Freezer burn (42/?)
Freezer Burn
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
"The two of you had better be fucking with me," Clint warned wearily as he opened another bottle of water. "I am not prepared to deal with it if you're not."
Steve and Thor exchanged matching looks of guilelessness. Clint hissed.
"I did not say that they would be good sport on their own," Thor said in a mollifying tone. "Rodents, of unusual size or not, never are. But in combination with the fire pits, it would perhaps prove enough of a challenge to make it worth the undertaking. On a slow afternoon."
Clint did not look mollified. He looked like he was considering going up to the cockpit to see if the pilots couldn't find another HYDRA base to let him jump out over. But it was an idle thought; after almost forty hours of action - two raids in two different countries in two time zones separated only by a nap on a plane ride - and Clint, like everyone else not Thor, was not seriously considering a third. Even Steve was feeling it, although not to the extent the others were - most of the SHIELD troops, including Corrales on the other side of Steve from Thor, were fast asleep.
"How's the shoulder?" Steve asked because Clint had winced as he'd raised the water bottle to drink. "Besides sore."
Clint made a face. "Just sore," he assured, re-capping the empty bottle and tossing it - offhand - into the makeshift garbage can a few feet away. He'd fallen from a second-story roof, although the degree to which he'd broken his fall was a matter of some debate between what Clint had offered and what witnesses had seen, which is why Steve was prepared to keep on him until there was either a confession or an x-ray. "Nothing structural."
Steve did nothing to hide his own skepticism and Clint pretended not to notice, closing his eyes and settling back - gingerly - in his seat to doze. They had another seven hours - and an in-air refueling - to go before they got back to New York and Steve wanted to sleep, too, but he was still a little too keyed up to do so and instead pulled out his tablet and started reviewing the reports and intelligence that were already being uploaded. The first raid, in Venezuela, had been over long enough that there was a coherent, if not complete, narrative of events available to go along with the photographs and video of the massive compound they'd stormed as dawn had broken the day before. It had also been over long enough for the government in Caracas to start raising a fuss about being invaded by a US-led coalition force and how the time when this sort of outrage could go unpunished was over, but Steve was unconcerned about that. They'd secured proof that Caracas had known exactly what was going on in Delta Amacuro and, no matter how much Chavez tried to protest, he still sounded like Claude Rains in that he was shocked, shocked! that such things were going on inside his nation's borders. That he'd spent the past three weeks praising HYDRA for its actions in New York, London, and Tokyo made his threats of retribution less than menacing and his protests of innocence easily ignorable. That the second raid had taken place in Bolivia, a client state of Venezuela, was almost beside the point.
"Will these actions matter?" Thor asked after a companionable silence. "HYDRA promises that for every man to fall, two more will come to take his place. Is this not true as well for their fortifications?"
Steve sighed. "I think that all we can hope for is that it's not," he admitted, understanding that Thor was really suggesting that the past days' activities had been more entertaining than productive. Steve couldn't let himself agree out loud, not when they didn't have a better play to make. "We're not going on these raids to stamp out HYDRA like a brushfire. It wouldn't work. But we can learn from what we find, maybe stop something else before it happens."
Thor's expression maybe showed how naïve he thought Steve's words were and how little he was fooled by them into believing that Steve meant them fully. For all that Thor was cheerfully and perpetually befuddled by Earth's little details, he was a successful warrior of an untold number of campaigns and understood combat and war on levels that none of the rest of them could match. He'd lived for millennia and Steve didn't think any of them could quite appreciate how tiny, in every sense, their lives and plans and priorities must seem to him. Thor was usually gracious about it, but sometimes it slipped out, like now, and, for an instant, Steve felt very callow and young indeed.
"And maybe we shall find your Red Skull," Thor mused. A peace offering, Steve realized, for an unintended offense that hadn't really offended. Being made to feel childish by Thor was a different kind of foolish than when he was publicly confounded by the mysteries of twenty-first century life.
He smiled wryly. "That, too."
By the time they landed on the Helicarrier, Steve had been asleep for almost six hours, his tablet closed and resting at his feet (courtesy of Thor, he suspected, because he didn't even remember falling asleep). While Corrales rousted his men, Steve kicked Clint in the foot to wake him, watching him startle and then move freely for the half-second before the pain in his shoulder kicked in, at which point he froze.
"Are you going to go down to Medical by yourself or is Thor going to carry you like a sack of potatoes?" Steve asked as he picked up his shield and ruck. Next to Steve, Thor put on a bright smile at the possibility and Clint glowered at him, but it was lost in the stream of troops passing by and through them.
"If I go down to Medical, they are going to find all of the other things that are wrong and I'm never going to get cleared for field ops again," Clint grumbled.
"They won't do a psych eval," Steve promised. "Everything else is more or less fixable with duct tape and aspirin."
Clint picked up his pack with his good(-ish) arm. "I liked you better before you'd mastered sarcasm."
"I mastered sarcasm in the 1920's," Steve replied mildly, nodding to Corrales, who was standing on the ramp and indicating by gesture that he was going. "You shouldn't trust everything you see on the newsreels."
Thor walked alongside Clint as they left the plane, the latter complaining about not actually needing an armed escort, and Steve followed behind. Unsurprisingly, Tapper was waiting for them and Steve went over to him. Tapper's news, however, was not what he expected.
"Peggy Carter's in the hospital," Tapper said. "Respiratory infection."
Steve swallowed past the panic rising in his chest. "Is she-"
He hadn't spoken to Peggy since early last week; he'd been increasingly absorbed in the final mission prep and then they'd left to join the Kearsarge and while he'd had downtime once aboard, he'd been distracted by the sailors eager to show him their ship and the marines happy to have a new playmate and he just hadn't thought about it because, even now, despite their history and Peggy's constant reminders, he still assumed she'd always be there.
"She's fine, more or less," Tapper assured gently. "She's out of ICU as of this morning."
Steve nodded sharply. He looked at his watch; he'd gotten off the plane knowing that he had hours of debriefing and discussions ahead of him and while he certainly hadn't been looking forward to it, he'd accepted it as part of the process and as something he'd have to get through before going home and eating in his own kitchen and sleeping in his own bed for the first time in a week. But even a blazingly fast debrief would make it too late for him to get down to Philadelphia today and then tomorrow would bring a whole new set of problems and intelligence and the possibility, Clint's fears notwithstanding, that the Avengers were going out again.
"We're in contact with the hospital," Tapper went on. "They know you're coming."
"But-"
Tapper gave him a tiny smile. "But Fury's still in DC scaring the crap out of people and not-so-secretly running the world, Hill's been in London since Wednesday, and everyone here still has plenty to do before we absolutely, positively, need to get stuck in a conference room for six hours right now. Corrales can handle the primary debrief; he doesn't get sent along with you guys just because nobody else wants to go. Fury will be back in his office tomorrow first thing, so just be back for that."
Steve took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "I will be."
Tapper patted him on the shoulder and stepped away, putting his hand to his earpiece. "Jesus, what now?" he asked the unknown caller as Steve started walking toward the stairs that led from the flight deck.
He showered and changed and checked in on Clint - getting an MRI while a fascinated Thor watched - before going down to the well deck to wait for the ferry to Brooklyn. There was a SHIELD boat service crewman waiting for him when he got there, though, with orders to take him directly to the slip closest to his apartment and Steve made a mental note to thank Tapper later.
The drive down on his bike was complicated by the New York and Philly rush hours, but it was just volume and he made good time considering, although he was still arriving near the end of what he suspected were regular visiting hours.
Peggy was lying in bed looking pale and frail and old in a way he'd never really appreciated. Her eyes were closed and she was peaceful and still and he found himself rooted to the spot where he stood at the end of her bed in fear because he wasn't ready to lose her and could not imagine what he'd do without her. He felt pinpricks of tears in his eyes and a thousand-ton weight on his chest.
"You could at least sit down if you're going to be my creepy watcher for the evening," Peggy said in a whispery voice as her eyes fluttered open.
Steve smiled weakly and he knew Peggy could see everything on his face that he'd have wanted to hide from her. "Have you been getting regular creepy watchers?" he asked with a terribly fake lightness. "Is this something I have to take care of?"
Peggy smiled and held out her hand to him as he dragged the chair over to her bedside and sat down. He took her hand and squeezed it as firmly as he dared and she squeezed back before freeing herself from his grip and reaching out to caress his cheek. He turned into the motion automatically, closing his eyes to keep the returning pinpricks from turning into real tears.
"You're better looking than last evening's creepy watcher," Peggy told him, voice still breathy but a little stronger now that she was fully awake. She kept her hand on his cheek and he made no motion but to open his eyes lest she remove it. She wiped the tear forming in the corner of his eye with her thumb. "He sat in the half-shadows, talking endlessly on his cell phone despite the very clear rules about that in the ICU, and using words that you would never use in front of a lady. If it weren't for the fact that he was cursing out the President, I might have protested."
Steve smiled then, a real one. He was surprised but not shocked that Fury would come to keep Peggy company.
"A respite between the idiots in Washington and the chaos in New York," Peggy said, then started to cough, a bronchial cough that brought Steve to his feet to summon a nurse because he knew that sound and the struggle for breath that came with it; not all of the years in his current body could erase those visceral memories. Peggy glared at him and he stilled, although he still remained poised to run for help. But she stopped coughing and gestured for him to give her the plastic cup with a straw coming out of it and he did, holding it for her as she sipped at the water inside.
"You should have heard me on Monday," Peggy said once she had finished drinking and Steve had replaced the water cup on the little table.
He gave her a look that said loudly how much he wished he'd been there and how much he'd wished that it hadn't been necessary and how little he was impressed by her current bravado for his sake.
"Tell me about your adventures in South America," she commanded. "Fury's swashbuckling is all with metaphorical swords."
Fury, who had probably singlehandedly avoided a worldwide financial collapse by blackmailing the Chinese government with the details of the AIM factories (some actual fact, a lot of well-played bluffing) into not only not further destabilizing the dollar, but instead propping it up by buying more, had given Peggy an overview of what was going on. So Steve told her about the assaults on the compounds in Venezuela, taking time to digress into the tale of Thor's introduction to coconuts and his delight in their multipurpose function as food, drink, and weapon - a story that nearly became unfunny as Peggy laughed hard enough to start coughing again - and the strangeness of fighting in tropical climates. The actual details of the fighting were skippable; Peggy knew he didn't like rehashing it and they'd both seen enough bloodshed during their war that there was no relish in it now.
Bolivia had been a different kind of battle; they'd chosen to go in after finding evidence of the site's existence in the administrative offices of the main Venezuelan compound. Without accurate maps of the place or real surveillance to know how many people were there and what kind of defenses they had, it had been a more dangerous entrance with their main advantage being surprise because they'd had to leave so many behind to secure the vast Venezuelan network of sites and the geography put them beyond the reach of their primary supply chains until the FAB could mobilize. But with all of that, it hadn't been so bad - they'd had surprise, a Norse god spoiling for a good fight, and the Bolivian compound had been a training camp of sorts and so the majority of the fighters were still learning how to hold their weapons, let alone aim them. Clint's falling off a roof had been about par for the level of casualty SHIELD had taken.
"Even if he's cleared right away, which he probably won't be because he never went in for his standard physical after getting reinstated the other month and Human Resources cares about that even if Fury doesn't, we're going to be shorthanded for a while," Steve told Peggy. "Thor was supposed to go back to Asgard last week, Bruce is off-limits until the end of the month, and I've got a promotional itinerary that makes my USO days look relaxing."
Fury might have stopped a global collapse, but it had still been a miserable few weeks for the world's economy because panic, once begun, was hard to slow down, let alone stop. The runs on banks had finally been headed off with emergency interventions by central banks around the world and the Chinese show of faith had stopped the dollar's freefall, but HYDRA had not stopped once they'd been cleared out of the world's largest financial centers. They'd been doing relentless press, using the internet and calling up media outlets to promote their agenda and offer the world its alternative to the status quo. Steve had been asked to serve as the public affairs antidote, to make appearances (which he didn't mind) and speeches (which he didn't like) reminding people that the world as it was, as flawed as it was, was still mostly comprised of democracies and republics and giving all of that up in favor of HYDRA's promises was not going to make it a better place. HYDRA's rebranding itself as a populist, progressive movement that promoted meritocracy and dedicated itself to eradicating hunger and illiteracy did not change the fact that they were still fascists, still openly desirous of world domination, and still willing to kill everyone who stood in their way even if they no longer wore Nazi insignia alongside the HYDRA emblems.
Steve couldn't understand how HYDRA could be so effective doing this, how they could actually be gaining in popularity after what they'd done last month, but they were. Their offer to supply candidates for local elections - HYDRA becoming a political party as a transitional step to becoming the only political power and rendering parties obsolete - had been taken up by nine countries already. He understood that the last several years had been hard financially for many people around the world, that after years in rough seas any port in a storm would do. He'd watched Hitler's rise to power after the Weimar Republic and if he hadn't understood it all then, he'd read enough about it now to appreciate that charismatic strength and an appeal to the personal indignities of the public was a powerful combination and that someone saying "we will make you stop feeling powerless" had immense appeal. But Hitler hadn't been Hitler when he'd used those promises in his rise to power; HYDRA was already established in history books as the fomenters of genocide and Steve had never felt so horrified and miserable in this strange future he'd woken up in than when he'd contemplated the fact that HYDRA was gaining ground because people didn't care about what they'd done.
"You aren't a bad song-and-dance man when you try," Peggy said lightly, although he could see in her expression that she knew exactly how serious this was and how much more important this was than selling war bonds. "You must remember to smile more, though."
He gave her a weak smile, although it possibly came across as more of a grimace. "Haven't really had a lot to smile about lately."
Peggy gestured for the water cup again. "And speaking of the teammate who didn't even make your list..." she prompted once she'd finished drinking.
Steve replaced the cup with a sigh. "Tony's... Tony's in awful shape."
The public fallout from the news that HYDRA had used Stark Industries technology had been massive. Tony had been right - it hadn't mattered that the device used hadn't actually been produced by Stark Industries, had instead been a pirated copy from a source still undetermined. Because not only did everyone know that it had been Stark tech, they also knew that Stark Industries' New York concerns - Stark Tower, their outposts in the Meatpacking District - had been left undamaged by both HYDRA's attacks and the EMPs that stopped it. Which wasn't actually that remarkable - the far west side of Lower Manhattan had escaped the worst damage and Stark Tower was too far north to be within the impact zone - but had nonetheless been cleverly and very intentionally turned into a sinister tale of corporate greed and the immense power of the super-rich, the main villains of HYDRA's narrative of corruption. Without any evidence whatsoever, despite the fact that Tony-as-Iron-Man had been saving people and had plummeted sixty stories to the ground after the EMP had gone off, there was now a working theory that Tony had sold the technology to HYDRA itself so that he could profit from the after-effects by selling weapons to a government about to put itself on a war footing against both HYDRA and, possibly, against its own people in the wake of the financial panic and the possibility of a populist revolution. It was ridiculous, but it was also irrefutable and there was enough taint and rumor that New York City's mayor had refused Stark Industries' offer of free clean-energy generators for downtown - generators that could have been driven down Broadway and set up within hours - and chosen to instead accept Trident's offer of the same even if the parts had to be flown in from factories in Europe and that couldn't happen until the local airports had been reopened to civilian traffic.
The private fallout was even worse. Steve had been in daily contact with Pepper up until he'd gotten swallowed up by the Venezuela mission prep, as much to be a friend to her as to keep tabs on Tony, who was spiraling downward at a pace nobody could check. That the drinking was completely out of hand was a given, but it had taken a combination of Steve, Pepper, Colonel Rhodes, Bruce, and a discreet team of SHIELD's cyber division and Stark Industries programmers to prevent Tony from either donning Iron Man armor or forcing Jarvis to enable his self-destructive behavior. The truth, however, was that Tony didn't need Jarvis to be a danger to himself or others and all of them understood that. The best that any of them could do was to catch him during the periods when his mania - there was no other word for it - was at a low ebb and try to direct him toward less harmful activities than building himself new armor or a new weapons system or trying to override the locks that had been placed on Jarvis's available-to-Tony actions or whatever so-clever idea (and they all were, which was part of the tragedy) that Tony'd come up with as a way to clear his name and stop the damage he'd caused. Because that's how he saw it, no matter how many times anyone reminded him that HYDRA had pushed the button and if it hadn't been Stark tech, it would have been someone else's. Tony didn't care about that detail. "Without me, they're doing it the old-fashioned way and out of hundred bombs, there'd have been failures. Every failure would have been lives saved. Every. Single. One."
"Like father, like son that one," Peggy sighed sadly. "Ecstatic highs and unfathomable lows."
Once upon a time, Steve might have been jealous of Peggy's reminiscences of Howard, but Peggy's outright incredulity every time he'd so much as react had cured him of it and now, watching Tony tear himself apart at the seams, he could admit that yes, Peggy was right. Which he would not have told Tony even if he'd been in a good frame of mind.
Peggy reached out and took his hand again. "Tell me something good."
It took Steve an honest few moments to come up with anything that would qualify - his life in the past month had hardly been joyful - but he eventually settled on relaying his adventures at Pearl Paint, where he'd spent a shocking amount of money furnishing the corner of his living room he'd cleared aside to turn into an art studio. He'd bought a drafting table and an easel and paints and markers and pencils and then canvases and paper to use them on. "It felt ridiculously decadent," he admitted. "In ways that spending money on silly foods at the farmer's market doesn't. I didn't make myself put anything down because I couldn't afford it, didn't make myself choose between regular watercolors or gouache, got more brushes than I strictly needed and new pencils even though I already have a good supply. And then I got Thor to help me carry all of it on the subway home. Actually, he was pretty eager to help once he found out what I was doing and I didn't need to bribe him with dinner, unlike everyone else I work with."
"Even he thinks you need a hobby," Peggy said smugly.
Steve frowned at her, but kind of suspected that she was not wrong.
It wasn't long after that the nurses came to check on Peggy and chase Steve out - it was long past visiting hours and even though Peggy was in the VIP area of the hospital and the rules were flexible to an extent, Steve could tell that Peggy was fading a bit and did not protest. He kissed her cheek, promised he'd call her tomorrow and visit as soon as he could - he did not think he'd be getting off the Helicarrier at a decent hour - and wished her goodnight.
Once outside her room, he stopped the nurse and asked how Peggy was really doing.
"She's doing extremely well for her age," he was told. "But her age is almost ninety-five and there are limits to how resilient anyone is at that point."
Steve drove back to New York in the cold bite of an early spring night and tried to focus on how Peggy was on schedule for an end-of-the-week discharge from the hospital and not how the nurse had hinted that some kind of at-home care might become necessary sooner than later. It felt selfish to ask Peggy, of all people, to be the steady rock when everything else in his life was in unpredictable motion, to defy time and nature without the same gifts he'd been given simply because he was lonely and a little scared to be without her. He already knew what she'd say to that.
Clint called while he was still on the Turnpike, asking about Peggy and then informing him that (a) it was just a sprain and (b) Thor thought MRIs were the coolest thing ever and had wanted Clint to go back in to the tube to get something else scanned.
"I told him you'd model for him," Clint reported. "Expect Medical to schedule the appointment for next week because they love him just as much as everyone else does."
Genfic; PG-13-ish
Avengers/Captain America ensemble
previous parts | ao3
"The two of you had better be fucking with me," Clint warned wearily as he opened another bottle of water. "I am not prepared to deal with it if you're not."
Steve and Thor exchanged matching looks of guilelessness. Clint hissed.
"I did not say that they would be good sport on their own," Thor said in a mollifying tone. "Rodents, of unusual size or not, never are. But in combination with the fire pits, it would perhaps prove enough of a challenge to make it worth the undertaking. On a slow afternoon."
Clint did not look mollified. He looked like he was considering going up to the cockpit to see if the pilots couldn't find another HYDRA base to let him jump out over. But it was an idle thought; after almost forty hours of action - two raids in two different countries in two time zones separated only by a nap on a plane ride - and Clint, like everyone else not Thor, was not seriously considering a third. Even Steve was feeling it, although not to the extent the others were - most of the SHIELD troops, including Corrales on the other side of Steve from Thor, were fast asleep.
"How's the shoulder?" Steve asked because Clint had winced as he'd raised the water bottle to drink. "Besides sore."
Clint made a face. "Just sore," he assured, re-capping the empty bottle and tossing it - offhand - into the makeshift garbage can a few feet away. He'd fallen from a second-story roof, although the degree to which he'd broken his fall was a matter of some debate between what Clint had offered and what witnesses had seen, which is why Steve was prepared to keep on him until there was either a confession or an x-ray. "Nothing structural."
Steve did nothing to hide his own skepticism and Clint pretended not to notice, closing his eyes and settling back - gingerly - in his seat to doze. They had another seven hours - and an in-air refueling - to go before they got back to New York and Steve wanted to sleep, too, but he was still a little too keyed up to do so and instead pulled out his tablet and started reviewing the reports and intelligence that were already being uploaded. The first raid, in Venezuela, had been over long enough that there was a coherent, if not complete, narrative of events available to go along with the photographs and video of the massive compound they'd stormed as dawn had broken the day before. It had also been over long enough for the government in Caracas to start raising a fuss about being invaded by a US-led coalition force and how the time when this sort of outrage could go unpunished was over, but Steve was unconcerned about that. They'd secured proof that Caracas had known exactly what was going on in Delta Amacuro and, no matter how much Chavez tried to protest, he still sounded like Claude Rains in that he was shocked, shocked! that such things were going on inside his nation's borders. That he'd spent the past three weeks praising HYDRA for its actions in New York, London, and Tokyo made his threats of retribution less than menacing and his protests of innocence easily ignorable. That the second raid had taken place in Bolivia, a client state of Venezuela, was almost beside the point.
"Will these actions matter?" Thor asked after a companionable silence. "HYDRA promises that for every man to fall, two more will come to take his place. Is this not true as well for their fortifications?"
Steve sighed. "I think that all we can hope for is that it's not," he admitted, understanding that Thor was really suggesting that the past days' activities had been more entertaining than productive. Steve couldn't let himself agree out loud, not when they didn't have a better play to make. "We're not going on these raids to stamp out HYDRA like a brushfire. It wouldn't work. But we can learn from what we find, maybe stop something else before it happens."
Thor's expression maybe showed how naïve he thought Steve's words were and how little he was fooled by them into believing that Steve meant them fully. For all that Thor was cheerfully and perpetually befuddled by Earth's little details, he was a successful warrior of an untold number of campaigns and understood combat and war on levels that none of the rest of them could match. He'd lived for millennia and Steve didn't think any of them could quite appreciate how tiny, in every sense, their lives and plans and priorities must seem to him. Thor was usually gracious about it, but sometimes it slipped out, like now, and, for an instant, Steve felt very callow and young indeed.
"And maybe we shall find your Red Skull," Thor mused. A peace offering, Steve realized, for an unintended offense that hadn't really offended. Being made to feel childish by Thor was a different kind of foolish than when he was publicly confounded by the mysteries of twenty-first century life.
He smiled wryly. "That, too."
By the time they landed on the Helicarrier, Steve had been asleep for almost six hours, his tablet closed and resting at his feet (courtesy of Thor, he suspected, because he didn't even remember falling asleep). While Corrales rousted his men, Steve kicked Clint in the foot to wake him, watching him startle and then move freely for the half-second before the pain in his shoulder kicked in, at which point he froze.
"Are you going to go down to Medical by yourself or is Thor going to carry you like a sack of potatoes?" Steve asked as he picked up his shield and ruck. Next to Steve, Thor put on a bright smile at the possibility and Clint glowered at him, but it was lost in the stream of troops passing by and through them.
"If I go down to Medical, they are going to find all of the other things that are wrong and I'm never going to get cleared for field ops again," Clint grumbled.
"They won't do a psych eval," Steve promised. "Everything else is more or less fixable with duct tape and aspirin."
Clint picked up his pack with his good(-ish) arm. "I liked you better before you'd mastered sarcasm."
"I mastered sarcasm in the 1920's," Steve replied mildly, nodding to Corrales, who was standing on the ramp and indicating by gesture that he was going. "You shouldn't trust everything you see on the newsreels."
Thor walked alongside Clint as they left the plane, the latter complaining about not actually needing an armed escort, and Steve followed behind. Unsurprisingly, Tapper was waiting for them and Steve went over to him. Tapper's news, however, was not what he expected.
"Peggy Carter's in the hospital," Tapper said. "Respiratory infection."
Steve swallowed past the panic rising in his chest. "Is she-"
He hadn't spoken to Peggy since early last week; he'd been increasingly absorbed in the final mission prep and then they'd left to join the Kearsarge and while he'd had downtime once aboard, he'd been distracted by the sailors eager to show him their ship and the marines happy to have a new playmate and he just hadn't thought about it because, even now, despite their history and Peggy's constant reminders, he still assumed she'd always be there.
"She's fine, more or less," Tapper assured gently. "She's out of ICU as of this morning."
Steve nodded sharply. He looked at his watch; he'd gotten off the plane knowing that he had hours of debriefing and discussions ahead of him and while he certainly hadn't been looking forward to it, he'd accepted it as part of the process and as something he'd have to get through before going home and eating in his own kitchen and sleeping in his own bed for the first time in a week. But even a blazingly fast debrief would make it too late for him to get down to Philadelphia today and then tomorrow would bring a whole new set of problems and intelligence and the possibility, Clint's fears notwithstanding, that the Avengers were going out again.
"We're in contact with the hospital," Tapper went on. "They know you're coming."
"But-"
Tapper gave him a tiny smile. "But Fury's still in DC scaring the crap out of people and not-so-secretly running the world, Hill's been in London since Wednesday, and everyone here still has plenty to do before we absolutely, positively, need to get stuck in a conference room for six hours right now. Corrales can handle the primary debrief; he doesn't get sent along with you guys just because nobody else wants to go. Fury will be back in his office tomorrow first thing, so just be back for that."
Steve took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "I will be."
Tapper patted him on the shoulder and stepped away, putting his hand to his earpiece. "Jesus, what now?" he asked the unknown caller as Steve started walking toward the stairs that led from the flight deck.
He showered and changed and checked in on Clint - getting an MRI while a fascinated Thor watched - before going down to the well deck to wait for the ferry to Brooklyn. There was a SHIELD boat service crewman waiting for him when he got there, though, with orders to take him directly to the slip closest to his apartment and Steve made a mental note to thank Tapper later.
The drive down on his bike was complicated by the New York and Philly rush hours, but it was just volume and he made good time considering, although he was still arriving near the end of what he suspected were regular visiting hours.
Peggy was lying in bed looking pale and frail and old in a way he'd never really appreciated. Her eyes were closed and she was peaceful and still and he found himself rooted to the spot where he stood at the end of her bed in fear because he wasn't ready to lose her and could not imagine what he'd do without her. He felt pinpricks of tears in his eyes and a thousand-ton weight on his chest.
"You could at least sit down if you're going to be my creepy watcher for the evening," Peggy said in a whispery voice as her eyes fluttered open.
Steve smiled weakly and he knew Peggy could see everything on his face that he'd have wanted to hide from her. "Have you been getting regular creepy watchers?" he asked with a terribly fake lightness. "Is this something I have to take care of?"
Peggy smiled and held out her hand to him as he dragged the chair over to her bedside and sat down. He took her hand and squeezed it as firmly as he dared and she squeezed back before freeing herself from his grip and reaching out to caress his cheek. He turned into the motion automatically, closing his eyes to keep the returning pinpricks from turning into real tears.
"You're better looking than last evening's creepy watcher," Peggy told him, voice still breathy but a little stronger now that she was fully awake. She kept her hand on his cheek and he made no motion but to open his eyes lest she remove it. She wiped the tear forming in the corner of his eye with her thumb. "He sat in the half-shadows, talking endlessly on his cell phone despite the very clear rules about that in the ICU, and using words that you would never use in front of a lady. If it weren't for the fact that he was cursing out the President, I might have protested."
Steve smiled then, a real one. He was surprised but not shocked that Fury would come to keep Peggy company.
"A respite between the idiots in Washington and the chaos in New York," Peggy said, then started to cough, a bronchial cough that brought Steve to his feet to summon a nurse because he knew that sound and the struggle for breath that came with it; not all of the years in his current body could erase those visceral memories. Peggy glared at him and he stilled, although he still remained poised to run for help. But she stopped coughing and gestured for him to give her the plastic cup with a straw coming out of it and he did, holding it for her as she sipped at the water inside.
"You should have heard me on Monday," Peggy said once she had finished drinking and Steve had replaced the water cup on the little table.
He gave her a look that said loudly how much he wished he'd been there and how much he'd wished that it hadn't been necessary and how little he was impressed by her current bravado for his sake.
"Tell me about your adventures in South America," she commanded. "Fury's swashbuckling is all with metaphorical swords."
Fury, who had probably singlehandedly avoided a worldwide financial collapse by blackmailing the Chinese government with the details of the AIM factories (some actual fact, a lot of well-played bluffing) into not only not further destabilizing the dollar, but instead propping it up by buying more, had given Peggy an overview of what was going on. So Steve told her about the assaults on the compounds in Venezuela, taking time to digress into the tale of Thor's introduction to coconuts and his delight in their multipurpose function as food, drink, and weapon - a story that nearly became unfunny as Peggy laughed hard enough to start coughing again - and the strangeness of fighting in tropical climates. The actual details of the fighting were skippable; Peggy knew he didn't like rehashing it and they'd both seen enough bloodshed during their war that there was no relish in it now.
Bolivia had been a different kind of battle; they'd chosen to go in after finding evidence of the site's existence in the administrative offices of the main Venezuelan compound. Without accurate maps of the place or real surveillance to know how many people were there and what kind of defenses they had, it had been a more dangerous entrance with their main advantage being surprise because they'd had to leave so many behind to secure the vast Venezuelan network of sites and the geography put them beyond the reach of their primary supply chains until the FAB could mobilize. But with all of that, it hadn't been so bad - they'd had surprise, a Norse god spoiling for a good fight, and the Bolivian compound had been a training camp of sorts and so the majority of the fighters were still learning how to hold their weapons, let alone aim them. Clint's falling off a roof had been about par for the level of casualty SHIELD had taken.
"Even if he's cleared right away, which he probably won't be because he never went in for his standard physical after getting reinstated the other month and Human Resources cares about that even if Fury doesn't, we're going to be shorthanded for a while," Steve told Peggy. "Thor was supposed to go back to Asgard last week, Bruce is off-limits until the end of the month, and I've got a promotional itinerary that makes my USO days look relaxing."
Fury might have stopped a global collapse, but it had still been a miserable few weeks for the world's economy because panic, once begun, was hard to slow down, let alone stop. The runs on banks had finally been headed off with emergency interventions by central banks around the world and the Chinese show of faith had stopped the dollar's freefall, but HYDRA had not stopped once they'd been cleared out of the world's largest financial centers. They'd been doing relentless press, using the internet and calling up media outlets to promote their agenda and offer the world its alternative to the status quo. Steve had been asked to serve as the public affairs antidote, to make appearances (which he didn't mind) and speeches (which he didn't like) reminding people that the world as it was, as flawed as it was, was still mostly comprised of democracies and republics and giving all of that up in favor of HYDRA's promises was not going to make it a better place. HYDRA's rebranding itself as a populist, progressive movement that promoted meritocracy and dedicated itself to eradicating hunger and illiteracy did not change the fact that they were still fascists, still openly desirous of world domination, and still willing to kill everyone who stood in their way even if they no longer wore Nazi insignia alongside the HYDRA emblems.
Steve couldn't understand how HYDRA could be so effective doing this, how they could actually be gaining in popularity after what they'd done last month, but they were. Their offer to supply candidates for local elections - HYDRA becoming a political party as a transitional step to becoming the only political power and rendering parties obsolete - had been taken up by nine countries already. He understood that the last several years had been hard financially for many people around the world, that after years in rough seas any port in a storm would do. He'd watched Hitler's rise to power after the Weimar Republic and if he hadn't understood it all then, he'd read enough about it now to appreciate that charismatic strength and an appeal to the personal indignities of the public was a powerful combination and that someone saying "we will make you stop feeling powerless" had immense appeal. But Hitler hadn't been Hitler when he'd used those promises in his rise to power; HYDRA was already established in history books as the fomenters of genocide and Steve had never felt so horrified and miserable in this strange future he'd woken up in than when he'd contemplated the fact that HYDRA was gaining ground because people didn't care about what they'd done.
"You aren't a bad song-and-dance man when you try," Peggy said lightly, although he could see in her expression that she knew exactly how serious this was and how much more important this was than selling war bonds. "You must remember to smile more, though."
He gave her a weak smile, although it possibly came across as more of a grimace. "Haven't really had a lot to smile about lately."
Peggy gestured for the water cup again. "And speaking of the teammate who didn't even make your list..." she prompted once she'd finished drinking.
Steve replaced the cup with a sigh. "Tony's... Tony's in awful shape."
The public fallout from the news that HYDRA had used Stark Industries technology had been massive. Tony had been right - it hadn't mattered that the device used hadn't actually been produced by Stark Industries, had instead been a pirated copy from a source still undetermined. Because not only did everyone know that it had been Stark tech, they also knew that Stark Industries' New York concerns - Stark Tower, their outposts in the Meatpacking District - had been left undamaged by both HYDRA's attacks and the EMPs that stopped it. Which wasn't actually that remarkable - the far west side of Lower Manhattan had escaped the worst damage and Stark Tower was too far north to be within the impact zone - but had nonetheless been cleverly and very intentionally turned into a sinister tale of corporate greed and the immense power of the super-rich, the main villains of HYDRA's narrative of corruption. Without any evidence whatsoever, despite the fact that Tony-as-Iron-Man had been saving people and had plummeted sixty stories to the ground after the EMP had gone off, there was now a working theory that Tony had sold the technology to HYDRA itself so that he could profit from the after-effects by selling weapons to a government about to put itself on a war footing against both HYDRA and, possibly, against its own people in the wake of the financial panic and the possibility of a populist revolution. It was ridiculous, but it was also irrefutable and there was enough taint and rumor that New York City's mayor had refused Stark Industries' offer of free clean-energy generators for downtown - generators that could have been driven down Broadway and set up within hours - and chosen to instead accept Trident's offer of the same even if the parts had to be flown in from factories in Europe and that couldn't happen until the local airports had been reopened to civilian traffic.
The private fallout was even worse. Steve had been in daily contact with Pepper up until he'd gotten swallowed up by the Venezuela mission prep, as much to be a friend to her as to keep tabs on Tony, who was spiraling downward at a pace nobody could check. That the drinking was completely out of hand was a given, but it had taken a combination of Steve, Pepper, Colonel Rhodes, Bruce, and a discreet team of SHIELD's cyber division and Stark Industries programmers to prevent Tony from either donning Iron Man armor or forcing Jarvis to enable his self-destructive behavior. The truth, however, was that Tony didn't need Jarvis to be a danger to himself or others and all of them understood that. The best that any of them could do was to catch him during the periods when his mania - there was no other word for it - was at a low ebb and try to direct him toward less harmful activities than building himself new armor or a new weapons system or trying to override the locks that had been placed on Jarvis's available-to-Tony actions or whatever so-clever idea (and they all were, which was part of the tragedy) that Tony'd come up with as a way to clear his name and stop the damage he'd caused. Because that's how he saw it, no matter how many times anyone reminded him that HYDRA had pushed the button and if it hadn't been Stark tech, it would have been someone else's. Tony didn't care about that detail. "Without me, they're doing it the old-fashioned way and out of hundred bombs, there'd have been failures. Every failure would have been lives saved. Every. Single. One."
"Like father, like son that one," Peggy sighed sadly. "Ecstatic highs and unfathomable lows."
Once upon a time, Steve might have been jealous of Peggy's reminiscences of Howard, but Peggy's outright incredulity every time he'd so much as react had cured him of it and now, watching Tony tear himself apart at the seams, he could admit that yes, Peggy was right. Which he would not have told Tony even if he'd been in a good frame of mind.
Peggy reached out and took his hand again. "Tell me something good."
It took Steve an honest few moments to come up with anything that would qualify - his life in the past month had hardly been joyful - but he eventually settled on relaying his adventures at Pearl Paint, where he'd spent a shocking amount of money furnishing the corner of his living room he'd cleared aside to turn into an art studio. He'd bought a drafting table and an easel and paints and markers and pencils and then canvases and paper to use them on. "It felt ridiculously decadent," he admitted. "In ways that spending money on silly foods at the farmer's market doesn't. I didn't make myself put anything down because I couldn't afford it, didn't make myself choose between regular watercolors or gouache, got more brushes than I strictly needed and new pencils even though I already have a good supply. And then I got Thor to help me carry all of it on the subway home. Actually, he was pretty eager to help once he found out what I was doing and I didn't need to bribe him with dinner, unlike everyone else I work with."
"Even he thinks you need a hobby," Peggy said smugly.
Steve frowned at her, but kind of suspected that she was not wrong.
It wasn't long after that the nurses came to check on Peggy and chase Steve out - it was long past visiting hours and even though Peggy was in the VIP area of the hospital and the rules were flexible to an extent, Steve could tell that Peggy was fading a bit and did not protest. He kissed her cheek, promised he'd call her tomorrow and visit as soon as he could - he did not think he'd be getting off the Helicarrier at a decent hour - and wished her goodnight.
Once outside her room, he stopped the nurse and asked how Peggy was really doing.
"She's doing extremely well for her age," he was told. "But her age is almost ninety-five and there are limits to how resilient anyone is at that point."
Steve drove back to New York in the cold bite of an early spring night and tried to focus on how Peggy was on schedule for an end-of-the-week discharge from the hospital and not how the nurse had hinted that some kind of at-home care might become necessary sooner than later. It felt selfish to ask Peggy, of all people, to be the steady rock when everything else in his life was in unpredictable motion, to defy time and nature without the same gifts he'd been given simply because he was lonely and a little scared to be without her. He already knew what she'd say to that.
Clint called while he was still on the Turnpike, asking about Peggy and then informing him that (a) it was just a sprain and (b) Thor thought MRIs were the coolest thing ever and had wanted Clint to go back in to the tube to get something else scanned.
"I told him you'd model for him," Clint reported. "Expect Medical to schedule the appointment for next week because they love him just as much as everyone else does."