fic: Revenant (12/?)
Revenant: Chapter Twelve
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
It took more than a week for James and Natasha to get a plan approved by Fury for the trip to Latveria. Fury wanted hard details, which wasn't what James was used to providing and clashed with what Natasha was realizing was a far more improvisational style than anyone at SHIELD was used to working with even considering the personalities of the Avengers. For James, everything after the flight to Sarajevo -- Belgrade was closer, but the Latverians watched that airport -- depended upon the situation on the ground and was left vague because of it. Fury was neither amused nor willing to put up with it -- "you might not have had to give a briefback as the Winter Soldier, but you sure as hell know how they're done, Sergeant Barnes" -- and things got contentious at times as copy after copy got returned to them covered in notes that ranged from requests for specific details to "are you fucking kidding me?".
James was only half-kidding when he told her that he was starting to miss his old life. Natasha could sympathize to a point because she, too, had had to be broken to the bit of detailed advance planning. The Red Room had let its operatives use their own discretion so long as the job got done, but coming to SHIELD, she'd had to learn to explain what she was going to do before she did it, do it, then justify it afterward. At the start, Coulson had more or less had to play Twenty Questions with her to get an approvable plan cobbled together and she'd always let Clint handle that part when they'd worked together (in exchange for her writing up the AAR; fair was fair). But her sympathy was starting to stretch thin by the one week mark because James was stubbornly refusing to be precise in places where it was possible to be precise, even if they needed to do something else when that point arrived.
"What I don't understand is why you haven't just upped and left on your own," she told him at one of these points. "You're just fucking with him at this point and he knows it."
"I'm not fucking with him for the sake of fucking with him," James replied as they sat at his dining table with maps and notes at the other end from their takeout containers. "And if I am, it's mutual. You can't tell me you put up with this bullshit on a regular basis."
She couldn't, which was why she hadn't completely lost her temper with him yet. Fury was pushing harder than any good controller of a field agent would -- and Fury had been both a great field agent and a superb controller -- and she didn't think it was just because he still didn't like that they were going to Latveria. This was a test for James, although she was still debating what the topic was and what would constitute a passing grade. It wasn't a test of his loyalty, at least with respect to whether he might be the best sleeper agent to ever infiltrate SHIELD or not. It might've been a test of his mental health, although Natasha didn't believe for a moment that Fury hadn't been getting regular updates from the shrink or that he would have allowed them to get this far if he'd thought James couldn't handle it. But it also could have been something subtler, which James had perhaps identified already.
"This is more than usual," she agreed, frowning as he poured more tzatziki on his souvlaki. They'd agreed on mutually assured destruction via garlic breath before ordering, but there was such a thing as overkill. James grinned at her and leaned across the table, pouring the rest of the little container on her plate. She glared at him for a second, then shrugged. "You know why he's doing it?"
James took a bite and chewed and swallowed before answering.
"I know why I am doing it," he said instead. "So they don't think I'm a cheap trick. When I signed up for this gig, I knew what I was really doing: turning myself out for SHIELD in return for access to Steve."
"That's not true!" she cut him off, angry that he was thinking so. Angry that he was still seeing what could be home as yet another temporary place of employment that might not be voluntary. "James, you know that's not true."
"Of course it is, Natalia," he said with a sad smile. Resigned. "You see how Fury talks -- I see Steve on their terms, when my work for them isn't taking me away, which it does even when it's just sitting in conference rooms with pencil-pushers and waiting around in case something actionable comes up."
She made a disgusted noise. "That's how we all work," she told him sourly. "Hurry up and wait, go there and sit on your hands until we come up with something for you to do, all of that. You can't tell me that this wasn't your life in the Army. I know it was. And it's not like they're asking you to do something you don't want to do already."
"They're not," James agreed easily. "But it's not going to stop once we get Belova and whoever sent her. You think they're going to just let me go back to Wyoming or wherever Steve is living and just stay there? Live on their dime so I can be near Steve because I used to be a Howling Commando and it's my due as a war hero? They don't work like that. They'll find something else - I've given them enough for years of mission only I can pull off, or so they'll say. It will never be over."
He broke off, waiting for her to contradict him, but she didn't because, while she hadn't thought about it until now, she couldn't say that this wasn't a possibility. That Fury would take advantage of what he had on offer, which was the Winter Soldier at his beck and call. Fury had been genuine about his intentions when it came to repatriating James and getting him well, but he would never forget about the bigger picture. Natasha felt a little naive for having done so herself, distracted by her own jealousies as she had been.
"And I agreed to this," James went on, matter of fact. "I knew all along what Fury wanted from me. It was worth any price to see Steve and I don't regret paying it. But I have to push back because if I don't, the price will go up. I have to give them boundaries so that they don't keep taking more from me. Or taking me from Steve."
She understood that negotiation, should have recognized it from the start, perhaps. She'd certainly spent enough time testing SHIELD, testing Coulson, testing Clint for where their boundaries were, how much could she get away with asking of them before they said no or asked for payment in return. And every time she'd found the answer to be more than she had thought, more than she would need. She'd found it all so strange to be trusted like that, respected like that. It had taken her a long time to get used to it, to not see it as something to use. To be generous about accepting it and giving it in return, to fear losing it. She had thought she would be required to teach James those lessons, to show him how to trust and be trusted again, and had been pleasantly surprised when he hadn't started immediately testing everyone around him, including her. Instead, he'd gone to the shrink, he'd gone to the analysts, he'd gone where they told him to be even if it wasn't where he'd wanted to be. But she'd read that all wrong, too. He hadn't been living for himself. He had been living up to the terms of his invisible agreement. He wasn't building himself a life; what living he did, what growth he managed, that was all a byproduct.
"Steve isn't being held hostage by SHIELD," she said carefully. "You don't have to negotiate with his kidnappers so that you'll get to see him again."
James put his fork down. "I'm not Steve, someone they can bring to the White House and celebrate not being dead. They're never going to be able to admit I'm not dead because if they do, they'll have to say where I was and what I became. I can't exist. I won't exist except for what they've given me. Which is also what they can take away. So, yeah, I do have to negotiate with them because they are holding the key to everything I have ever had for myself. My old ratty undershirts, my best friend, my girl -- they can make it all go away. I'll play ball with them because I have to, but I don't have to let them get comfortable with it."
Natasha wanted to protest, but she knew that even if she could convince herself that this would never be an option for Fury -- and she wasn't sure she could -- she would never be able to convince James. So, instead, she took a different tack. "I hope you realize that should it ever come down to that, you have more allies than you think you do."
James smiled at her, grateful and knowing both. "But in the meantime, agree to Novy Izvory as the extraction point?"
"Please," she exhorted. Fury would live with all of the presumed deviations from their plan, but giving him a time and place where they would be to get out of danger would cover a lot of future sins.
Five days later, they were on their way to Sarajevo.
They were going to be two days in town before cutting northeast through Serbia; it would give them time to do some local shopping -- some things they would need could not be packed into carry-on luggage -- and it would give Fury his chance to make sure they'd gotten in undetected. The Latverians watched the Belgrade airport like hawks, but they had spies in and around other important transit points, so Fury had insisted on a 24-hour waiting period between landing and driving off to make sure there wouldn't be a welcome committee waiting for them.
Fury had offered to get local support for logistics; SHIELD had no permanent resources in Sarajevo, but he could use other agencies. James declined and Natasha backed him up on it since the fewer people who knew they were there, the better off they'd be. Getting what they needed was hardly going to be a problem for experienced pros like themselves. They laid low the first day, getting themselves on local time and waiting for any updates from the Helicarrier (Belova was still in the wind, nobody had seen them in Sarajevo), but on the second day they split up the shopping list between them; James bought their guns and Natasha stole their car and picked up food, a couple of containers of bosanski lonac and some fresh pitas from a hole-in-the-wall place that had probably been dishing up the same since Tito had been in diapers.
Natasha did the driving up toward the Latverian border; James closed his eyes because he was going to be doing the close work once they got there. They ditched the car in a field, wiping it down and removing the plates and other identifying documentation, which they buried, and then they changed into work clothes and started walking. There were formal border crossings a couple of kilometers northwest and southeast, but in between them there were no fences or guards -- of the visible type. The forest was dense and monitored electronically in stages. It was passable if you knew what was there and how it worked, as James did, but it was complicated enough to deter all but the most clever of smugglers. Even so, James needed the better part of an hour to get them past, during which all Natasha could do was play lookout.
"Welcome to Latveria," James said with a grin as he finished.
They walked on until the trees started to thin out, then they changed clothes again.
Southern Latveria was mostly agrarian, which meant work started before dawn and two strangers moving around at that hour would not go unnoticed, certainly not in a culture so used to watching everyone else (and being watched in turn) as Latveria's. So they didn't bother skulking. Instead, they were going with covers so audacious that even Natasha had blinked when James had proposed them. Fury had gone ballistic and they'd argued about it for a full two days before James had gotten his way.
Inspector Marko Ivanic and Sergeant Irina Mironova-Tahic of the Latverian internal security service (SKL) stepped out of the trees and on to the road. James had the higher rank so that he would be the one asked any questions and Natasha had been given a name that would explain why she spoke somewhat imperfect Latverian (she was fluent, but her idiomatic vocabulary was spotty and she spoke with a Russian accent she couldn't quite erase).
Natasha had been understandably nervous -- and Fury something stronger -- about posing as members of the secret police in a state where everything was monitored and most everything computerized. But James had insisted that that was an advantage because it would let them move around more freely and deter questions. Natasha still skeptical, but it was too late to back out now.
"If I end up back in that prison cell, I am going to hunt you down and feed you to Thor's dragon-eating koi," she warned as they walked. There was a farmhouse visible on the left, half-hidden by fields of wheat but with a light on the front porch. They would be seen imminently, if they hadn't been already.
They didn't see anyone as they walked past, but they hadn't gotten another kilometer down the road when a police cruiser slowed down and stopped next to them.
James did the talking. He whipped out his ID and explained in his slangy Doomstadt-accented Latverian who they were and why they were so far from home. "Someone probably saw some teenagers sneaking home after curfew and we get sent down to Selo Srpska to look for smugglers," he said with a 'what are you gonna do?' shrug. "We were supposed to get picked up at 0530, but nobody came and the fucking border guards won't lend us bicycles, so we're stuck walking back to Zembolia."
Natasha stood next to James, looking every inch like a civil servant who'd been up all night chasing phantoms and whose morning had not gotten any better since.
The constable, a young man with beefy features, poor skin, and thick hair, seemed to accept the story, asking if they'd called a taxi or asked for a police ride because he hadn't heard anything and he would have been the one retrieving them if he had. Nobody at the station had said anything about any SKL operations in Selo Srpska, however.
"This particular wild goose chase was ordered by Chief Inspector Spirovski," James said, digging into his jacket pocket for his cell phone. "I can call the fat fucker and ask him why nobody told you guys..."
Constable Pasztor blanched. "No, no, I believe you," he assured. Whoever Spirovski was, Pasztor wanted nothing to do with interrupting his breakfast to question orders. "I can drive you to Zembolia now, but you'll have missed the morning train north. The next one coming through that stops at Pleskec won't be for at least another hour and a half, maybe more."
James waved his hand dismissively. "More time for a proper breakfast at Mamaliska's."
Which was very clearly the right answer as far as Pasztor went because he beamed and told them to hop in.
"Thank you," Natasha said as she reached for the driver-side rear door. James subtly made a move to stop her, nothing that Pasztor would have noticed, but she saw it clearly enough.
"Can you turn off the back-seat video camera before we get in?" he asked, sounding a little ashamed and a lot apologetic. "Everyone at Katarina Street already thinks we're sleeping together and the last thing we need is a giant photo of us from the perp feed looking like we spent the night rolling in the hay."
At least that's what Natasha assumed he said; he'd used a couple of euphemisms for sex that she hadn't heard before in that context. Either way, Pasztor gave them a knowing nod and complied and then Natasha opened the door and got in, sliding over as James got in behind her.
Zembolia was a modest town that looked like so many other modest towns in this part of the world, too small to have been in the sights of grand-visioned conquerors or communists and thus carrying the solidity of centuries in its walls. Not too many cars, lots of bicycles and a few donkey-drawn carts, painted signs, and the surreptitious omnipresent monitoring implements of the twenty-first century police state.
"Breakfast is on me if you want," James offered Pasztor, who mournfully declined as they pulled up in front of Mamaliska's, which fit right in with its rustic exterior and lattice windows.
On the inside, however, it was more modern. The furniture was definitely younger than James. Probably.
They were served a hearty breakfast by a waitress who had obviously seen them pull up in the cruiser and then the friendly exchange with Pasztor and that, Natasha presumed, identified them as police and prevented the kind of questioning that obvious strangers in a small town would normally be subjected to. She hadn't doubted that part of James's reasoning for the cover IDs. It was what would come later that worried her.
"How are we going to get to Doomstadt?" Natasha asked quietly in Latverian. There was nobody close enough to overhear, but even from a distance, English would be notable because it didn't sound at all like Latverian in its rhythms.
In the planning phase, James had been vague about how they were going to get from the forest near Selo Srpska to Doomstadt and Fury hadn't called him on it. Natasha hadn't thought too much about it because in her experience, opportunities usually presented themselves. But here they were in a restaurant across from the train station and with a local constabulary who knew that two SKL agents were in town waiting for the train -- Pasztor had no doubt hit the radio before the gas pedal to pull away from the curb. And the trains, like everything else in Latveria, had cameras in them and there was every chance that there would be real SKL agents waiting at the other end.
James smiled at her, every inch the senior officer imparting earned wisdom to his subordinate. "Dirty little secret of the Latverian police state: the CCTV cameras on the trains and buses aren't monitored live. They're fed into facial recognition software in four-hour chunks, so our 10am train ride won't be fed into the machine until noon at the earliest. So even if we appeared on the footage, they wouldn't spot us for another few hours -- the software doesn't work fast like it does on television and it will have to plow through the end of the morning rush hour first. But we're not going to appear on the footage because I came armed." He paused to wiggle the fingers on his left hand, waiting for her to react to the bad pun. Terrible pun. "And they won't think anything of it because the cameras are finicky and go out far more than they'd like to admit. Something about all of the motion."
They finished breakfast and James tipped generously, but not outrageously; everyone knew the SKL paid well and an inspector could afford to be magnanimous. Then they went across the street to the rail station. As they walked, James told her how to buy the tickets to Doomstadt, what to ask and which words to use to make it sound like she knew exactly where she was going and was familiar with the Latverian rail system. James, meanwhile, went toward the newspaper stand. She conducted the transaction as James had instructed, asking for two second-class tickets to Pleskec and a blue receipt, which wasn't actually blue. ("It's like green cards in the States, they used to be but everyone still calls them that.") She'd refamiliarized herself with Latverian coinage before they'd left, so she didn't fumble when handing over exact change, and thanked the clerk.
James was outside the station on the track-side, all the way at the end of the platform with a lit cigarette in his hand, flicking ash downwind like a pro as he read the headlines from a folded Times of Latveria. Because even if someone was feeling brave enough to ask the SKL officers a casual question, they'd probably not want to walk all the way out to the designated smoking area to to do it.
"Do you know what the most trafficked item is for smugglers into Latveria?" James asked as she approached. He held up the cigarette pack, which was comically tiny. "Latverian law says that they can only be sold eight to a pack, to discourage smoking. Nobody outside the country wants to mess up their production lines to stuff tiny boxes for such a small market, so the only legal ones are domestics and they're more expensive than even good booze. The black market stuff isn't cheap, either, especially if it's not the Serbian shit. You can buy a good meal for what it costs to get a pack of Gauloises or anything American."
They shifted position so that James was downwind, since the breeze had shifted and Natasha had been getting a face full of smoke.
"Did you ever smoke for real?" she asked, curious, since he managed the cigarette with the sort of casual indifference that was hard for even trained operatives to fake, although he was faking it here -- he wasn't inhaling. He didn't smoke now and hadn't when they'd known each other the first time, which she had noted and been cheered by because she hadn't and that had made her an outlier even within the Red Room because everyone in Russia smoked. Which in turn was why she'd had to take lessons in it, throwing up half a dozen times before she could even manage to inhale once, and her handlers had given up. SHIELD, on the other hand, paid for its employees to quit smoking.
"Yeah," he admitted. "Not a lot before the war because I didn't have too much spare change and they made Steve wheeze to be around, but I bummed a few during my breaks at work. Once I enlisted, though, sure. We all did and the Army gave us cigarettes to do it with, at least until the Commandos. But by then, we had other sources, not least Howard Stark, who'd import cartons of the good stuff by the box-load because he didn't want to smoke the British ones. Also, we were in France all the time and Dernier was like a truffle pig except for Gauloises, which were still unfiltered then and Jesus, I still remember that rush."
He was smiling as he spoke and Natasha smiled back.
"Steve's first and only attempt to try smoking was with a Gaulois bleu," he went on, shaking his head. "Goofball couldn't have picked up a Pall Mall or something smoother. God, that was hilarious. Dugan nearly peed himself."
Natasha thought she knew what he was doing by reminiscing and she was more than willing to encourage him despite the possible risks. This was Latveria, where James had roamed confidently and cavalierly as the Winter Soldier, known and respected and feared by those in power. Until the life he'd known had been ripped away from him like the worst magic trick ever, revealing him to be a tool, a victim, a perpetrator of deeds he never would have consented to if he'd had his own mind. Latveria, possibly even more than Minyar, was where his nightmares lived. If he wanted to distract himself, she was going to let him.
She'd been watching him all along during the planning process, waiting for him to say something about the giant elephant in the room, but he never had. She hadn't prompted him for the same reason she'd never prompted Clint about his time under Loki's control when they'd been chasing James while he'd still been the Winter Soldier: some scars shouldn't be prodded by anyone but the bearers. Which was more or less what she'd told Fury when he'd asked her, privately, if letting James go back to Latveria was really a smart idea and was she so sure that this wasn't some elaborate redemptive suicide mission. She still wasn't sure about the first part, but she'd answered Fury firmly on the second: James had every intention of coming back from Doomstadt; he wouldn't have let her go along if he wasn't and he would never leave Steve as he was.
The train arrived on time, of course, and James properly disposed of his cigarette before they boarded. He indicated that he should go first, which was why she could say later that even though she'd been watching him, she would never have realized that he'd used the EMP blaster in his arm to take out the car's video camera if she hadn't known that that's what he was doing. It had been such a subtle gesture, so elegantly underplayed, that even the conductor, who'd watched them board, hadn't so much as blinked.
The conductor waited until they were seated before taking their tickets and leaving a marker that indicated that they were getting off at Pleskec. They rode in silence save for a couple of meaningless discussions in politely audible Latverian about who was going to write the report (she was, of course) and whether or not to include any details that indicated just how much of a pointless assignment it had been (it was Spirovski, so it wouldn't be safe, but maybe just one, because they had had to stay up all night). The closer they got to Doomstadt, the more crowded the train got and Natasha couldn't help but feel nervous. Neither of them were unknown quantities for Latveria's real secret police -- or any of their security services, internal or foreign -- and all it would take would be one person thinking they looked familiar and taking a surreptitious picture. She knew she was keeping her tension inside, maintaining the outwardly bored expression of a commuter, but it still annoyed her that James was sitting there with his eyes closed, body loose with sleep that was probably feigned, and not even looking around periodically.
Pleskec, where the SKL headquarters were, was almost at the opposite end of Doomstadt than Wernersburg, where Castle Doom was. They got off the train and James led her on a roundabout path that started off in the direction of Katarina Street but then quickly went well wide of it. Traveling inside Doomstadt had to be on foot; the city had an extensive public transit system, but it had too many eyes, human and electronic, for James to zap into harmlessness and they could maneuver more easily around the regular street CCTV cameras, especially after the pulled season-appropriate hats out of their bags. It took them an hour to get to Wernersburg on foot using two-man countersurveillance techniques.
"We should crash for a while," James said when they were together again. "We're not going to try for the Castle until late."
Natasha nodded. "You've got somewhere, I assume?"
Hotels required passports for foreign travelers and national identity cards for citizens; their SKL cards were perfect forgeries, but there would be a problem when they were run through the database, as everyone who was registering for a hotel would be.
James nodded and she followed him to a small hotel on a side street, one clearly intended to cater to Latverians needing to stay over in Doomstadt rather than any of the international chains for visitors from abroad looking for a spot of bland familiarity in a strange place. The desk clerk, name tag announcing him as Dusan, blinked twice when he saw James, but otherwise showed no sign of recognition or surprise. He filled out the registration himself, not even asking Natasha for a name, and ran two names through the computer that came back clear, then handed over a key. "Welcome and thank you for staying with us. Please let me know if there is anything you need."
The first thing they did once entering the room was a thorough security sweep. It came up clean.
"What's his story?" Natasha asked as she sat down on the bed and started taking off her shoes, leaning over to where she'd dropped her bag to pull it closer.
"I saved his sister's life a couple of years ago," James said as he dropped down next to her and flopped on to his back. "Entirely by accident. Turns out her would-be rapist and my corrupt palace courtier were the same guy. His family has a restaurant in Novy Izvora, but instead of free meals for life, I asked for an invisible room when I needed it."
In a place like Latveria, where everything was monitored, it wasn't that unusual for arrangements to be made to find true privacy -- and not even for illicit activities.
"You needed a place to bring your paramours?" she teased lightly.
"Sometimes," he allowed with an indifferent shrug. "It was just fucking and I really wasn't shy about it unless it was someone important's wife. But toward the end, when some of the Minyar conditioning was breaking down, it was mostly just a chance to get some quiet and figure out what the hell was was going on in my head."
They took turns showering and she let him go first; when she got out, he was already asleep on the bed. Or maybe not entirely, since he turned toward her when she got in next to him, pulling her close. But all they did was sleep.
When James's alarm went off, they got dressed -- in different clothes than they'd been wearing as SKL officers -- and took their things. They didn't bother to wipe anything down; Doom would know that they were in Latveria soon enough, one way or the other. They handed the key back to Dusan with vague words about going out to dinner and returning shortly and he asked if they would like recommendations, offering up a place nearby that served cheap but tasty fare. They concluded the pantomime by thanking him and then they left.
James took her to a different side street that featured a storefront with a queue, which they joined. The offerings were basic, giant versions of the traditional Latverian beef dumplings, steamed on racks right next to the smiling woman who also ladled out cups of soup, which was almost like a thin goulash when Natasha took a sip.
"Probably the best street food in the country," James explained as they walked. "Possibly the only thing I miss about here."
They'd finished their soups and were working on the dumplings that needed two hands to hold (they reminded Natasha of dabao in Hong Kong, just with different spices) when she recognized the entrance to the giant park that was attached to the grounds of Castle Doom. She remembered being here with Steve and Clint, waiting to execute a similarly improbable plan. She hoped this one went better.
"Did you like living here?" she asked as they sat on a bench in the park, joining a few other couples and families on nearby benches in enjoying a late bite on a warm autumn night.
It was a ridiculous thing to ask on the face of it, but she knew he would understand what she had meant.
"I don't think I can separate anything from who I was when I was here," he said after a pause for more than chewing and swallowing. "The Winter Soldier liked it here more than Russia, sure. It was pretty much the only place he had anything like a life, lived anything like how a real human being lived. It's the only place he had a name. But everything about that life was bullshit, was worse than bullshit because it was all some constructed reality where he was the punchline. So..."
"I'm not sure if it's an improvement that you talk about the Winter Soldier in the third person or not," she said half-jokingly.
James shrugged. "It comes and goes. It's not like I can forget I'm him. It's just sometimes I remember that I'm also Bucky who grew up in Brooklyn with Steve and I'm Sergeant Barnes, ex-POW and team sergeant of the Howling Commandos and I'm the golem who was part of Schmidt's personal army and had a HYDRA symbol on my shoulder and never even got a name. And I'm whoever I am now, who has to share headspace with all of those men and not go crazy doing it."
She leaned over and kissed his cheek and he looked at her questioningly.
"You were crazy long before you were anything but James Buchanan Barnes," she told him. "I have this on very good authority and nothing I've seen since has convinced me otherwise."
James laughed loud enough to draw attention, which required Natasha kissing him again, this time with her hands to his face to hide his features because one of the sets of eyeballs they'd drawn belonged to a policeman on patrol. He gave them a benign look as he passed, not even a glimmer of curiosity or concern, as James nuzzled her hair until he was well past.
"While my shrink probably approves of your methods," he murmured in her ear like love words, "Fury would shit housebricks if that's how we blew our cover."
When they got up from the bench a few minutes later, hand in hand and stopping first to throw away their litter, nobody noticed or cared. James led her up a different route than how she'd gone with Steve and Clint a year ago, along a semi-hidden path that went parallel to the front of the castle and past the barracks and guard stations they'd had to maneuver through. He stopped in a seemingly random spot, checked for witnesses by pulling her into a kiss and looking past her, then led her into the trees to what she first thought was an air ventilation shaft, then realized was an entrance to the underground tunnel network. The heavy iron door, looking like a raised manhole cover, was locked, a sturdy thing that would take far too long to pick. So James activated the armor for his arm, braced his feet, grabbed, and pulled. It took him two tries before the metal started to buckle, but then it came away so suddenly that James was thrown backward by the momentum, checking himself hard against a tree to stop his fall.
"Heh," he breathed out, winded and victorious. He waved the warped metal like a trophy.
He went down the revealed ladder first, waiting for her at the bottom because there was nowhere to go until they dealt with the next locked door, which unlike the one at the top was modern and alarmed and had a digital lock with a keypad. She wondered if this had been how Steve had gotten out last year; he might have been able to push past the iron door with enough force.
"Will frying it work or send everyone running?" Natasha asked. She had a password reader that would work, but it would take forever, especially if the code was longer than five digits.
"Tony gave me a setting that should just make it hiccup, not fry," James said, although he very clearly doubted whether it would work. "He called it the lockpick setting."
He held his hand over the lock and the moment the lights went out, he pulled the door open and Natasha ran through it, him at her heels, yanking it closed behind him. They stood for a moment looking at each other and grinning like idiots before they returned to the task at hand.
There was a short, dark, concrete tunnel and then another door with a swipe-card lock. James pulled a card out of his pocket and held it up in the dim light to see which end was up.
"That won't send up any flares?" she asked.
"It's a supervisory maintenance pass," he explained, swiping the card through the lock as the light changed from red to green. "Some of these sections were built to fend off the Turks, let alone the Nazis; they're in constant need of repair and all work has to be verified, although that rarely happens at the same time. Nobody would think twice about a night supervisor wandering around checking off all of the work that had been done during the day."
The corridor looked blandly familiar, anonymous enough that she couldn't tell if they were passing any part she had been near last year, if that door led to the supply closet she and Clint had hidden in or if that corridor led to the elevator bank where they'd been discovered. James knew where he was going, though, and led them purposely toward a door marked "exit" in Latverian with chartreuse signage, beyond which were stairs.
They went up three levels and then James swiped them through another door, into a hallway Natasha initially thought might be the royal apartments, then realized was instead just a very sumptuous hallway in a public part of the palace. There were expensive rugs on the dark hardwood floors and proper artwork on the richly painted walls and the bookcases that dotted the landscape all had leatherbound volumes with gold-embossed writing on the spines. There were regularly-spaced doorways on both sides, heavy wooden doors that were all open, even though there was no light coming from any room and thus, it would seem, nobody was around.
Except there was. The hallway had a turn to the left at the far end and there were voices coming from around that corner, casual voices talking at a volume that indicated that they were not worried about being overheard. James gestured for her to go into the nearest office, which had just enough ambient lighting from the hallway and the moonlit windows for them to make out furniture and see each other. With hand gestures, he directed her to go under the desk, which was a large, heavy, wooden thing with a panel that hid the user's feet. She went around it as James dropped to the ground and rolled himself under the heavy Victorian-style sofa, then crawled into the footwell, drawing her pistol and waiting.
She could hear the guards talking to each other about World Cup qualifying matches and the local basketball teams, using words she didn't know and couldn't even guess in context, as they drew closer. They were going into each room, she realized, and turning on the lights. She took the safety off her pistol, slowly as to not draw attention to the noise. She closed her eyes, waiting for the guards to reach their room. The lights flicked on and she opened her eyes, blinking to adjust, and held her breath as the footsteps drew closer and closer until they were just inches away, on the other side of the panel protecting the footwell.
And then they receded, heading back toward the doorway and the light turned off again. She exhaled silently, but otherwise didn't move until she heard the voices grow fainter again and then the beep-beep of the card-lock being disengaged and the door opening. Even then, after she heard the door close again, she waited. After another few minutes, she heard James shifting, so she put the pistol back on safety and crawled out from her hiding spot.
"The guards are supposed to check under the furniture," he explained as they dusted themselves off and continued on their way. "But they don't. They only turn on the lights because their supervisors sometimes watch from outside. The palace security system is good, they know it's good, and they know they have numbers."
"And yet here we are," she pointed out.
"Who do you think tested their security?" James asked with a grin.
It was then that she noticed that his left hand was still metallic; he had left the armor on.
"There's no point in hiding who I am now," he said with a shrug he probably hoped was casual. "And if we do get caught, well, they'll be more scared of the Winter Soldier than I am."
He led her back into the hallway before she could comment, down the way the guards had come from, pausing at the left turn before assuring that there were no surprises around the corner. There were a few more offices with another identical hallway between them, but at the end was another door with another card lock and James drew his pistol, gesturing for Natasha to draw her own before swiping them through.
There was nobody on the other side, which turned out to be an elevator bank. There were two elevators on the left, with a staircase on the far end, and then a single elevator on the right, with another staircase next to it. The ones on the left were for the office people, Natasha realized, and the one on the right was the royal elevator for Doom.
James gestured for silence, then indicated that they would be taking the royal stairs. The reason became apparent at the top of the fourth long set of stairs, which did not continue any further or lead to another locked door, but instead to an arched vestibule. James pulled out his silencer and started screwing it on to the muzzle of his pistol as they passed through the vestibule, which opened out to a gorgeous paneled foyer done up in Turkish-influenced reds and golds. Diagonally across from where they stood in shadows was a desk and a guard, who was reading.
James sighed quietly and unscrewed the silencer and holstered the pistol, instead pulling out a tranquilizer dart and a fat straw. Whoever the guard was, James recognized him and didn't want to kill him. Instead, he shot him in the neck with the dart. The guard crumpled slowly before he could even reach for where the dark had hit his carotid, slumping over so that he looked like he was a schoolboy asleep over his studies.
Natasha was shocked that the doors to the royal apartments were unlocked, especially at almost midnight, but they were. James knew the layout and led her quickly and quietly through; the family was in residence and the household staff might still be around. It was quiet, though; Victor and Valeria's children were young and probably asleep and Natasha was willing to guess that the staff had retired for the evening until she heard noises from the kitchen as they approached it. They could see a woman in an apron preparing a tea tray as they passed, down the long hallway that eventually led to the master bedroom and Victor von Doom's study.
This was where Steve had seen his best friend for the first time in more than seventy-five years and it had come at the business end of a bullet and Natasha wondered if James was thinking about that now or if he could put it out of his mind. She knew he would remember it.
The furrows in the wall the bullets had dug out were repaired, she noted in passing. As if they'd never been. Probably not the first bullet holes spackled over in Castle Doom.
The door to the study was closed, but there was a light coming through from underneath. James knocked twice, the hard-soft knock of someone who knew they were expected.
"Enter!" Doom called out quietly.
When James opened the door, Doom was at his desk with his reading glasses on. His attention remained at work, not needing to peer up at his maid bringing his tea. He looked content but serious, a successful man surrounded by his family and all that he had worked for, and not very much at all like the man who'd had her on her knees last year with one of his flunkies holding a gun to her head while he asked his questions.
"You can put the tea on the small table, Alena," he said, eyes still on his work as he crossed out a line of text. "Thank you and you may retire for the night."
When he didn't hear either confirmation or the sound of the tea service being put down, he looked up. His surprise was brief, but very genuine. He seemed especially surprised to see Natasha, which was good because it meant that nobody knew that James was working for SHIELD.
"I suppose this is overdue," Doom said calmly, taking off his reading glasses, folding them, and placing them on the desk. "If you are here to kill me, which you must be, then I ask that you do it away from here. I do not want my children to see me thus. This will be Ondrej's office soon enough and I want him to be able to oversee Latveria's care without being haunted by the memories of his father's corpse."
"You don't deserve that much consideration," James replied coldly in Latverian. "But Ondrej does."
Doom nodded in acknowledgment and started to stand.
"Stay where you are," James told him. "My gift to Ondrej will depend on how you answer my questions."
Doom sat. James gestured for Natasha to take one of the chairs across from the desk and he sat in the other.
"What do you want to know?" Doom asked. "You have already decided that I share blame for what has been done to you."
"Do you accept it?"
Doom shrugged carelessly. "I didn't know who you really were until a few years ago. But yes, I knew the gist of what had been taken from you, if not the specifics, from the start. I knew your visit to Minyar with Schmidt had not been your first. And I would not have cared had you continued to serve Latveria's interests so very well."
Natasha had known that Lukin had known who James really was and she had assumed that he hadn't cared, but the casual confirmation bothered her. He should have been at least a little bothered at using a brainwashed man, a captive, to do his dirtiest deeds, but he hadn't.
Alena and the tea arrived and she was startled by the extra people, frozen by the door. Natasha prepared to jump up and deal with her should she try to summon help, but Doom smiled and apologized for the surprise and asked that she bring two additional cups.
"What do you know of the other specialists Lukin has brought here to work?" James asked when she was gone.
"As little as possible," he replied. "I know the most about you because you were his greatest possession."
"And that divided loyalty doesn't bother you?" Natasha asked, choosing to show incredulity instead of anger at his continued reference to James as something less than human.
"I don't have anything to fear from Aleksander Lukin," Doom answered, pausing while Alena returned with the cups and left, closing the door behind her. She wasn't oblivious to what was going on; she'd understood that there would be no tea-drinking tonight else she would have poured it. "And it's not because I think I am smarter than he is or too dangerous to take on. It's quite the opposite. I am too small. Latveria is too small."
Natasha looked over at James, but he neither looked back at her nor gave anything away. The consummate professional.
"Alek is not here by choice," Doom continued. "I have always known that just as he has always done me the courtesy of pretending otherwise. But we can be useful to each other and that has been sufficient. He is not unhappy here."
James looked over at the window and the bookcase where he and Steve had fought before they'd both jumped out the window as Natasha and Clint had watched helplessly and fought off the Latverian troops on their tail. The damage was gone, fresh paint and new shelves and window sash pretending all was right in Castle Doom.
"You would have had me kill Captain America in this very room," James said, looking back at Doom. "Did you ask someone else to finish the job?"
At this Doom did startle a little. "No," he replied firmly and with disgust. "Defending Latveria's sovereignty from SHIELD on her own soil is one thing. Assassinating another nation's icon on his holy ground is quite another. It is uncouth. And were I to make such an attempt, it would be as a last resort because I would not expect Latveria to survive the experience... Ah. Is that why you are here? Not to kill me for your private revenge, but, back in the warm embrace of your native land, you arrive with the sanction of Nicholas Fury to exact vengeance on behalf of a grieving nation? That is why Miss Romanova has joined you."
And thus they had confirmation of what Sonia had told them.
"That's how it was supposed to go down," she said in English, not bothering to speak Latverian because the two men would understand her. Doom turned his attention to her. She looked over at James, who gave her a tiny nod, before continuing. "The murderer is identified as a Latverian foreign agent, we come here, and a day later, Latveria's planning a state funeral and a coronation."
Doom shook his head. "But--"
"But I don't think you have any idea what kind of nest of vipers you've invited into your home," she cut him off with a smile. "It's a good thing you don't think you're smarter than Lukin because you're not. He's been playing you from the start for far more than sanctuary."
"What do you mean?" Doom asked angrily, but Natasha could see that he wasn't angry at her, or at least not entirely angry at her. He was angry at himself. Doom was a shrewd politician and a very bright man. He must have understood that by allowing Lukin sanctuary in Latveria and then inviting him into the life of the royal family, Doom was grabbing a tiger by the tail. But he had thought that he would be able to recognize the warning signs, to sense the inevitable betrayal. He hated Natasha for telling him that he hadn't.
"The assassin was Yelena Belova," James told him, still in Latverian. "Who is an agent of the Latverian foreign security service. But if she wasn't acting on your orders -- and the assassination of a target as high-level as Captain America would have to come on your orders -- then she was acting on Lukin's. And if she was acting on Lukin's, then it was done with the full knowledge that you would be the one to pay."
Doom shook his head angrily and uttered denials. "Alek doesn't have the power to suborn an arm of the government."
Natasha laughed, ugly to her own ears. "Aleksander Lukin is the Supreme HYDRA. He has a lot of things you don't think he does."
James provided details. Doom got paler the longer he went on until finally he bid James stop.
"Call Ianescu," James suggested. Ianescu was the head of the Latverian foreign security service. "Ask him where Belova is. She's not in Mombasa; she hasn't been since she started hunting for me."
Doom picked up the phone and dialed. He apologized to Ianescu for the late call, but did he know where Sub-Commander Belova was? Mombasa? Was he sure? Checked in yesterday, had she? No, no need to recall her. It will be easy enough to task someone else.
Doom replaced the phone on its cradle and took a deep breath.
"Alek is not in Latveria right now," he said. "He is in Geneva. I will not use his children or Elizaveta against him. When he returns, he shall be dealt with."
"You'll try and you'll fail," Natasha told him. "You were correct. You are too small."
It was a statement calculated to make him act; they wanted Lukin scrambling and if took bringing down the royal house of Latveria in the process, well, so be it. The Happiest Nation in the World was rotten to the core.
James got up and Natasha followed.
"My gift to Ondrej is more time with his father, not his father's natural life," he warned in Latverian. Then he switched to English. "You're alive because I am letting you live. I have bigger fish to fry. Don't get comfortable."
They left the way they had come in. Once outside the park next to the castle, James hailed one of the special late-night cabs and asked the driver to take them to the main post office in Novy Izvory. Cabs had cameras, too, and it would be a long drive, a half-hour even in no traffic, but it would be the fastest way out of Doomstadt. Natasha didn't think Doom would be sending anyone after them, but there were still standing warrants out on both of them and those wouldn't get rescinded in the middle of the night.
They walked for about ten minutes once the cab dropped them off, basic counter-surveillance, and then went to the street where the car SHIELD had left them was parked in a public garage. Natasha took the keys from James, who was looking beat for more reasons than the long day. Being the Winter Soldier again had taken a lot out of him. She followed the signs for the Romanian border; there was nobody on the line and when the guards asked them what they had been doing in Latveria, James told them he used to live in Doomstadt and had been showing his girlfriend his old haunts.
Natasha pulled over at the first opportunity once they were an exit past the border and called Fury.
"We're out," she told him. "Message delivered. Nobody killed. Suspicions confirmed."
"Good," Fury told them, not hiding his relief. "No changes in plans. Proceed to getting the hell out of Dodge."
They were supposed to catch a flight from Giarmata airport in Timi?oara, but the flight didn't leave until a little before noon -- they had factored in a lot more time to do what they needed to do in Doomdstadt and get out of Latveria -- so they had hours to wait.
"Let's get a room," she suggested.
James nodded tiredly. "Sounds like a plan." He looked at his watch. "I should call Peggy."
He should, she privately agreed, for more reasons than just that he hadn't spoken to Peggy or to Steve since before they'd left New York. It would be close to five days since there'd been any contact and more than two weeks since they'd left Wyoming. Steve had been up and down since then. The nightmares were continuing, but Thor and the nurses had gotten him to sit in a chair with arms (he hadn't liked it much). The fuzzy ball the agents had gotten him was his new favorite thing ever -- it had a rattle inside, which he loved but drove Peggy nuts -- but it didn't quite make up for the fact that James wasn't there because Steve was watching the doorway hopefully every time he heard footsteps. That he was showing disappointment was good, very good, but it hadn't made James feel any better.
"You're going to be lucky it will just have to be a phone call," Natasha teased, changing lanes. James had done video chats from Brooklyn, which hadn't gotten Steve to stop waiting for him to walk into his room, but had it allowed Steve to see him when he talked and had given James the opportunity to see some of the small improvements Steve had been making. "You have looked better, Hot Stuff."
James blew her a kiss.
They found a not-too-sketchy-looking hotel near the airport. Natasha got them registered while James carried their backpacks. They'd have to sort through the contents before they went to the airport and lose anything that could get them arrested for trying to board with it.
Once they were in the room, Natasha took James's left hand in hers. It was the dull silver of vibranium because he still had the armor on top. "You can power down," she said gently. "We're clear."
James gave her an embarrassed smile and the metal disappeared, revealing cooler-than-human synthetic skin underneath. She kept the hand in her grip and used to pull him into a hug, which he returned, resting his cheek against the top of her head and breathing deeply. "Thank you," he said quietly. She squeezed a little harder.
Eventually they separated and James reached down to pick up the backpacks where he'd dropped them on the floor, tossing them on the bed. Which squeaked with just the light pressure on the springs.
They looked at each other and burst out laughing because that was totally a gauntlet thrown down in challenge.
But first, essentials. James called Peggy as Natasha dug out shampoo and soap. Everything was fine, but could she call back in half an hour? They were in the middle of something.
Natasha showered first and was digging through her pack's front pocket for her chapstick when James's phone rang, despite it only being twenty minutes.
"Do you want me to get it?" Natasha asked. James had already finished showering and had been brushing his teeth. She heard him spit before he answered no.
He came running out, towel slipping from around his hips as he grabbed it with one hand and his phone with the other. Such a graceful man in a fight and yet he nearly dropped both, which would have been a nice view, but would have put the call to voicemail.
She laughed at him and he smirked at her in return, although the smirk faded immediately when he answered the phone.
"Hey.... Steve?"
Also posted at DW.
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
It took more than a week for James and Natasha to get a plan approved by Fury for the trip to Latveria. Fury wanted hard details, which wasn't what James was used to providing and clashed with what Natasha was realizing was a far more improvisational style than anyone at SHIELD was used to working with even considering the personalities of the Avengers. For James, everything after the flight to Sarajevo -- Belgrade was closer, but the Latverians watched that airport -- depended upon the situation on the ground and was left vague because of it. Fury was neither amused nor willing to put up with it -- "you might not have had to give a briefback as the Winter Soldier, but you sure as hell know how they're done, Sergeant Barnes" -- and things got contentious at times as copy after copy got returned to them covered in notes that ranged from requests for specific details to "are you fucking kidding me?".
James was only half-kidding when he told her that he was starting to miss his old life. Natasha could sympathize to a point because she, too, had had to be broken to the bit of detailed advance planning. The Red Room had let its operatives use their own discretion so long as the job got done, but coming to SHIELD, she'd had to learn to explain what she was going to do before she did it, do it, then justify it afterward. At the start, Coulson had more or less had to play Twenty Questions with her to get an approvable plan cobbled together and she'd always let Clint handle that part when they'd worked together (in exchange for her writing up the AAR; fair was fair). But her sympathy was starting to stretch thin by the one week mark because James was stubbornly refusing to be precise in places where it was possible to be precise, even if they needed to do something else when that point arrived.
"What I don't understand is why you haven't just upped and left on your own," she told him at one of these points. "You're just fucking with him at this point and he knows it."
"I'm not fucking with him for the sake of fucking with him," James replied as they sat at his dining table with maps and notes at the other end from their takeout containers. "And if I am, it's mutual. You can't tell me you put up with this bullshit on a regular basis."
She couldn't, which was why she hadn't completely lost her temper with him yet. Fury was pushing harder than any good controller of a field agent would -- and Fury had been both a great field agent and a superb controller -- and she didn't think it was just because he still didn't like that they were going to Latveria. This was a test for James, although she was still debating what the topic was and what would constitute a passing grade. It wasn't a test of his loyalty, at least with respect to whether he might be the best sleeper agent to ever infiltrate SHIELD or not. It might've been a test of his mental health, although Natasha didn't believe for a moment that Fury hadn't been getting regular updates from the shrink or that he would have allowed them to get this far if he'd thought James couldn't handle it. But it also could have been something subtler, which James had perhaps identified already.
"This is more than usual," she agreed, frowning as he poured more tzatziki on his souvlaki. They'd agreed on mutually assured destruction via garlic breath before ordering, but there was such a thing as overkill. James grinned at her and leaned across the table, pouring the rest of the little container on her plate. She glared at him for a second, then shrugged. "You know why he's doing it?"
James took a bite and chewed and swallowed before answering.
"I know why I am doing it," he said instead. "So they don't think I'm a cheap trick. When I signed up for this gig, I knew what I was really doing: turning myself out for SHIELD in return for access to Steve."
"That's not true!" she cut him off, angry that he was thinking so. Angry that he was still seeing what could be home as yet another temporary place of employment that might not be voluntary. "James, you know that's not true."
"Of course it is, Natalia," he said with a sad smile. Resigned. "You see how Fury talks -- I see Steve on their terms, when my work for them isn't taking me away, which it does even when it's just sitting in conference rooms with pencil-pushers and waiting around in case something actionable comes up."
She made a disgusted noise. "That's how we all work," she told him sourly. "Hurry up and wait, go there and sit on your hands until we come up with something for you to do, all of that. You can't tell me that this wasn't your life in the Army. I know it was. And it's not like they're asking you to do something you don't want to do already."
"They're not," James agreed easily. "But it's not going to stop once we get Belova and whoever sent her. You think they're going to just let me go back to Wyoming or wherever Steve is living and just stay there? Live on their dime so I can be near Steve because I used to be a Howling Commando and it's my due as a war hero? They don't work like that. They'll find something else - I've given them enough for years of mission only I can pull off, or so they'll say. It will never be over."
He broke off, waiting for her to contradict him, but she didn't because, while she hadn't thought about it until now, she couldn't say that this wasn't a possibility. That Fury would take advantage of what he had on offer, which was the Winter Soldier at his beck and call. Fury had been genuine about his intentions when it came to repatriating James and getting him well, but he would never forget about the bigger picture. Natasha felt a little naive for having done so herself, distracted by her own jealousies as she had been.
"And I agreed to this," James went on, matter of fact. "I knew all along what Fury wanted from me. It was worth any price to see Steve and I don't regret paying it. But I have to push back because if I don't, the price will go up. I have to give them boundaries so that they don't keep taking more from me. Or taking me from Steve."
She understood that negotiation, should have recognized it from the start, perhaps. She'd certainly spent enough time testing SHIELD, testing Coulson, testing Clint for where their boundaries were, how much could she get away with asking of them before they said no or asked for payment in return. And every time she'd found the answer to be more than she had thought, more than she would need. She'd found it all so strange to be trusted like that, respected like that. It had taken her a long time to get used to it, to not see it as something to use. To be generous about accepting it and giving it in return, to fear losing it. She had thought she would be required to teach James those lessons, to show him how to trust and be trusted again, and had been pleasantly surprised when he hadn't started immediately testing everyone around him, including her. Instead, he'd gone to the shrink, he'd gone to the analysts, he'd gone where they told him to be even if it wasn't where he'd wanted to be. But she'd read that all wrong, too. He hadn't been living for himself. He had been living up to the terms of his invisible agreement. He wasn't building himself a life; what living he did, what growth he managed, that was all a byproduct.
"Steve isn't being held hostage by SHIELD," she said carefully. "You don't have to negotiate with his kidnappers so that you'll get to see him again."
James put his fork down. "I'm not Steve, someone they can bring to the White House and celebrate not being dead. They're never going to be able to admit I'm not dead because if they do, they'll have to say where I was and what I became. I can't exist. I won't exist except for what they've given me. Which is also what they can take away. So, yeah, I do have to negotiate with them because they are holding the key to everything I have ever had for myself. My old ratty undershirts, my best friend, my girl -- they can make it all go away. I'll play ball with them because I have to, but I don't have to let them get comfortable with it."
Natasha wanted to protest, but she knew that even if she could convince herself that this would never be an option for Fury -- and she wasn't sure she could -- she would never be able to convince James. So, instead, she took a different tack. "I hope you realize that should it ever come down to that, you have more allies than you think you do."
James smiled at her, grateful and knowing both. "But in the meantime, agree to Novy Izvory as the extraction point?"
"Please," she exhorted. Fury would live with all of the presumed deviations from their plan, but giving him a time and place where they would be to get out of danger would cover a lot of future sins.
Five days later, they were on their way to Sarajevo.
They were going to be two days in town before cutting northeast through Serbia; it would give them time to do some local shopping -- some things they would need could not be packed into carry-on luggage -- and it would give Fury his chance to make sure they'd gotten in undetected. The Latverians watched the Belgrade airport like hawks, but they had spies in and around other important transit points, so Fury had insisted on a 24-hour waiting period between landing and driving off to make sure there wouldn't be a welcome committee waiting for them.
Fury had offered to get local support for logistics; SHIELD had no permanent resources in Sarajevo, but he could use other agencies. James declined and Natasha backed him up on it since the fewer people who knew they were there, the better off they'd be. Getting what they needed was hardly going to be a problem for experienced pros like themselves. They laid low the first day, getting themselves on local time and waiting for any updates from the Helicarrier (Belova was still in the wind, nobody had seen them in Sarajevo), but on the second day they split up the shopping list between them; James bought their guns and Natasha stole their car and picked up food, a couple of containers of bosanski lonac and some fresh pitas from a hole-in-the-wall place that had probably been dishing up the same since Tito had been in diapers.
Natasha did the driving up toward the Latverian border; James closed his eyes because he was going to be doing the close work once they got there. They ditched the car in a field, wiping it down and removing the plates and other identifying documentation, which they buried, and then they changed into work clothes and started walking. There were formal border crossings a couple of kilometers northwest and southeast, but in between them there were no fences or guards -- of the visible type. The forest was dense and monitored electronically in stages. It was passable if you knew what was there and how it worked, as James did, but it was complicated enough to deter all but the most clever of smugglers. Even so, James needed the better part of an hour to get them past, during which all Natasha could do was play lookout.
"Welcome to Latveria," James said with a grin as he finished.
They walked on until the trees started to thin out, then they changed clothes again.
Southern Latveria was mostly agrarian, which meant work started before dawn and two strangers moving around at that hour would not go unnoticed, certainly not in a culture so used to watching everyone else (and being watched in turn) as Latveria's. So they didn't bother skulking. Instead, they were going with covers so audacious that even Natasha had blinked when James had proposed them. Fury had gone ballistic and they'd argued about it for a full two days before James had gotten his way.
Inspector Marko Ivanic and Sergeant Irina Mironova-Tahic of the Latverian internal security service (SKL) stepped out of the trees and on to the road. James had the higher rank so that he would be the one asked any questions and Natasha had been given a name that would explain why she spoke somewhat imperfect Latverian (she was fluent, but her idiomatic vocabulary was spotty and she spoke with a Russian accent she couldn't quite erase).
Natasha had been understandably nervous -- and Fury something stronger -- about posing as members of the secret police in a state where everything was monitored and most everything computerized. But James had insisted that that was an advantage because it would let them move around more freely and deter questions. Natasha still skeptical, but it was too late to back out now.
"If I end up back in that prison cell, I am going to hunt you down and feed you to Thor's dragon-eating koi," she warned as they walked. There was a farmhouse visible on the left, half-hidden by fields of wheat but with a light on the front porch. They would be seen imminently, if they hadn't been already.
They didn't see anyone as they walked past, but they hadn't gotten another kilometer down the road when a police cruiser slowed down and stopped next to them.
James did the talking. He whipped out his ID and explained in his slangy Doomstadt-accented Latverian who they were and why they were so far from home. "Someone probably saw some teenagers sneaking home after curfew and we get sent down to Selo Srpska to look for smugglers," he said with a 'what are you gonna do?' shrug. "We were supposed to get picked up at 0530, but nobody came and the fucking border guards won't lend us bicycles, so we're stuck walking back to Zembolia."
Natasha stood next to James, looking every inch like a civil servant who'd been up all night chasing phantoms and whose morning had not gotten any better since.
The constable, a young man with beefy features, poor skin, and thick hair, seemed to accept the story, asking if they'd called a taxi or asked for a police ride because he hadn't heard anything and he would have been the one retrieving them if he had. Nobody at the station had said anything about any SKL operations in Selo Srpska, however.
"This particular wild goose chase was ordered by Chief Inspector Spirovski," James said, digging into his jacket pocket for his cell phone. "I can call the fat fucker and ask him why nobody told you guys..."
Constable Pasztor blanched. "No, no, I believe you," he assured. Whoever Spirovski was, Pasztor wanted nothing to do with interrupting his breakfast to question orders. "I can drive you to Zembolia now, but you'll have missed the morning train north. The next one coming through that stops at Pleskec won't be for at least another hour and a half, maybe more."
James waved his hand dismissively. "More time for a proper breakfast at Mamaliska's."
Which was very clearly the right answer as far as Pasztor went because he beamed and told them to hop in.
"Thank you," Natasha said as she reached for the driver-side rear door. James subtly made a move to stop her, nothing that Pasztor would have noticed, but she saw it clearly enough.
"Can you turn off the back-seat video camera before we get in?" he asked, sounding a little ashamed and a lot apologetic. "Everyone at Katarina Street already thinks we're sleeping together and the last thing we need is a giant photo of us from the perp feed looking like we spent the night rolling in the hay."
At least that's what Natasha assumed he said; he'd used a couple of euphemisms for sex that she hadn't heard before in that context. Either way, Pasztor gave them a knowing nod and complied and then Natasha opened the door and got in, sliding over as James got in behind her.
Zembolia was a modest town that looked like so many other modest towns in this part of the world, too small to have been in the sights of grand-visioned conquerors or communists and thus carrying the solidity of centuries in its walls. Not too many cars, lots of bicycles and a few donkey-drawn carts, painted signs, and the surreptitious omnipresent monitoring implements of the twenty-first century police state.
"Breakfast is on me if you want," James offered Pasztor, who mournfully declined as they pulled up in front of Mamaliska's, which fit right in with its rustic exterior and lattice windows.
On the inside, however, it was more modern. The furniture was definitely younger than James. Probably.
They were served a hearty breakfast by a waitress who had obviously seen them pull up in the cruiser and then the friendly exchange with Pasztor and that, Natasha presumed, identified them as police and prevented the kind of questioning that obvious strangers in a small town would normally be subjected to. She hadn't doubted that part of James's reasoning for the cover IDs. It was what would come later that worried her.
"How are we going to get to Doomstadt?" Natasha asked quietly in Latverian. There was nobody close enough to overhear, but even from a distance, English would be notable because it didn't sound at all like Latverian in its rhythms.
In the planning phase, James had been vague about how they were going to get from the forest near Selo Srpska to Doomstadt and Fury hadn't called him on it. Natasha hadn't thought too much about it because in her experience, opportunities usually presented themselves. But here they were in a restaurant across from the train station and with a local constabulary who knew that two SKL agents were in town waiting for the train -- Pasztor had no doubt hit the radio before the gas pedal to pull away from the curb. And the trains, like everything else in Latveria, had cameras in them and there was every chance that there would be real SKL agents waiting at the other end.
James smiled at her, every inch the senior officer imparting earned wisdom to his subordinate. "Dirty little secret of the Latverian police state: the CCTV cameras on the trains and buses aren't monitored live. They're fed into facial recognition software in four-hour chunks, so our 10am train ride won't be fed into the machine until noon at the earliest. So even if we appeared on the footage, they wouldn't spot us for another few hours -- the software doesn't work fast like it does on television and it will have to plow through the end of the morning rush hour first. But we're not going to appear on the footage because I came armed." He paused to wiggle the fingers on his left hand, waiting for her to react to the bad pun. Terrible pun. "And they won't think anything of it because the cameras are finicky and go out far more than they'd like to admit. Something about all of the motion."
They finished breakfast and James tipped generously, but not outrageously; everyone knew the SKL paid well and an inspector could afford to be magnanimous. Then they went across the street to the rail station. As they walked, James told her how to buy the tickets to Doomstadt, what to ask and which words to use to make it sound like she knew exactly where she was going and was familiar with the Latverian rail system. James, meanwhile, went toward the newspaper stand. She conducted the transaction as James had instructed, asking for two second-class tickets to Pleskec and a blue receipt, which wasn't actually blue. ("It's like green cards in the States, they used to be but everyone still calls them that.") She'd refamiliarized herself with Latverian coinage before they'd left, so she didn't fumble when handing over exact change, and thanked the clerk.
James was outside the station on the track-side, all the way at the end of the platform with a lit cigarette in his hand, flicking ash downwind like a pro as he read the headlines from a folded Times of Latveria. Because even if someone was feeling brave enough to ask the SKL officers a casual question, they'd probably not want to walk all the way out to the designated smoking area to to do it.
"Do you know what the most trafficked item is for smugglers into Latveria?" James asked as she approached. He held up the cigarette pack, which was comically tiny. "Latverian law says that they can only be sold eight to a pack, to discourage smoking. Nobody outside the country wants to mess up their production lines to stuff tiny boxes for such a small market, so the only legal ones are domestics and they're more expensive than even good booze. The black market stuff isn't cheap, either, especially if it's not the Serbian shit. You can buy a good meal for what it costs to get a pack of Gauloises or anything American."
They shifted position so that James was downwind, since the breeze had shifted and Natasha had been getting a face full of smoke.
"Did you ever smoke for real?" she asked, curious, since he managed the cigarette with the sort of casual indifference that was hard for even trained operatives to fake, although he was faking it here -- he wasn't inhaling. He didn't smoke now and hadn't when they'd known each other the first time, which she had noted and been cheered by because she hadn't and that had made her an outlier even within the Red Room because everyone in Russia smoked. Which in turn was why she'd had to take lessons in it, throwing up half a dozen times before she could even manage to inhale once, and her handlers had given up. SHIELD, on the other hand, paid for its employees to quit smoking.
"Yeah," he admitted. "Not a lot before the war because I didn't have too much spare change and they made Steve wheeze to be around, but I bummed a few during my breaks at work. Once I enlisted, though, sure. We all did and the Army gave us cigarettes to do it with, at least until the Commandos. But by then, we had other sources, not least Howard Stark, who'd import cartons of the good stuff by the box-load because he didn't want to smoke the British ones. Also, we were in France all the time and Dernier was like a truffle pig except for Gauloises, which were still unfiltered then and Jesus, I still remember that rush."
He was smiling as he spoke and Natasha smiled back.
"Steve's first and only attempt to try smoking was with a Gaulois bleu," he went on, shaking his head. "Goofball couldn't have picked up a Pall Mall or something smoother. God, that was hilarious. Dugan nearly peed himself."
Natasha thought she knew what he was doing by reminiscing and she was more than willing to encourage him despite the possible risks. This was Latveria, where James had roamed confidently and cavalierly as the Winter Soldier, known and respected and feared by those in power. Until the life he'd known had been ripped away from him like the worst magic trick ever, revealing him to be a tool, a victim, a perpetrator of deeds he never would have consented to if he'd had his own mind. Latveria, possibly even more than Minyar, was where his nightmares lived. If he wanted to distract himself, she was going to let him.
She'd been watching him all along during the planning process, waiting for him to say something about the giant elephant in the room, but he never had. She hadn't prompted him for the same reason she'd never prompted Clint about his time under Loki's control when they'd been chasing James while he'd still been the Winter Soldier: some scars shouldn't be prodded by anyone but the bearers. Which was more or less what she'd told Fury when he'd asked her, privately, if letting James go back to Latveria was really a smart idea and was she so sure that this wasn't some elaborate redemptive suicide mission. She still wasn't sure about the first part, but she'd answered Fury firmly on the second: James had every intention of coming back from Doomstadt; he wouldn't have let her go along if he wasn't and he would never leave Steve as he was.
The train arrived on time, of course, and James properly disposed of his cigarette before they boarded. He indicated that he should go first, which was why she could say later that even though she'd been watching him, she would never have realized that he'd used the EMP blaster in his arm to take out the car's video camera if she hadn't known that that's what he was doing. It had been such a subtle gesture, so elegantly underplayed, that even the conductor, who'd watched them board, hadn't so much as blinked.
The conductor waited until they were seated before taking their tickets and leaving a marker that indicated that they were getting off at Pleskec. They rode in silence save for a couple of meaningless discussions in politely audible Latverian about who was going to write the report (she was, of course) and whether or not to include any details that indicated just how much of a pointless assignment it had been (it was Spirovski, so it wouldn't be safe, but maybe just one, because they had had to stay up all night). The closer they got to Doomstadt, the more crowded the train got and Natasha couldn't help but feel nervous. Neither of them were unknown quantities for Latveria's real secret police -- or any of their security services, internal or foreign -- and all it would take would be one person thinking they looked familiar and taking a surreptitious picture. She knew she was keeping her tension inside, maintaining the outwardly bored expression of a commuter, but it still annoyed her that James was sitting there with his eyes closed, body loose with sleep that was probably feigned, and not even looking around periodically.
Pleskec, where the SKL headquarters were, was almost at the opposite end of Doomstadt than Wernersburg, where Castle Doom was. They got off the train and James led her on a roundabout path that started off in the direction of Katarina Street but then quickly went well wide of it. Traveling inside Doomstadt had to be on foot; the city had an extensive public transit system, but it had too many eyes, human and electronic, for James to zap into harmlessness and they could maneuver more easily around the regular street CCTV cameras, especially after the pulled season-appropriate hats out of their bags. It took them an hour to get to Wernersburg on foot using two-man countersurveillance techniques.
"We should crash for a while," James said when they were together again. "We're not going to try for the Castle until late."
Natasha nodded. "You've got somewhere, I assume?"
Hotels required passports for foreign travelers and national identity cards for citizens; their SKL cards were perfect forgeries, but there would be a problem when they were run through the database, as everyone who was registering for a hotel would be.
James nodded and she followed him to a small hotel on a side street, one clearly intended to cater to Latverians needing to stay over in Doomstadt rather than any of the international chains for visitors from abroad looking for a spot of bland familiarity in a strange place. The desk clerk, name tag announcing him as Dusan, blinked twice when he saw James, but otherwise showed no sign of recognition or surprise. He filled out the registration himself, not even asking Natasha for a name, and ran two names through the computer that came back clear, then handed over a key. "Welcome and thank you for staying with us. Please let me know if there is anything you need."
The first thing they did once entering the room was a thorough security sweep. It came up clean.
"What's his story?" Natasha asked as she sat down on the bed and started taking off her shoes, leaning over to where she'd dropped her bag to pull it closer.
"I saved his sister's life a couple of years ago," James said as he dropped down next to her and flopped on to his back. "Entirely by accident. Turns out her would-be rapist and my corrupt palace courtier were the same guy. His family has a restaurant in Novy Izvora, but instead of free meals for life, I asked for an invisible room when I needed it."
In a place like Latveria, where everything was monitored, it wasn't that unusual for arrangements to be made to find true privacy -- and not even for illicit activities.
"You needed a place to bring your paramours?" she teased lightly.
"Sometimes," he allowed with an indifferent shrug. "It was just fucking and I really wasn't shy about it unless it was someone important's wife. But toward the end, when some of the Minyar conditioning was breaking down, it was mostly just a chance to get some quiet and figure out what the hell was was going on in my head."
They took turns showering and she let him go first; when she got out, he was already asleep on the bed. Or maybe not entirely, since he turned toward her when she got in next to him, pulling her close. But all they did was sleep.
When James's alarm went off, they got dressed -- in different clothes than they'd been wearing as SKL officers -- and took their things. They didn't bother to wipe anything down; Doom would know that they were in Latveria soon enough, one way or the other. They handed the key back to Dusan with vague words about going out to dinner and returning shortly and he asked if they would like recommendations, offering up a place nearby that served cheap but tasty fare. They concluded the pantomime by thanking him and then they left.
James took her to a different side street that featured a storefront with a queue, which they joined. The offerings were basic, giant versions of the traditional Latverian beef dumplings, steamed on racks right next to the smiling woman who also ladled out cups of soup, which was almost like a thin goulash when Natasha took a sip.
"Probably the best street food in the country," James explained as they walked. "Possibly the only thing I miss about here."
They'd finished their soups and were working on the dumplings that needed two hands to hold (they reminded Natasha of dabao in Hong Kong, just with different spices) when she recognized the entrance to the giant park that was attached to the grounds of Castle Doom. She remembered being here with Steve and Clint, waiting to execute a similarly improbable plan. She hoped this one went better.
"Did you like living here?" she asked as they sat on a bench in the park, joining a few other couples and families on nearby benches in enjoying a late bite on a warm autumn night.
It was a ridiculous thing to ask on the face of it, but she knew he would understand what she had meant.
"I don't think I can separate anything from who I was when I was here," he said after a pause for more than chewing and swallowing. "The Winter Soldier liked it here more than Russia, sure. It was pretty much the only place he had anything like a life, lived anything like how a real human being lived. It's the only place he had a name. But everything about that life was bullshit, was worse than bullshit because it was all some constructed reality where he was the punchline. So..."
"I'm not sure if it's an improvement that you talk about the Winter Soldier in the third person or not," she said half-jokingly.
James shrugged. "It comes and goes. It's not like I can forget I'm him. It's just sometimes I remember that I'm also Bucky who grew up in Brooklyn with Steve and I'm Sergeant Barnes, ex-POW and team sergeant of the Howling Commandos and I'm the golem who was part of Schmidt's personal army and had a HYDRA symbol on my shoulder and never even got a name. And I'm whoever I am now, who has to share headspace with all of those men and not go crazy doing it."
She leaned over and kissed his cheek and he looked at her questioningly.
"You were crazy long before you were anything but James Buchanan Barnes," she told him. "I have this on very good authority and nothing I've seen since has convinced me otherwise."
James laughed loud enough to draw attention, which required Natasha kissing him again, this time with her hands to his face to hide his features because one of the sets of eyeballs they'd drawn belonged to a policeman on patrol. He gave them a benign look as he passed, not even a glimmer of curiosity or concern, as James nuzzled her hair until he was well past.
"While my shrink probably approves of your methods," he murmured in her ear like love words, "Fury would shit housebricks if that's how we blew our cover."
When they got up from the bench a few minutes later, hand in hand and stopping first to throw away their litter, nobody noticed or cared. James led her up a different route than how she'd gone with Steve and Clint a year ago, along a semi-hidden path that went parallel to the front of the castle and past the barracks and guard stations they'd had to maneuver through. He stopped in a seemingly random spot, checked for witnesses by pulling her into a kiss and looking past her, then led her into the trees to what she first thought was an air ventilation shaft, then realized was an entrance to the underground tunnel network. The heavy iron door, looking like a raised manhole cover, was locked, a sturdy thing that would take far too long to pick. So James activated the armor for his arm, braced his feet, grabbed, and pulled. It took him two tries before the metal started to buckle, but then it came away so suddenly that James was thrown backward by the momentum, checking himself hard against a tree to stop his fall.
"Heh," he breathed out, winded and victorious. He waved the warped metal like a trophy.
He went down the revealed ladder first, waiting for her at the bottom because there was nowhere to go until they dealt with the next locked door, which unlike the one at the top was modern and alarmed and had a digital lock with a keypad. She wondered if this had been how Steve had gotten out last year; he might have been able to push past the iron door with enough force.
"Will frying it work or send everyone running?" Natasha asked. She had a password reader that would work, but it would take forever, especially if the code was longer than five digits.
"Tony gave me a setting that should just make it hiccup, not fry," James said, although he very clearly doubted whether it would work. "He called it the lockpick setting."
He held his hand over the lock and the moment the lights went out, he pulled the door open and Natasha ran through it, him at her heels, yanking it closed behind him. They stood for a moment looking at each other and grinning like idiots before they returned to the task at hand.
There was a short, dark, concrete tunnel and then another door with a swipe-card lock. James pulled a card out of his pocket and held it up in the dim light to see which end was up.
"That won't send up any flares?" she asked.
"It's a supervisory maintenance pass," he explained, swiping the card through the lock as the light changed from red to green. "Some of these sections were built to fend off the Turks, let alone the Nazis; they're in constant need of repair and all work has to be verified, although that rarely happens at the same time. Nobody would think twice about a night supervisor wandering around checking off all of the work that had been done during the day."
The corridor looked blandly familiar, anonymous enough that she couldn't tell if they were passing any part she had been near last year, if that door led to the supply closet she and Clint had hidden in or if that corridor led to the elevator bank where they'd been discovered. James knew where he was going, though, and led them purposely toward a door marked "exit" in Latverian with chartreuse signage, beyond which were stairs.
They went up three levels and then James swiped them through another door, into a hallway Natasha initially thought might be the royal apartments, then realized was instead just a very sumptuous hallway in a public part of the palace. There were expensive rugs on the dark hardwood floors and proper artwork on the richly painted walls and the bookcases that dotted the landscape all had leatherbound volumes with gold-embossed writing on the spines. There were regularly-spaced doorways on both sides, heavy wooden doors that were all open, even though there was no light coming from any room and thus, it would seem, nobody was around.
Except there was. The hallway had a turn to the left at the far end and there were voices coming from around that corner, casual voices talking at a volume that indicated that they were not worried about being overheard. James gestured for her to go into the nearest office, which had just enough ambient lighting from the hallway and the moonlit windows for them to make out furniture and see each other. With hand gestures, he directed her to go under the desk, which was a large, heavy, wooden thing with a panel that hid the user's feet. She went around it as James dropped to the ground and rolled himself under the heavy Victorian-style sofa, then crawled into the footwell, drawing her pistol and waiting.
She could hear the guards talking to each other about World Cup qualifying matches and the local basketball teams, using words she didn't know and couldn't even guess in context, as they drew closer. They were going into each room, she realized, and turning on the lights. She took the safety off her pistol, slowly as to not draw attention to the noise. She closed her eyes, waiting for the guards to reach their room. The lights flicked on and she opened her eyes, blinking to adjust, and held her breath as the footsteps drew closer and closer until they were just inches away, on the other side of the panel protecting the footwell.
And then they receded, heading back toward the doorway and the light turned off again. She exhaled silently, but otherwise didn't move until she heard the voices grow fainter again and then the beep-beep of the card-lock being disengaged and the door opening. Even then, after she heard the door close again, she waited. After another few minutes, she heard James shifting, so she put the pistol back on safety and crawled out from her hiding spot.
"The guards are supposed to check under the furniture," he explained as they dusted themselves off and continued on their way. "But they don't. They only turn on the lights because their supervisors sometimes watch from outside. The palace security system is good, they know it's good, and they know they have numbers."
"And yet here we are," she pointed out.
"Who do you think tested their security?" James asked with a grin.
It was then that she noticed that his left hand was still metallic; he had left the armor on.
"There's no point in hiding who I am now," he said with a shrug he probably hoped was casual. "And if we do get caught, well, they'll be more scared of the Winter Soldier than I am."
He led her back into the hallway before she could comment, down the way the guards had come from, pausing at the left turn before assuring that there were no surprises around the corner. There were a few more offices with another identical hallway between them, but at the end was another door with another card lock and James drew his pistol, gesturing for Natasha to draw her own before swiping them through.
There was nobody on the other side, which turned out to be an elevator bank. There were two elevators on the left, with a staircase on the far end, and then a single elevator on the right, with another staircase next to it. The ones on the left were for the office people, Natasha realized, and the one on the right was the royal elevator for Doom.
James gestured for silence, then indicated that they would be taking the royal stairs. The reason became apparent at the top of the fourth long set of stairs, which did not continue any further or lead to another locked door, but instead to an arched vestibule. James pulled out his silencer and started screwing it on to the muzzle of his pistol as they passed through the vestibule, which opened out to a gorgeous paneled foyer done up in Turkish-influenced reds and golds. Diagonally across from where they stood in shadows was a desk and a guard, who was reading.
James sighed quietly and unscrewed the silencer and holstered the pistol, instead pulling out a tranquilizer dart and a fat straw. Whoever the guard was, James recognized him and didn't want to kill him. Instead, he shot him in the neck with the dart. The guard crumpled slowly before he could even reach for where the dark had hit his carotid, slumping over so that he looked like he was a schoolboy asleep over his studies.
Natasha was shocked that the doors to the royal apartments were unlocked, especially at almost midnight, but they were. James knew the layout and led her quickly and quietly through; the family was in residence and the household staff might still be around. It was quiet, though; Victor and Valeria's children were young and probably asleep and Natasha was willing to guess that the staff had retired for the evening until she heard noises from the kitchen as they approached it. They could see a woman in an apron preparing a tea tray as they passed, down the long hallway that eventually led to the master bedroom and Victor von Doom's study.
This was where Steve had seen his best friend for the first time in more than seventy-five years and it had come at the business end of a bullet and Natasha wondered if James was thinking about that now or if he could put it out of his mind. She knew he would remember it.
The furrows in the wall the bullets had dug out were repaired, she noted in passing. As if they'd never been. Probably not the first bullet holes spackled over in Castle Doom.
The door to the study was closed, but there was a light coming through from underneath. James knocked twice, the hard-soft knock of someone who knew they were expected.
"Enter!" Doom called out quietly.
When James opened the door, Doom was at his desk with his reading glasses on. His attention remained at work, not needing to peer up at his maid bringing his tea. He looked content but serious, a successful man surrounded by his family and all that he had worked for, and not very much at all like the man who'd had her on her knees last year with one of his flunkies holding a gun to her head while he asked his questions.
"You can put the tea on the small table, Alena," he said, eyes still on his work as he crossed out a line of text. "Thank you and you may retire for the night."
When he didn't hear either confirmation or the sound of the tea service being put down, he looked up. His surprise was brief, but very genuine. He seemed especially surprised to see Natasha, which was good because it meant that nobody knew that James was working for SHIELD.
"I suppose this is overdue," Doom said calmly, taking off his reading glasses, folding them, and placing them on the desk. "If you are here to kill me, which you must be, then I ask that you do it away from here. I do not want my children to see me thus. This will be Ondrej's office soon enough and I want him to be able to oversee Latveria's care without being haunted by the memories of his father's corpse."
"You don't deserve that much consideration," James replied coldly in Latverian. "But Ondrej does."
Doom nodded in acknowledgment and started to stand.
"Stay where you are," James told him. "My gift to Ondrej will depend on how you answer my questions."
Doom sat. James gestured for Natasha to take one of the chairs across from the desk and he sat in the other.
"What do you want to know?" Doom asked. "You have already decided that I share blame for what has been done to you."
"Do you accept it?"
Doom shrugged carelessly. "I didn't know who you really were until a few years ago. But yes, I knew the gist of what had been taken from you, if not the specifics, from the start. I knew your visit to Minyar with Schmidt had not been your first. And I would not have cared had you continued to serve Latveria's interests so very well."
Natasha had known that Lukin had known who James really was and she had assumed that he hadn't cared, but the casual confirmation bothered her. He should have been at least a little bothered at using a brainwashed man, a captive, to do his dirtiest deeds, but he hadn't.
Alena and the tea arrived and she was startled by the extra people, frozen by the door. Natasha prepared to jump up and deal with her should she try to summon help, but Doom smiled and apologized for the surprise and asked that she bring two additional cups.
"What do you know of the other specialists Lukin has brought here to work?" James asked when she was gone.
"As little as possible," he replied. "I know the most about you because you were his greatest possession."
"And that divided loyalty doesn't bother you?" Natasha asked, choosing to show incredulity instead of anger at his continued reference to James as something less than human.
"I don't have anything to fear from Aleksander Lukin," Doom answered, pausing while Alena returned with the cups and left, closing the door behind her. She wasn't oblivious to what was going on; she'd understood that there would be no tea-drinking tonight else she would have poured it. "And it's not because I think I am smarter than he is or too dangerous to take on. It's quite the opposite. I am too small. Latveria is too small."
Natasha looked over at James, but he neither looked back at her nor gave anything away. The consummate professional.
"Alek is not here by choice," Doom continued. "I have always known that just as he has always done me the courtesy of pretending otherwise. But we can be useful to each other and that has been sufficient. He is not unhappy here."
James looked over at the window and the bookcase where he and Steve had fought before they'd both jumped out the window as Natasha and Clint had watched helplessly and fought off the Latverian troops on their tail. The damage was gone, fresh paint and new shelves and window sash pretending all was right in Castle Doom.
"You would have had me kill Captain America in this very room," James said, looking back at Doom. "Did you ask someone else to finish the job?"
At this Doom did startle a little. "No," he replied firmly and with disgust. "Defending Latveria's sovereignty from SHIELD on her own soil is one thing. Assassinating another nation's icon on his holy ground is quite another. It is uncouth. And were I to make such an attempt, it would be as a last resort because I would not expect Latveria to survive the experience... Ah. Is that why you are here? Not to kill me for your private revenge, but, back in the warm embrace of your native land, you arrive with the sanction of Nicholas Fury to exact vengeance on behalf of a grieving nation? That is why Miss Romanova has joined you."
And thus they had confirmation of what Sonia had told them.
"That's how it was supposed to go down," she said in English, not bothering to speak Latverian because the two men would understand her. Doom turned his attention to her. She looked over at James, who gave her a tiny nod, before continuing. "The murderer is identified as a Latverian foreign agent, we come here, and a day later, Latveria's planning a state funeral and a coronation."
Doom shook his head. "But--"
"But I don't think you have any idea what kind of nest of vipers you've invited into your home," she cut him off with a smile. "It's a good thing you don't think you're smarter than Lukin because you're not. He's been playing you from the start for far more than sanctuary."
"What do you mean?" Doom asked angrily, but Natasha could see that he wasn't angry at her, or at least not entirely angry at her. He was angry at himself. Doom was a shrewd politician and a very bright man. He must have understood that by allowing Lukin sanctuary in Latveria and then inviting him into the life of the royal family, Doom was grabbing a tiger by the tail. But he had thought that he would be able to recognize the warning signs, to sense the inevitable betrayal. He hated Natasha for telling him that he hadn't.
"The assassin was Yelena Belova," James told him, still in Latverian. "Who is an agent of the Latverian foreign security service. But if she wasn't acting on your orders -- and the assassination of a target as high-level as Captain America would have to come on your orders -- then she was acting on Lukin's. And if she was acting on Lukin's, then it was done with the full knowledge that you would be the one to pay."
Doom shook his head angrily and uttered denials. "Alek doesn't have the power to suborn an arm of the government."
Natasha laughed, ugly to her own ears. "Aleksander Lukin is the Supreme HYDRA. He has a lot of things you don't think he does."
James provided details. Doom got paler the longer he went on until finally he bid James stop.
"Call Ianescu," James suggested. Ianescu was the head of the Latverian foreign security service. "Ask him where Belova is. She's not in Mombasa; she hasn't been since she started hunting for me."
Doom picked up the phone and dialed. He apologized to Ianescu for the late call, but did he know where Sub-Commander Belova was? Mombasa? Was he sure? Checked in yesterday, had she? No, no need to recall her. It will be easy enough to task someone else.
Doom replaced the phone on its cradle and took a deep breath.
"Alek is not in Latveria right now," he said. "He is in Geneva. I will not use his children or Elizaveta against him. When he returns, he shall be dealt with."
"You'll try and you'll fail," Natasha told him. "You were correct. You are too small."
It was a statement calculated to make him act; they wanted Lukin scrambling and if took bringing down the royal house of Latveria in the process, well, so be it. The Happiest Nation in the World was rotten to the core.
James got up and Natasha followed.
"My gift to Ondrej is more time with his father, not his father's natural life," he warned in Latverian. Then he switched to English. "You're alive because I am letting you live. I have bigger fish to fry. Don't get comfortable."
They left the way they had come in. Once outside the park next to the castle, James hailed one of the special late-night cabs and asked the driver to take them to the main post office in Novy Izvory. Cabs had cameras, too, and it would be a long drive, a half-hour even in no traffic, but it would be the fastest way out of Doomstadt. Natasha didn't think Doom would be sending anyone after them, but there were still standing warrants out on both of them and those wouldn't get rescinded in the middle of the night.
They walked for about ten minutes once the cab dropped them off, basic counter-surveillance, and then went to the street where the car SHIELD had left them was parked in a public garage. Natasha took the keys from James, who was looking beat for more reasons than the long day. Being the Winter Soldier again had taken a lot out of him. She followed the signs for the Romanian border; there was nobody on the line and when the guards asked them what they had been doing in Latveria, James told them he used to live in Doomstadt and had been showing his girlfriend his old haunts.
Natasha pulled over at the first opportunity once they were an exit past the border and called Fury.
"We're out," she told him. "Message delivered. Nobody killed. Suspicions confirmed."
"Good," Fury told them, not hiding his relief. "No changes in plans. Proceed to getting the hell out of Dodge."
They were supposed to catch a flight from Giarmata airport in Timi?oara, but the flight didn't leave until a little before noon -- they had factored in a lot more time to do what they needed to do in Doomdstadt and get out of Latveria -- so they had hours to wait.
"Let's get a room," she suggested.
James nodded tiredly. "Sounds like a plan." He looked at his watch. "I should call Peggy."
He should, she privately agreed, for more reasons than just that he hadn't spoken to Peggy or to Steve since before they'd left New York. It would be close to five days since there'd been any contact and more than two weeks since they'd left Wyoming. Steve had been up and down since then. The nightmares were continuing, but Thor and the nurses had gotten him to sit in a chair with arms (he hadn't liked it much). The fuzzy ball the agents had gotten him was his new favorite thing ever -- it had a rattle inside, which he loved but drove Peggy nuts -- but it didn't quite make up for the fact that James wasn't there because Steve was watching the doorway hopefully every time he heard footsteps. That he was showing disappointment was good, very good, but it hadn't made James feel any better.
"You're going to be lucky it will just have to be a phone call," Natasha teased, changing lanes. James had done video chats from Brooklyn, which hadn't gotten Steve to stop waiting for him to walk into his room, but had it allowed Steve to see him when he talked and had given James the opportunity to see some of the small improvements Steve had been making. "You have looked better, Hot Stuff."
James blew her a kiss.
They found a not-too-sketchy-looking hotel near the airport. Natasha got them registered while James carried their backpacks. They'd have to sort through the contents before they went to the airport and lose anything that could get them arrested for trying to board with it.
Once they were in the room, Natasha took James's left hand in hers. It was the dull silver of vibranium because he still had the armor on top. "You can power down," she said gently. "We're clear."
James gave her an embarrassed smile and the metal disappeared, revealing cooler-than-human synthetic skin underneath. She kept the hand in her grip and used to pull him into a hug, which he returned, resting his cheek against the top of her head and breathing deeply. "Thank you," he said quietly. She squeezed a little harder.
Eventually they separated and James reached down to pick up the backpacks where he'd dropped them on the floor, tossing them on the bed. Which squeaked with just the light pressure on the springs.
They looked at each other and burst out laughing because that was totally a gauntlet thrown down in challenge.
But first, essentials. James called Peggy as Natasha dug out shampoo and soap. Everything was fine, but could she call back in half an hour? They were in the middle of something.
Natasha showered first and was digging through her pack's front pocket for her chapstick when James's phone rang, despite it only being twenty minutes.
"Do you want me to get it?" Natasha asked. James had already finished showering and had been brushing his teeth. She heard him spit before he answered no.
He came running out, towel slipping from around his hips as he grabbed it with one hand and his phone with the other. Such a graceful man in a fight and yet he nearly dropped both, which would have been a nice view, but would have put the call to voicemail.
She laughed at him and he smirked at her in return, although the smirk faded immediately when he answered the phone.
"Hey.... Steve?"
Also posted at DW.