, although he’d never say he was close to sober and he still couldn’t move his arms or legs or body and expect to control the results. He was lucid, more or less, aware of his surroundings - trussed up naked in Schmidt’s procedure room, drugs being pumped into his arm - and that he was in the future-present and not the past he’d left behind. There was no Bucky - or Yasha, for that matter.
Schmidt was lying on one of the hospital beds, but Steve’s eyes were drawn to the other, where he - his clone - lay dressed in his uniform, the shield at his feet. Between the two beds was Tarleton and his chair and the Cauldron and tubes and some kind of computer and Steve half-remembered something about waiting and he chased the thought around in circles until he realized that the noise he’d been hearing wasn’t in his head but was instead real, a rumble that grew louder, loud enough for the glass in the room to tinkle and the walls to shake.
“We are collapsing the tunnels, Captain,” Schmidt said from the bed. “Many casualties, friend and foe, very sad. And one of those casualties will be you, burned beyond recognition so that they will need to use DNA to realize that you were just another Steve Rogers clone found crushed in the rubble.”
Another set of vibrations and the noise of distant thunder. Steve prayed that Natasha had listened to him, that she’d sent someone - he knew better than to think she’d go herself - up to the surface to raise the Helicarrier. He prayed that his teammates were alive, that Corrales and his men were alive, that Schmidt was just collapsing empty tunnels full of bad memories and nightmare fuel. He knew it wasn’t true, though. They’d never have left him behind, not if they knew where he was and what Schmidt’s plans for him were. He didn’t want more deaths on his hands.
A clang of something metal hitting the door had them all turning, but Tarleton and Schmidt didn’t seem all that worried and Steve couldn’t see that part of the room. Schmidt did dispatch guards, though, and Steve got a tiny bit of perverse pleasure out of Schmidt being maybe a little concerned.
“Another three minutes,” Tarleton said. “The temperature is rising much faster now.”
A louder bang from outside the room and this startled both Tarleton and Schmidt, enough so that Schmidt ordered one of the guards to set the dosage of Steve’s drugs to maximum, apparently unwilling to risk him breaking free. Steve only wished he was as much of a threat as Schmidt took him to be right now.
He watched the guard approach, willing himself to find the strength to do something useful with his arm and strike out, but all he could do was flick his hand uselessly at the IV line dangling just out of reach. He watched the dial be turned, saw the drip rate of pink-tinted solution go from slow plik to almost a steady dribble, and watched the pinkish fluid make its way down the line and into the arm he couldn’t pull away hard enough to dislodge the needle. He breathed deeply, trying to brace for the rush of the drug, but it washed over him like a tidal wave of heat and prickles and he felt swept off his feet, unsure if he was even still upright, if he was still whole and not blown apart at the seams.
There were more loud noises, but he couldn’t tell if they were his mind playing tricks or real. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open and it was so much easier to just sleep. He felt like he was underwater, surfacing long enough to breathe and then sinking again, and the sounds were all muffled and the lights were blurry and dim and far away. He thought he heard his name, but he couldn’t open his eyes or his ears and let himself fall back into the comforting, drifting numbness.
He felt something - someone - touching his face gently and he turned into it on reflex, wondering if it were Bucky back to watch over him while he slept.
“Steve. Steve. You have to wake up now. Where’s that annoying metabolism of yours?”
Not Bucky. A woman. Peggy? The words were right but the voice was wrong. He opened his eyes as much as he could, which was barely a slit, to see a flash of red. Natasha.
“There you are,” she said, holding his head up gently by his chin. “We took the IV out. You’ll be good as new before you know it.”
He nodded, since what she was saying required a response, but it was a couple of moments before her words fully penetrated and he understood. His eyes drifted closed again and he felt her rubbing her thumb along his chin.
“Stay with me,” she exhorted softly. “Stay with me.”
He took as deep breaths as he dared, trying to find his center again. He could tell that the drug was no longer being pumped into his system, could feel the mist enshrouding his thoughts dissipate slowly, but he had no strength whatsoever and no control over his body.
“Oh my god, this is the best scene in at least three different Captain America pornos!”
Steve blinked his eyes open again, unable to focus on anything but aware that there was a yellow and red mass in front of him. “Tony?” he asked, or at least he tried to; he wasn’t sure it came out at all.
“Stop ogling, Stark, and help me get him down,” Natasha ordered. “Commander, we’re going to need that bed!”
It wasn’t Tony who helped Natasha free him, but Thor, who ripped away the chains and cuffs that bound him with remarkable fury and remarkable gentleness and then slipped an arm under his shoulders and half-carried him to one of the hospital beds, onto which he collapsed gracelessly. He felt a blanket being draped over him.
“Rest,” Thor encouraged softly, patting his shoulder. “The battle is well in hand.”
Steve wanted to sleep, but knew he could not. There wasn’t much action going on in the room - Schmidt’s guards were either dead or subdued - but there would be so much else to do, here and elsewhere. His world had shrunk to this room, but that didn’t mean it had stopped existing elsewhere. He didn’t have his watch and had no idea of how much time had passed since they’d first come underground. It had been hours, no doubt, but how many?
His senses were back close enough to normal for him to function, but he still had to fight the urge to close his eyes and sleep and he felt rubbery and weak when he tried to push up on the bed with his arms. His uniform and underclothes and shield had been placed at the foot of his bed and he tried to fight off the memory of seeing the clone in his clothes on this very bed, but he also needed to get dressed.
He looked over at the other bed and was surprised to see Schmidt lying there, an arrow pinning him there by the shoulder. He was trying to work it free, despite the immense pain and Steve appreciated the determination, but he couldn’t let Schmidt get away - again - now.
“Stop,” he told Schmidt, his voice sounding too loud in his ears. “You’ll just make it worse.”
Schmidt gave him a look of impatient annoyance that clearly expressed how little he was worried about that - or about Steve, who was still not sure he’d be able to do anything but fall flat on his face if he tried to rise out of his bed.
“I double-dog dare you,” Clint said in a flat voice from the foot of Schmidt’s bed and Steve blinked in surprise because he hadn’t seen Clint approach at all. Clint had another arrow drawn, aimed right at Schmidt’s forehead. “You don’t want to know what kind of damage I can do from this distance.”
“Don’t,” Steve ordered. “Hawkeye!”
Clint turned his head, not moving the bow and arrow.
“Don’t let him give you an excuse,” Steve said slowly, careful to make each word understandable and not slurred. “He needs to live.”
Clint half-snorted, half-snarled. “What, so he can spend twenty years in a Supermax? I know what life is like in one of those and it’s more than he deserves.”
“Not ours,” Steve said, trying to push himself up to sitting and not succeeding. “He’s a Nazi war criminal. The Israelis would love to have him.”
What could be worse for Johann Schmidt than to die a weak old man in the custody of the people he’d helped to nearly eradicate?
Clint laughed bitterly and stood back, lowering the bow. He called for Casimir to flexicuff Schmidt to the bed in a tone that clearly implied that this should have been done already. Which was true and Casimir’s body language indicated that he knew it, even if he hadn’t personally been to blame for the oversight.
After another few minutes of resting, Steve tried inching upward again without the room spinning on him. It didn’t, so he wrapped the blanket around his middle and swung his feet off the bed.
“Just where do you think you’re going?”
Steve turned to see Corrales giving him a look that the four little Corraleses (“Corralesitos”) probably knew all too well. “I would like to put my clothes on,” he replied. He sounded very petulant to his own ears.
Corrales shook his head. “Lean back, I’ll push you out of a high traffic area, unless you want to put on a show.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just moving around to the head of the bed and steering it off to one side. He ended up having to help Steve with the dressing, too, which embarrassed Steve a little because he couldn’t untangle his feet and his briefs, but Corrales handled it with the patient humor of a father and left him alone to restore his dignity and his state of dress once he had his undershirt on.
Tony clanked over by the time he’d gotten his uniform shirt on, if not yet zippered, and was very carefully getting his socked feet through his uniform pants without rolling off the bed.
“Stand up,” Tony said, raising the face panel. “Trust me, I’ve got years of experience being where you are right now. Doing it that way only ends in sorrow and Pepper laughing hard enough to cry.”
Once he had his pants on and buckled - he’d only swayed hard enough for Tony to reach out to steady him twice - he asked for a sitrep.
“Who you see is who there is,” Tony said sourly. “We were having an old-fashioned battle of attrition out in the tank room; they just kept coming and never running out of ammo while we were running out of both ammo and defensible positions. Thank God none of them can even shoot fish in a barrel, which we were. Then the ceiling started falling in and that ended that show. Nearly ended us, but Thor’s hammer got us out of a tight spot - Ling’s got a shattered foot, but we got it and him out. We’d already lost five, though, and there’re probably half a dozen with moderate to severe injuries. Nobody’s litter urgent.”
Steve nodded, relieved that that didn’t upset his equilibrium further. “And if they were?”
“I could try to blast my way out of here,” Tony replied. “It’s what we’ll end up having to do anyway.”
Steve looked over at Schmidt, who was lying on the bed with his eyes closed. “Or we could just ask Schmidt or Tarleton; they were planning on escaping. Schmidt was, at least. They had to have a route out.”
“Tarleton’s dead,” Tony replied, lowering the visor again. “Barton put one in his circuit board a half-second before he put one in Schmidt’s shoulder.”
Steve didn’t have much of a reaction to that. He was disappointed, of course - Tarleton could have been useful, if he’d chosen to talk. He was Zola’s successor and Steve would have liked to think that he’d follow there, too, but maybe he wouldn’t have. Zola had been uncomfortable with Schmidt’s zeal and largely motivated by self-preservation; Tarleton’s reasons for following Schmidt had been different and they would have made it harder to break him.
They walked - slowly - back into the main of the room, past the twisted remains of the contraption Steve had been tied to and past Schmidt’s bed and Steve could see the aftermath of the fight he’d slept through. Almost all of the guards were dead; there were three sitting with their hands cuffed behind their backs and two more lying down with evidence of medical treatment. The place had been trashed, bullet holes and blaster burns everywhere, but Corrales’s team was doing its best to pack up what looked most important - computer parts, the Cauldron, containers of fluid that were clearly important but Steve couldn’t guess why.
“You find Natasha’s friend?” Steve asked.
Tony tilted his head. “What’s that a euphemism for?”
Steve frowned. “Nothing. One of her associates was working for Schmidt. They seemed surprised to see each other here,” he explained. “Yasha. He knocked me out with a titanium roundhouse, but I think he took care of me when I was trussed up.”
“You think,” Tony repeated.
Steve didn’t want to confess that in his drug-induced haze he’d thought it was Bucky, so he ignored the implied question. “You didn’t find anyone with a metal arm, did you?”
Tony couldn’t really shrug in the armor. “Not that I noticed.”
“So there has to be a way out,” Steve reasoned. “He found one.”
A sharp whistle from Corrales. “Everyone freeze!”
Steve looked over at Thor, who looked back at him questioningly, but the mystery was resolved a moment later when the rumbling from before was audible again. It was growing louder quickly and Steve wasn’t the only one thinking that they were about to have more tunnels collapsing, maybe on them or maybe just blocking their way out. If Yasha had gotten free, he might have set the rest of the demolitions. Or it could have been one of the HYDRA troops or simply gravity and a mountain resenting the shifting that had already taken place.
“Okay, everyone has ninety seconds to grab their shit and get ready to bug out,” Corrales ordered. “Alpha Team, you’ve got the bodyguards and the loot. Avengers, you’ve got Schmidt.”
It was a more even division of labor once Steve realized that it was probably going to be Thor and Tony who dug them out of whatever fell in their way.
“It’s the Hulk!” Gasmorgan called out from the doorway. “I saw some green.”
The Hulk could make things better or much worse, so Steve made his way - mostly steadily - toward the doorway to hopefully get his attention before he knocked the wrong thing down.
“Missing long time,” the Hulk accused when he finally found them. He poked Steve in the chest hard enough to make him stumble backward. “Fury thinks you’re dead.”
Steve smiled more broadly than he felt warranted. “Won’t be the first time. Do you remember how you got down here? Do you think you could show us how to go back out?”
The Hulk gave him a wary look. “You a clone?”
“No,” Steve assured. “The clone’s over there.”
He pointed inside the room and then had to step back because the Hulk wanted to see. Kiplinger gestured at the body bag at his feet. Steve understood why they wanted to take it, but he didn’t want to even look at the body bag knowing what was in it.
“Make new path,” Hulk rumbled, turning back to Steve. “You have too much stuff.”
With the Hulk leading the way, their parade back to the outside was much less tentative than the way in had been. There was nobody to shoot at and the Hulk obviated the risk of booby traps simply by being himself. There would be plenty to shoot at when they got outside, though. It was dark again, which this far north and this early in the year did not mean what it would elsewhere as far as time passing. SHIELD had a strong and visible presence within the facility’s perimeter, but it was by no means secured and there were open battles on both sides of them as they emerged from the hangar-like building that sheltered the cavern entry the Hulk had led them to. Nothing close enough to merit their involvement, however, so they made their way to the SHIELD tracked vehicle parked nearby. Natasha and Clint kept Schmidt between them, both to keep him from running and to make sure nobody shot him by accident or on purpose.
Steve didn’t have a radio, so it was Tony who ended up having to talk to Fury, which meant that the conversation was brief, sharp, and ended with Steve being ordered to accompany Schmidt to the Helicarrier on the already-dispatched quinjet - with the expectation that he’d be staying for a while. Tony was impervious to Steve’s demands that he tell Fury that that was unnecessary.
“Would you be listening if it were one of us?” Clint asked him wryly. “’I’ve been pumped full of enough ketamine to power the LA party scene for years, but I’m only stumbling a little now and I’m totally ready to go dodge bullets and blaster cannons.’ Please.”
Which was more or less what Fury said when Steve asked to be allowed to rejoin his team down on the surface. Fury had been waiting when the jet landed, watching silently as Steve led Schmidt down the ramp and presented him.
“Overdue, but not unexpected,” was Fury’s response to Schmidt. Then he turned to the unit of SHIELD troops and told the lieutenant to take Schmidt down to the brig. “Have the medical staff undo Agent Barton’s handiwork,” he added, since the arrow was still in place.
Fury demanded and Steve delivered a short version of events as he’d seen them, from the quinjet going down early to the Hulk showing up. He was missing chunks of the story - he’d been absent, either physically or mentally, for stretches - but he could elaborate on Schmidt’s plan to take his place.
“What was his end-game there?” Fury mused as they waited for the elevator. “He certainly wasn’t planning on spending the next twenty years leading the Avengers. Or was it just long enough to milk us dry and then disappear?”
Steve had wondered that, too. “You’ll have to ask him.”
“Herr Schmidt and I will be having many interesting conversations,” Fury assured darkly. “You, on the other hand, are stood down for the next three hours. You are going to report to Medical for rehydration and then bloodwork in case they were pumping you full of something other than tranquilizers. And then you are going to do whatever it is you want to do that is hopefully sleeping but will definitely not include finagling your way back down to the surface. If I find out that you’re trying to sneak down there, your stand-down gets bumped up to twelve hours and don’t think I won’t throw you in a brig cell, too.”
Steve got lost en route to Medical - he could rehydrate just fine with a glass and a water fountain and he was pretty sure that there’d been no poison in the IV drip. If there were, it would do its thing before the tests came back anyway. But he didn’t think Schmidt would want to kill him like that, hanging senseless in a corner of the room like a side of beef. He’d have wanted to do it personally, probably while wearing Steve’s own face, and with a weapon he could hold, like the daggers his guard wore.
Instead, he went to the Avengers’ team room and drank a couple of glasses of water and dug out his cell phone from his locker.
“Steve?” Peggy answered on the third ring, sounding like he’d woken her up and he realized belatedly that he didn’t even know what time it was here in Minyar, let alone working out the time difference for Philadelphia.
“We got him,” he said, his voice catching on the last word, forcing him to take a deep breath as the emotions welled up out of nowhere. “We got him.”
And then he started to cry, harder and harder until he was sobbing. This was news he’d waited seventy-two years to deliver and the cost of the delay, the weight of it, was crushing him. He’d lost his girl, his dreams of a happily ever after, his world and his sense of place within it. And then he’d woken up in a future where he had no purpose until his past came back to try to destroy not only what small peace he’d found in this time, but also what little bit of himself he had left from his own. He should feel relieved that this was all over, that Schmidt could do no more damage, but all he could feel was the ache of what had already been lost. And then selfish for that because so many had lost so much more; he was still alive to weep.
A few minutes and a small mountain of dirty tissues later, he was close enough to collecting himself that he could risk trying to talk again. “Sorry.”
“Oh, Steve,” Peggy sighed, fond and exasperated and he smiled, just a little. And then he had to wipe his nose.
Because she knew him better than anyone, she did not mention his outburst and instead asked him where things stood that he was free to call her. Which in turn forced him to confess that he’d been stood down and given orders from Fury which he was currently disobeying to various degrees. She told him that if he did not go eat something and take a nap, she’d be a much greater threat to him than Fury. He believed her wholeheartedly and said so.
She laughed, then sobered. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but this really is a case of late being better than never. This was so very necessary and it will save so many lives.”
He sighed. “I know. Really, I do.”
“You’ve already paid a terrible price for this victory,” Peggy said. “Don’t let him take any more. You did good today, Steve. Don’t forget that for a moment.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He went down to the commissary and grabbed one of the pre-packaged sandwiches and an orange and took them back to the team room because he really wasn’t in the mood for company. And then after he ate, he stretched out on one of the couches and closed his eyes and slept.
When he woke up, the room lights were dimmed and there was a weight on his shin that turned out to be Clint, sitting on the floor at the foot of the couch with his head against the seat cushion and Steve’s leg.
“Stop moving,” Clint murmured, not opening his eyes. “Stood down until 0600. Go back to sleep.”
But Steve didn’t, instead looking around without moving his legs. Natasha and Bruce were curled up on opposite sides of the other couch and Tony had commandeered the recliner (of course). Thor had his feet up on the desk and was sitting in the matching chair, head tilted back and snoring loudly.
Steve watched his team sleep for a few minutes, debating whether he could possibly get out of the room without waking them all before accepting that he could not. And that perhaps he should not because this was exactly where he belonged.
... and this is where the credits roll and I get to go HOLY POOP, PEOPLE, I AM DONE WRITING THIS STORY and say that, according to Word, it's around 196K words, and a little less by AO3's count, so anyone who bet the over on 200K just missed out.
Also, I get to thank aliciam publicly, because without her, I would have been a weeping ball of neurotic goo a hundred thousand words ago.
And I could probably list the restaurants referred to in this story, all of which exist except for the sushi place in Manhattan, but there are a ton of sushi places in Manhattan. But everything else is real and very tasty, although I admittedly haven't been to Don Peppe's since I was a little kid and there was still a bullet hole in the front window, but I go to the Greek place all the time. Because best food in NYC is in Queens.
.... and then, because this is a Marvel production, you all would still be sitting around waiting for the end of the credits. So, here it is:
Steve greeted Hsiang as he entered her domain, gesturing with his chin toward Fury’s closed office door. “Do you have any idea what this is about?”
Hsiang shook her head no. Just because she ordered around one of the most powerful men in the world like her own personal puppet didn’t mean that he couldn’t find ways of vexing her ascension to complete omniscience.
He’d gotten the phone call early this morning to show up at the Helicarrier, no uniform required. His first thought was that it would be something to do with Schmidt, since most of what he’d been contacted about since their return to New York had had to do with what SHIELD was getting out of Schmidt - verify this, does that make any sense, where did this happen, how did you know what this was - and this wouldn’t have been the first time he’d been called in because Schmidt had confounded them to the point of immobility. Schmidt wasn’t letting his physical captivity get in the way of a good time, not when he could cause so much havoc with a clever lie or a casual half-truth or, worse, with a genuine revelation.
The other alternative, that this was the prequel to another round of routing out HYDRA bases, was less likely because those tended to come through Tapper and weren’t in Fury’s office.
All of which was to say that Steve had no idea what was awaiting him when he opened Fury’s office door. But Fury and Natasha sitting at the conference table was not on the list.
“What’s this about?” he asked with false casualness as he sat down across from Natasha and next to Fury.
Natasha was in uniform, but her aspect was not one of impending professional business. She looked apologetic and that worried him more than being told he was going on some ridiculous and dangerous mission. Natasha was repentant about very few things - a list that did not include her back-channel work with Fury during her suspension from SHIELD - and Steve knew her well enough to appreciate what usually made the list. That meant that this was personal and there was absolutely no way that this would end well for him.
“Sit, Cap,” Fury commanded.
Steve didn’t want to, but he did.
“What have you two been lying to me about that you’ve now been forced to confess?”
Neither of them looked indignant, which was as good a confession as anything they might say.
“It’s not lying by commission,” Natasha began, stopping when Steve gave her a look. They’d already had this conversation once before, in Detroit, and he’d thought - hoped - that that had been the end of that. He’d never thought Natasha would be truthful and forthcoming ever more, but he’d hoped that they’d progressed enough that she’d save the real baloney for someone else. “I never lied to you about this, Steve. I didn’t share my suspicions, most of which sounded crazy even to me, for what I thought were good reasons. I’ve been fed so much crap my eyes should be brown and if I said something every time real life overlapped with those fairy tales, I’d have been put on permanent psych eval.”
Nobody leapt to fill in that joke, which spoke to how delicate this situation really was.
“Fine,” Steve allowed, since the distinction between lying out of habit and lying for benevolent reasons was not one he wanted to make. “So I’ll rephrase: what am I here for you to confess to, since that’s obviously why I’m here.”
Fury pulled a manila folder out from the pile at his left elbow, but left it closed under his right hand and did not push it toward Steve.
“Yaakov Stepanovich Yachmenev,” Fury began. “Known to the Widow as Yasha. Known to SHIELD Counterintelligence as Igor, the agent who delivered the files that burned her. Known to everyone as a Cold War urban legend called ‘The Winter Soldier.’”
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
Natasha materialized at his side as he left the re-energized battle behind him. “You’re not the only one who has ghosts to hunt down in this house of horrors.”
She had picked up a pair of HYDRA blaster rifles in the tank room and given one to him and they made their way quickly down the hallway, knocking down anyone who stood in their way. They were drawing larger crowds, clearly heading in the right direction but also farther from support, until they turned a corner and straight into a blaster cannon volley. Steve pulled Natasha behind him with his free arm and threw up the shield in time, but the force was so strong that it sent both of them flying into the far wall, him against her and her against the wall and he could hear her grunt of pain as they crumpled to the ground, surrounded by HYDRA troops wearing a very familiar red device on their left biceps: the stylized death’s head of the Red Skull’s personal guard.
It was yet another layer of jagged edges of past and present to rip open old wounds and create new ones. Seeing clones of himself lying helpless and innocent and dead, walking through the maze of old labs, worrying about his teammates and how many more SHIELD agents were going to die because of the absurd, awful game he and Schmidt had resumed after decades on hiatus.
"Been a while, boys," Steve murmured, although he knew it was loud enough for Natasha to hear him because she turned slightly. "I wonder how many of your grandfathers dreamt of this moment."
Because Schmidt's personal guards were not going to be recruits from Nepal or Macedonia or Chad; underneath the reflective face shields, Steve would bet much that they were good Aryan boys, maybe a little Argentine blood mixed in, but German-speaking and direct descendants of the HYDRA that had served the Reich. Schmidt wouldn't trust his protection to anyone who couldn't prove loyalty going back generations.
They were marched as prisoners down the corridor and past the blaster cannon, the first of three, and then another phalanx of the guard. Steve considered trying to make a break for it and knew that Natasha was considering the same, but decided against it because while he was sure that the guardsmen weren’t going to kill him, he could not say the same for Natasha and while she might not care, he did.
Also, it was much easier to get in to face Schmidt this way.
The room they were led into was large and brightly lit and freshly painted and yet it still smelled of old death underneath the new paint and the same chlorine-saline air as the tank room. There were guards, but past the guards was another clone tank - Steve couldn’t see if it was occupied and was a little relieved for it - and a pair of empty hospital beds, between which was a table upon which the Gundestrup Cauldron rested.
A man in a lab coat over a shirt and tie crossed the room behind the guards and Steve froze when he saw him. And when the man saw Steve, he froze, too, but only for a moment and then he smiled and adjusted his glasses.
“Captain Rogers,” Johann Schmidt greeted him warmly, like an old friend he had not seen in decades. “I’m glad you still recognize me despite the change in costuming.”
Natasha’d been fussing, but she stilled at the words. Steve could only spare a quick glance at her, though. Not enough to try to communicate, not enough to make sure that she was all right. Not with Schmidt standing in front of him after all of this time.
Schmidt approached them, walking with the same stride he'd always had. He was a fit man for someone who must be in his seventies, looking younger and energetic and the glasses seemed to be the only concession to time.
Steve breathed deeply through his nose, steadying himself. This shouldn't be disturbing; he was the same as he'd been since the serum had changed him and Schmidt was an old man. An old man surrounded by guards, but Steve had found himself in worse spots before. He'd voluntarily put himself in worse spots before. He'd gone up against Schmidt without any training or clue what he was supposed to be doing, wearing his USO costume and carrying a shield that couldn't even stop the rubber stage bullets without denting.
But it was disturbing. Scary, even. Possibly because he'd been in worse spots, because he had done this before and knew what Schmidt was about and what lengths he'd go to to get what he wanted and how much he enjoyed rubbing Steve's face in it. Ignorance was bliss, after all, and it was always harder the second time (and the third and...) to steel himself for this battle that he had always felt unprepared for. Because unlike Schmidt, he would not go to any length to win and they both knew that.
“Yes,” Schmidt said as if agreeing with Steve’s unspoken thoughts. “Time and fate have treated us very cavalierly, have they not? But I shall regain the upper hand, because it is my destiny, and you shall sacrifice yourself to help me, because that is yours.”
Steve forced himself to smile and shake his head. “Not this time.”
Schmidt looked at him indulgently, which in his current form made him look grandfatherly. Benign. “This time there will be no surprises, no mistakes, no loose ends that will unravel my plans. I have made the most of my lessons, Captain. I paid a very steep price to learn them. I did not understand the nature of the cube, did not appreciate the ultimate power I held in my hand - oh, I thought I did, but it was a time for hubris, was it not?
“This time, I have planned carefully. Patiently. Thoughtfully. The cauldron does not have the raw power of the cube, but it has instead a distinct function, one that can be understood and mastered. And instead of the meek, faithless Zola to assist me, I have the ambitious Tarleton, whose loyalty can be safely bought and kept. I will not fail this time.”
“I won’t let you win,” Steve gritted out. “I’ll stop you. We’ll stop you.”
Schmidt’s smile turned cold. “No, my dear boy, you will not. Because the most important lesson I learned is to make sure that you are dead before I begin. And because I know that despite the fact that you hold yourself apart - how could you not, surrounded by such lesser creatures? - that you do still draw them to you like moths to a flame, I will kill you in such a fashion that they will not even notice that the flame has gone to a different candle.”
Steve shook his head. “Everyone saw the cloning tanks.”
“Those everyones are going to die, too,” Schmidt replied, amused by his own drollery. “And then who will be left who would even be able to tell that you weren’t quite yourself? Virginia Potts, who will be grief-stricken by the loss of her lover and focused on saving his legacy? Peggy Carter, an old woman in frail health whose death nobody would even question so long as it appeared natural? You have made it very easy for me. You always have.”
Steve schooled his face to impassive, but he knew Schmidt could see that his words were making their marks.
A mechanical noise from the behind the wall of guards and Steve expected one of the AIM mechas to appear, but it both was and was not. George Tarleton looked nothing like the photos Steve had seen of him, not the early pictures from Stark Industries or the later ones from Trident. Tarleton didn’t quite look like a man anymore at all. He sat in a wheelchair that had no wheels, instead seemed to be a regular chair with repulsors, but what was so striking was his head, which was shaved and a metal plate attached to one side, like the back of Steve’s stereo back home with outputs and inputs and a tiny red light.
Next to him, Natasha bit off a curse.
"A clever solution to a terrible problem," Schmidt said as they watched Tarleton move around. He was initially hard to identify as a Parkinson's patient, his hands were steady and deft as they worked the machines around the beds, but then Steve could see the terrible tremors that made his legs twitch even in the braces they'd been strapped into. "A clever solution, but an imperfect one. He may have control of his legs or of his arms, but not both at once. His body is a prison, Rogers, more so than mine is to me."
Steve looked over at Schmidt. "Why don't you get him a new body to use? You've got the cauldron."
He meant it facetiously, at least in part, but Schmidt took it as a serious question.
"He has earned the reward," Schmidt admitted, "but he will not take it. He chooses diminishment and frailty and death. It's not a choice that I understand, but it is one I will respect despite its inconveniences to me."
Of course Schmidt wouldn't understand it, but Steve did. It's why neither Tony nor Bruce would make a different choice if offered to them: the sense of self, imperfections and all, was too strongly tied to the body. Even if those bodies betrayed them, even if those bodies actively tried to kill them. Steve didn't think either would admit the temptation was there -- they'd done their best to hide it when they'd first found out about Andreas von Strucker -- but he understood why they'd ultimately refuse. It was the same reason why sometimes he missed being the old Steve Rogers, the one without broad muscles or healthy lungs, who'd made his friends and his way on far different terms than how he had to conduct himself now.
"Why did you wait this long?" Steve asked. "To change bodies. You've known how to do it without the cube for decades. Why risk the infirmity of age or even death when you could have picked another twenty-something off the street?"
Schmidt smiled. "Are you fishing for a compliment, Captain? That you are worth the wait? You are, absolutely. You are as close as I could come to my old self and for that I would have waited even longer than I did.
"But the fact of the matter is that sharing a mind with someone is a difficult thing, something I did not properly appreciate when I was with the Strucker child. Andreas was a toddler when I moved in, he was weak and could not fight for control and remained subordinate to me throughout our association. Matthias, whose skin I wear now, was an adult, more or less fully formed, and not as pliable. The fight with him has never ceased. It has grown less tiring as the years have gone by, but it is energy I no longer wish to dedicate if it is no longer necessary. A clone -- of you, of anyone else -- provides me with space I will not have to share."
Steve shook his head. It was a reasonable answer to a question that was both practical and insane. "Will Matthias survive?"
Schmidt shrugged. "I don't see why not," he replied. "And now a question for you: where is the cube?"
Steve smiled. "You never figured that one out, did you? All those raids and you never even got close."
It had long been their only victory, at least once they recognized it as such: HYDRA had not only never found the cube, but they'd never even realized it wasn't on Earth.
"The visit to the plane, was that you hoping it was there or trying to scare us into moving it?" he asked. "It didn't work. The cube is beyond your reach. Even if you end up wearing my face."
Which was probably a bluff -- Thor had long made half-serious offers of visits to Asgard -- but not one he thought Schmidt could call.
Tarleton finished up whatever he was doing and the chair floated over to them. "We're ready," he said. "It's time to begin the process."
Schmidt, in German, gave orders to one of his guards to update him on the fight in the tank room and the location and status of the other Avengers.
Steve stole a look over at Natasha, who wasn't looking back at him. She was instead looking past him, behind him, to something or someone he couldn't see without turning enough to draw the physical attentions -- and rifle muzzles -- of the guards watching him.
The guard reported back that everyone was still in the tank room and that additional troops had been summoned to ensure this.
"Well then," Schmidt said, clapping his hands together once. "Let us begin. Doctor Chaudoury, please begin the preparation of the clone."
There was a noise that sounded like flushing water and Steve realized that they were draining the clone tank, but his attention was drawn to movement in the left corner of his peripheral vision, someone walking toward them. The person Natasha had been transfixed by.
Not transfixed, he saw as he watched her face. She wasn't surprised or shocked; she was trying to draw his -- and he was a he, from the height and breadth -- attention and make eye contact.
Finally, the figure drew close enough for Steve to make out that it was a man with shaggy dark hair in his face and his hands jammed into the front pockets of the hoodie he had drawn over his head. A well-armed man judging by the bulges under the hoodie and the pistol at his hip.
"{Why are you here, Yasha?}", she hissed as he came to stand behind them.
"{Why are you?}" he bit back, barely audible for all of Steve's enhanced hearing and the fact that he was a foot away.
"Yes, Yasha," Schmidt turned back from where he'd been watching the preparations that Steve still couldn't fully see through the forest of guards. "Why are you here? You are not needed yet. I appreciate the urge to reunite with your comrade, but there must be a precise order to things."
"{Fucking Nazis,}" Yasha muttered, but disappeared silently the way he'd came. Steve wondered if Yasha knew he was being literal.
"Friend of yours?" he asked Natasha, who answered with a tight grimace.
"Maybe once," she said sadly. "Maybe more recently than I realized. Maybe never at all."
Steve wondered who Yasha had been to her once. He hoped they both lived long enough for her to refuse to answer.
They waited, surrounded by guards and with Yasha somewhere behind them, while the cloning tank was drained and the body removed and dried and examined. Once Schmidt was satisfied with his future home, he told his lieutenant to take Natasha back to the tank room.
“Make sure everyone knows,” Steve told Natasha before she was dragged away. “Send someone to the surface so that Fury knows.”
Natasha looked to protest, to assure him that the Avengers would come for him, but he silenced her with a look. They both knew that there was no guarantee of what the Avengers would find when they got to him. This was the Monster Factory, after all.
He turned back to Schmidt once the door closed behind Natasha and her phalanx of guards. This was between them, had been from the start.
He hoped he didn’t look as scared as he felt. But he felt it, the fear, that this was how it would end. He’d never minded the idea of dying for a good cause - he’d never had a death wish, never gotten too reckless or taken his improved physical prowess for granted. He had never wanted to die, but he had wanted to be where he could make a difference and those places were dangerous.
He didn’t want to die here, in a Russian cave that was a legacy of a war he’d never seen, at the hand of Johann Schmidt for such a stupid, vain, reason as a madman wanting to live forever and rule the world. He didn’t want Peggy to have to be told once more that he was never coming home - or being visited by a Schmidt who wore his face but carried his own grudges against the woman who foiled so many HYDRA plans over the better part of fifty years. He didn’t wake up in the future to die because of unfinished business from the past.
“Bring him here,” Tarleton’s voice said - Steve couldn’t see him and didn’t know where ‘here’ was, but it turned out to be a reinforced A-frame, like the easel he had at home, except made of metal and with a supporting structure that looked like it was grounded in concrete. “Strip.”
Steve tilted his head. “Pardon?”
“Strip off your clothes, Captain Rogers,” Schmidt said as he came around the circle of guards and appeared in a gap between them at Steve’s right. “I will need them.”
He gestured that Steve should start with the cowl. Steve didn’t budge and Schmidt sighed.
“We can do this with or without your cooperation, Captain.”
Steve smirked. He didn’t feel like being cooperative, but if the alternative was to get killed and then stripped, he’d go the burlesque route. He started by unshouldering the shield, which for some reason they’d left him with even as they’d taken his firearms, and placed it gently on the ground at his feet. Then came the gloves, dropped inside the shield, and then the cowl, pulling it back and running his fingers through his hair on instinct to smooth it back down. It was enough progress to satisfy Schmidt, who disappeared again behind the wall of guards.
Steve unzipped the shirt and let it fall open, revealing the unit t-shirt he’d gotten from one of the 7th Special Forces Group ODAs he’d worked with during his missions in South America. He made to pull off the uniform top by twisting down to reach behind and pull at the left wrist with his right hand, but instead he dropped down and picked up the shield, kicking out at the shins of the guards and pushing out with the shield as the shock of his move radiated out. It quickly devolved into a rugby scrum because the guards were under orders not to shoot him yet, but then quickly ended because as well-trained as they were, Steve was better. He emerged from the pile, pushing off one grasping hand with his foot to go for the door. But he never made it because he’d launched himself directly into Yasha’s fist.
Normally a roundhouse punch, even a really good one, didn’t bother him too much. He’d feel it if the guy was big enough that putting his hips into it mattered, but mostly it stung and then stopped. Yasha’s did more than sting; it knocked him flat on his keester and made him feel for his teeth with his tongue, stunning him long enough for Schmidt’s guards to start pulling themselves apart and putting themselves together.
Steve sprung to his feet, peripheral attention on Schmidt’s guards and his primary focus on Yasha, who still had his hood up but held his arms loosely at his sides, ready to go. With his hands out of his pockets, it was easy to see that Yasha’s left hand was not flesh but a prosthetic and one made for rough stuff at that.
“That punch should have knocked you out,” Yasha said with no Russian accent whatsoever, which didn’t surprise Steve in the slightest after listening to Natasha switch between a dozen languages. That he had a Brooklyn accent maybe did, but there were hundreds of thousands of Russians living in New York City and most of them were in Brooklyn. Yasha might have been Red Room, or he could have been a guy Natasha knew from New York who’d been recruited by HYDRA. “It might have even killed you.”
Steve grimaced. “Hard head,” he answered, deking left and moving right and throwing out his shield arm to push Yasha back and away. The shield connected with a muted clang that could only be metal on metal, but Yasha did end up off-balance and Steve pushed harder, pivoting on his foot to get more access to the door. But Yasha reached out and got enough of him to bring him down again, half-throwing him to the floor. Whatever that arm of his was made of, it gave him tremendous strength and Steve pushed off his hands and knees, ready to leap for the door, but instead he was dropped back to the ground and the last thing he felt was the side of a metal hand slamming into the back of his neck and then nothing more.
“-not ready yet. It has to build up its charge; we can’t afford to use it prematurely.”
Steve heard voices but could not guess context. Couldn’t really focus at all, feeling sloppy and loose in body and mind, a dim memory telling him that this was what alcohol used to do to him before. He focused on his breathing, slow and steady and clear, full and easy and not the short breaths of an asthmatic in a polluted city. Not before. He tried to move his hands, flex his fingers, and found that he could do that but it made noise, a metal rattling and he forced his eyes open to look but closed them again because the world was too bright and too blurry and moving too fast. He let his head hang, not wanting to make the motion worse, not sure he had the strength to hold it up.
He was cold and his teeth were numb and he felt like he needed to puke, felt it rising in his chest and he let it come, knowing that this was the only way he’d feel better. He felt it splatter on his feet and it disgusted him, but not enough to try to move away. He wasn’t sure he could, hanging there like a soggy scarecrow, wretched and dizzy.
Voices, too far away to make out, and then water thrown at his feet. He opened one eye enough to see a mop moving, see that he was naked, and then closed it again because the world was starting to spin once more.
A hand grabbed his hair at the forehead and pushed his head back.
“Drink,” a voice commanded softly. A voice he recognized so well and obeyed automatically because Bucky was always looking after him, even now. He drank, accepting the first sip of water to rinse out his mouth and then spit, the glass returned to his lips so that he could drink more. “Not so fast, you’ll bring it right back up.”
Steve chuffed out a ghost of a laugh. Bucky’s “and I’m not cleaning up your sick a second time tonight” was implied and understood.
He finished the water, slowly, and a cloth wiped at his mouth when he did.
“If you want anything useful out of him before you kill him, you’re going to have to lower the dosage,” Bucky said. “It may be horse tranquilizer, but it’s for larger horses than this one.”
Steve opened his eyes again because why would Bucky say such a thing?
Bucky, wearing Yasha’s blue hoodie turned back to him, annoyed confusion on his face. “Who the hell is Bucky?”
On the other side of the room, there was laughter.
He knew he went back to sleep, although he couldn’t say how he knew that and he couldn’t say for how long, but when he woke up again, he wasn’t as wasted, although he’d never say he was close to sober and he still couldn’t move his arms or legs or body and expect to control the results. He was lucid, more or less, aware of his surroundings - trussed up naked in Schmidt’s procedure room, drugs being pumped into his arm - and that he was in the future-present and not the past he’d left behind. There was no Bucky - or Yasha, for that matter.
Schmidt was lying on one of the hospital beds, but Steve’s eyes were drawn to the other, where he - his clone - lay dressed in his uniform, the shield at his feet. Between the two beds was Tarleton and his chair and the Cauldron and tubes and some kind of computer and Steve half-remembered something about waiting and he chased the thought around in circles until he realized that the noise he’d been hearing wasn’t in his head but was instead real, a rumble that grew louder, loud enough for the glass in the room to tinkle and the walls to shake.
“We are collapsing the tunnels, Captain,” Schmidt said from the bed. “Many casualties, friend and foe, very sad. And one of those casualties will be you, burned beyond recognition so that they will need to use DNA to realize that you were just another Steve Rogers clone found crushed in the rubble.”
Another set of vibrations and the noise of distant thunder. Steve prayed that Natasha had listened to him, that she’d sent someone - he knew better than to think she’d go herself - up to the surface to raise the Helicarrier. He prayed that his teammates were alive, that Corrales and his men were alive, that Schmidt was just collapsing empty tunnels full of bad memories and nightmare fuel. He knew it wasn’t true, though. They’d never have left him behind, not if they knew where he was and what Schmidt’s plans for him were. He didn’t want more deaths on his hands.
A clang of something metal hitting the door had them all turning, but Tarleton and Schmidt didn’t seem all that worried and Steve couldn’t see that part of the room. Schmidt did dispatch guards, though, and Steve got a tiny bit of perverse pleasure out of Schmidt being maybe a little concerned.
“Another three minutes,” Tarleton said. “The temperature is rising much faster now.”
A louder bang from outside the room and this startled both Tarleton and Schmidt, enough so that Schmidt ordered one of the guards to set the dosage of Steve’s drugs to maximum, apparently unwilling to risk him breaking free. Steve only wished he was as much of a threat as Schmidt took him to be right now.
He watched the guard approach, willing himself to find the strength to do something useful with his arm and strike out, but all he could do was flick his hand uselessly at the IV line dangling just out of reach. He watched the dial be turned, saw the drip rate of pink-tinted solution go from slow plik to almost a steady dribble, and watched the pinkish fluid make its way down the line and into the arm he couldn’t pull away hard enough to dislodge the needle. He breathed deeply, trying to brace for the rush of the drug, but it washed over him like a tidal wave of heat and prickles and he felt swept off his feet, unsure if he was even still upright, if he was still whole and not blown apart at the seams.
There were more loud noises, but he couldn’t tell if they were his mind playing tricks or real. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open and it was so much easier to just sleep. He felt like he was underwater, surfacing long enough to breathe and then sinking again, and the sounds were all muffled and the lights were blurry and dim and far away. He thought he heard his name, but he couldn’t open his eyes or his ears and let himself fall back into the comforting, drifting numbness.
He felt something - someone - touching his face gently and he turned into it on reflex, wondering if it were Bucky back to watch over him while he slept.
“Steve. Steve. You have to wake up now. Where’s that annoying metabolism of yours?”
Not Bucky. A woman. Peggy? The words were right but the voice was wrong. He opened his eyes as much as he could, which was barely a slit, to see a flash of red. Natasha.
“There you are,” she said, holding his head up gently by his chin. “We took the IV out. You’ll be good as new before you know it.”
He nodded, since what she was saying required a response, but it was a couple of moments before her words fully penetrated and he understood. His eyes drifted closed again and he felt her rubbing her thumb along his chin.
“Stay with me,” she exhorted softly. “Stay with me.”
He took as deep breaths as he dared, trying to find his center again. He could tell that the drug was no longer being pumped into his system, could feel the mist enshrouding his thoughts dissipate slowly, but he had no strength whatsoever and no control over his body.
“Oh my god, this is the best scene in at least three different Captain America pornos!”
Steve blinked his eyes open again, unable to focus on anything but aware that there was a yellow and red mass in front of him. “Tony?” he asked, or at least he tried to; he wasn’t sure it came out at all.
“Stop ogling, Stark, and help me get him down,” Natasha ordered. “Commander, we’re going to need that bed!”
It wasn’t Tony who helped Natasha free him, but Thor, who ripped away the chains and cuffs that bound him with remarkable fury and remarkable gentleness and then slipped an arm under his shoulders and half-carried him to one of the hospital beds, onto which he collapsed gracelessly. He felt a blanket being draped over him.
“Rest,” Thor encouraged softly, patting his shoulder. “The battle is well in hand.”
Steve wanted to sleep, but knew he could not. There wasn’t much action going on in the room - Schmidt’s guards were either dead or subdued - but there would be so much else to do, here and elsewhere. His world had shrunk to this room, but that didn’t mean it had stopped existing elsewhere. He didn’t have his watch and had no idea of how much time had passed since they’d first come underground. It had been hours, no doubt, but how many?
His senses were back close enough to normal for him to function, but he still had to fight the urge to close his eyes and sleep and he felt rubbery and weak when he tried to push up on the bed with his arms. His uniform and underclothes and shield had been placed at the foot of his bed and he tried to fight off the memory of seeing the clone in his clothes on this very bed, but he also needed to get dressed.
He looked over at the other bed and was surprised to see Schmidt lying there, an arrow pinning him there by the shoulder. He was trying to work it free, despite the immense pain and Steve appreciated the determination, but he couldn’t let Schmidt get away - again - now.
“Stop,” he told Schmidt, his voice sounding too loud in his ears. “You’ll just make it worse.”
Schmidt gave him a look of impatient annoyance that clearly expressed how little he was worried about that - or about Steve, who was still not sure he’d be able to do anything but fall flat on his face if he tried to rise out of his bed.
“I double-dog dare you,” Clint said in a flat voice from the foot of Schmidt’s bed and Steve blinked in surprise because he hadn’t seen Clint approach at all. Clint had another arrow drawn, aimed right at Schmidt’s forehead. “You don’t want to know what kind of damage I can do from this distance.”
“Don’t,” Steve ordered. “Hawkeye!”
Clint turned his head, not moving the bow and arrow.
“Don’t let him give you an excuse,” Steve said slowly, careful to make each word understandable and not slurred. “He needs to live.”
Clint half-snorted, half-snarled. “What, so he can spend twenty years in a Supermax? I know what life is like in one of those and it’s more than he deserves.”
“Not ours,” Steve said, trying to push himself up to sitting and not succeeding. “He’s a Nazi war criminal. The Israelis would love to have him.”
What could be worse for Johann Schmidt than to die a weak old man in the custody of the people he’d helped to nearly eradicate?
Clint laughed bitterly and stood back, lowering the bow. He called for Casimir to flexicuff Schmidt to the bed in a tone that clearly implied that this should have been done already. Which was true and Casimir’s body language indicated that he knew it, even if he hadn’t personally been to blame for the oversight.
After another few minutes of resting, Steve tried inching upward again without the room spinning on him. It didn’t, so he wrapped the blanket around his middle and swung his feet off the bed.
“Just where do you think you’re going?”
Steve turned to see Corrales giving him a look that the four little Corraleses (“Corralesitos”) probably knew all too well. “I would like to put my clothes on,” he replied. He sounded very petulant to his own ears.
Corrales shook his head. “Lean back, I’ll push you out of a high traffic area, unless you want to put on a show.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just moving around to the head of the bed and steering it off to one side. He ended up having to help Steve with the dressing, too, which embarrassed Steve a little because he couldn’t untangle his feet and his briefs, but Corrales handled it with the patient humor of a father and left him alone to restore his dignity and his state of dress once he had his undershirt on.
Tony clanked over by the time he’d gotten his uniform shirt on, if not yet zippered, and was very carefully getting his socked feet through his uniform pants without rolling off the bed.
“Stand up,” Tony said, raising the face panel. “Trust me, I’ve got years of experience being where you are right now. Doing it that way only ends in sorrow and Pepper laughing hard enough to cry.”
Once he had his pants on and buckled - he’d only swayed hard enough for Tony to reach out to steady him twice - he asked for a sitrep.
“Who you see is who there is,” Tony said sourly. “We were having an old-fashioned battle of attrition out in the tank room; they just kept coming and never running out of ammo while we were running out of both ammo and defensible positions. Thank God none of them can even shoot fish in a barrel, which we were. Then the ceiling started falling in and that ended that show. Nearly ended us, but Thor’s hammer got us out of a tight spot - Ling’s got a shattered foot, but we got it and him out. We’d already lost five, though, and there’re probably half a dozen with moderate to severe injuries. Nobody’s litter urgent.”
Steve nodded, relieved that that didn’t upset his equilibrium further. “And if they were?”
“I could try to blast my way out of here,” Tony replied. “It’s what we’ll end up having to do anyway.”
Steve looked over at Schmidt, who was lying on the bed with his eyes closed. “Or we could just ask Schmidt or Tarleton; they were planning on escaping. Schmidt was, at least. They had to have a route out.”
“Tarleton’s dead,” Tony replied, lowering the visor again. “Barton put one in his circuit board a half-second before he put one in Schmidt’s shoulder.”
Steve didn’t have much of a reaction to that. He was disappointed, of course - Tarleton could have been useful, if he’d chosen to talk. He was Zola’s successor and Steve would have liked to think that he’d follow there, too, but maybe he wouldn’t have. Zola had been uncomfortable with Schmidt’s zeal and largely motivated by self-preservation; Tarleton’s reasons for following Schmidt had been different and they would have made it harder to break him.
They walked - slowly - back into the main of the room, past the twisted remains of the contraption Steve had been tied to and past Schmidt’s bed and Steve could see the aftermath of the fight he’d slept through. Almost all of the guards were dead; there were three sitting with their hands cuffed behind their backs and two more lying down with evidence of medical treatment. The place had been trashed, bullet holes and blaster burns everywhere, but Corrales’s team was doing its best to pack up what looked most important - computer parts, the Cauldron, containers of fluid that were clearly important but Steve couldn’t guess why.
“You find Natasha’s friend?” Steve asked.
Tony tilted his head. “What’s that a euphemism for?”
Steve frowned. “Nothing. One of her associates was working for Schmidt. They seemed surprised to see each other here,” he explained. “Yasha. He knocked me out with a titanium roundhouse, but I think he took care of me when I was trussed up.”
“You think,” Tony repeated.
Steve didn’t want to confess that in his drug-induced haze he’d thought it was Bucky, so he ignored the implied question. “You didn’t find anyone with a metal arm, did you?”
Tony couldn’t really shrug in the armor. “Not that I noticed.”
“So there has to be a way out,” Steve reasoned. “He found one.”
A sharp whistle from Corrales. “Everyone freeze!”
Steve looked over at Thor, who looked back at him questioningly, but the mystery was resolved a moment later when the rumbling from before was audible again. It was growing louder quickly and Steve wasn’t the only one thinking that they were about to have more tunnels collapsing, maybe on them or maybe just blocking their way out. If Yasha had gotten free, he might have set the rest of the demolitions. Or it could have been one of the HYDRA troops or simply gravity and a mountain resenting the shifting that had already taken place.
“Okay, everyone has ninety seconds to grab their shit and get ready to bug out,” Corrales ordered. “Alpha Team, you’ve got the bodyguards and the loot. Avengers, you’ve got Schmidt.”
It was a more even division of labor once Steve realized that it was probably going to be Thor and Tony who dug them out of whatever fell in their way.
“It’s the Hulk!” Gasmorgan called out from the doorway. “I saw some green.”
The Hulk could make things better or much worse, so Steve made his way - mostly steadily - toward the doorway to hopefully get his attention before he knocked the wrong thing down.
“Missing long time,” the Hulk accused when he finally found them. He poked Steve in the chest hard enough to make him stumble backward. “Fury thinks you’re dead.”
Steve smiled more broadly than he felt warranted. “Won’t be the first time. Do you remember how you got down here? Do you think you could show us how to go back out?”
The Hulk gave him a wary look. “You a clone?”
“No,” Steve assured. “The clone’s over there.”
He pointed inside the room and then had to step back because the Hulk wanted to see. Kiplinger gestured at the body bag at his feet. Steve understood why they wanted to take it, but he didn’t want to even look at the body bag knowing what was in it.
“Make new path,” Hulk rumbled, turning back to Steve. “You have too much stuff.”
With the Hulk leading the way, their parade back to the outside was much less tentative than the way in had been. There was nobody to shoot at and the Hulk obviated the risk of booby traps simply by being himself. There would be plenty to shoot at when they got outside, though. It was dark again, which this far north and this early in the year did not mean what it would elsewhere as far as time passing. SHIELD had a strong and visible presence within the facility’s perimeter, but it was by no means secured and there were open battles on both sides of them as they emerged from the hangar-like building that sheltered the cavern entry the Hulk had led them to. Nothing close enough to merit their involvement, however, so they made their way to the SHIELD tracked vehicle parked nearby. Natasha and Clint kept Schmidt between them, both to keep him from running and to make sure nobody shot him by accident or on purpose.
Steve didn’t have a radio, so it was Tony who ended up having to talk to Fury, which meant that the conversation was brief, sharp, and ended with Steve being ordered to accompany Schmidt to the Helicarrier on the already-dispatched quinjet - with the expectation that he’d be staying for a while. Tony was impervious to Steve’s demands that he tell Fury that that was unnecessary.
“Would you be listening if it were one of us?” Clint asked him wryly. “’I’ve been pumped full of enough ketamine to power the LA party scene for years, but I’m only stumbling a little now and I’m totally ready to go dodge bullets and blaster cannons.’ Please.”
Which was more or less what Fury said when Steve asked to be allowed to rejoin his team down on the surface. Fury had been waiting when the jet landed, watching silently as Steve led Schmidt down the ramp and presented him.
“Overdue, but not unexpected,” was Fury’s response to Schmidt. Then he turned to the unit of SHIELD troops and told the lieutenant to take Schmidt down to the brig. “Have the medical staff undo Agent Barton’s handiwork,” he added, since the arrow was still in place.
Fury demanded and Steve delivered a short version of events as he’d seen them, from the quinjet going down early to the Hulk showing up. He was missing chunks of the story - he’d been absent, either physically or mentally, for stretches - but he could elaborate on Schmidt’s plan to take his place.
“What was his end-game there?” Fury mused as they waited for the elevator. “He certainly wasn’t planning on spending the next twenty years leading the Avengers. Or was it just long enough to milk us dry and then disappear?”
Steve had wondered that, too. “You’ll have to ask him.”
“Herr Schmidt and I will be having many interesting conversations,” Fury assured darkly. “You, on the other hand, are stood down for the next three hours. You are going to report to Medical for rehydration and then bloodwork in case they were pumping you full of something other than tranquilizers. And then you are going to do whatever it is you want to do that is hopefully sleeping but will definitely not include finagling your way back down to the surface. If I find out that you’re trying to sneak down there, your stand-down gets bumped up to twelve hours and don’t think I won’t throw you in a brig cell, too.”
Steve got lost en route to Medical - he could rehydrate just fine with a glass and a water fountain and he was pretty sure that there’d been no poison in the IV drip. If there were, it would do its thing before the tests came back anyway. But he didn’t think Schmidt would want to kill him like that, hanging senseless in a corner of the room like a side of beef. He’d have wanted to do it personally, probably while wearing Steve’s own face, and with a weapon he could hold, like the daggers his guard wore.
Instead, he went to the Avengers’ team room and drank a couple of glasses of water and dug out his cell phone from his locker.
“Steve?” Peggy answered on the third ring, sounding like he’d woken her up and he realized belatedly that he didn’t even know what time it was here in Minyar, let alone working out the time difference for Philadelphia.
“We got him,” he said, his voice catching on the last word, forcing him to take a deep breath as the emotions welled up out of nowhere. “We got him.”
And then he started to cry, harder and harder until he was sobbing. This was news he’d waited seventy-two years to deliver and the cost of the delay, the weight of it, was crushing him. He’d lost his girl, his dreams of a happily ever after, his world and his sense of place within it. And then he’d woken up in a future where he had no purpose until his past came back to try to destroy not only what small peace he’d found in this time, but also what little bit of himself he had left from his own. He should feel relieved that this was all over, that Schmidt could do no more damage, but all he could feel was the ache of what had already been lost. And then selfish for that because so many had lost so much more; he was still alive to weep.
A few minutes and a small mountain of dirty tissues later, he was close enough to collecting himself that he could risk trying to talk again. “Sorry.”
“Oh, Steve,” Peggy sighed, fond and exasperated and he smiled, just a little. And then he had to wipe his nose.
Because she knew him better than anyone, she did not mention his outburst and instead asked him where things stood that he was free to call her. Which in turn forced him to confess that he’d been stood down and given orders from Fury which he was currently disobeying to various degrees. She told him that if he did not go eat something and take a nap, she’d be a much greater threat to him than Fury. He believed her wholeheartedly and said so.
She laughed, then sobered. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but this really is a case of late being better than never. This was so very necessary and it will save so many lives.”
He sighed. “I know. Really, I do.”
“You’ve already paid a terrible price for this victory,” Peggy said. “Don’t let him take any more. You did good today, Steve. Don’t forget that for a moment.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
He went down to the commissary and grabbed one of the pre-packaged sandwiches and an orange and took them back to the team room because he really wasn’t in the mood for company. And then after he ate, he stretched out on one of the couches and closed his eyes and slept.
When he woke up, the room lights were dimmed and there was a weight on his shin that turned out to be Clint, sitting on the floor at the foot of the couch with his head against the seat cushion and Steve’s leg.
“Stop moving,” Clint murmured, not opening his eyes. “Stood down until 0600. Go back to sleep.”
But Steve didn’t, instead looking around without moving his legs. Natasha and Bruce were curled up on opposite sides of the other couch and Tony had commandeered the recliner (of course). Thor had his feet up on the desk and was sitting in the matching chair, head tilted back and snoring loudly.
Steve watched his team sleep for a few minutes, debating whether he could possibly get out of the room without waking them all before accepting that he could not. And that perhaps he should not because this was exactly where he belonged.
... and this is where the credits roll and I get to go HOLY POOP, PEOPLE, I AM DONE WRITING THIS STORY and say that, according to Word, it's around 196K words, and a little less by AO3's count, so anyone who bet the over on 200K just missed out.
Also, I get to thank aliciam publicly, because without her, I would have been a weeping ball of neurotic goo a hundred thousand words ago.
And I could probably list the restaurants referred to in this story, all of which exist except for the sushi place in Manhattan, but there are a ton of sushi places in Manhattan. But everything else is real and very tasty, although I admittedly haven't been to Don Peppe's since I was a little kid and there was still a bullet hole in the front window, but I go to the Greek place all the time. Because best food in NYC is in Queens.
.... and then, because this is a Marvel production, you all would still be sitting around waiting for the end of the credits. So, here it is:
Steve greeted Hsiang as he entered her domain, gesturing with his chin toward Fury’s closed office door. “Do you have any idea what this is about?”
Hsiang shook her head no. Just because she ordered around one of the most powerful men in the world like her own personal puppet didn’t mean that he couldn’t find ways of vexing her ascension to complete omniscience.
He’d gotten the phone call early this morning to show up at the Helicarrier, no uniform required. His first thought was that it would be something to do with Schmidt, since most of what he’d been contacted about since their return to New York had had to do with what SHIELD was getting out of Schmidt - verify this, does that make any sense, where did this happen, how did you know what this was - and this wouldn’t have been the first time he’d been called in because Schmidt had confounded them to the point of immobility. Schmidt wasn’t letting his physical captivity get in the way of a good time, not when he could cause so much havoc with a clever lie or a casual half-truth or, worse, with a genuine revelation.
The other alternative, that this was the prequel to another round of routing out HYDRA bases, was less likely because those tended to come through Tapper and weren’t in Fury’s office.
All of which was to say that Steve had no idea what was awaiting him when he opened Fury’s office door. But Fury and Natasha sitting at the conference table was not on the list.
“What’s this about?” he asked with false casualness as he sat down across from Natasha and next to Fury.
Natasha was in uniform, but her aspect was not one of impending professional business. She looked apologetic and that worried him more than being told he was going on some ridiculous and dangerous mission. Natasha was repentant about very few things - a list that did not include her back-channel work with Fury during her suspension from SHIELD - and Steve knew her well enough to appreciate what usually made the list. That meant that this was personal and there was absolutely no way that this would end well for him.
“Sit, Cap,” Fury commanded.
Steve didn’t want to, but he did.
“What have you two been lying to me about that you’ve now been forced to confess?”
Neither of them looked indignant, which was as good a confession as anything they might say.
“It’s not lying by commission,” Natasha began, stopping when Steve gave her a look. They’d already had this conversation once before, in Detroit, and he’d thought - hoped - that that had been the end of that. He’d never thought Natasha would be truthful and forthcoming ever more, but he’d hoped that they’d progressed enough that she’d save the real baloney for someone else. “I never lied to you about this, Steve. I didn’t share my suspicions, most of which sounded crazy even to me, for what I thought were good reasons. I’ve been fed so much crap my eyes should be brown and if I said something every time real life overlapped with those fairy tales, I’d have been put on permanent psych eval.”
Nobody leapt to fill in that joke, which spoke to how delicate this situation really was.
“Fine,” Steve allowed, since the distinction between lying out of habit and lying for benevolent reasons was not one he wanted to make. “So I’ll rephrase: what am I here for you to confess to, since that’s obviously why I’m here.”
Fury pulled a manila folder out from the pile at his left elbow, but left it closed under his right hand and did not push it toward Steve.
“Yaakov Stepanovich Yachmenev,” Fury began. “Known to the Widow as Yasha. Known to SHIELD Counterintelligence as Igor, the agent who delivered the files that burned her. Known to everyone as a Cold War urban legend called ‘The Winter Soldier.’”