It had many beginnings; her father’s narrow survival of the Great War, her birth, the boy she kicked at five, the boy she bit at seven, Michael, the day everything clicked into place at bootcamp, her first kill in France, extracting a doctor in Germany, meeting a kindred spirit in America –
"Wait!"
She pulled him in, gave him a kiss hard and a smile tight with meaning, and pushed him out.
"Go get him."
Then Steve was lifted into the sky by the Valkyrie and Peggy was skidding along frozen rock, bracing and making herself small in the back of Schmidt’s car as the tires screeched and dread filled her lungs and Colonel Phillips shouted "Hold on!"
But from one moment to the next, there was nothing left to hold on to.
– the realisation that she’d made a big, big mistake.
The radio crackled to life. The Commandoes jolted to attention.
"Come in. This is Captain Rogers, do you read me?"
Jim was at the control panel in a heartbeat. "Captain Rogers, what is your position?"
"Schmidt’s dead," Rogers said. "I can’t change the plane’s trajectory, I gotta force it down while I’m still in the middle of nowhere."
"What? Hey, not so fast, where –"
"Is Peggy there?" Rogers interjected.
"No. She’s somewhere in the compound, but we’re looking for Carter and Phillips right now, so if you can just stay on the line –"
"There’s no time." Rogers’s voice was strangled. "This thing’s headed for New York. I gotta put her in the water."
Dum Dum grabbed the microphone and snapped, "Rogers, listen to me, dammit! Jonesy was making the rounds looking for Carter and the Colonel and found a bunch of paper pushers hiding away in a back room, about to set Hydra’s administration on fire. Top of the pile about to be torched was the log of a message that came into this base earlier in the morning. Some Russian force nearby, wanting to exchange a prisoner for Hydra weaponry. The Russians found Barnes, Cap. He’s alive."
"Bucky’s alive?" Rogers breathed.
"Yes! So quit the martyr act and –"
"Oh god. Oh thank god." He panted like someone had called off the firing squad, then moaned like he was dying anyway. "God, I’m sorry. I’m gonna need you guys to get him back from those Russians for me."
"Like hell! Imagine what he’d say if he heard all this nonsense coming outta your mouth."
"You’ve gotta save him," Rogers went on, unrelenting. "You’ve gotta – Peggy’ll figure out how. She’ll take care of him. They’ll take care of each other."
"Cap –" Jim tried.
"Tell them they have my blessing if they ever want it. Tell them I love them, both of them. Tell them –"
The connection cut to static.
There was snow in her mouth. Snow and blood, and underneath it all the taste of tears. Snow fell into the Colonel’s eyes, too, but he wasn’t blinking any longer.
I’m sorry, Colonel, god, I’m so, so sorry.
Though her back and side felt like fire and her legs felt like nothing, Peggy clawed her way through the snow to close his eyes with numb, shaking fingers. She rolled onto her back with the last of her strength, looked up at the clouded sky searching for she knew not what, the snow falling ever heavier, and – and –
"Help me," she rasped. "Help me," she croaked. "Help!"
It was so cold. She couldn’t stop shaking.
An engine roared to life out of nowhere, then halted. German voices washed over her.
"Is that Obergruppenführer Schmidt’s car?"
"Those are Americans. Did they steal it and run it off the cliff?"
"Serves them right."
A blond, sharp-featured officer bent over Peggy and narrowed his eyes. "The woman’s still alive."
"Leave her, she won’t be much longer."
"No, we’ll take her," the man decided, and gestured for two soldiers to pick her up.
Peggy felt their hands on her as if from very far away. When she tried to stand, it felt like her legs weren’t there at all.
"Why? We need to hurry."
"Revenge." The man captured her chin, turning her face this way and that. "I knew it. This is Captain America’s woman. Don’t you recognize her from the propaganda films? He carries her photograph in his compass, it’s sickeningly romantic. She knows all their secrets. We take her, make her tell us everything she knows, and then I use the formula Zola left us and finally put my own research into practice. We don’t need the other one."
Peggy spat in his face.
"Oberführer Holzman, you are mad!" the second man snapped, voice rising to hysteria. "We’ll be lucky if we make it to a safe place alive!"
Slowly, with deceptive calm, her captor took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face.
"Cut off one head, two more shall take its place. We are now those heads, Sturmbannführer Specht. We take her, and if she lives, I will fashion her into Hydra’s sharp new teeth. The Americans will pay for what they’ve done today. I can see it now.
Rest assured, Agent Margaret Carter of the Strategic Scientific Reserve," he added in English, the look in his eyes chilling her in a way even the ice and snow had not managed. "I will make you all pay."
Bucky kept his military decorations on the mantelpiece along with his late wife’s Pulitzers and copies of his daughters’ birth certificates, hanging over too many framed photographs to take in all at once. There were wedding portraits and baby pictures, candids and staged group shots in every colour or lack thereof, newspaper and magazine clippings. Steve barely recognized anyone. But so many of them bore Bucky’s features in some way or another, his nose or his eyes or the curve of his smile or all at once, and this, all these photographs –
Seventy years and going on four generations, and he’d missed it.
In a cluster of black and white on the far left (his own face before and after, the Commandos, their Sunday finest for Bucky’s eighteenth birthday, Mr Barnes’s military portrait), he found what he’d been dreading and longing for in equal measure: Peggy from the elbows up in immaculate olive drab; the three of them making faces at the camera man in a London bar that was bombed out not two weeks later. A ghost. A memory of everything they’d hoped the future would be. A fresh, gaping hole in his chest where his – their – her life should have been.
Then, only then, did it all finally start to feel real.
"I used to think about what it would be like," Steve admitted, steeped too deep in grief to care about shame any longer. "I thought for sure losing you would be worse, because you’d been there for as long as I could remember, but I..."
"There is no less or worse. Just different."
"Yeah," Steve rasped.
The headstone didn’t feel real. Her body wasn’t here. He’d never said goodbye. She’d been British and disappeared on the other side of the Atlantic, what was it even doing on American soil?
"I still enter all her information every time they develop some new forensic method or set up a new database," Bucky admitted, hands deep in the pockets of his coat. "She’s probably the most well-documented deceased person in history, but even now I just can’t take the chance that she might still be out there somewhere, lost or detained or frozen, even. I mean, it worked for you. And the hypothermia is exactly what kept me alive long enough to be found. The shrinks say it’s paranoid, a sign of unresolved trauma stemming from my time with Zola and the Russians, so they threaten to have me declared unfit whenever I make too big a fuss about it. Of course I then threaten to have them declared incompetent, because anyone working for SHIELD should damn well know better, but it’s a nuisance."
Bucky’s voice was deeper, rougher. His idiom and vocabulary were different, his accent had changed. Steve closed treacherous, burning eyes and pretended Buck was just coming down with a cold. Let himself deny for just a moment that the man standing beside him had crow’s feet and silvered temples, that his face no longer held the roundness of youth and his body wasn’t as lithe as it used to be. That Steve’s shortcomings had cost him an arm.
He counted every selfish blessing he had, though.
Bucky was ninety-five years old, but he didn’t look a day over forty.
"By the time someone realised what had happened, the weather had erased all tracks. Of course we looked for her, and for you too, but... in the end, it came down to luck. I’m afraid the same will be true for her. That one day someone will find some bones and after all these years of searching, that’s that. I just hope, whatever happened to her, she didn’t suffer."
While he slept, history had turned Captain America into a gilded myth and reduced Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter to footnotes. Their own people had given up on her. The world had ended and in its place had grown one where even the things that got better were subtly, glaringly wrong.
Steve had died and instead of finding heaven or hell, he was the one mourning.
Only Bucky was still there. Still cared. And Bucky had mourned them and moved on and lived out a lifetime with another woman overnight.
Steve lowered his head, covered his eyes, and did everything in his power not to cry.
Somewhere far away, a woman unburdened by such thoughts wiped blood off a knife and tilted her face toward the sky, snow catching in her lashes. A melody sprang to mind unbidden, though there were no words she could recall.
She hummed all the way to her rendezvous point, blood drying into her clothes.
"When did you turn into such a workaholic?" Steve grumbled, shuffling into the kitchen in his pyjamas. The 21st century had so many useful new words.
"The Cold War." Bucky didn’t look up from his laptop. "They wouldn’t let the super soldier idea die then and they’re not letting it die now. These clowns got their hands on SHIELD research, god knows how, and –"
"Buck." Steve settled his hands on his shoulders and nuzzled the top of his head. "I know you’re usually the one telling me this, but even you need your beauty sleep."
Bucky stiffened.
Steve lifted his head. "I’m sorry, is this –"
"No, no, it’s... it’s fine."
He lowered his head again and breathed in deeply, selfishly. "I know it’s been seventy years for you, Buck, but god, I miss you."
"Steve..."
Bucky reached back and buried his real hand in Steve’s hair. His voice was gravelly.
"It’s like riding a bicycle, having you around again, but... no, no buts, I just keep waiting for Peggy to walk into the room too. Twenty years with you, and then she joins in for one or two and I can’t imagine being ‘us’ without her anymore. Ain’t that something?"
"Yeah." Steve squeezed his eyes shut. "Ain’t it just."
Bucky turned in his chair with a cheeky, "You know what she’d say if she heard me talking like that though, don’t you?", eliciting a watery smile from Steve.
"‘Boys!’" they mimicked simultaneously.
This would be, Steve thought as he peeled off Bucky’s newfangled boxer briefs, where Peggy would –
He stopped.
"This would be when Peggy’d sit back and tuck one heel under her and rock on it, enjoy the show and wait for you to finish me off so she could finish you." Bucky sighed. "God, I’m sorry –"
"No, it’s okay. It’s good." Steve pressed his face into Bucky’s stomach, smiling painfully but uncontrollably, and fumbled to take him to hand. "Keep going?"
"Okay." Bucky’s hand wove into his hair. "Okay."
It was the twenty-first century. Aliens attacked, buildings talked, and gods walked the earth.
"But the greatest miracle of all," Steve declared as they parked the car and crossed the crowded square toward his favourite take-out place. "Is that you’ve worked your way up from personal mother hen to head of international security and still haven’t developed a stress ulcer."
"Why do I feel like you’ve found yourself a challenge?" Bucky drawled, and hiccupped.
An odd look crossed his face. He looked down.
A red stain bloomed on his chest.
Steve’s heart stopped. "Oh god, Buck –"
Bucky tackled him and a second bullet whistled by inches from his head. A woman not ten feet from them cried out, stumbled, clutched her shoulder.
"Shooter’s in the crowd," Bucky snarled, grimacing.
Steve rolled into a crouch. "I don’t see anyone."
He tried frantically to scan the square and apply pressure to the wound at the same time, but Bucky batted him away with one hand and clutched at his chest with the other.
"Handgun and silencer. We need to lure them away from the real civilians before –"
"Never mind, found ’em," Steve cut in as the street was swarmed with black tactical gear. "But those aren’t handguns."
The odd looks around them turned into a pre-panicked ruckus throughout the street, and Steve used the flurry of activity nearest the assault team to hoist Bucky to his feet, spirit him through the nearest open door, and prop him up in a marginally defensible position behind a wall. Bucky drew his gun and thrust it at him.
Steve ran out the door, crouched and empty-handed. His shield was in the car.
The bullets found him halfway there.
Outside, Steve’s shield sang through a storm of bullets. People ran inside looking for cover, and a girl with wide eyes but steady hands helped staunch the bleeding and direct them out the back when Bucky’s voice failed him and he began to lose sensation in his fingers.
I always forget to say goodbye, he thought faintly.
Another refugee stepped inside: a curvaceous vision of a woman, dressed to the nines like they rarely did these days, calm and composed and adjusting her sunglasses without a care in the world.
All his instincts started blaring at once.
She closed and locked the door behind her.
He raised his gun, but in the blink of an eye the woman had kicked it from his hand, shot the girl between the eyes, and trained her weapon on him.
Handgun. Silencer.
She crouched down in front of him. Bucky’s eyes caught on her red, red lips.
No, he thought.
"Hello, General Barnes."
She took off her sunglasses.
"Oh," he breathed, his heart seizing in his chest. "Oh, sugar, I’m so sorry."
She cocked her head. "Well that’s just silly. I was sent to deliver a message."
"Yeah?" he whispered hoarsely.
If all that was left to him was to face his failures and die, he couldn’t be faulted for drinking in his last sight, could he?
"Thank you for your long years of service. You have aided Hydra more than you could ever imagine. Now it’s time for you to rest, assured that the world will be left in good hands. Hydra’s hands."
The gun jabbed the underside of his chin. She leaned in; kissed him.
He’d missed her scent for so, so long. When she drew back, he whimpered.
"Goo–"
"Wait, wait." With a fumbling hand, he pulled the chain with his dog tags and wedding ring out of his shirt and over his head. He held it out. "For you."
She gave the necklace a brief look of utter bafflement before pocketing it. His hand fell to his side, the last of his strength spent. Then she stood, and his eyes followed her like a flower follows the sun.
"Goodbye, Bucky," Peggy said.
And as he closed his eyes, she pulled the trigger.
"We’ve managed to stabilize his condition. The gunshot wound to his chest should be fine," the doctor said. "As for the wound to the head, the good news is that we know he’s made a full recovery from severe brain trauma before, most notably after the, um, train incident in ’44."
Steve’s jaw clenched. "And the bad news?"
"It’s still severe brain trauma. The enhancements to his system do miraculous work, but I really can’t make any promises. He might be back on his feet this time next month, or he might never wake up again. We just don’t know."
"He’ll be fine," Natasha declared, voice hard. "He will."
"I’ll notify his family," Steve choked out, and excused himself.
Natasha followed him. "Hey, you were sleeping with him, right?"
"For god’s sake Natasha, now is not the time for –"
"Does he still never take off those beat-up old dog tags of his?"
Steve frowned. Stopped. "How do you know that?"
"He was a widower, I was curious, shit happened and then you came back."
"...that explains a lot. Why did nobody tell me this?"
"I asked him not to. No hard feelings though, I’m the one who broke it off with him, not the other way around. So?"
"I – yes. I mean, no, he never takes those things off." He turned back, stricken. "I didn’t see them on him in there. He should have them when he wakes up, his wedding ring’s on the same chain. The surgeons must’ve –"
Natasha grabbed his arm and dragged him away. "They didn’t."
"There’s a tracker. Of SHIELD’s. Embedded in Bucky’s oldest dog tags."
"I can hear you making a face at me, Rogers. Stop it. He put it there himself."
"Well that makes one of us."
"I can’t believe you’re still holding onto that grudge. It’s a standard feature of the issued uniform. Do you want to disappear under a glacier for another seventy years?"
He didn’t dignify that with a response. She turned the laptop she’d been working on toward him.
The signal was coming from a downtown bank.
"Who else knows about this thing?" Steve asked.
"Anyone with clearance level nine or up. They’ve got no reason to check the tracker while they know where his body is, though."
"Unless we tell them," Steve said.
"Unless we tell them," Natasha agreed.
They sized each other up.
"If you were planning to tell them, you’d have brought it up back in the hospital, in front of Fury and Sitwell."
"It’s a little fishy, don’t you think? Big flashy tac team chases you up and down a busy street in broad daylight, while James gets shot down by some incognito assassin with a quiet little pocket gun. Then his dog tags turn up halfway across the city. Either the shooter took them for personal reasons, or they knew about the tracker. Both options beg a lot of questions, and ‘is it a trap?’ is the least interesting one."
Steve let that sink in. "You think someone with clearance level nine or higher orchestrated the attack, took Bucky’s chain, and is expecting one of us to follow the trail?"
"I think ruling out the possibility could be the last mistake either of us ever makes."
They say it’s paranoid, but anyone working for SHIELD should damn well know better.
"But why?"
"Only one way to find out."
By walking into the trap.
"Well this is anticlimactic," Natasha said. "After all the stealth and ingenuity it took to break in, our mystery perp could’ve at least had the decency to be here."
Steve wandered around the vault, taking in the strange banks of equipment and a contraption that, when he pulled away the sheet covering it, looked like a massage table with restraints. "You have unreasonably high standards."
Natasha followed the locator beep of her what-doesn’t-it-do cell phone to a suitcase on a metal table, which she rifled through. Women’s clothing, make-up kit, a curly brown wig...
"Found it."
She pulled the chain from a coat pocket. Steve greedily snatched it up and tucked it into his own shirt.
"Not to put a damper on your undying love or anything, but I think we should disable the tracker before you –"
Suddenly, he greedily snatched her up and tucked her behind his shield, right in time to keep a hail of bullets out of her hair. When the spray let up for a moment, Steve launched the shield at their assailant and their bodies out of the way of the next volley.
He had one of the clerks from upstairs dangling against the wall moments later. "Who are you?!"
The fake clerk choked and spluttered. His mouth twisted, and –
Natasha wrenched his jaw open and yanked out his hollow tooth.
"Cyanide capsule. Looks like we’ve got a fanatic on our hands, Cap. You might wanna step out for a while. I’ll get him to talk, but it might take some doing, and I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable."
The man promptly wet himself. "No, please, please, I’ll tell you anything you want to know!"
Steve and Natasha exchanged raised eyebrows.
"Who are you?"
Nobody important.
"Who do you work for?"
Hydra.
"No."
Yes.
(Well, shit.)
"What is this place?"
The base of operations for their most dangerous and elusive operative. A super soldier, codename: Agent Winter.
"No."
Yes.
("Who?"
"The boogieman. Santa Claus. A supernatural fiction the intelligence community alternately thanks or blames for all their unsolved cases.")
"What’s her real name?"
Nobody knows.
"Why did she lead us here?"
Wait, what?
"Where is she now?"
Off to finish the job, duh.
"I have a bad feeling about that vault," Natasha screamed in Steve’s ear over the roar of the wind and engine.
"Just the vault?"
"Especially the vault."
"Wake him up," she demanded.
The medic cowered on the ground beside the bed. "I can’t!"
"Bollocks."
"He’s in a coma, it’s physically impossible."
Ugh. Useless civilian medicine.
She shot him and rounded on the bed herself.
"Wake up, James Barnes," she commanded. "You need to answer a question before you die."
The ruckus in the hallway flared up again. Bloody amateurs.
Barnes had reacted to her facial features last time. They’d made her kiss him and call him by a pet name.
She unfastened the mask and goggles from her helmet, leaned in, softly caressed his cheek, and whispered, "Bucky. Wake up, darling. Wake up for me, Bucky, please?" in his ear.
The brain monitors beside his bed showed only the most infinitesimal of responses.
If only she could’ve taken him back to base. Her maintenance workers would’ve known how to wake him.
"Get away from him!"
Captain America’s shield whirled by where her ear had been a split second before. Excruciating shock knocked her gun from her hand. She rolled, putting Barnes and the bed between herself and her assailants, and tore the electric charge mechanism from the back of her glove.
Then she looked up and got the same response from Steve Rogers as she had from Barnes.
"Peggy?" he said, wide-eyed and stricken.
She could’ve worked with that, if the redhead hadn’t been there and seen her reach for her second gun and decided to open fire first. More gunfire signalled SHIELD reinforcements in the halls. She dodged and lunged, and Rogers leaped and begged.
"Peggy, please, what are you doing, Peggy, it’s me, Steve, Peggy, Peggy Peggy Peggy."
Who the hell was Peggy?
She socked him in the jaw from sheer irritation.
Punches flew, her knives clanged on the shield and he pushed her further and further from her target, and then she pushed him through the window and he pulled her down along with him.
Rogers’s head cracked the pavement. Winter ran.
"Bucky felt it all along," was the closest to anything useful they got out of Steve. He pressed a bag of ice to the back of his head and stared unseeing into the middle distance. "Hydra got their hands on Peggy during that last raid and the reason he could be so high up in the military and help run SHIELD and still never find her is because SHIELD is Hydra."
Natasha filled Fury in on the bank.
He swore. "That’s a decommissioned SHIELD site."
"And here even I was thinking I might be getting ahead of myself this time."
"I called in Hill as soon as Barnes got shot, but assume everyone else is compromised. First order of business is to get Barnes underground and send out word he was killed in the scuffle."
"His family –" Steve started.
"Would have been at the top of Hydra’s infiltration wish list."
Steve hurled his ice pack across the room and buried his face in his hands.
"After that, we find out why they want him dead now of all times, and how the hell deep we’ll have to cut to –"
"To the bone."
Fury and Natasha stared. Steve stood.
"They stonewalled Bucky for seventy years, they duped him and you and all the other executive officers, if they’re not in Hydra’s pocket to start with, and don’t even try to tell me either of you can tell where SHIELD’s research started and Hydra’s applications began. Hydra played us all like puppets, god only knows how literal that is for Peggy to make her this way, and SHIELD is what made it possible. None of this is salvageable. What more proof do you need? SHIELD is the world’s longest-running farce."
"My organisation is under attack from the inside out and you want to help Hydra bring the whole thing down?" Fury said indignantly.
Natasha cut in: "Steve, what was that you were saying about SHIELD research with Hydra applications?"
"What? Well – I’m assuming. Bucky’s been overseeing this investigation into stolen SHIELD research on super soldiers that keeps going nowhere, it’s been stuck in his craw for months. And since Peggy almost put a fist through my shield just now? Serum’s worked for Hydra before, I see no reason why they wouldn’t try it again."
"That’s what I was afraid of. Had James made any progress recently that could explain why they’d suddenly want to be rid of him?"
"Nothing’s happened for weeks."
"Then maybe Hydra’s the one that’s made some kind of breakthrough."
Neither of them liked the sound of that.
"Oh no," Fury groaned. "They used SHIELD resources to conduct secret research that SHIELD proper would never have gotten approved for and then laundered it like counterfeit money by letting SHIELD ‘discover’ and ‘examine’ the results. Creating something like this ourselves is one thing, but trying to contain and control an already spreading wildfire would be another."
He swore, lengthily and passionately.
"You’re right. They’re not trying to bring SHIELD down, they’re using it."
"Exactly what results did that research yield, anyway? I never asked and Buck never volunteered."
"A variant of old-school super serum using Extremis nanotech, with the addition of an Asgardian-derived effect we’ve been calling quantum entanglement for simplicity’s sake, or magic for accuracy’s," Fury said. "In essence, it’s a formula for a reprogrammable, externally operated nanovirus for rewriting the human brain and nervous system. It can be controlled with no time lag or weakness to distance or obstacles, because instead of relying on a transfer of information it uses particles that are connected on a level so far removed from the physical that ordinary physics has no choice but to consider them one and the same regardless of their respective physical locations."
Steve gave him a flat, dead-eyed look. "You’re telling me SHIELD has a remote controlled brainwashing virus that’s impossible to hide from. Hydra has a –"
"It’s still only theoretical for now, but our idea was to use it on violent offenders and other threats to society –"
"Threats to society? Like what, world leaders? Revolutionaries? Free spirits?"
"You don’t –"
"It doesn’t matter," Natasha snapped. "That proposal got shot down almost immediately, the talk’s been slanted toward outlawing it from the start. But if Hydra’s really been lurking for seventy years, they know the value of patience. James may have been the most uncompromising voice of opposition, but he was far from the only one. His assassination would’ve been one step on a trajectory that could’ve spanned years, decades. But James has survived two attempts on his life now, Steve and I shook crucial information out of their bank guy, and the boogieman of the international intelligence community turns out to be real, and Steve’s ex. We backed them into a corner without even realising it. They have no choice but to make the next move, and soon."
"You should’ve been in and out in seconds. What took you so long?"
She bit her tongue to bleeding to quell the instinctive truth. "I first interrogated the attending physician about what I’d done wrong to allow the target to live, sir."
"Even a point-blank headshot isn’t one hundred percent guaranteed instant death," Agent Rumlow said. "I could’ve told you that."
Secretary Pierce raised an eyebrow.
"Then I... failed twice. But neither of my mistakes will happen again, sir."
Pierce beaconed over a tablet screen and played a security video from the target’s hospital room.
"I suppose you wanted the target’s own imput on the matter too? No, let me guess: it had something to do with this."
Another video: of Rogers and Romanoff in the compromised base, stealing her necklace.
She made an involuntary noise.
"Explain yourself, Agent."
"That was mine."
Pierce’s voice was glacial. "What?"
"Barnes gave it to me. ‘For you’, he said. Not for an assignment, for me," she pleaded, looking her handler in the eye. "You know I never ask for anything, sir, but he gave it to me."
"Are you really that stupid? What he gave you was a sentimentally disguised locator chip that led his Avengers right into our midst!"
"No," she choked out. "Barnes knew my face. Rogers called me ‘Peggy’."
"Yes. Just as we told you they might."
They’d told – ?
...they had.
The world seemed to tilt on its axis. In the heat of the moment, she had forgotten that.
Pierce stared her down.
"Tell me, Agent Winter. Why did you think we knowingly sent you up against these two men who thought they knew your face and thought your name was Peggy Carter? Because you are really who they mistook you for? Do you truly think Hydra is that foolish, that cruel?"
Her mouth worked futilely. "I just wanted to know what he was thinking before I killed him."
"And what, exactly, made you think you were entitled to information Hydra had decided to purposely not divulge? Well? I’m waiting."
"I – I don’t now. I don’t know."
But, she realised: she was convinced she did know.
Because some strange voice inside of her said Barnes and Rogers were right and Hydra was lying to her.
But that was unthinkable.
"Your thoughtlessness cost us a dozen good soldiers. Normally we would rectify such gross incompetence with reprogramming, but the base holding that equipment is compromised."
"I don’t need it, sir."
The air started feeling hot and thick.
"No?"
"I am Hydra’s best and brightest. I am Hydra’s sharp teeth."
(– she spat in his face set fire to the machines hooked fingers in bloody eye sockets fought screamed cursed begged and they touched her took her cut cut cut her and she screamed screamed screamed –)
This was why she had no memories, she realised, shaking suddenly and fiercely. No living being could do what she did and remember and not go mad and fail.
(– your sacrifice you shaped the century betterment of mankind so future generations don’t have to allow Barnes the dignity of his choice your sacrifice your sacrifice yoursacrificeyoursacrificeyour –)
"I sac – su – surrender myself for disciplinary action and then, by your leave, sir, I will rectify my mistakes."
Pierce smiled. "In that case, I know just the thing."
"You really think it’s wise to send her after them again, mister secretary?"
"The woman you just saw? Not at all. But we’re working on that. Agent Winter has her orders, now I need you to relay yours to the team."
Rumlow threw one last look back at the limp body laid out face down on the table, cybernetic components and interfaces pock-marking the back of the shorn skull.
They rounded a corner just as the first unidentifiable instrument started whining.
It really was a shame, Pierce thought, that she ran on such unsophisticated old methods. Her power and aptitude and experience weren’t things that could be programmed, but given the choice between inferior assets with flawless programming and the sheer amount of maintenance required to keep this one working smoothly, the fresh new drones won by a landslide.
But not until she had rid them of the other old-school super soldiers out there.
"Yeah, I can do this," Stark’s voice reported. "The protection is impressive for an inferior product, but, you know. Inferior product. I would say SHIELD should’ve looked into getting their software from me, but since it’s actually Hydra I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t. It’ll take a while to do this the stealthy way though, so feel free to take a potty break."
His relentless stream of babble paused momentarily.
"Hey, you guys wanna have a sleepover?"
(The first thing Tony Stark had said when the call connected was:
"So word on the street is somebody finally did the enabling old bastard in. You know I had good money on dad outliving him once upon a time? Never could make up my mind about what would happen to their joint obsession, though."
When even Fury had stared at the receiver in shocked silence for a beat too long, the second thing had been:
"Please tell me you’re not telling me anything because you’re trying to decide how much you can and can’t tell me about uncle Buck’s top secret survival.")
Natasha joined Steve by Bucky’s bedside in Stark Tower at the crack of dawn. "No activity at the vault. No sign of her anywhere else either."
Steve made a wordless noise of acknowledgement and kept running Bucky’s chain through his fingers like a rosary.
"You know the KGB tested their own version of a super serum on me once?" Natasha said absentmindedly. "Their idea of a coming-of-age present. Hurt like hell, and nothing even happened."
"You’re kidding me." Steve’s eyes were like saucers. "Nothing happened? Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Absolutely sure? Because Bucky’s serum didn’t activate until his body needed it to survive fatal –"
"Been there, done that."
"When were you born?"
"1984."
"For real?"
"For real."
"Then maybe it’s just too early to tell."
Natasha looked at him. "You’re actually serious."
"Like a heart attack."
Natasha ate her five star lunch with a face like she was chewing cardboard; Steve didn’t even bother.
"So why’d you break it off with Bucky?" Steve asked Natasha restlessly. "For all intents and purposes, you were there first. I was ancient history."
"It’s cute that you actually believe that. I didn’t have to be a psychic to see what was gonna happen, Rogers. It was written all over his face the moment he got the call about you."
"You didn’t even consider fighting for the man you loved?"
"I didn’t love him. Love is for children."
She took one last hateful look at her sandwich and threw it in the trash.
Steve made a decision and sat back in his chair.
"Anyone ever tell you about the time Bucky talked Captain America into a ménage a trois?"
Now Natasha’s eyes grew to the size of saucers. "You, him, and Carter?"
"For the better part of the war. Peggy even talked about adding a second woman if we ever met one, but barring that we were gonna have a plus one household and everything."
"Two undead exes for competition. Even better."
"That’s not –"
"I know what you meant, Steve. Shut up. I need to think. This changes everything." She shot him a look. "You’re telling me now, though?"
"Yeah," Steve assured her. "I like to be upfront about these kinds of things. And whatever becomes of any of us from here on out, you deserve to know."
"Steve. If even a fraction of the incidents attributed to Agent Winter were really Carter –"
"Yeah. Yeah, I know."
"Remember," they told her. "You made your sacrifices to right a world gone wrong."
"Yes," she slurred, because that made sense, even though, no – she did not remember. They had made her not remember.
"Long story short, I’m in and I know all SHIELD’s secrets. You helped –" Stark waved a hand at Hill, Fury and Natasha. "– but it was mostly my unexaggerated genius."
A holographic map sprung to life above the table.
"Not that uncle Buck would’ve had any reason to connect these particular dots, but knowing what we do now, it’s pretty obvious this is where the control centre would be."
"Camp Lehigh," Steve said. "It’s like they’re not even trying to be subtle."
"The good news is that the quantum entanglement effect means the control device doesn’t need to be connected to any satellite or network, so if you destroy that one computer, you eliminate the virus’s entire threat in one go," Hill said. "The bad news is, no way are they just gonna let us walk in there."
Tony crossed his arms. "Well, at least we know the virus can’t be in the operational stage yet, or none of you would be here, still capable of independent thought."
"Or it is operational to whatever degree, at least one of us but more likely all of us are infected, and the only reason it hasn’t been activated is because the benefits just haven’t outweighed the risk of premature discovery yet. Which will change the moment they figure out what we know. We can’t just assume we’re in the clear."
"But we can’t let paranoia stop us either," Fury said. "We need allies that aren’t as likely to have been exposed and who can take us down if need be."
"Rhodey," Tony said immediately. Then, like pulling teeth: "And – Pepper. She’s clean, I know, we check. She – the Extremis – it’s not gone. I’ll talk to Pepper."
"That’s a start," Fury said, not unkindly.
"It’s everyone I care about who hasn’t already been shot in the head, is what it is," Tony snapped nonetheless, and excused himself.
Ms Potts joined them and brought apologies on Tony’s behalf and an impressive calm in the face of life-threatening pressure, for a civilian.
Colonel Rhodes arrived with reinforcements of his own.
"You are my new best friend," Natasha declared when she saw Sam Wilson’s wings. "Hawkeye will be so jealous and aroused."
"Um," said Sam Wilson.
"Alright, enough fooling around," said – surprisingly – Tony. He reached up to close the visor of his brand new armour and the paint came away wet. "We’ve got a man to avenge."
And a woman to save.
Their plan of attack was simple, almost fool-proof; they were expecting it to fail anyway. And a good thing too, because it did so spectacularly.
"This is too easy," Natasha observed for starters, when all teams made it onto the camp grounds unhindered.
Secondly, "HILL, WHAT THE FUCK?!" Wilson screamed over the comms, followed by sounds of a struggle.
Third, "Nick?" said Ms Potts thinly. "Nick!"
Grunts, gunshots, screams.
And fourth: with a cry of "PEPPER?!" Tony gave away his and Natasha’s position to make a beeline for her, and of course that was the moment Hydra agents came swarming like ants from a kicked nest.
Steve and Rhodes looked at each other in mutual realisation.
"I’ll stay close," Rhodes promised, and they turned to repel the enemy advance together.
Tony dropped Natasha at the entrance to a conspicuously new bunker just as Steve and Rhodes were preparing to blast their way inside.
"The virus is operational," she confirmed over the sound of repulsor fire. "Hydra wanted Nick and Maria alive and unharmed. We had to use the sedatives. Restraints didn’t work, Maria dislocated her own shoulder fighting them. Potts and Wilson are evacuating them now."
"You’ll be next," Rhodes cautioned.
Steve caught Natasha’s eye. "Too late to turn back now."
She nodded grimly. "If I go down I’m taking them down with me."
"Don’t worry," Tony said. "Still got Rhodey and me to play designated driver. And on the off chance they got to us too, JARVIS knows what to do with the suits."
Unfortunately, so did Hydra.
They fought their way into the heart of the bunker, located the elevator down to the control centre, and on the way down an EMP field fried all of Iron Man and War Machine’s electronics.
"Shit," Rhodes said from a heap on the ground.
"Shit," Tony agreed from his own heap.
"Rogers, I need you to promise me something."
"It won’t get that far, Nat."
"Dammit, can you for once not play the incorrigible optimist, just please –"
The elevator doors opened. A gas grenade sailed over their heads, hit the wall behind them, and exploded. The blast propelled them from the elevator, blinded and coughing.
Blast doors sealed off the exit behind them, and then... nothing happened.
When they got their bearings, Peggy was seated almost primly behind a desk across the room. She was in full combat gear save for the helmet from before, and Steve made a strangled noise when he saw.
Oh god, not her too.
Natasha, pale-faced and still breathing hard, raised her gun and took fire at the banks of computers behind Peggy. The bullets struck a shimmering force field, inches from and wide of Peggy’s face. She didn’t even flinch.
An image flickered to life on the wall behind her.
"Christ, I wanted it to be anyone but you," Natasha said with conviction.
"Agent Romanoff. Captain Rogers." Alexander Pierce inclined his head. "I wish it didn’t have to come to this."
"What, no gloating, no monologueing?"
Pierce sighed. "You labour under the misconception that I’m some kind of villain, Steve."
Steve looked into Peggy’s dead eyes. "I don’t see any room for misconceptions, Alexander."
"My weaker nature wants to offer you one last chance to see reason, but I know a lost cause when I see one, and I have better things to do tonight. Agent Winter, Black Widow – kill him."
Peggy entered some commands on the computer, rose fluidly, and crossed the force field – while Natasha crumpled, screaming and clawing at her face.
The smoke, Steve realised, horrified. They’d inhaled the virus.
"Steve –" she gasped.
"I promise, I promise!"
They’d both inhaled the smoke, but all Steve felt of it was sick agony to see the state Nat and Peggy were in. He would’ve had something to say about what they called people as sadistic as Pierce where he was from, but Peggy jumped him, grabbing the edge of the shield for leverage and bringing down a knife over the rim, and Steve only barely managed to duck.
Rogers and Winter were evenly matched, flawlessly moving masterpieces of violence, even through the litany of sentimental nonsense Rogers spewed and the visible agitation it provoked in Winter.
Such a waste, Alexander thought. On every conceivable level.
But he was comforted in the knowledge that soon there would be no use for their kind either way. Soon there would be peace. And if sometimes that peace misfired, such as seemed to be the case with Romanoff, well. Mistakes were there to learn from.
"Peggy, please don’t make me do this," Rogers groaned as he parried. "You can fight the virus, I know you can."
"Oh, she can," Alexander confirmed. "Which is why we had to use something else for her. And you too."
"The other serum!" Rogers exclaimed, and shoved Winter back, and turned to Romanoff – only to receive a roundhouse kick to the face.
Ah, the virus took after all. They’d have to check if such delays were common once they moved on to a bigger pool of test subjects.
A warning popped up in the corner of Alexander’s screen, and his audio crackled.
"Alexander. Goddamn this. Goddamn you," a voice slurred.
Rogers looked up at the sound (again) and got punched in the face for his distraction (again).
Alexander raised his eyebrows. "Dad. Why am I not surprised."
"Don’ call me that, snake."
Such a waste.
"For what it’s worth, I really am fond of your daughter, and she gave me the most beautiful children in the world. I’ll take good care of the family."
"You better hope Steve or Nat kills you first," his father-in-law pronounced laboriously. "’Cause if I get my hands on you I will make you pay for every lie ’n every finger you ever laid on Maggie ’n the kids."
"That’s nice, dad."
Romanoff and Winter almost had Rogers backed up against the force field. Could get messy.
Another new window popped up on the screen.
"Thanks for letting us know where to find you, dad. Agent Rumlow and his team will be with you as soon as they’re done here."
"Don’ think so. JARVIS, release the files."
"I’m sorry, sir, but Mr Stark forgot to include you on the list of persons authorized to give that command."
"JARVIS," Romanoff shouted at the top of her lungs from where she dangled from Rogers’ neck. "Release the files!"
"Yes, Agent Romanoff."
"What?" Alexander said.
Romanoff turned and threw herself at Winter, propelling them both through the force field and using Winter’s clearance chip to do it. Three jabs in sensitive places later and Romanoff had her hands free to throw a grenade, and pull herself and Winter out again. The resulting explosion obliterated the computers and caved in the ceiling.
"What."
The phone on Alexander’s desk rang.
"What?!" he snapped into it.
"Sir," his secretary stammered. "Someone published the contents of our classified databases online. All of them."
"All our dirty little secrets," Bucky lisped. "But especially yours, son."
"I may or may not have neglected to tell SHIELD that I also once received the type of serum that made you and Steve immune to the nanovirus," Natasha told Carter, who crouched ready to spring where she’d been dropped, staring between her and where Pierce’s face had been.
"I was just pretending to be on your side," Natasha clarified after a too-long beat of non-response.
"Then all three of us will die," Carter finally said numbly, sliding to her knees.
Explosions sounded in the distance, right on cue.
Natasha met Steve’s wide eyes.
Carter toppled and slumped like her strings were cut.
"Peggy! Peggy, is there another way out of here?" Steve asked, kneeling.
She curled up, clutching her head.
"Peggy, please, we have to get out of here before the whole base comes down on top of us."
"Our orders are to die," Carter ground out.
Cracks appeared in the ceiling.
Natasha lifted a grate in the floor. "Rogers!"
He grabbed Carter around the waist and jumped down, but not fast enough; the first slab of rock coming down hit his head and shoulder as he tried to shield her.
We’re done for, Natasha thought, staring at Carter staring with wide, horrified eyes at the limp form slumped on top of her.
Then debris started coming down like rain from a cloud bursting, and there was a hand around her wrist, and she was tucked into a pile of limbs as Carter held up the shield, standing a little less tall with every passing second and every falling rock but holding holding holding –
"I knew him, once," Carter murmured, eyes far away. "And Barnes too."
Her gaze focussed, just barely, on Natasha.
"But not you."
"Yeah, I’m new, I wasn’t born in time to be part of the original Allied Musketeers." Blood tickling down her temple and pretty out of it herself, she let go of Rogers’ pulse and stuck out her hand. "Natasha Romanoff."
Carter stared at it for a long, long moment.
Then she visibly made a decision, snapping to attention, and turned away.
"I’ll get back to you on that."
The Triskelion was in such an uproar nobody looked twice at her or her jet. Secretary Pierce was just about to flee the premises, but he staggered back with a curse when he opened his office door to the sight of her.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
"I really was Peggy Carter, wasn’t I?"
Pierce didn’t quite stare her down this time. "Your orders were simple, Agent Winter. Kill and die. Why are you still standing? Don’t tell me you failed to kill Rogers again."
She was disobeying with every breath she took. It was like nails drilling into her skull, making her ears ring and her vision fade in and out of focus from the pain, but she had made her sacrifices and held her tongue and curbed her desires. She had given them everything and asked for nothing. This, though – they owed her this.
"I knew Rogers and Barnes. I think I was their ally. Their friend. Why aren’t we still? What happened?"
Pierce backed back into the room. She followed him. "You wised up. You saw the sacrifices that needed to be made and you made them."
"Why?"
"You know why."
"No I don’t. You took that memory away. I want it back."
Pierce backed into his desk and turned to snatch something up. Winter grabbed his wrist and plucked the palm tablet from his hand before he could use it.
"How am I supposed to stand by my choices when I can’t remember why I made them? I want to know! I want –"
– I want to change my mind.
But no, it couldn’t be wanting.
"You – you took too much. How can I make the judgements I should in the field when I don’t even know –"
"Charge full voltage," Pierce snarled.
Familiar, eternally indescribable agony filled her skull and sent her thrashing to the floor, control of her limbs and voice gone. A moment or an eternity later, the pain let up just enough to tell her Pierce had reclaimed his tablet and was saying this was always the problem with you, too much and you’re useless, too little and you get like this.
Suddenly his face swam into view. He’d wrenched her chin up.
For some reason, she thought of snow.
“You don’t make judgements, you don’t make decisions, you do what we damn well tell you to do,” Pierce said. “You want to know the truth? The man who made you was a selfish hack blinded by his grudges. Bad enough Barnes still talks about murdering Zola cool as a cucumber and nobody’s ever bothered to disprove the claims that brain damage from the fall made him innocent by reason of insanity. Holzmann too could have given Hydra hundreds of willing, superior soldiers, but instead he took the secret of the serum to an early grave and left us only you, a symbol of the futility of resistance that never could get her own lesson through her thick skull. And now our presence has been exposed and our nanovirus has proven to be defective, so I can’t even replace you.”
It works just fine, she could’ve told him.
If she told him he might make the pain stop. He might kill her quickly and never make her feel this way again. She would be free, and he would get what he wanted.
She could’ve.
She didn’t.
Pierce punched some commands into his palm tablet and Winter felt every nerve in her body shiver.
"Get up, follow me, do not harm or hinder me in any way, protect me when I need it, and don’t even think about disobeying, or the pain you just felt will seem like a tickle. I won’t even have to press a button."
There were strings wrapped around her joints, tugging gently but stinging with a whole new level of viciousness when she failed to comply. There was already blood leaking from her ears from the last shock. The implants would burn through her brain, slowly, if she didn’t get up and do as he said.
She grabbed the Derringer strapped to her thigh and shot Pierce through the head.
Correctly, this time.
"JARVIS?" Bucky asked feverishly. He couldn’t remember how many times he’d asked. He couldn’t remember what was happening. He could barely blink. His head was pounding to the beat of wrong wrong wrong and everything he did remember told him he should not be awake yet. "Where is everyone? Are they alive? JARVIS?"
"Miss Potts just re-established contact, sir. Mr Stark and Colonel Rhodes are incapacitated but unharmed. Mr Wilson, Agent Romanoff, and Captain Rogers are attempting to excavate the Iron Man and War Machine armours from some rubble. Agent Hill and Director Fury are en route to the Triskelion."
"Peggy. Where’s Peggy?"
"Agent Carter left the combat zone at Camp Lehigh, made a brief appearance at the Triskelion, and has not been sighted since, sir."
"She’s alive? She’s okay?"
"Yes."
Relief rolled Bucky’s eyes right back in his head.
"JARVIS?" he garbled.
"Yes, sir?"
"You can turn the drugs back on now. Wake me when they need me."
(JARVIS was not a human being and had, as such, not ‘hesitated’ at any point during this exchange. Any delay in his responses was a result of juggling both the flow of SHIELD’s secrets and the calculations necessary to determine the most desirable outcome to the conversation.
Contrary to what Tony would lead people to believe, JARVIS was perfectly capable of little white lies.
There was never any hesitation either way in the universe according to Bucky, though, because due to the brain damage his perception of time was shot all to hell at that point.)
"I heard that," Natasha laughed, tucking her phone between cheek and shoulder as she slipped into her heels. "Not that it’s not true."
"Don’t admit it!" Steve groaned. "Think of his ego. Do you really wanna feed it?"
"Hey!" James protested somewhere in the background.
"I’ll take the personality if it means I get the body exactly the way I like it. James, all I’m saying is, your vanity is misguided. Canes are distinguished and classy and the perfect accessory for an older gentleman going out to dinner and a show."
Steve and James groaned in unison.
"Those jokes are older than I am, come on."
Natasha was confident they knew her well enough to know how widely she was grinning.
"I’m hanging up now, boys. See you in ten."
She locked the door behind her, snuggled deeper into the fur of her coat, and headed out into the night, her path illuminated by streetlights, windowpanes, and Christmas decorations.
A figure in a sleek, elegant coat showing just a hint of the red dress underneath stood in wait for her at the end of the street. Her lips were bright red and rich brown hair, slightly too long and wild to be called a flapper cut, curled out from underneath a trilby hat.
The other woman put her arm through Natasha’s and fell into step beside her.
"You’re alive," Natasha observed.
"Yes." She took a deep breath and held out her free hand. "Peggy Carter. Pleased to make your acquaintance."
Natasha shook it, smiling. "You sure took your sweet time getting back to me about that."
"Yes, I... had to take some detours."
"I thought for sure Hydra’d gotten the drop on you, harvested your body for tissue samples, and put the remains through a woodchipper."
"Charming."
"I don’t pretend to be an optimist. Always good to be wrong, though. Now James and Steve, on the other hand, will tell you they never doubted you for a second, though they have been worried sick and looking all over for you."
"James. Bucky?"
"Yeah, I’m not calling him that. It’s 2015. Bucky is what grandparents call their dogs."
Peggy only smiled.
"I take it you know where I’m going and intend to come with me."
"Yes."
"And that they’ll both be there."
"That was the idea."
"Like ripping off a band-aid, huh?"
"Let’s hope."
When they reached the restaurant, it had started to snow.
Peggy remembered a song, and remembered remembering a song. She remembered a kiss, and another snowfall, and every beginning and decision that had brought her here.
Her memories did no justice to the sun igniting in Steve’s eyes when he saw them coming down the sidewalk, or Bucky forgetting his walking stick mid-step and hobbling to reach out tentatively and then hug frantically, or the taste of Steve’s mouth, the salt and stubble on Bucky’s cheeks, the feeling of coming home.
Once, on a balmy evening in the summer of ’44, when even war hadn’t disturbed the song of the cicadas, Bucky had asked Steve and Peggy: "When the war is over and we’ve found that second woman and we can do whatever we want, where do you wanna go?"
And Peggy, to no small amount of amusement and infinite fondness, had answered: "The future."