Freezer Burn (24/?)
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
"Thor, stand down," Steve called as he bounded across the lawn. "Thor!"
He skidded to a halt at the last moment, holding out his shield arm in case bright colors would help draw Thor's attention from where he was currently menacing a trio of SHIELD agents, all of whom looked like the last thing they needed after an already miserable afternoon was to be threatened by a posse of Asgardians. Thor had brought his friends, two of whom stood behind him now, glowering over his shoulder at the agents.
"Thor," Steve tried again, close enough to reach out and touch his teammate's arm, the one holding the closest agent by the collar of his uniform. "Hands off. They're on our side, remember?"
Thor did not let go, but he at least lowered Mjolnir and turned his attention to Steve. "They--"
"Kept Doctor Foster and her research team safe," Steve cut him off. He put more pressure on Thor's arm, pushing down so that Thor would let go. He did, so Steve did. "Nobody died, nothing can't be replaced, everyone gets to go home at the end of the day. That's a pretty good result considering the circumstances, don't you think?"
The alarm had gone off aboard the Helicarrier at 1526; HYDRA had launched a full assault on a (thought-to-be) clandestine SHIELD research facility near Cleveland. A direct action team had been airborne by 1535, followed quickly by additional teams because nobody was answering the Helicarrier's queries and the local emergency services had not received a single 911 call. Steve and Clint had been on one of the second wave flights out because, as Tapper put it, "there are going to be complications."
Steve was currently staring right back at one of the main complications, at least for the time being. Thor's blood was still up from the fighting, now long over, and so he'd switched his attentions from the HYDRA agents who'd attacked his lady love to the SHIELD agents who'd kept her alive and mostly undamaged, but not entirely. Doctor Foster was being treated for cuts and abrasions and the general symptoms of being the victim of an armed assault on her place of employ. It was nothing life-threatening, nothing that would leave a scar, probably, but she'd been bloodied and Thor had seen red.
"I think Doctor Foster would rather you accompany her to the hospital than threaten the men who saved her life," Steve said calmly. "Unless you're still scared of hospitals?"
That bit was maybe a calculated -- Doctor Foster had made a joke about Thor's prior experiences with doctors when the EMT had asked her if she wanted to call anyone to meet her there -- but right now, Steve would take what he could get. Thor had been stalking around menacing anyone and everyone who caught his eye, his four compatriots watching but not interfering, and he was starting to get in the way.
"I am not afraid of hospitals," Thor spat out. "My experiences came when I... You are goading me, Captain."
Steve shrugged. "I'm pointing out that your girl might like a hand to hold in the ambulance," he replied as artlessly as he could. Which was pretty artless; he'd perfected the innocent look long before he'd become Captain America.
"Jane Foster is not a girl," Thor retorted, but the vehemence of his words was undone by the faint edge of a smile creeping on to his face. "That does not mean that she should endure such an experience alone."
With a nod of either acknowledgement or apology or some combination of the two toward the agent he'd been so recently threatening, Thor stalked off in the general direction of the makeshift triage center.
"You guys did good," Steve told the SHIELD agents, meaning both for the afternoon and for not escalating things with Thor. "Go get checked out and then go get checked in -- they're running head-counts and setting up shifts."
The agents muttered thanks and departed. Steve turned to the two Asgardians, a striking woman and a giant bear of a man.
"You could have helped out there," he chided.
"We wouldn't have let him go too far," the man replied somewhat carelessly. "Best Thor get it out of his system now."
"Best for whom?" Steve asked sourly, raising his arm to wave back to Agent Stokes, who was trying to draw his attention from across the square that made up the building's front courtyard. "Excuse me."
The building, a U-shaped white-walled banality, housed three SHIELD laboratories and some support services (there'd been a lot of jokes on the plane about HYDRA doing them a favor by taking out HR), all surrounded by well-manicured lawns and sharply-cut hedgerows and set back a couple hundred yards from the road, from which it looked like just another office park in an area dotted with them. Little did anyone know.
"Hazmat's been through and has given the all-clear," Stokes, the second-in-command of the action teams began as Steve approached, Steve somewhat gracelessly dodging one of the body-bag-laden stretchers. Nobody from SHIELD had died, but there'd been several HYDRA casualties because, as usual, HYDRA valued quantity over quality in their stormtroopers. "But if you'd like to head in, let me know and I'll find you a buddy. We're not letting anyone in by themselves right now. Even you fancy-pants Avengers."
Steve smirked, but nodded. "How bad's the butcher's bill?"
He already knew there'd been at least two medevacs, a scientist and the SHIELD agent escorting him to safety had been caught in an explosion in one of the labs.
"Twenty casualties, four urgent," Stokes replied. "We're moving thirteen to area hospitals and the others got bandaged up on site."
Steve nodded, eyes scanning the scene for Clint, who'd disappeared from Steve's side shortly after they'd landed. He finally spotted his teammate at the edge of the copse of trees to the right of the building. "Can two fancy-pants Avengers go in together?"
Stokes looked around, finally seeing Clint, who'd started to walk toward them but was still a distance away. "Sure, take him. Take Thor and his buddies, too, if you can."
"I think they've made as much fuss as they're going to make," Steve assured, sparing a glance back at where he'd left the Asgardians. They weren't there, so they'd probably gone to find Thor.
"Don't get me wrong, they were a huge help during the fight," Stokes said. "Just, well, they're a little... exuberant. And then Thor saw Doctor Foster and..." he trailed off, waving his hand vaguely.
"Yeah," Steve agreed, understanding completely.
A pair of agents were standing a couple of feet away, waiting to talk to Stokes; Steve let him take care of his business and started walking across the square to meet Clint halfway.
"They cut the power and phone lines," Clint said as they headed toward the front doors. Or, rather, where the front doors would have been if they hadn't been blown off. The large glass shards were far enough away to indicate a pretty big blast radius; the glass stepped on and tracked around by boot treads was smaller and had its own path that stretched from halfway across the square to well inside the lobby. "They had a cell jammer, too, but they took that with them."
There was blood spattered across the beige and frosted-glass sign that backed the guard station; somehow, the two agents manning it had survived, although one had taken a bullet to the neck. There was more blood on the monitors and workspace, thankfully not arterial spray.
The security turnstiles, plexiglass saloon-door-type panels mounted on a waist-high base, were mostly destroyed, but the ones that had remained intact, on the far left and right, were set in the open position and those were the ones they used.
They went up the leftmost stairs, stopping on the second floor, which was occupied entirely by the support departments. The damage here was relatively minimal, the smell of flashbang grenades still lingered in the hallways, but the bulletholes were high up enough that they'd been intended to scare and not kill. HYDRA hadn't come for Accounting or HR, the former of which was a little bit of a surprise and the latter of which was a lot of joking disappointment (at least now, while there were no friendly fatalities). An attack on Payroll could have gotten them names and home addresses, allowing them to go after any SHIELD agent (or to sell the list to any of the many who had such desires), but HYDRA had been content to use a detachment to keep the personnel trapped at their desks while the main force headed upstairs to the labs.
On the flight over, there'd been suspiciously little information about what went on in the labs, which everyone took to mean that it was classified for more than just security reasons. Or maybe not. Steve didn't know what could be so unethical or otherwise unpleasant about Jane Foster's projects. Thor had spoken of her work before, occasionally in unintentionally elliptical phrases that had more to do with the lack of distinction between 'science' and 'magic' on Asgard than with any lack of understanding on his part. (Which did not mean that Thor understood the details, he was cheerfully honest about that, but he certainly grasped the bigger pictures.) She was trying to build a gateway to other worlds, Earth's version of a Bifrost, which might have appeal to HYDRA but for the fact that all of it was completely theoretical until she found an alternate source of energy to the tesseract. So while Thor viewed it her work as a kind of preliminary architecture sketch for a future bridge that was eminently buildable, Tony considered it a pleasant fairy tale and if Steve had to guess which side HYDRA was going to take, it would probably be Tony's.
The other labs, however, looked a little more ominous once they got up to the third floor. For reasons that had nothing to do with the blood and scorchmarks on the walls.
Doctor Foster's lab suite was to the left when they emerged from the stairwell, Lab B and Lab C (no further identifiers) in front of them and to the right. All three main doors had been blown off with high explosives and the vestibule still had that slightly charred smell.
"The lady or the tiger?" Clint mused. "The two with the 'hazardous materials' warnings or the one with the warning that you might get fried by random voltage?"
Steve smiled uneasily. "Stokes said that Hazmat has been through."
Clint snorted. "They were wearing rubber suits with their own air supplies," he pointed out. "They just know what their little computers told them."
"I don't think we can find a canary on such short notice," Steve said. "I do wish we'd gotten a hint about what was going on here, though."
"No you don't," a familiar voice said behind them. They turned to see Natasha.
"About time you got your ass out of bed," Clint said by way of greeting. Natasha flipped him off.
"Children," Steve warned. "Don't make me make you go play outside."
Natasha and Clint gave him matching looks of such innocence that none of the three were able to keep a straight face.
"What's going on here?" Steve asked Natasha once the giggles had run their course and they'd sobered. "Everyone knows it's 'nothing good,' but how bad is it, really?"
Clint picked up a piece of blackened debris and turned it over in his hands, rubbing a part of it with his thumb. "Keypad for the entry lock," he said, then put it back down.
"It's not bad," Natasha prevaricated, which usually meant that it was very bad indeed. "It's just... It's not going to make you love your job very much."
Steve frowned, annoyed as ever by attempts to protect him from the big, bad modern world. Especially by people who knew how much it did annoy him and how unnecessary it was. "I've already waded through the worst human beings could do to one another," he reminded her. "On both sides. I can handle it."
"It's not like that, Cap," Natasha replied ruefully. "It's... Come on."
She turned and started picking her way through the debris that littered the floor en route to Lab C. Steve had no choice but to follow, Clint trailing behind.
Lab C was a series of rooms with windows that faced on to a central hallway that showed signs of grenade use and gunfire; it still smelled of CS gas, not the more innocuous flashbangs they'd used downstairs, and most of the windows were shot out.
The first doors on the left and right were for a break room and the bathrooms; they were propped open but there was no reason to step in. HYDRA had cleared them as a matter of protocol, but had gone straight on toward the business end of the floor. As Steve, Natasha, and Clint retraced those steps, Steve observed the damage, which told its own story as much as the human witnesses had.
The entire area was a mess, the kind of mess that came with tornadoes and armies of search teams with orders to destroy what wasn't useful. This wasn't the careful search by professionals; this was a ransack. The stools weren't just overturned, they were broken and tossed into the hallway, the glass cases shattered even if the contents inside looked undisturbed. There was blood, but not in the kind of quantities or distributions that went along with a lot of shooting at people. Most of the injuries had come from cuts and physical assault, not gunshots; people hiding and trying to escape, people being ordered to do things, being 'encouraged' to comply, and then, only then, being punished for failure.
The rooms were all more or less identical as far as Steve's unscientific mind went: similar furniture, similar unreadable scribbles on the whiteboards, similar damage by HYDRA. But one room was apparently not the same as all of the others because it had yellow caution tape across it.
"Now this is just honeycomb to a bear," Clint sighed happily, rubbing his hands in anticipation. "What do we have in here that someone doesn't even want the other agents to see?"
He was about to reach for an end of the tape when Natasha made a noise. "Wait."
She pulled out what looked like a powder compact that turned out to actually be a powder compact. Steve watched, curious and a little fascinated, as Natasha walked over to the taped door, held up the compact as a regular woman might, swirled the puff around on the powder, dabbed at her nose, and then held the puff up in her hand and blew.
The cross-hatching of a laser tripwire appeared in the resulting cloud.
"Hunh," Clint chuffed, then turned back to Natasha, who was finished her touch-up and putting away the compact. "You knew this was there?"
"Not as such," Natasha replied, looping a lock of hair behind her ear. "I know what has to be here somewhere. Or what Fury's praying is still here."
Steve frowned. "You're being mysterious for its own sake again."
Natasha made an apologetic face. "I'm not trying to drag this out," she said. "I just don't know how to explain it without you seeing it for yourself."
Steve and Clint exchanged looks. "I think she's talking to you and not to us," Clint said.
Steve thought so, too, which meant nothing good. "Is that to keep us out as well?"
"Probably," Natasha replied airily. "But that's a completely ridiculous expectation."
Once upon a time, he'd have respected the clear warnings to keep out. But that time had long passed and Natasha was making it very clear that whatever was in this room was going to upset him on a personal level. There were very few things that happened in laboratories that could upset him personally in this day and age, which meant that it had to be related to the past. He wouldn't need three guesses to figure out what that was.
"Do you need anything to get us in or will you settle for just applause afterward?" Steve asked.
"Well, look who's volunteering to be an accessory to B&E," Clint commented mildly. He stepped next to Natasha and looked closely at the door frame, pointing out what were probably the laser projectors to Natasha, who nodded.
It took them two minutes, maybe, and that was only because Clint was being fussy about how he took down the caution tape.
The lab looked like every other room they'd seen so far, but only at first. Once they were in and past the floor-to-ceiling metal shelving that hid most of the room from the doorway, they could see that the room was actually two rooms, a smaller one carved out of the larger. The smaller had windows that let them look in from the larger room that surrounded it (with blinds that hung unevenly and in disarray), but none into the hallway and had metal panels blocking the windows to the outside.
"Lead, I bet," Clint said, gesturing toward the panels with his chin from where they stood at the smaller room's doorway. "Invisible from the outside because of the exterior glaze."
Natasha slipped gracefully between them to the far wall, bending down to pick up papers that had fallen on the floor. She came up with a poster that had curled up on itself and she unrolled it, pinning it back on to the wall with some tacks that were nearby but not intended for the purpose. And then she stood back so that they could see.
"Oh, shit," Clint spat.
Steve found himself with no reaction whatsoever to seeing a diagram of himself with arrows leading from observations crammed into neat boxes. Or, rather, he had a thousand reactions, but all of them together canceled each other out and he found himself numb.
"Cap?" Natasha prompted. "Steve?"
He looked around the room, at the papers strewn on the counters and tables and floor and what had stayed on the walls, at the models and equations and how some of them looked familiar even if he'd never really ever learned what they meant.
"I thought it would be Bucky," he finally said. "I thought that's why Fury'd been asking me about him. That they'd be trying to recreate whatever Zola did to him because HYDRA has it now."
They probably were, maybe even here. But this room wasn't about Bucky. It was about him.
He shouldn't be surprised that SHIELD was working on the super-soldier serum. It would have been foolish of them not to be, even without HYDRA to spur them on. And he'd more or less come to terms with his role as lab rat and lab goal before he'd fallen asleep in the sea; he'd let Erskine's assistants poke and prod at him when he'd come stateside because he knew what kind of advantage having a 'brother,' having an army of brothers, would do for the war effort. And he'd known that while he was harder to kill than the average soldier, he wasn't immortal. Even if he'd had no idea just how close to immortal he'd turn out to be.
And yet this still stung as only a betrayal could.
"I'm sorry," Natasha began with a sigh. "I've known from the start that they've been working on this, but I didn't realize until today that Fury had never told you."
He nodded; he didn't want her thinking that he thought she'd reneged on her promise in Detroit. But he wasn't really capable of saying more about this right now.
"So, what, they took DNA samples while you were sleeping?" Clint asked, then frowned. "Right, of course. That's exactly when they took samples. Before you were fully defrosted."
Steve hadn't really ever thought about what had gone on between when he'd been found in the ice and when he'd woken up in that fake room with the baseball game playing. It had been disturbing as a concept - he'd been defrosted like a fish being transported for sale and then people had come and watched him like a museum exhibit - and he'd never given a thought to that someone (SHIELD) might have taken advantage of him in any way. But, in his new reality with its cynicism masking itself as pragmatism, he probably should have expected as much.
He looked over at the metal fridge; the door was closed. He went over to it and opened it. It was empty. "Does this mean they have my blood?" he asked, showing them the empty interior. "My DNA?"
Natasha shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted. "From that fridge, probably not. Your samples get more security than the President does; he's more replaceable."
"All they have to do is take a popsicle stick out of his trash can," Clint pointed out. "Or a tissue after..." he trailed off, making a very vague hand gesture that the other two nonetheless understood and made Steve blush.
"Why do you think he has his own incinerator for his garbage?" Natasha replied, then looked over at Steve. "It's mostly for more standard security, but that, too."
"I don't think coming up with all of the ways that HYDRA could already have what they need from me is all that comforting," Steve told her wryly.
She gave him an 'I was only trying to help' shrug. "But the truth is that we don't know what they took from any of the labs yet and so, yes, they might have taken something that had originated with your samples. I can't tell you not to worry, but I can tell you that everyone else is worrying, so you don't have to if you don't want to."
Steve smirked; they all knew that he was not going to be able to pass up the opportunity to worry about this, even if he wanted to.
"What's in Lab B?" Clint asked. "Now that we've gotten the big mystery out of the way."
Natasha made a dismissive gesture in the general direction of Lab B. "Biological warfare."
Steve gave her a look. "I thought everyone agreed not to use that anymore."
"Terrorists don't sign conventions or treaties," Natasha replied with a shrug. "We're not developing it to use it. We're developing it to be able to cure it when someone else uses it. Next door's all the stuff that's too hot to keep at Fort Detrick."
In the distance, they heard voices - other agents were entering Lab C. They looked at each other, Natasha took the diagram off the wall and dropped it back to the floor, and then they headed back into the outer room. Steve went out into the hallway first, the distraction while Clint and Natasha put the security measures back in place.
"Hey, Cap, didn't realize you were here," Agent Jimenez greeted him as she came out of the breakroom by the doorway. Steve jogged over to her, feeling a little guilty of intentionally taking advantage of the mild startruck-ness SHIELD agents not based on the Helicarrier often got when meeting him for the first time. She had nothing to do with the subterfuge going on here, not Fury's hiding the research and not the Avengers' own break-in, and he felt bad that she had to be deceived at all. But the alternative was not attractive, so he asked her what was going on downstairs and whether she'd heard updates on anyone who'd been sent to the hospitals.
She and her partners were the first shift of the security patrol for Lab C; Vandermeer, the Senior Agent in Charge, had organized a rotation until a full complement of security agents could be airlifted in.
Natasha and Clint ostentatiously appeared out of the doorway of the room across from the one they'd broken into, arguing about the relative merits of semtex versus C-4. Steve gave Jimenez a shrug, joked about being stuck with them, and wished her well before calling over for his teammates and promising to get out of Jimenez's way.
"Let's go see what's up on the roof," Clint suggested once they were back in the vestibule between the three labs. The stairs led up to a fire door with a warning about an alarm on it, but the power was still out in the building and so nothing sounded when they pushed through.
The roof was covered in gray gravel, the odd cigarette butt mixed in for color and texture, and afforded a full view of the surrounding area with only the central air conditioning units in the middle to interrupt the vista. There'd been no apparent access to or from the roof by HYDRA, but the SHIELD forensics people would come up here anyway once they arrived. Which would probably be soon.
Steve crossed over to the front of the building and could see the scene below; the ambulances were gone but there were five new trucks and vans and all of them had come bearing SHIELD personnel and equipment.
"Why was Doctor Foster's lab here?" Steve asked, turning back to his teammates. "You've got two bio-warfare labs and, what, astrophysics?"
"And HR," Clint chimed in dutifully. "More deadly than anything too dirty for Detrick."
"Ironically, it was for security reasons," Natasha answered, her face clearly indicating that she thought the joke wasn't going to be any funnier later. "This was considered the safest place not on the Helicarrier and not in some remote outpost that we can turn into a fortress that looks like a fortress. I think she'd probably have preferred the remote outpost, but she lost that fight when she signed on to work for SHIELD."
Clint barked out a laugh. "It just hit me that Thor's been sneaking off for romantic getaways in Cleveland."
They were all still chuckling over that when Natasha suddenly cried out and pitched forward, a shocked look on her face and her hand over her heart as if she were about to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Steve had the shield unslung and on his arm even as he was able to catch Natasha before she fell. She landed hard on her knees, he landed harder on his own as he swiveled her so that her forehead was in the crook of his neck allowing the shield to cover her back and his body her front. Clint stood over them, arrow nocked and eyes scanning the horizon.
"I'm okay," Natasha gritted out, breath hot against Steve's throat.
"You're bleeding all over my nice, clean uniform," he retorted. "That makes you, by definition, not okay."
That she could talk at all, however, was a good sign.
"Get to the AC unit," Clint called over his shoulder. "On three."
On one, Steve scooped up Natasha in his arms, doing his best to ignore her gasp of pain. On two, he rose to his haunches. On three, he ran to the giant AC unit, Clint right with him. They stayed small and ready to move again in case there was more than one sniper.
After a minute came and went with nothing, Steve shifted Natasha carefully in his arms so that he could see the wound. It wasn't to the heart, that much he knew before looking, but he was relieved to see that it was far enough away that it might not have even gotten much of a lung. He gently pried her fingers away enough to see that it was by the collarbone, near the shoulder joint but not on it. With his free hand, he reached into the belt pouch that held field dressings and pulled one out. They were some funky SHIELD thing that Tony might have invented and while they were meant to be applied to bare skin, Steve didn't bother because help was a thirty foot drop away.
"I'm going to take her down," Steve told Clint. "You'll cover us?"
Clint spared a quick look over and Steve gestured to the nearest parapet.
"Landing's gonna hurt," Clint said.
Steve knew he meant for Natasha, not for him. They'd all seen him jump from higher.
"It's too far to the stairs and it'll take too long," Steve said. "She's a tough cookie."
"Go on three," Clint replied.
"Sorry in advance," Steve told Natasha as he rearranged her so that he could carry her and then brace for the impact of the landing. Tough cookie or not, she was going to be in a lot more pain once they did.
They shocked everyone on the ground; nobody had heard the shot and it took a minute for Steve's directions to be heard and understood over the chaos. But there were supplies in the still-standing triage tent and there was a car equipped with a policeman's lights and Natasha was soon being rushed off to a hospital.
Clint was by Steve's side as they watched the car speed out of the parking lot.
"That was a little random," Clint said. "By which I mean it was completely out of character for HYDRA, not that it was unintentional. I think whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing."
Steve nodded. HYDRA wasn't a sniper kind of operation. "Were they waiting for one of us or would anybody have done?"
Clint chuckled. "We're gonna have to wait for Natochka on that one."
Steve gave Clint a sharp look, wiping his now-clean hands on a towel. There was nothing to be done for his uniform. "You think she was the target?"
Clint shrugged. "I think that the nearest building is more than a kilometer away and that if you're going to park at that distance, when you are presented with three stationary targets, you either aim for center-mass of the largest one, especially when he's got a target on his chest-" Clint gestured with his thumb at the star on Steve's sternum "-or you have something specific in mind because you have the skills to pull it off. You don't wing the smallest target unless you're really fucking lucky or that's what you mean to do."
Steve rubbed his face with his empty hand. As if today didn't have enough mysteries, both unsolved and unintentionally revealed. "This day just gets better and better."
"Captain, sir?" A SHIELD agent was waving to him from the command post. "Director Fury's on the line. He wants to talk to you."
"I'm sure he does," Steve sighed.
Clint nodded. "Better and better."
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
"Thor, stand down," Steve called as he bounded across the lawn. "Thor!"
He skidded to a halt at the last moment, holding out his shield arm in case bright colors would help draw Thor's attention from where he was currently menacing a trio of SHIELD agents, all of whom looked like the last thing they needed after an already miserable afternoon was to be threatened by a posse of Asgardians. Thor had brought his friends, two of whom stood behind him now, glowering over his shoulder at the agents.
"Thor," Steve tried again, close enough to reach out and touch his teammate's arm, the one holding the closest agent by the collar of his uniform. "Hands off. They're on our side, remember?"
Thor did not let go, but he at least lowered Mjolnir and turned his attention to Steve. "They--"
"Kept Doctor Foster and her research team safe," Steve cut him off. He put more pressure on Thor's arm, pushing down so that Thor would let go. He did, so Steve did. "Nobody died, nothing can't be replaced, everyone gets to go home at the end of the day. That's a pretty good result considering the circumstances, don't you think?"
The alarm had gone off aboard the Helicarrier at 1526; HYDRA had launched a full assault on a (thought-to-be) clandestine SHIELD research facility near Cleveland. A direct action team had been airborne by 1535, followed quickly by additional teams because nobody was answering the Helicarrier's queries and the local emergency services had not received a single 911 call. Steve and Clint had been on one of the second wave flights out because, as Tapper put it, "there are going to be complications."
Steve was currently staring right back at one of the main complications, at least for the time being. Thor's blood was still up from the fighting, now long over, and so he'd switched his attentions from the HYDRA agents who'd attacked his lady love to the SHIELD agents who'd kept her alive and mostly undamaged, but not entirely. Doctor Foster was being treated for cuts and abrasions and the general symptoms of being the victim of an armed assault on her place of employ. It was nothing life-threatening, nothing that would leave a scar, probably, but she'd been bloodied and Thor had seen red.
"I think Doctor Foster would rather you accompany her to the hospital than threaten the men who saved her life," Steve said calmly. "Unless you're still scared of hospitals?"
That bit was maybe a calculated -- Doctor Foster had made a joke about Thor's prior experiences with doctors when the EMT had asked her if she wanted to call anyone to meet her there -- but right now, Steve would take what he could get. Thor had been stalking around menacing anyone and everyone who caught his eye, his four compatriots watching but not interfering, and he was starting to get in the way.
"I am not afraid of hospitals," Thor spat out. "My experiences came when I... You are goading me, Captain."
Steve shrugged. "I'm pointing out that your girl might like a hand to hold in the ambulance," he replied as artlessly as he could. Which was pretty artless; he'd perfected the innocent look long before he'd become Captain America.
"Jane Foster is not a girl," Thor retorted, but the vehemence of his words was undone by the faint edge of a smile creeping on to his face. "That does not mean that she should endure such an experience alone."
With a nod of either acknowledgement or apology or some combination of the two toward the agent he'd been so recently threatening, Thor stalked off in the general direction of the makeshift triage center.
"You guys did good," Steve told the SHIELD agents, meaning both for the afternoon and for not escalating things with Thor. "Go get checked out and then go get checked in -- they're running head-counts and setting up shifts."
The agents muttered thanks and departed. Steve turned to the two Asgardians, a striking woman and a giant bear of a man.
"You could have helped out there," he chided.
"We wouldn't have let him go too far," the man replied somewhat carelessly. "Best Thor get it out of his system now."
"Best for whom?" Steve asked sourly, raising his arm to wave back to Agent Stokes, who was trying to draw his attention from across the square that made up the building's front courtyard. "Excuse me."
The building, a U-shaped white-walled banality, housed three SHIELD laboratories and some support services (there'd been a lot of jokes on the plane about HYDRA doing them a favor by taking out HR), all surrounded by well-manicured lawns and sharply-cut hedgerows and set back a couple hundred yards from the road, from which it looked like just another office park in an area dotted with them. Little did anyone know.
"Hazmat's been through and has given the all-clear," Stokes, the second-in-command of the action teams began as Steve approached, Steve somewhat gracelessly dodging one of the body-bag-laden stretchers. Nobody from SHIELD had died, but there'd been several HYDRA casualties because, as usual, HYDRA valued quantity over quality in their stormtroopers. "But if you'd like to head in, let me know and I'll find you a buddy. We're not letting anyone in by themselves right now. Even you fancy-pants Avengers."
Steve smirked, but nodded. "How bad's the butcher's bill?"
He already knew there'd been at least two medevacs, a scientist and the SHIELD agent escorting him to safety had been caught in an explosion in one of the labs.
"Twenty casualties, four urgent," Stokes replied. "We're moving thirteen to area hospitals and the others got bandaged up on site."
Steve nodded, eyes scanning the scene for Clint, who'd disappeared from Steve's side shortly after they'd landed. He finally spotted his teammate at the edge of the copse of trees to the right of the building. "Can two fancy-pants Avengers go in together?"
Stokes looked around, finally seeing Clint, who'd started to walk toward them but was still a distance away. "Sure, take him. Take Thor and his buddies, too, if you can."
"I think they've made as much fuss as they're going to make," Steve assured, sparing a glance back at where he'd left the Asgardians. They weren't there, so they'd probably gone to find Thor.
"Don't get me wrong, they were a huge help during the fight," Stokes said. "Just, well, they're a little... exuberant. And then Thor saw Doctor Foster and..." he trailed off, waving his hand vaguely.
"Yeah," Steve agreed, understanding completely.
A pair of agents were standing a couple of feet away, waiting to talk to Stokes; Steve let him take care of his business and started walking across the square to meet Clint halfway.
"They cut the power and phone lines," Clint said as they headed toward the front doors. Or, rather, where the front doors would have been if they hadn't been blown off. The large glass shards were far enough away to indicate a pretty big blast radius; the glass stepped on and tracked around by boot treads was smaller and had its own path that stretched from halfway across the square to well inside the lobby. "They had a cell jammer, too, but they took that with them."
There was blood spattered across the beige and frosted-glass sign that backed the guard station; somehow, the two agents manning it had survived, although one had taken a bullet to the neck. There was more blood on the monitors and workspace, thankfully not arterial spray.
The security turnstiles, plexiglass saloon-door-type panels mounted on a waist-high base, were mostly destroyed, but the ones that had remained intact, on the far left and right, were set in the open position and those were the ones they used.
They went up the leftmost stairs, stopping on the second floor, which was occupied entirely by the support departments. The damage here was relatively minimal, the smell of flashbang grenades still lingered in the hallways, but the bulletholes were high up enough that they'd been intended to scare and not kill. HYDRA hadn't come for Accounting or HR, the former of which was a little bit of a surprise and the latter of which was a lot of joking disappointment (at least now, while there were no friendly fatalities). An attack on Payroll could have gotten them names and home addresses, allowing them to go after any SHIELD agent (or to sell the list to any of the many who had such desires), but HYDRA had been content to use a detachment to keep the personnel trapped at their desks while the main force headed upstairs to the labs.
On the flight over, there'd been suspiciously little information about what went on in the labs, which everyone took to mean that it was classified for more than just security reasons. Or maybe not. Steve didn't know what could be so unethical or otherwise unpleasant about Jane Foster's projects. Thor had spoken of her work before, occasionally in unintentionally elliptical phrases that had more to do with the lack of distinction between 'science' and 'magic' on Asgard than with any lack of understanding on his part. (Which did not mean that Thor understood the details, he was cheerfully honest about that, but he certainly grasped the bigger pictures.) She was trying to build a gateway to other worlds, Earth's version of a Bifrost, which might have appeal to HYDRA but for the fact that all of it was completely theoretical until she found an alternate source of energy to the tesseract. So while Thor viewed it her work as a kind of preliminary architecture sketch for a future bridge that was eminently buildable, Tony considered it a pleasant fairy tale and if Steve had to guess which side HYDRA was going to take, it would probably be Tony's.
The other labs, however, looked a little more ominous once they got up to the third floor. For reasons that had nothing to do with the blood and scorchmarks on the walls.
Doctor Foster's lab suite was to the left when they emerged from the stairwell, Lab B and Lab C (no further identifiers) in front of them and to the right. All three main doors had been blown off with high explosives and the vestibule still had that slightly charred smell.
"The lady or the tiger?" Clint mused. "The two with the 'hazardous materials' warnings or the one with the warning that you might get fried by random voltage?"
Steve smiled uneasily. "Stokes said that Hazmat has been through."
Clint snorted. "They were wearing rubber suits with their own air supplies," he pointed out. "They just know what their little computers told them."
"I don't think we can find a canary on such short notice," Steve said. "I do wish we'd gotten a hint about what was going on here, though."
"No you don't," a familiar voice said behind them. They turned to see Natasha.
"About time you got your ass out of bed," Clint said by way of greeting. Natasha flipped him off.
"Children," Steve warned. "Don't make me make you go play outside."
Natasha and Clint gave him matching looks of such innocence that none of the three were able to keep a straight face.
"What's going on here?" Steve asked Natasha once the giggles had run their course and they'd sobered. "Everyone knows it's 'nothing good,' but how bad is it, really?"
Clint picked up a piece of blackened debris and turned it over in his hands, rubbing a part of it with his thumb. "Keypad for the entry lock," he said, then put it back down.
"It's not bad," Natasha prevaricated, which usually meant that it was very bad indeed. "It's just... It's not going to make you love your job very much."
Steve frowned, annoyed as ever by attempts to protect him from the big, bad modern world. Especially by people who knew how much it did annoy him and how unnecessary it was. "I've already waded through the worst human beings could do to one another," he reminded her. "On both sides. I can handle it."
"It's not like that, Cap," Natasha replied ruefully. "It's... Come on."
She turned and started picking her way through the debris that littered the floor en route to Lab C. Steve had no choice but to follow, Clint trailing behind.
Lab C was a series of rooms with windows that faced on to a central hallway that showed signs of grenade use and gunfire; it still smelled of CS gas, not the more innocuous flashbangs they'd used downstairs, and most of the windows were shot out.
The first doors on the left and right were for a break room and the bathrooms; they were propped open but there was no reason to step in. HYDRA had cleared them as a matter of protocol, but had gone straight on toward the business end of the floor. As Steve, Natasha, and Clint retraced those steps, Steve observed the damage, which told its own story as much as the human witnesses had.
The entire area was a mess, the kind of mess that came with tornadoes and armies of search teams with orders to destroy what wasn't useful. This wasn't the careful search by professionals; this was a ransack. The stools weren't just overturned, they were broken and tossed into the hallway, the glass cases shattered even if the contents inside looked undisturbed. There was blood, but not in the kind of quantities or distributions that went along with a lot of shooting at people. Most of the injuries had come from cuts and physical assault, not gunshots; people hiding and trying to escape, people being ordered to do things, being 'encouraged' to comply, and then, only then, being punished for failure.
The rooms were all more or less identical as far as Steve's unscientific mind went: similar furniture, similar unreadable scribbles on the whiteboards, similar damage by HYDRA. But one room was apparently not the same as all of the others because it had yellow caution tape across it.
"Now this is just honeycomb to a bear," Clint sighed happily, rubbing his hands in anticipation. "What do we have in here that someone doesn't even want the other agents to see?"
He was about to reach for an end of the tape when Natasha made a noise. "Wait."
She pulled out what looked like a powder compact that turned out to actually be a powder compact. Steve watched, curious and a little fascinated, as Natasha walked over to the taped door, held up the compact as a regular woman might, swirled the puff around on the powder, dabbed at her nose, and then held the puff up in her hand and blew.
The cross-hatching of a laser tripwire appeared in the resulting cloud.
"Hunh," Clint chuffed, then turned back to Natasha, who was finished her touch-up and putting away the compact. "You knew this was there?"
"Not as such," Natasha replied, looping a lock of hair behind her ear. "I know what has to be here somewhere. Or what Fury's praying is still here."
Steve frowned. "You're being mysterious for its own sake again."
Natasha made an apologetic face. "I'm not trying to drag this out," she said. "I just don't know how to explain it without you seeing it for yourself."
Steve and Clint exchanged looks. "I think she's talking to you and not to us," Clint said.
Steve thought so, too, which meant nothing good. "Is that to keep us out as well?"
"Probably," Natasha replied airily. "But that's a completely ridiculous expectation."
Once upon a time, he'd have respected the clear warnings to keep out. But that time had long passed and Natasha was making it very clear that whatever was in this room was going to upset him on a personal level. There were very few things that happened in laboratories that could upset him personally in this day and age, which meant that it had to be related to the past. He wouldn't need three guesses to figure out what that was.
"Do you need anything to get us in or will you settle for just applause afterward?" Steve asked.
"Well, look who's volunteering to be an accessory to B&E," Clint commented mildly. He stepped next to Natasha and looked closely at the door frame, pointing out what were probably the laser projectors to Natasha, who nodded.
It took them two minutes, maybe, and that was only because Clint was being fussy about how he took down the caution tape.
The lab looked like every other room they'd seen so far, but only at first. Once they were in and past the floor-to-ceiling metal shelving that hid most of the room from the doorway, they could see that the room was actually two rooms, a smaller one carved out of the larger. The smaller had windows that let them look in from the larger room that surrounded it (with blinds that hung unevenly and in disarray), but none into the hallway and had metal panels blocking the windows to the outside.
"Lead, I bet," Clint said, gesturing toward the panels with his chin from where they stood at the smaller room's doorway. "Invisible from the outside because of the exterior glaze."
Natasha slipped gracefully between them to the far wall, bending down to pick up papers that had fallen on the floor. She came up with a poster that had curled up on itself and she unrolled it, pinning it back on to the wall with some tacks that were nearby but not intended for the purpose. And then she stood back so that they could see.
"Oh, shit," Clint spat.
Steve found himself with no reaction whatsoever to seeing a diagram of himself with arrows leading from observations crammed into neat boxes. Or, rather, he had a thousand reactions, but all of them together canceled each other out and he found himself numb.
"Cap?" Natasha prompted. "Steve?"
He looked around the room, at the papers strewn on the counters and tables and floor and what had stayed on the walls, at the models and equations and how some of them looked familiar even if he'd never really ever learned what they meant.
"I thought it would be Bucky," he finally said. "I thought that's why Fury'd been asking me about him. That they'd be trying to recreate whatever Zola did to him because HYDRA has it now."
They probably were, maybe even here. But this room wasn't about Bucky. It was about him.
He shouldn't be surprised that SHIELD was working on the super-soldier serum. It would have been foolish of them not to be, even without HYDRA to spur them on. And he'd more or less come to terms with his role as lab rat and lab goal before he'd fallen asleep in the sea; he'd let Erskine's assistants poke and prod at him when he'd come stateside because he knew what kind of advantage having a 'brother,' having an army of brothers, would do for the war effort. And he'd known that while he was harder to kill than the average soldier, he wasn't immortal. Even if he'd had no idea just how close to immortal he'd turn out to be.
And yet this still stung as only a betrayal could.
"I'm sorry," Natasha began with a sigh. "I've known from the start that they've been working on this, but I didn't realize until today that Fury had never told you."
He nodded; he didn't want her thinking that he thought she'd reneged on her promise in Detroit. But he wasn't really capable of saying more about this right now.
"So, what, they took DNA samples while you were sleeping?" Clint asked, then frowned. "Right, of course. That's exactly when they took samples. Before you were fully defrosted."
Steve hadn't really ever thought about what had gone on between when he'd been found in the ice and when he'd woken up in that fake room with the baseball game playing. It had been disturbing as a concept - he'd been defrosted like a fish being transported for sale and then people had come and watched him like a museum exhibit - and he'd never given a thought to that someone (SHIELD) might have taken advantage of him in any way. But, in his new reality with its cynicism masking itself as pragmatism, he probably should have expected as much.
He looked over at the metal fridge; the door was closed. He went over to it and opened it. It was empty. "Does this mean they have my blood?" he asked, showing them the empty interior. "My DNA?"
Natasha shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted. "From that fridge, probably not. Your samples get more security than the President does; he's more replaceable."
"All they have to do is take a popsicle stick out of his trash can," Clint pointed out. "Or a tissue after..." he trailed off, making a very vague hand gesture that the other two nonetheless understood and made Steve blush.
"Why do you think he has his own incinerator for his garbage?" Natasha replied, then looked over at Steve. "It's mostly for more standard security, but that, too."
"I don't think coming up with all of the ways that HYDRA could already have what they need from me is all that comforting," Steve told her wryly.
She gave him an 'I was only trying to help' shrug. "But the truth is that we don't know what they took from any of the labs yet and so, yes, they might have taken something that had originated with your samples. I can't tell you not to worry, but I can tell you that everyone else is worrying, so you don't have to if you don't want to."
Steve smirked; they all knew that he was not going to be able to pass up the opportunity to worry about this, even if he wanted to.
"What's in Lab B?" Clint asked. "Now that we've gotten the big mystery out of the way."
Natasha made a dismissive gesture in the general direction of Lab B. "Biological warfare."
Steve gave her a look. "I thought everyone agreed not to use that anymore."
"Terrorists don't sign conventions or treaties," Natasha replied with a shrug. "We're not developing it to use it. We're developing it to be able to cure it when someone else uses it. Next door's all the stuff that's too hot to keep at Fort Detrick."
In the distance, they heard voices - other agents were entering Lab C. They looked at each other, Natasha took the diagram off the wall and dropped it back to the floor, and then they headed back into the outer room. Steve went out into the hallway first, the distraction while Clint and Natasha put the security measures back in place.
"Hey, Cap, didn't realize you were here," Agent Jimenez greeted him as she came out of the breakroom by the doorway. Steve jogged over to her, feeling a little guilty of intentionally taking advantage of the mild startruck-ness SHIELD agents not based on the Helicarrier often got when meeting him for the first time. She had nothing to do with the subterfuge going on here, not Fury's hiding the research and not the Avengers' own break-in, and he felt bad that she had to be deceived at all. But the alternative was not attractive, so he asked her what was going on downstairs and whether she'd heard updates on anyone who'd been sent to the hospitals.
She and her partners were the first shift of the security patrol for Lab C; Vandermeer, the Senior Agent in Charge, had organized a rotation until a full complement of security agents could be airlifted in.
Natasha and Clint ostentatiously appeared out of the doorway of the room across from the one they'd broken into, arguing about the relative merits of semtex versus C-4. Steve gave Jimenez a shrug, joked about being stuck with them, and wished her well before calling over for his teammates and promising to get out of Jimenez's way.
"Let's go see what's up on the roof," Clint suggested once they were back in the vestibule between the three labs. The stairs led up to a fire door with a warning about an alarm on it, but the power was still out in the building and so nothing sounded when they pushed through.
The roof was covered in gray gravel, the odd cigarette butt mixed in for color and texture, and afforded a full view of the surrounding area with only the central air conditioning units in the middle to interrupt the vista. There'd been no apparent access to or from the roof by HYDRA, but the SHIELD forensics people would come up here anyway once they arrived. Which would probably be soon.
Steve crossed over to the front of the building and could see the scene below; the ambulances were gone but there were five new trucks and vans and all of them had come bearing SHIELD personnel and equipment.
"Why was Doctor Foster's lab here?" Steve asked, turning back to his teammates. "You've got two bio-warfare labs and, what, astrophysics?"
"And HR," Clint chimed in dutifully. "More deadly than anything too dirty for Detrick."
"Ironically, it was for security reasons," Natasha answered, her face clearly indicating that she thought the joke wasn't going to be any funnier later. "This was considered the safest place not on the Helicarrier and not in some remote outpost that we can turn into a fortress that looks like a fortress. I think she'd probably have preferred the remote outpost, but she lost that fight when she signed on to work for SHIELD."
Clint barked out a laugh. "It just hit me that Thor's been sneaking off for romantic getaways in Cleveland."
They were all still chuckling over that when Natasha suddenly cried out and pitched forward, a shocked look on her face and her hand over her heart as if she were about to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Steve had the shield unslung and on his arm even as he was able to catch Natasha before she fell. She landed hard on her knees, he landed harder on his own as he swiveled her so that her forehead was in the crook of his neck allowing the shield to cover her back and his body her front. Clint stood over them, arrow nocked and eyes scanning the horizon.
"I'm okay," Natasha gritted out, breath hot against Steve's throat.
"You're bleeding all over my nice, clean uniform," he retorted. "That makes you, by definition, not okay."
That she could talk at all, however, was a good sign.
"Get to the AC unit," Clint called over his shoulder. "On three."
On one, Steve scooped up Natasha in his arms, doing his best to ignore her gasp of pain. On two, he rose to his haunches. On three, he ran to the giant AC unit, Clint right with him. They stayed small and ready to move again in case there was more than one sniper.
After a minute came and went with nothing, Steve shifted Natasha carefully in his arms so that he could see the wound. It wasn't to the heart, that much he knew before looking, but he was relieved to see that it was far enough away that it might not have even gotten much of a lung. He gently pried her fingers away enough to see that it was by the collarbone, near the shoulder joint but not on it. With his free hand, he reached into the belt pouch that held field dressings and pulled one out. They were some funky SHIELD thing that Tony might have invented and while they were meant to be applied to bare skin, Steve didn't bother because help was a thirty foot drop away.
"I'm going to take her down," Steve told Clint. "You'll cover us?"
Clint spared a quick look over and Steve gestured to the nearest parapet.
"Landing's gonna hurt," Clint said.
Steve knew he meant for Natasha, not for him. They'd all seen him jump from higher.
"It's too far to the stairs and it'll take too long," Steve said. "She's a tough cookie."
"Go on three," Clint replied.
"Sorry in advance," Steve told Natasha as he rearranged her so that he could carry her and then brace for the impact of the landing. Tough cookie or not, she was going to be in a lot more pain once they did.
They shocked everyone on the ground; nobody had heard the shot and it took a minute for Steve's directions to be heard and understood over the chaos. But there were supplies in the still-standing triage tent and there was a car equipped with a policeman's lights and Natasha was soon being rushed off to a hospital.
Clint was by Steve's side as they watched the car speed out of the parking lot.
"That was a little random," Clint said. "By which I mean it was completely out of character for HYDRA, not that it was unintentional. I think whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing."
Steve nodded. HYDRA wasn't a sniper kind of operation. "Were they waiting for one of us or would anybody have done?"
Clint chuckled. "We're gonna have to wait for Natochka on that one."
Steve gave Clint a sharp look, wiping his now-clean hands on a towel. There was nothing to be done for his uniform. "You think she was the target?"
Clint shrugged. "I think that the nearest building is more than a kilometer away and that if you're going to park at that distance, when you are presented with three stationary targets, you either aim for center-mass of the largest one, especially when he's got a target on his chest-" Clint gestured with his thumb at the star on Steve's sternum "-or you have something specific in mind because you have the skills to pull it off. You don't wing the smallest target unless you're really fucking lucky or that's what you mean to do."
Steve rubbed his face with his empty hand. As if today didn't have enough mysteries, both unsolved and unintentionally revealed. "This day just gets better and better."
"Captain, sir?" A SHIELD agent was waving to him from the command post. "Director Fury's on the line. He wants to talk to you."
"I'm sure he does," Steve sighed.
Clint nodded. "Better and better."