Of Home Near

Peggy left London in the misty pre-dawn of morning, after the blackout had ended but before the sun had properly come up, if such a thing could be applied to London in March. The morning’s damp drizzle suited her mood as she maneuvered the truck through the city streets; she could have had a driver take her or just waited for the transport the Commandos were supposed to take, but she didn’t want to be at headquarters at the moment. It was petty and she knew it was petty, but there was nothing she could do about that.

She had slept poorly the previous night; she and Phillips had gotten in too late to do anything other than rescind the lockdown Howard had ordered. All of the SSR’s interrogators were still over on the continent with the 107th or up at the same holding facility in Scotland where Arnim Zola and most of the other ranking Hydra prisoners had been transported, and even if they hadn’t been, Howard didn’t trust anyone but Phillips or Peggy to deal with Steve. Peggy herself wasn’t certain whether that was a good thing or a bad one; the sooner both interrogations and debriefings were done, the better. No one at the SSR was yet certain which of the two it was going to be and at the moment Peggy didn’t think she was objective enough to be the one to decide.

As she had expected, it took several hours to get out of London via the A3. She made it all the way to Bramshott before she had to pull over to the side of the road to let a military convoy go by and have a good cry while she was at it.

When the convoy had gone and she had cried herself out, she fixed her makeup and checked it in her compact mirror. The Commandos knew her well enough that they might be able to tell she had been weeping, but all of them were too polite to mention it. Dugan had actually walked in on her crying two weeks earlier and all he had done was give her a handkerchief and gone to wait outside the tent door until she had finished.

The worst thing that could happen has already happened, she reminded herself as she turned the lorry back onto the road. Anything that happens next is a gift, no wonder how awful the truth is.

She wasn’t sure if she had been crying for the Steve she hadn’t been able to bury five weeks earlier or the Steve who had still been asleep with his wife – if she was his wife and not a Hydra plant – when Peggy had left headquarters. Both, maybe.

Despite the early hour at which she had started, it was well past noon by the time she finally arrived at RAF Tangmere; she had had to pull over twice more along the way and gotten trapped on the wrong side of a railway when the passenger train was shunted onto the sidings to let a troop transport go by. The Howling Commandos were packed and ready to go, playing cards with some of the off-duty airmen. Peggy greeted them as cheerfully as she could and let them finish their game while she had a cup of tea with two of the RAF Special Duties pilots who sometimes flew for the SSR and were still on the base instead of over on the continent. When she came out again, the Commandos had tossed all of their gear into the back of the lorry and were now waiting on her.

“What’s with the personal treatment?” Dugan asked, climbing into the passenger seat next to her as the rest of the Commandos piled into the back. “That have anything to do with why we got called back all sudden-like?”

“That,” Peggy said, throwing the lorry into gear with a wrench of effort, “is a conversation we can have a little ways down the road.”

Dugan gave her a thoughtful look in response to that, then tipped his bowler hat down over his eyes and settled back for a brief nap. From the sounds in the back most of the Commandos were doing the same; Falsworth and Morita both snored. They might have had a good night’s sleep at Tangmere, but they had all been in the field too often to pass up the opportunity for a few hours’ kip.

Peggy waited until they were about halfway to London, taking back roads this time in hopes of avoiding more convoys, before she pulled the lorry over, kicked Dugan to wake him up, and collected her bag. Dugan followed her into the back of the truck as she climbed in. The Commandos were coming awake all at once, their hands going to weapons at the sudden stop and then falling away from the guns as they remembered where they were. They pulled themselves upright and onto the benches at the sides of the truck, yawning – Jones had a flask of coffee that he passed around and Peggy took a healthy swallow of the bitter liquid before she handed it on to Dugan.

“What I’m going to tell you is classified at the highest level,” she said. “Right now only Howard and Colonel Phillips know all of it.”

That got a few sideways glances, but it wasn’t the first time something they had heard something like that. Not even the dozenth.

“So it’s bad, isn’t it?” Jones said.

“Not exactly,” Peggy said. She pulled the file folders out of her bag and rested them on her knees, straightening them with a few nervous twitches before she forced herself to rest her hands on top of them. She had to take a deep breath before she said, “Steve is back.”

There was a moment of blank silence as all five of them took that in, then Dernier let out a whoop of relief and clasped his hands together. Morita, the only one of the Commandos who had had a chance to talk to Steve onboard the Valkyrie, slumped back and said, “He made it out. Oh, thank god –”

“Not – exactly,” Peggy said again. She opened the folder on top of the pile on her lap and removed the stack of photographs there, handing them to Dugan. “This is the main lab at headquarters, a week ago.”

Dugan’s lips pursed in a silent whistle as he leafed through the photographs, then passed them on. As they made the circuit of the Commandos, Peggy said, “The official story, once this leaves the SSR, will be that Steve bailed out of the Valkyrie and walked back to the Allied lines.”

“Well, that’s obviously not the real story,” Falsworth observed.

“Obviously not,” Peggy agreed.

“Who’s the girl?” Jones asked.

Peggy took a deep breath. “That,” she said, “is Mrs. Steven Rogers.”

There was a long moment of silence, broken only by the sound of Dernier leafing through the photographs Jones had just passed him, After the silence had started to become uncomfortable, Dugan finally said, “What like, married married? That kind of Mrs. Steven Rogers?”

“I shouldn’t think there are too many other options,” Peggy said, feeling a muscle in her jaw twitch. “Her given name is Natasha Romanoff.”

“Russian,” Falsworth said, his gaze flickering upwards.

“American, apparently. From Dayton, Ohio.”

Morita gave Falsworth the usual sharp look to remind him that someone’s surname was no guarantor of their nationality and said, “So Steve met her along the way, wherever he was? OSS? Or one of the Baker Street girls; SOE’s got a couple of Americans, right? Or is she one of ours?”

“Charming how none of you pondered the option that she might be a civilian or a noncombatant,” Peggy said dryly.

Dernier looked down at the photograph he was still holding, which captured – somewhat blurrily – the moment Natasha Rogers’s fist had collided with the face of one of Howard’s engineers. “Her?”

“Technically I’m a noncombatant,” Peggy reminded him, which got an elaborate Gallic gesture of disbelief in response. It was a very technical distinction in the SSR, which required combat training even for personnel who would never leave headquarters (which Howard Stark had complained about the entire time but completed nevertheless), but officially women in the armed services weren’t combatants.

Morita held a hand out for the photographs and frowned at them again when Dernier passed them over. “This isn’t Steve’s gear,” he said slowly. “It looks like it, but it’s not right, even counting out the star being gone. He looks like he’s been through hell, though.”

“If the official story is that he walked out, then what’s Steve say?” Jones asked.

Peggy’s fingers flexed inadvertently against the file folders on her lap. She looked down at them, half-surprised by the action, then looked up at the Commandos again. They were all watching her with concern – for her, for Steve. For the Steve Rogers they remembered, the one whom they all thought had died five weeks ago, determined and alone and so, so frightened.

Five weeks wasn’t so long, though Peggy thought that she would probably have nightmares about it for the rest of her life. He had been so afraid in those last few minutes, desperate to not think about what he had to see coming.

Peggy had spent the past five weeks hoping it had been fast. She still hoped that.

She took a deep breath, trying and failing to smile, and said, “Steve says he’s from the future.”

The response in the truck bed was utter silence, as all five of the surviving Howling Commandos tried to decide if she was joking or not, then Morita said bluntly, “Bullshit,” at the same time Jones said, “That’s, uh, quite a story.”

“That’s what I said,” Peggy said. She did manage to smile this time, but it was crooked and gone almost as soon as she had managed to shape the expression.

“What does Stark say?” Falsworth asked, looking like he was having some trouble with the entire concept, which was both relatable and understandable.

“Howard believes him, but Howard is so desperate to get into Steve’s knickers that he would believe anything Steve says,” Peggy said, then winced; just because everyone knew it was true didn’t mean it was the sort of thing that ought to be said out loud.

“Sounds like that position’s already taken,” Morita muttered; Jones dug an elbow into his side in response.

Dugan, who had been promoted to sergeant and team leader a month earlier, glared at them both and said, “So when you say the future, are you talking next week, next month, next year –”

“Seventy-three years from now, apparently,” Peggy said. “The year of our lord two thousand and eighteen.”

“That can’t possibly a real number,” Falsworth said. “Even Captain Rogers – how would that even work?”

Peggy looked down at the folders again. “Accord to Steve, when he crashed the Valkyrie, he was – frozen is what he said, quite literally in ice, and wasn’t found until the year 2012. He was revived by the SSR’s successor agency and has been working for them for the past six years; it’s where he met his – his wife, apparently.” She cocked her head to one side and added, “During an alien invasion.”

“Uh –”

She lifted her hands, palm up, as if to ward off a blow. “It’s what he said – what they both said. They were involved in another fight when they were sent here.”

“They were in a fight, that’s for sure,” Jones said, looking at one of the photographs. “I don’t know about gray-skinned Martians, though; humans can punch you in the face just as much as one of Welles’ monsters. And we’ve all seen Steve take a punch.”

It was Dugan who said, “What do you think, Peggy?”

“I think Steve believes it’s true,” she said. “And I think no one other than Steve and Schmidt knows what really happened on that plane.”

“Crâne Rouge,” Dernier said bitterly, making Hitler’s mocking nickname for Johann Schmidt into a curse.

“Yes,” Peggy agreed. “As much as I hate to admit it, we only have Steve’s word for it that he’s dead. And we all know how the serum can be, too. It can make things…difficult.” They had had a few bad scares with Steve that way over the past year and a half and since they had happened to Steve he probably wouldn’t have been able to recognize them in someone else.

Sounding like he was thinking out loud, Jones said, “We know Schmidt had people working on psychological conditioning and memory manipulation, and some of them got pretty far. The only problem is that we still don’t know who or where they are.”

The SSR only knew because they had had the unfortunate experience of running into the products of Hydra’s experimentation on those lines, usually Allied POWs who had been plucked out of the factories and labor camps along some unknown metric. The Commandos had found four so far over the course of the past five weeks, a situation Peggy knew they all found profoundly disorienting; as former Hydra prisoners it was only luck that none of them had ended up in that position. The Commandos had been forced to kill two of them, the third had killed himself after being taken prisoner, and the fourth was in an SSR cell insisting he was a German named Karl Menzel from Pforzhelm, instead of Jeff Myllyharju from Staten Island, a lieutenant in the 107th Infantry who had been captured at Azzano in 1943 and vanished from the same Krausberg Hydra facility in which the Commandos had been held.

The idea that Schmidt might have done anything of the sort to Steve was horrifying.

“Yeah, but why bother?” Morita said, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “It’s a little complicated for a cover story when all they’d need to do was drop him and the lady a mile from the front lines and have him walk in. Stark gets nuts about Steve, but even he’s not dumb enough to let him have free run of headquarters until he figures out what’s what.”

He looked a question at Peggy, who said, “Howard put the building on full lockdown and neither Steve nor Mrs. Rogers have gone anywhere without at least two MPs since. Colonel Phillips lifted the lockdown when we arrived yesterday, though it’s ruffled a few feathers over at Baker Street and Grosvenor Street, since they both had people at headquarters when the lockdown went into effect.”

The British Special Operations Executive’s main offices were on Baker Street and the United States’ Office of Strategic Services had its British headquarters on Grosvenor Street. All three agencies exchanged information and occasionally people with some frequency, though SOE had the lead in Europe and the SSR dealt with anything esoteric. Generally they got along well, but there had been some unpleasant clashes in the past and this was going to be another one.

Falsworth said thoughtfully, “Schmidt was, or is –” He grimaced at the present tense. “– a little wrong in the head, as is anyone who sides with him. What seems illogical to us may make perfect sense to him.”

“We have to consider every possibility,” Peggy said. “No matter how unpleasant or unlikely. Including –” She swallowed, forcing herself to go on. “Including the possibility that Steve may be telling the truth. We’ve all seen things over the past few years that would have a better place in the pictures than in the real world, but they’re real enough to kill.”

Her fingers flexed against the file folders again, and she told the Howling Commandos what she had told herself a hundred times since she had walked into Howard’s office yesterday. “The worst thing that could happen has already happened,” she said. “If Steve is telling the truth, then it’s over and done with and there was never anything we could have done. But if he’s lying – even if he doesn’t know he’s lying – then it’s up to us to find out what the truth really is.”

Natasha rolled over onto her stomach to watch Steve shave, resting her chin on her crossed arms. Their room had a small sink and mirror, though the bathroom was down the hall.

“I thought safety razors had already been invented in 1945,” she said; Steve was using a straight razor.

“Belonged to my dad,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to it – after, you know. The Smithsonian didn’t have it and it hasn’t shown up on eBay that I know of.” He paused what he was doing and stepped over to show Natasha the spot on the handle where the initials JCR had been inlaid in mother-of-pearl.

“The Rogers I know,” she said. “The J’s – Joseph, right? Jonathan?”

“Joseph Christopher Rogers,” Steve said, going back to the sink. “Born 1893 in Castlecomer, County Kilkenny, died 1918, New York City – before I was born. Never met him.”

“Do you look like him?” Natasha asked curiously.

He shook his head. “Ma only had two pictures. He was dark-haired, I think, taller than me – taller than me back then, anyway, I don’t know about now. She was small and fair like me. None of the pictures of them survived,” he added, his face clouded, then he blinked and said, “Actually, if my wallet’s still in my footlocker and no one’s swiped it –”

Natasha got up since his hands were full, wincing as her bare feet hit the cold floor. It took her a few minutes of searching to find the battered leather wallet, since Steve hadn’t had a reason to go looking for it since they had arrived. Inside were his identification card, a small quantity of both American and British money, a matchbook from a hotel in Milwaukee, a couple of pencil stubs, and four black-and-white photographs. Natasha sat cross-legged on the parquet floor to look at them as Steve finished shaving.

It was always a shock to see pictures of Steve before he had gotten the serum, though not more than half a dozen of those had survived to the present day. She thought he might have been about sixteen in the photograph on top, a guess she made less from looking at Steve (who could have passed for twelve) than from looking at Bucky next to him, both of them posed in front of a roller coaster that was still at Coney Island today – well, in 2018, though it was there in 1945 too. Steve had a black eye and a woebegone expression. The second photograph was of a pretty but tired-looking woman in old-fashioned nurse’s whites with Steve’s fair hair and determined chin. Below that was a portrait photo of a dark-haired, heavily freckled young man in a WWI U.S. Army uniform; someone had written Pvt. Joey Rogers, 107 Inf across the bottom of the photograph. The last photo was of the same man and the woman, both looking very young, standing on a dock with a two-funneled steamship just behind them. Natasha turned it over to find Joseph Rogers & Sorcha O Faolain Sarah Rogers, 1912, Queenstown written on the back. The Anglicization of the second name had been written in a different hand and with a different pen than the rest.

“They eloped,” Steve said, sitting down on the floor beside her as he wiped his now-smooth cheeks with a towel. “Dad was Church of Ireland, Ma was Catholic. Ma’s family wrote to her sometimes; after Dad died they wanted her to go back to Ireland once it was safe to travel after the war, but she wouldn’t do it. Dad’s family never forgave him for running off, though I know Ma wrote to them to tell them he’d died. I’ve never met any of them on either side, though I’m pretty sure I’ve still got relatives alive over there. Or did. Do.” He frowned at the confusion of tenses, then shrugged and said, “That’s the RMS Campania behind them, that used to do the Liverpool-Cobh-New York run – Cobh was still Queenstown then. It was right after Titanic went down; Ma told me that if her brothers hadn’t been after them, she and Dad might not have gotten on at all, they were so scared.”

Natasha looked over at him, feeling a little prickle of unease. You could forget what Steve Rogers was. Not that he was Captain America; three years in the same house as the Red Guardian had left her unimpressed by a super soldier’s enhanced strength, the more so because Steve had never treated it as anything particularly extraordinary the way Tony and Rhodey treated the suits or Wanda her powers. It was as much a part of him as his blonde hair and blue eyes; he was Captain America to his bones, the way Natasha was the Black Widow.

But you could forget, sometimes, that he had been born in 1918, four months before the end of World War One, four years before the creation of the Soviet Union, when Woodrow Wilson had been president of the United States and the last tsar of Russia had been unknowingly counting down the final days of his life.

Steve looked back at her, his blue eyes a little worried, and Natasha said, “You do look like them – both of them. They’d be proud of you.”

“They’d be confused as all get-out, probably,” Steve said, taking the photographs from her and leafing through them slowly. “God, this was five minutes after I finished throwing up,” he added fondly, indicating the Coney Island picture. “Bucky’s ma insisted, though, for my ma to have since she was working that day and couldn’t come. She was a good lady. I wrote to her, after Bucky –” He bit his lip, shaking his head. “She’s buried next to him – next to his tombstone, anyway; the grave in Brooklyn’s empty, like the one in Arlington. Obviously.”

He laid the photographs across his knee and rubbed his hands over his face, his expression suddenly showing every one of his ninety-nine years – he was still a few months short of his century. “I can’t go after him,” Steve said, his voice harsh with agony. “Even if we had any idea where Hydra has him right now –” The Winter Soldier records they had found only started in 1957, leaving a twelve-year gap. “– I can’t risk affecting the war. I don’t think the Allies would lose it at this point, but I can’t – there are a lot of ways it could go worse than it actually did and it already went pretty bad.”

“I’m Russian, Steve, I know,” Natasha said. She put a hand on his shoulder and he leaned heavily against her, breathing hard.

“I’m scared enough as it is that Howard’s here dealing with us instead of in New Mexico, and I’m still not even sure he actually was involved with the Manhattan Project or if that was just cover for him being in the SSR,” Steve said miserably. “It’s not like I can ask him about it, since the Manhattan Project doesn’t even get declassified until after the war and Howard’s SSR service was never declassified. Though that part I knew about already, obviously.” He wiped a hand over his face again and managed to add, with strained good humor, “And that’s why I always turned down requests to talk about the war, which made a lot of university history departments very annoyed.”

“And Nick Fury would have had you skinned.”

“And Nick Fury would have had me skinned.”

Most of the SSR’s missions were still classified and very few had ever been digitized, so they hadn’t been included in the SHIELD files Natasha had dumped onto the internet four years ago. Since Steve’s return had been made public in the wake of the Battle of New York, there had been dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, but both SHIELD and the U.S. Army had held onto the mission reports with tooth and nail. As far as she was aware, fewer than half a dozen of the Howling Commandos’ missions had ever been declassified, and those had all been the ones that had barely been classified anyway, since they had intersected with the regular army.

Steve rubbed at his forehead. “This god damn war,” he said bitterly. “When I was in it the first time – you know how it is. You’re just getting through it, doing the best you can do. But knowing what’s coming – and knowing that as bad as it was, it could have been a hell of a lot worse – if I think about it too much I think I’m going to lose it.”

Natasha nodded. It wasn’t as personal to her as it was to Steve, but she knew enough about WWII that thinking about it too much made her a little nauseous. And that was just the war, not all the other shit that had been going on around the same time, all the bloody pieces falling into place that would shape the next seventy years.

“Not that I can tell Phillips any of that,” Steve added grimly. “And the damned thing is I don’t know all that much about the end of the war anyway. Not enough to know what’s safe to say or do or not.”

Natasha nodded again. They had talked the subject to death over the course of the last week, and at the end of the day neither of them knew enough about the last six months of the Second World War except that it had been a bloody, brutal end to a bloody, brutal war that could have continued to drag on across both the European and Pacific theatres under different circumstances. The problem was that they didn’t know for certain what those circumstances were.

“Damn it,” Steve said again, bitter. He scrubbed at his eyes again, then wiped the side of his hand against his shirt and sorted through the photographs again, visibly pushing his frustration aside; after six years, Natasha was familiar enough with how that looked. “Ma took this in ’35, couple months before she got sick. TB – tuberculosis,” he said, even though Natasha hadn’t asked. “Couldn’t shake it; she died in ’36, when I was eighteen.”

“She’s pretty,” Natasha said, smiling at Steve.

“Yeah, she was,” Steve said. He tapped the photographs together like a stack of cards to straighten them, then slid them back into his wallet and tossed it into the footlocker.

Natasha leaned back on her hands, watching him as he got to his feet to finish dressing. She could still remember the exact moment she had looked at him four years ago and realized, with a nearly electric shock, I want this man. Not just as a teammate or a partner or a friend, in the way that being on the run from Hydra had forced her to articulate; she wanted him in her bed as well as at her side. Stupid to realize then after two years of trying to set him up with other women, and if she had known at the time that Steve liked men as well as women she would have diversified his options, which was probably exactly why he had never mentioned it to her.

I want this man, and then, immediately, I can’t have him. Women like Natasha Romanoff didn’t get to have men like Steve Rogers.

She had woken up that next morning a week past, in the pitch dark of the room with the blackout curtains still drawn, with Steve’s arm around her and his breath slow and steady against the back of her neck, and the first thing she had thought had been, Steve. And then, I’m in 1945.

Funny to have him after all, in this time and place.

“What are you thinking about?” Steve asked, pulling on his Eisenhower jacket and doing up the buttons.

“Shared life experience,” Natasha said, and saw the quick flash of his smile. She pushed to her feet, wincing a little, and went to get dressed. After a week in 1945, she was used to the clothing, but she missed her underwire bra – her sports bra, too. The soft, slightly pointed cups of the brassieres Howard Stark had brought – he had gotten her size right, damn him – did interesting things to her breasts that Steve seemed to appreciate, but on the whole Natasha thought she preferred the silhouette of her own time, not to mention the improved support. She missed her underwear, too. At least she could wear pants, even if they weren’t anywhere near as common as in the 21st century; she had two skirts, but since they hadn’t been allowed out of the SSR there was no real point in trying to blend in, and she hated nylons. Steve had told her that she was lucky Howard had stocks of them, since nylon stockings had been one of the many victims of the war in England.

Steve turned to her as she was sitting on the side of the bed unpinning her hair. “How do I look?”

“Like yourself,” Natasha said.

“Like I did in 2012?”

“Your hair’s still too long, going by the other men I’ve seen here,” she said, and he rolled his eyes. “But – no. You don’t look older, not really, but – it’s something in the eyes, I think. Body language, too; you don’t move like anyone else here.” She thought about it. “You used to, but you haven’t for a long time. Not when you’re fighting, I mean, just normally.”

Steve grimaced. “Well, I can’t do anything about that.”

“You could, but it’s probably not what you actually want to do,” Natasha said. “The body language, I mean, not the eyes. Why did you shave, anyway?”

“Because no one has a beard in 1945,” Steve said, sighing. “Not in the United States Army, anyway. If I wanted a mustache – stop laughing.”

Natasha covered her mouth with her hand, letting a handful of hairpins fall to the bed. “If you grow a mustache, I’m taking pictures,” she said. “And bringing them back to 2018 to show Sam and Bucky.”

“Very funny,” Steve said. “You know the only good thing about growing up during the Great Depression, before social media and everyone and their aunt had a smartphone with a camera? No pictures.”

“Oh, so Bucky’s seen it,” Natasha said, delighted.

“Maybe not, Hydra did mess with his memory –” Steve said, his cheeks crimson, and Natasha dissolved into giggles at the mental image until Steve came over and kissed her to make her stop. That went on until Natasha was on her back on the bed, her blouse open and Steve’s hands skating thoughtfully over her breasts, his jacket discarded on the floor.

Apart from hashing out the potential repercussions of time travel, they had also spent a lot of the last week making out.

They were about to do considerably more than that when there was a knock on the door. Natasha let her head fall back against the bed with a gusty sigh. “Breakfast?”

“Probably,” Steve said, kissing her quickly before he straightened up and retrieved his jacket, pulling it on as he went to get the door. Natasha fastened the buttons of her blouse without bothering to get up.

“Good thing I didn’t have lipstick on yet,” she called after Steve.

He rubbed a hand over his jaw, blushing, and said, “Good thing it wasn’t five minutes later or neither of us would have had anything on.”

Natasha sighed regretfully and sat up to make sure her curls hadn’t gotten too squashed; she had only gotten half the pins out from the little coils of pin curls she had slept in. She was starting to remember why she had gotten out of the habit of curling her hair regularly.

Steve opened the door before whoever was on the other side could knock again.

“Captain Rogers –” the WAC began, and then stopped. She sounded badly taken aback as she repeated, “Captain Rogers – uh – breakfast. And Colonel Phillips will see you at 9 o’clock.”

Natasha twisted to look at her, bemused by the other woman’s reaction until she realized that its cause was almost certainly the fact that Steve was cleanshaven for the first time since they had arrived. Everyone in the SSR knew that it was Captain America who had come back, but the reason that he had grown the beard in the first place was that he didn’t look like Captain America with it. Shaving meant that he actually looked like the Steve Rogers everyone remembered. Even if they had known it academically, it was one thing to know and another to see.

“Understood,” Steve told the woman gravely, taking the covered tray from her. “I’ll expect my escort then.”

“And I can take, um, Mrs. Rogers to the ladies room if she’d like,” the WAC added, sounding more awkward about it than she had the last time they had done this dance. Howard Stark might be stupid about Steve Rogers – that was more than obvious after a week in his company – but he hadn’t let it affect the SSR’s internal security. Steve and Natasha weren’t allowed anywhere else in the building alone and they usually weren’t allowed out of their room together, either, except to talk to Howard. They also mostly ate in their room.

Natasha got to her feet, dropping the last few pins onto the bed to undoubtedly roll over at an awkward time later, probably while naked. “Thank you, I’d appreciate that.”

The WAC waited for her to pull her shoes on and pick up her makeup bag, then took her down the corridor past the MPs guarding their door.

Natasha knew from Steve that the SSR’s headquarters on King Charles Street were in a repurposed government building, like many of the others in Whitehall. There was still a little of the grandeur of the old building visible in the parquet flooring and the crown molding – more obvious elsewhere, Steve had said, but Natasha hadn’t seen those rooms. On this floor old offices had been broken up into bedrooms for SSR personnel or guests like Steve and Natasha, the kind of guests who required extra security, reinforced walls, and reinforced doors – expatriates, refugees, and the occasional defector, the ones who didn’t go into the cells on the building’s lowest level belowground. The women’s bathroom was at one end of the hallway, the men’s at the other, and from the look of it the former had been added at some point during the war; the SSR didn’t have gender parity, but it had a slightly higher percentage of women than other joint-service agencies.

The WAC waited in the corridor outside the bathroom door as Natasha went in. It was bad tradecraft if she had considered Natasha a real threat, which she clearly didn’t, but good manners otherwise; Natasha had done similar work for SHIELD before. She had also been under a similar guard before, back when she had first defected from the Red Room; SHIELD had been understandably cautious of her.

She had had worse than 1940s plumbing over the years – for one, at least the 1940s actually had plumbing, which more than a few places Natasha had been before hadn’t. If she and Steve had landed near the front lines in Europe – or worse, the Pacific – they wouldn’t have been so lucky, though.

The face that looked back at her in the mirror after she had washed her hands and put on her makeup wasn’t a stranger’s, just a little different than she was used to. After two years with the blonde, Natasha was mostly used to it; her roots had grown out to a half-centimeter of coppery red, but there was nothing she could do about that. Even if she had had access to it, she wasn’t about to mix 1940s hair dye with modern box dye just to cover up her roots. The soft curls weren’t unfamiliar either; it wasn’t that different from the way she had been wearing her hair when she and Steve had met six years earlier, though she had gotten tired of the upkeep not long afterwards. The makeup styles of the 1940s were fairly conservative, not difficult to replicate once Natasha had gotten a good look at how women were actually wearing them. She didn’t put too much effort into trying to cover the lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn’t been there six years ago, nor the faint scars on her face, both the legacy of three decades of making a living fighting and killing men, and more recently, robots and aliens. She was over thirty and there was no shame in looking it; it wasn’t something that many survivors of the Red Room could boast of.

Natasha wasn’t putting on a role, not exactly; not the way she did when she went undercover. Instead she was slipping into the skin of the woman she would have been if she had been born in 1918, not 1984 – she and Steve were the same age, minus the sixty-seven years he had spent in the ice and the five months between his July birthday and her December one. She had heard the contemplative whispers in the SSR on the rare occasions she had been allowed out; Steve was a known quality here, but she was still an unfamiliar one. OSS, that was the rumor – the American Office of Strategic Services, the granddaddy of the CIA and SOCCOM and even SHIELD; in many ways SHIELD had been closer to the OSS than to the SSR, even if the line of descent wasn’t quite so direct.

Only that wasn’t entirely true, because even if Natasha Romanoff had been born in 1918 she wouldn’t have been born in America. The woman she would have been if she had been born in the turbulent years of the Russian Revolution and everything else in her life had gone exactly the same –

By 1945 there had already been a Red Room long enough to turn out two generations of the women who in a few decades’ time would come to be known as the Black Widows. They weren’t Widows yet, though, and it wasn’t called the Red Room, either. But it was there. It was here, right now.

Colonel Phillips didn’t look up from the report he was reading as Irene Lorraine showed Steve into his office, though he gestured the two MPs who had escorted Steve there to remain outside before she shut the door. Steve stood at parade rest as he waited, his hands clasped behind his back; as far as Phillips was concerned he was still a serving officer in the United States Army and he had damned well better act like it. He let his gaze flicker around the familiar room, which looked little different from the last time he had been in here except that the positions of the piles of file folders and reports had changed slightly, and there were new marks on the big map of occupied Europe on the wall.

Without looking up, Phillips said, “If you’re looking for Agent Carter, she’s off on an errand. Probably best for you, since I’m pretty sure she wants to have you drawn and quartered.”

“No, sir,” Steve said, trying and failing to keep his voice light. He had underestimated what it would be like to see Peggy again, young and beautiful and untouched by the passage of time. And alive. “She doesn’t want someone else to do it, she wants to do it herself.”

“You’re probably right there.”

Phillips took his time finishing his report, then picked up a pencil and made a couple of notations on it before he set both aside and looked up at Steve. He blinked once at the sight of Steve’s cleanshaven face, sharp contrast to what Steve had looked like yesterday and revealing the already-yellowed bruise Peggy’s fist had left on his jaw, but all he said was, “Rogers, you’ve been a pain in my ass since June 15, 1943, when Abe Erskine dragged you onto my army base like a chewed-over kitten he found behind a garbage can and felt sorry for.”

“Thank you, sir,” Steve said, straight-faced.

“Don’t give me any sass.” Phillips nodded at the chair in front of his desk and Steve took the unspoken order to sit. Phillips looked him over, a tiny frown knitting the flesh between his weathered brows before he finally said, “Stark believes that damn fool story you fed him and Carter thinks you and your girl are both lying through your teeth, but grants that you might not know it. So, Rogers, which is it?”

“That I might not know it?” Steve repeated, a little startled, and thought, Bucky, with fleeting dismay. Hydra wouldn’t have started with Bucky, though. That was the sort of thing you had to build up to. “I mean, it is the truth. But what –”

“Found a few new things since you did your swan dive,” Phillips said bluntly. “Johann Schmidt was one sick son of a bitch.”

“You can say that again, sir.”

Phillips cocked an eyebrow at him. “And it is ‘was’?”

“Yes,” Steve said. “I think if he was still a problem, he would have made that pretty clear five weeks ago. He went up in –” He hesitated, unsure how to describe it; he’d seen the Tesseract at work now and what had happened to Schmidt wasn’t the same. For an instant he felt a surge of real panic, because the thing that had just been made clear to him about Infinity Stones was that sometimes you really didn’t know. But Johann Schmidt wasn’t the kind of guy who could stay quiet for long; if the Space Stone hadn’t killed him, then they all would have known long before Steve had woken up.

“– smoke,” he finished, aware that there was no way that Phillips had missed his brief uncertainty. “He went up in smoke. That thing he had, the Tesseract – what was powering the Hydra guns – it ate him up.”

“You get that there are only two people who know what happened on that plane and until a week ago, both of you were dead?”

“Yes, sir,” Steve said.

“And you get that we only have your word for Schmidt being dead?”

“Yes, sir.”

Phillips looked at him for a long moment, then shrugged and said, “Well, you might as well give your report, Rogers. Little late, but it wouldn’t be the first time.”

Steve hesitated again, but he couldn’t see any potential harm in telling Phillips what had happened onboard on the Valkyrie – he had already told Howard, for that matter, and it all ended the same way, anyway. He gave it to Phillips the same way he had given it to Nick Fury six years earlier, the first time in sixty-seven years that anyone from the SSR or SHIELD had ever known what had really happened to Captain America and the Red Skull. Only it wasn’t Captain America and the Red Skull that Chester Phillips was concerned with, it was Captain Steve Rogers and Obergruppenführer Johann Schmidt.

Steve had forgotten what that felt like.

When he had finished, Phillips just sat there, frowning – he had taken a few notes as Steve spoke, but that was all. Eventually he said, “You happen to know where you went down?”

Steve shook his head. It was a lie, actually – he and Natasha both knew the coordinates where he had been found – but there was no more obvious way to change the future than letting the SSR pull him out of the ice sixty-seven years early, as much as part of him ached for it. Maybe having Captain America around for the Korean War or the Cold War or any of the rest would have changed things for the better, kept Hydra out of SHIELD, found Bucky, stopped the Red Room, but if the last six years had made anything clear to Steve, it was that there were bigger things out there than Earth. There was nothing he could have done that would have stopped Loki from coming in 2012 or Thanos in 2018 – maybe some of the rest, too, but he was less certain how much his presence or lack thereof would have impacted the creation of merely terrestrial foes. He did know that if he hadn’t been there, things could have gone a hell of a lot worse.

“Mmm.” Phillips’ expression suggested that he wasn’t certain whether or not Steve was telling the truth about that, but Steve was a much better liar than anyone ever gave him credit for. “Give me one reason why I should believe this story of yours, Rogers.”

“Because it’s the truth?” Steve suggested. “I know how it sounds –”

Phillips gave him a pointed look.

Steve met his eyes, feeling a prickle of unease. Howard believed him – about three-quarters of the way believed him, but not all the way. He knew Peggy didn’t, though she hadn’t said as much to his face, and now he knew exactly it was that she had thought. If he had been in her place he would have made the same assumption: a complicated and unlikely lie to mask a terrible truth. Unless that wasn’t what she was thinking at all, because he had gone through enough of SHIELD’s records from the past seventy years to know that some of the assumptions he would have made about her train of thought in 1945 weren’t what she had ended up doing. And they had never gone into the field together apart from that last time, though he knew she had been operational while he had been out on missions; the places the Howling Commandos went weren’t the same kinds of places people with Peggy’s skills operated.

Peggy had reasons that Howard didn’t for not wanting to believe him, but at the end of the day it was Colonel Phillips Steve had to convince. He insisted, “It is the truth.”

Phillips leaned back in his chair, frowned at him, and said, “What was your wife wearing the day you met her?”

“Sir?” Steve said, confused.

“Simple question, Rogers, and you’ve always had a memory like a steel trap.”

“Blue jeans,” Steve said, “red shirt, black leather jacket, and a gun – Glock 26 subcompact pistol. Her hair was red then; she only started coloring it a couple years back.”

“Glock?” Phillips said.

Steve had to think about it. “Austrian gunmaker,” he said finally. “I don’t think they exist yet – I’d have to ask Nat to be sure; she’d know better than me there.”

Phillips rifled through the papers on his desk for a moment before he found a blank sheet and a sharp pencil, both of which he pushed across the table to Steve. Steve took them, raising his eyebrows, and said dryly, “You want me to draw Natasha or the gun?”

“What do you think?”

“Yes, sir,” Steve said, a little bemused but understanding what Phillips wanted from him. During the war, it often hadn’t been practical to bring a camera along; after Phillips, Peggy, and Howard had figured out that Steve had a photographic memory – which predated the serum – they had usually had him draw anything they wanted a better look at. For Howard that had usually been Hydra’s labs, since those always got blown up first. Right now, Phillips was betting that if Steve was lying or if it was a constructed memory, then he wouldn’t be able to replicate it.

“Don’t get fancy about it,” Phillips warned him as Steve dragged his chair a little closer to the desk so that he had a flat surface to work on. As Steve started his preliminary sketch, he asked, “I don’t suppose there’s anything you could say that would prove you’re from the future? Stark said you were worried about changing the course of the war.”

“I am,” Steve said, not looking up. “I’d really prefer we still win it and I don’t know enough details about the end of the war to know what will and won’t affect that.” He paused for a moment, thinking about the books he had read, and said finally, “The last V-2s are going to hit London on March 27, a little under a week from today. The last one’s going to hit on Kynaston Road in Orpington with one casualty, a woman. The next to last one’s going to hit Whitechapel and it’s going to kill a hundred and thirty-four people.”

“Where in Whitechapel?”

Steve shut his eyes, summoning up the memory of the page, the black-and-white picture of the damage – he’d seen the aftermath of so many bombing runs and rocket attacks that there hadn’t been anything spectacular about this one except for the date and the fact that he had seen it in a book, not in real life. “Vallance Road.”

He was pretty certain that if there was anything that the Allies could have done about the V-2s they would have done it by now. Even so, saying it out loud made his skin prickle, in case he was wrong about that.

“Mmm.” Phillips wrote that down. “Anything else you want to pass along?”

Steve bit his lip and spent several minutes drawing, sketching out the shape of the control tower and the parked Quinjets on the helicarrier’s deck. “I can tell you when President Roosevelt is going to die,” he said at last; that had been natural causes, so there was no way anything he could do or say would affect it.

He heard Phillips’ breath catch in his throat. “And when is that?” he said, his voice rough; he knew Franklin Delano Roosevelt personally, though Steve didn’t know if they were close at all.

“April 12, 1945,” Steve said. “Cerebral hemorrhage – brain bleed. There was nothing – there isn’t going to be anything anyone can do.”

“Jesus,” Phillips whispered, sounding genuinely shaken for the first time in Steve’s memory. “You sure about that, Rogers?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Yeah, I’m sure.” He still remembered the gut-punch shock of finding it out, part of a list of bare facts that SHIELD had put together to catch him up quickly those first few awful days. He had never actually met President Roosevelt, though he had shaken hands with the First Lady once and been introduced to then-Senator Truman by Senator Brandt during his USO tour.

“Jesus,” Phillips said again. He sat back, contemplating that, as Steve returned to sketching. Eventually he said, “Anything else? You know where any of the other V-2s are going to hit?”

“If I had known I was coming here I’d have memorized a list,” Steve said. The V-2 rocket attacks on London and the surrounding area, which had begun the previous September, had continued daily since they had arrived; one had struck in Westminster a few days earlier, audible from SSR HQ.

He had had conversations a few times with people unable or unwilling to understand the devastation of World War Two – nearly always Americans, Europeans like Wanda or Natasha understood it just fine. He had actually gotten into a couple of arguments about it with Tony, who even after getting out of the weapons business still wanted to believe that his bombs had been the biggest and baddest. Maybe they had been, but for most of the war “who’s got the biggest” hadn’t been the point. It didn’t hurt, but it hadn’t been the point; quantity had a quality all its own. Steve had spent most of his portion of the war in England, Germany, and occupied Europe; he and the Howling Commandos had gone through Le Havre and Caen right after the RAF had pounded both to smoldering rubble as part of Operation Overlord. In October of 1944 they had been on the outskirts of Stuttgart when almost six hundred RAF planes had been bombing the city, one of the more terrifying experiences of Steve’s life. He had driven the Valkyrie into the ground to make certain that that didn’t happen in America.

Phillips made a sound that wasn’t quite agreement, but wasn’t quite disagreement either. He asked Steve a few more questions while Steve sketched out his memory of his meeting with Natasha on the helicarrier’s deck, filling in enough of the background to make it obvious that it hadn’t taken place in a blank void. Some of it Steve could answer; some of it he couldn’t, either because he wasn’t certain it wouldn’t affect the war or because he just didn’t know.

When he had finished the drawing, he passed it across the desk to Phillips and shook out his hand, working his fingers. He didn’t cramp up the way he had before the serum, not exactly, but he had never gotten out of the habit and he wasn’t going to drop it now.

Phillips looked at the drawing for a while, studying the details that meant it was probably a real memory rather than Steve’s imagination or something mocked up for him by Hydra. “Aircraft carrier?” he said finally.

“Yes, sir.” You couldn’t see the rotors from this angle and there was no point in specifying it had been a helicarrier, since that wouldn’t mean anything to Phillips.

“The hell kind of plane is that?”

“It’s a Quinjet. Fixed-wing, with rotors in each wing for increased maneuverability. I think those were mostly fighters, single pilot, but there are a couple other models designed for pilot and co-pilot, or with a small crew, with space for troop transport. Nat and I can both fly one.” Which didn’t mean anything here, since they hadn’t been invented yet. Jet-powered aircraft did exist; the Germans and the British were both using them right now, but the U.S. wouldn’t start until after the war. Rotary aircraft were in use on both sides of the war, but wouldn’t be common until the Korean War; the only people that Steve knew of who had used them in combat were Hydra, and even they hadn’t had that many.

Phillips went back to studying the drawing. After a moment, Steve said, “When I woke up, SHIELD had mocked up what they thought a private hospital room in 1945 would look like, because they thought I might overreact if I woke up in a normal one, since they look a little different now – then. They had a vintage radio playing and everything, only it was playing one of the Dodgers-Phillies games from ’41. The woman they brought in to check on me had her makeup, hair, clothes – all of it not quite right. I do know women’s clothes and hair,” he added dryly, which got a brief grin from Phillips.

“Paid attention to the chorus girls kicking up their legs, did you?”

“Little hard not to,” Steve said. “Those tours are pretty close company.” He’d gotten over any nerves he had about speaking to women very quickly.

In 2013, the USO had asked him, very politely and very hopefully, if he would be willing to do a seventieth anniversary show, with all of the proceeds going to whichever charitable organizations he wanted. Steve had agreed, a little reluctantly, because even if he didn’t think his USO service was the most important thing he had done during the war he still considered it to have been important work. They had interviewed him about his time in the USO after the show and as a surprise had brought out the three surviving chorus girls and one band member from his original tour. Steve had cried on live television, which had gotten two of the women crying too, and it had taken the moderator the better part of ten minutes to get the interview going again.

Phillips snorted. “How’d the stage show end up going?”

“Concussed a couple of SHIELD agents, busted through the wall and out into the street, and got cornered in Times Square – we were in the New York SHIELD station,” Steve said, and frowned briefly. “Jury’s still out on whether it counted as overreacting or not. I didn’t kill anyone, so I still think I underreacted, frankly.”

Phillips made a sound of agreement and said, “Sloppy of them. You get in trouble?”

Steve shook his head. “Fury – Director Fury – knew he’d screwed up. I think he was also glad I didn’t kill anyone on my way out, since as far as he knew I’d woken up thinking Hydra or the Nazis had me. Which I did.” His jaw worked briefly and he looked away; six years later the memory still stung.

He had woken up and it had been his own people, at least. Bucky hadn’t been so lucky.

Only it hadn’t just been his own people. Six years later Steve still wasn’t sure who had seen him while he had still been unconscious, or asleep, or however you wanted to describe it, and he sure as hell didn’t know which of them had been Hydra and which had really been SHIELD. I watched you while you were sleeping, Coulson had said, and died before Steve had known which of the two he had been. It was still his private nightmare that someone might have done a little more than just watch.

After a moment he looked back at Phillips, who had watched him steadily the whole time. “Do you believe me?” he asked.

“Rogers –” Phillips began, then stopped, uncharacteristically hesitant. Finally, he said, “Stark showed us your gear and made some pretty convincing arguments that way, but you know how he is. I believe that you believe you’re telling the truth. But I also know you’re not telling me everything.”

“I’m not,” Steve said.

“And that’s a problem,” Colonel Phillips told him. “We’re still in a war and it’s not won yet. I can’t sit back and trust that it’s going to be just on your say-so. If you’re in this war, Rogers, then you’re in this war. It’s not 1941 anymore; you can’t be half-in and half-out.”

It was well into evening by the time Peggy and the Howling Commandos finally arrived back at headquarters. She parked the lorry with the handful of other vehicles used by the SSR and the other divisions that had their London offices in the warren of government buildings around King Charles Street and the boys piled out of the back, bags slung over their shoulders. Dugan had stayed with them after they had gotten back on the road, along with the files Peggy had brought; she had heard them talking while she had been driving, but hadn’t been able to make out about what. It wasn’t hard to guess, though.

They went in, gave sign and countersign to the girl at the front desk – a WAAF today, since the SSR pulled from all of the services – and descended down into the depths of the SSR. The Commandos detoured to drop off their gear while Peggy stayed in the war room, talking to Squadron Leader Kim Pantcheff, their RAF liaison officer with the Government Code and Cypher School headquartered at Bletchley Park. The SSR had cryptographers at headquarters, of course, but like the rest of the British and American cryptanalysis programs theirs was concentrated at Bletchley.

“Damnedest thing,” Pantcheff was saying, as he, Peggy, and two of the SSR cryptographers studied the intercepts Bletchley’s Hut 12, the SSR’s GC&CS division, had sent over that day. SSR policy was to send anything on even if it hadn’t been decrypted, in the hopes that there was someone or something at HQ who might be able to crack it.

“Not Hydra,” said Peggy, flattening the long strips of Typex paper on the table in front of them and glaring at the innocuous collection of apparently-random letters. “Not regular German communications – Soviet? We’ve heard that they’ve been going after Hydra stragglers as well.”

The SSR’s operations since the Valkyrie had gone down had been a race against Nazi and Soviet attempts to identify and find all of Hydra’s outposts. Some of Schmidt’s followers were far more patriotic than he had been and were more than willing to be folded back into the Ahnenerbe, the SS division where Hydra had started and later broken from in 1939 when Johann Schmidt and Heinrich Himmler had quarreled. The Russians had their own deep science and special weapons division; even if they were allied with the British and the Americans, they weren’t interested in sharing. The SSR wasn’t completely certain if the Soviet deep science division was part of the NKVD or a separate agency, since the USSR seemed to sprout new security agencies like mushrooms. They weren’t even sure what it was called, though there had been rumors about it since before the war.

“What have we got?” Morita asked as the Howlies returned.

Rose Roberts and Hana Korematsu, the two cryptographers, moved aside so that they could get a look at the printouts. Both were American; besides Pantcheff, Peggy was the only other British codebreaker the SSR had been able to wrestle from Bletchley’s clutches, and that only because SOE had done it first. She had always been too impatient to be a really good codebreaker, anyway.

“We think it’s the blasted white whale again,” Pantcheff said. The ‘white whale’ was the series of transmissions Bletchley had been intercepting intermittently since the beginning of the war, but they had never gotten a pinch that would allow them to decode it, and they had never found out where the transmissions originated. “There was a burst of traffic last night after the lockdown here was lifted and it’s been continuing all day. Something’s happening somewhere, but damned if we have any idea what it is. It does make one think, though, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, I do my best never to do that,” Dugan said, scratching at his head beneath the brim of his bowler hat. He and the other Commandos shifted a little from foot to foot, too polite to come out and ask, but clearly less interested in encrypted mystery communiques than in Steve Rogers.

Peggy asked for them. “Do you know where –”

“They’re all up in the gym, along with half the staff who want to catch the show,” Rose said. She gathered up a armful of folders. “I gotta take the Bletchley reports to Mr. Stark and the colonel anyway, I’ll go with you.”

“I wouldn’t mind catching the show myself,” Falsworth said, sounding contemplative. “I’ve rather missed it.”

Rose put her hand on Peggy’s arm and Peggy looked at her, a little surprised. “They’re all up in the gym,” she repeated. “Including Mrs. Rogers.”

Peggy felt a muscle in her jaw twitch while everyone else looked studiously down at the encrypted Typex printouts, pretending not to listen. “Steve’s a grown man and we never made any promises to each other,” she said. “If he wants to marry the first pretty girl who drops her knickers for him, that’s his own prerogative.”

“Not the first,” Morita muttered, then said, “What?” when they all looked at him. “I didn’t say anything.”

“Um,” Rose said, looking like she regretted mentioning it.

In retrospect, Peggy decided wearily, she should have made certain she knew what the unofficial SSR story was about Steve’s mysterious appearance, since the time travel tall tale was need-to-know only, which meant exactly three people: Phillips, Howard, and her. Everyone in the SSR had signed the Official Secrets Act or the American equivalent, so they wouldn’t talk out of doors, but the internal grapevine was still impressive.

She asked Rose about it on their way to the gym, which was one floor up from the war room, labs, and the other operations sections of the SSR. Rose gave her a thoughtful look, like she was wondering about Peggy’s motivations for asking, but said, “Gossip mill’s hot, Peg, since Captain Rogers and Mr. Stark aren’t talking and neither is the lady. Couple stories have floated to the top. First is that she’s OSS – maybe SOE, but she’s American, so.” She shrugged. “Or that she’s from the SSR Pacific division, the one headquartered out of Hawaii. God knows what they get up to.”

“They work more closely with regular intelligence, I believe,” Peggy said, though in truth she had very little idea herself; the European and Pacific SSR divisions had almost no crossover, and the few times that they had run into some it had been facilitated by the SSR division back in the States.

Rose frowned a little in thought. She was a sturdily-built redhead a head shorter than Peggy, with black-rimmed spectacles and a mean right hook, smart as a whip and generally good-natured. “The story I like is that she hauled Captain Rogers out of the North Sea after the crash and it was l –” She bit her tongue on what was probably meant to be love at first sight and finished instead, “– and got him back to the Allied lines, but that one doesn’t account for the –” She made a gesture that indicated their rather startling arrival. “The other one’s that the captain got captured by Hydra and she got him out. Or the other way around. Or both of them. She’s nice – I’ve talked to her a few times, though Mr. Stark hasn’t exactly been letting her or Captain Rogers out.”

“None of which,” Peggy said through clenched teeth, “accounts for the wedding.”

“Um,” Rose said again.

“Are they?” Morita asked laconically. “You know –”

“Intimate?” Falsworth said, with a glare at him for bringing the subject up in front of two women.

“Fucking?” Dernier said, and Jones had a sudden coughing fit. Morita pounded him helpfully on the back.

“Well, yeah,” Rose said, surprised they had to ask. “I mean – you can tell, you know. He’s crazy about her.”

Peggy counted to ten in French, German, and Italian to keep from saying something that she would probably regret if she let herself think it. She was starting in on Russian when Dugan asked, “Did you see them come in?”

Rose shook her head. “I was asleep – it was the middle of the night, right, and only the night watch and Mr. Stark’s cadre of crazy scientists was still up. Heard about it first thing in the morning, though – I mean, it’s Captain Rogers. Officially – unofficially, it’s the story that Mr. Stark’s been trying to spread, but he never made any announcements – they came in the door after midnight, but everyone’s heard, even if not everyone believes it. And they put five people in the hospital when they got here.”

The codebreakers all bunked at headquarters instead of in billets elsewhere in the city, since if intercepts came in they needed to be available immediately. It meant that they hadn’t been trapped outside the SSR when Howard had ordered the lockdown.

“Five?” Jones said, impressed.

“Well, four, Dr. Binney just had a broken nose. That’s the guy Mrs. Rogers slugged. Irene says that the doc told him to stop whining and go to bed.”

“Oh, Bin-Bons,” Falsworth said, in tones of understanding. He and the engineer had known each other in university before the war. “That’s all right, then, he probably deserved it.”

“‘If not everyone believes it’?” Peggy said, curious.

Rose shrugged. “I mean, it’s a crazy story even for the captain. Appearing in a flash of blue and green light? With a wife? Though if he had just knocked on the door Mr. Stark wouldn’t have put us on lockdown and he definitely wouldn’t be keeping Captain Rogers under guard. So nobody really knows.”

They reached the gym to find that Rose hadn’t been wrong; what seemed like half of the SSR was in the room, gathered around the edges of the makeshift boxing ring that was even occasionally used for boxing, though usually not with Marquess of Queensbury rules. The SSR was a little too pragmatic for that.

It took them a few moments to make their way to Colonel Phillips and Howard Stark, who were near the front of the crowd along with Corporal Lorraine, who had probably accompanied Phillips and looked like she had forgotten about the armful of folders she was holding. Peggy opened her mouth to say hello and then stopped, her attention caught by the two people in the boxing ring. She had expected Steve, of course, since he was the only person in the SSR who would get this kind of audience, and maybe a couple of the SSR’s other operators, his usual sparring partners outside of her and the Commandos. She hadn’t expected –

“Mon Dieu,” Dernier said respectfully. “That is the fastest woman I have ever seen.”

Steve and his wife were both sweat-soaked and breathing hard, stripped to shirtsleeves and with their hands and wrists taped up. Steve was holding back a little, but as far as Peggy could tell it was mostly in how hard he was hitting and only a hair in speed.

“My god,” Dugan echoed in English, his gaze fixed on Steve. “That’s really him.”

He shaved, Peggy thought irrelevantly, only it wasn’t really irrelevant; there was no such thing. Steve had been here for a week before he had picked up a razor, which might have been because he hadn’t been allowed a blade, but somehow she doubted it. He waited until Colonel Phillips and I saw him, and then he shaved.

It should have made him look more like the Steve Rogers who had gone down somewhere over the North Sea – what they thought was over the North Sea, at least, they just didn’t know and Steve had said he didn’t know his coordinates. Instead it made him look older and a little harder, and for the first time Peggy had a flicker of doubt that his absurd story might have been true after all.

She stepped quietly up between Howard and Colonel Phillips to watch the tail end of the fight, keeping most of her attention on Natasha rather than Steve. Fast, she thought in silent agreement with Dernier. Very, very fast. You had to be if you were a woman; you would mostly be fighting men who were bigger, heavier, and stronger than you, with a longer reach and fewer conditioned compunctions about fighting at all. Peggy was as tall as many men and hit as hard as most, but she couldn’t bull her way through a fight the way Steve could, or even someone like Dugan or Falsworth. In her stocking feet Natasha was four inches shorter than Peggy and probably two stone lighter, compact as a Scottish wildcat next to Steve’s six feet of rangy leopard-bulk.

And she was keeping up with him.

Part of it was familiarity; that wasn’t something that could be faked. She and Steve had sparred together before, very likely often; Peggy could see it in the way that they both moved. Even for men who regularly hit women – too many of them – there was usually an instant’s hesitation when it came to actually fighting one. Men who weren’t accustomed to hitting women usually had a good bit more than an instant’s hesitation, doubled when it came to hitting a pretty one, and Steve had still had that five weeks ago, the last time they had sparred together. Either he had lost any reticence he had about hitting a woman or he knew Natasha so well that he wasn’t worried about hurting her.

And I don’t know that style, Peggy thought, with a little professional interest. Part of it relied on simply not being there when Steve threw a punch or a kick at her – Steve was also using knees, elbows, and feet a great deal more than he had five weeks ago, though he had never been strictly a boxer – but it was clear that the other woman was a superb athlete. Natasha went in with her whole body, relying on leverage and momentum to make up for the size and physical strength that she lacked. It was fluid in a way that Peggy found faintly alien, something almost off-putting about it in a way that she couldn’t put her finger on until she looked again and realized that she had simply never seen another woman fighter who was that confident in her own body and its capabilities. A few dancers, yes, and a woman acrobat she had met at Bletchley, but not another fighter. There was something weirdly sobering about the realization.

She and Steve were sparring for the joy of it, not to win; real fights seldom lasted more than a handful of heartbeats, and Peggy’s experienced eye picked out a dozen moments when Steve could have put the other woman down solely because of his super soldier’s strength. He moved differently now too, with the same fluid, alien grace as Natasha, any lingering uncertainty in his new body – and there had still been a little five weeks ago, even after a year and a half – all of it gone now.

Natasha bounced off the floor like a jack-in-the-box and threw herself at Steve, hooking her thighs around his shoulders and under one arm, her whole body swinging around to drop him. Steve went, rolling himself up around her as they both came down together, keeping her from getting free even after she slammed a closed fist against his stomach. There was a quick flurry of blows, the two of them rolling across the ring in a tangle of limbs before Steve got his hands under one ankle and tossed her. Natasha turned in the air and came down in a three-point crouch with one leg bent in front of her and the other outstretched to the side, her left hand braced against the floor and her right raised in a fist next to her shoulder, like she expected to have a weapon there – a gun, maybe, or the weaponized bracelets Howard had shown them the other day. Steve had kept moving, coming back to his feet in a showy backflip with his fists up like a boxer – left arm slightly forward and angled a little to the side, as though he had his shield there ready to take the brunt of any upcoming blow. Peggy’s gaze traced the line of fire from Natasha’s upraised hand to Steve’s invisible shield; it was dead center.

She read the other woman’s lips as she mouthed pow! Steve grinned at her, his gaze flickering sideways for an instant to fix on Peggy. For an instant his expression was torn, grief in his eyes for some reason. Natasha looked too, then straightened to her feet and went over to Steve, saying something to him that Peggy couldn’t make out. He smiled wryly down at her and she leaned up on tiptoe to kiss him. Peggy looked away.

Phillips finally turned to Peggy and said, for her and Howard alone, “Did you see that?”

“I did indeed,” Peggy confirmed, just as quietly. Body memory was the last thing to go; it was what kept you alive, after all, though sometimes it could get you killed too. Steve might not have the shield now, but he had had it recently enough that his body still remembered it.

“She’s good,” Howard said.

“Very,” Peggy admitted reluctantly. “And she didn’t learn that in Ohio.”

There was a smattering of applause from the audience when it became clear that the show was over. Phillips turned to say something to Lorraine and Rose, both of whom dragged their attention away from the spectacle to talk to him. It took some effort; Steve’s and Natasha’s sweat-soaked shirts clung to their bodies, revealing rather a lot whether you preferred men or women.

“Howard, I can see the untoward thoughts going on behind your eyes,” Peggy said to him, since she felt like she had to say something. Her hands twitched for a moment, wanting to see how Natasha Rogers did against an opponent she wasn’t sharing a bed with, but now wasn’t the time. She wanted the other woman to be fresh and not straight off another fight, for one.

Howard gave her a wounded look. “All my thoughts are as innocent as a newborn baby’s.”

“At the birth of Venus, perhaps,” Peggy said.

Steve took the towels someone passed him, handed one to Natasha, and ducked beneath the rope dividing the makeshift ring from the rest of the gym, wiping the sweat off his face as he did so. He took a step towards them and then stopped abruptly as he finally saw Dugan and the other Howling Commandos. He made an oddly hesitant gesture with one hand, as though he was trying to convince himself they were real and wasn’t willing to commit, and Dugan shoved gracelessly forward past Howard and caught Steve in an embrace. Steve hugged him back hard, tears streaming down his face as the rest of the Commandos descended on him in a noisy rush.

Somewhere in the mess of crying, laughing men – even Falsworth had cracked a smile – Steve said, “They told you –”

“Yeah, Peggy told us,” Dugan said. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll talk about it later.”

Happier to see them than he was to see me, Peggy thought, and wondered for a considering moment why that might be – apart from the obvious, of course. Natasha had followed Steve out of the ring and was watching the reunion with thoughtful interest as she unwound the long strips of gauze and tape from her hands. She didn’t look surprised to see the Commandos or confused about who they were.

As if she had felt Peggy’s gaze on her, Natasha turned her head and met her eyes for an instant, coolly impersonal.

For an instant Peggy wanted to scream, simply because it wasn’t fair. Never mind the time travel rigmarole; she had girlfriends whose men had been reported killed or missing and who had found new boyfriends, only for all parties involved to be shocked when the first man had come back. She knew a few men whom that had happened to, for that matter, whose wives or fiancées or girlfriends were serving as nurses or in the Special Operations Executive or other overseas jobs, or even those who had been bombed out during the Blitz and mistakenly reported killed. She had known men – and women – who simply took up with other people while their husbands or wives or boyfriends were away, not even thought dead.

Peggy had known it happened. She just hadn’t expected it to happen to her.

She looked away and back at the Commandos just as Morita said from inside the huddle of men, “You son of a bitch.”

“That’s ‘you son of a bitch, sir,’” Steve said, sounding like he was torn between laughing and crying. “The silver bars aren’t decorative.”

“Oh, sorry,” Morita said. “You son of a bitch, sir.”

Peggy smiled a little. Whatever else had happened, it was good to see Captain America back with the Howling Commandos.

Steve finally extricated himself from the group, wiping at his eyes, and reached out behind him without looking. Natasha put her hand into his and let herself be drawn forward as Steve said, “Natasha – Natasha Romanoff. Nat, this is Dum-Dum Dugan, Jim Morita, Gabe Jones, Montgomery Falsworth, and Jacques Dernier – the Howling Commandos.”

Peggy turned on her heel and left. She didn’t care if it was petty; she couldn’t watch this.

She was halfway down the hall when she realized that Steve had introduced the other woman with her maiden name, not her married one. It was the first time Peggy had ever heard him slip.

The hot water lasted just long enough to steam up the mirrors in the bathroom. Natasha wouldn’t have minded if it had been cold, since all she wanted was to sluice the sweat off her skin, but she was out just as the water started to cool. She dried her short hair with a towel and got dressed again, wiping the steam off the bathroom mirror as she tugged at her hair to inspect her roots. There was an MP waiting outside the bathroom door instead of the WAC who had brought her up, one of the men who had been watching her spar with Steve, and he looked a little nervous as he escorted Natasha back to her room.

Steve wasn’t there, still down in the canteen catching up with the Howling Commandos. They had invited her to join them, but the Commandos were clearly suspicious of Natasha and Steve had been so wretchedly glad to see them that she didn’t want to intrude, so she had begged off.

All of them had been dead by the time Steve had come out of the ice – no, that wasn’t quite right. Timothy Dugan had died the day before Steve had woken up, but he had already been out of the ice for more than a week by then.

Fury hadn’t told him until after the funeral, and Steve had put a fist through a wall in a rare show of temper. Steve had told Natasha about it months later, sitting in the back of a Quinjet on their return to Washington from a mission that had resolved itself while they were in the air, leaving them both full of pent-up adrenaline only slowly wearing off and making them a little reckless with it. Steve said things like that, sometimes, like he had bottled it up for too long and something had to come out or he would explode. Scraps of information about horrible revelations from the 21st century, odds and ends of memory from World War Two or from growing up in a tenement slum in Brooklyn in the twenties and thirties. Sometimes Natasha had given him a few of her own memories in return, some of it bits and pieces she had sworn she had either forgotten or had expected to take to her grave. He had never been surprised or shocked by anything she said.

Even Nick Fury had occasionally made the mistake of thinking that Captain America was innocent of the uglier parts of human nature, just because Steve was young and optimistic and good-looking and had died before the atomic bomb had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Steve wasn’t even that much of an optimist, when it came down to it; he was just stubborn. He had been born months before Armistice Day in 1918, had come of age in the Great Depression, and had fought his way through Nazi-occupied Europe in the Second World War. He had seen a whole world die in agony and terror long before he had crashed the Valkyrie into the North Atlantic.

Natasha was still thinking about that as the MP shut the door behind her and locked it.

Something made her go still, some undefinable change in the air. The room was small, nowhere for anyone to hide – not even under the bed, since there was a trunk of Natasha’s borrowed clothes there – but there was something that hadn’t been here earlier. It took her ten minutes of dedicated searching before she found it.

When Steve came back an hour later, Natasha was sitting cross-legged on the side of their bed twisting her hair into little spirals and pinning each curl into place. She waited until the door had been shut and locked again before she said, “There’s a woman in the SSR, probably in her early twenties, American or British, maybe Canadian, not from Australia or the Colonies; white and good-looking, not married, but she might have had a boyfriend or two during the war. She’s enlisted, not an officer; she’s not an operator, she doesn’t go into the field. She doesn’t have top clearance, but she’s in a position where classified documents pass through her hands regularly. She won’t have been in the SSR when it started; she’ll have come in later, maybe after Project Rebirth. She might be from a city, but if she is, it won’t be a major one like New York or Chicago, something mid-sized. More likely she’s from somewhere rural, so she won’t have known anyone here when she joined.”

Steve stared at her. “That’s most of the women in the SSR,” he said after a moment. “Why?”

Natasha slid her last pin into place and tipped her head at the room’s one tiny table, where Steve had left his sketchpad and pencils. The pencils were sitting crosswise on top of each other, forming an X; there was another X traced lightly in the corner of the open page. Steve looked down at the pencils and the marking, then said, “I didn’t do this.”

“I know,” Natasha said. “Someone made me. Probably during the fight.”

A frown knit between Steve’s brows. “What do you mean?”

Natasha got up and went over to him, picking up one of the pencils and flipping to a fresh page in the sketchpad; the one on top was of her, not wearing very much, and Steve blushed when she saw it. Natasha grinned briefly at him before she drew an X on the clean page, two plain lines crossing each other.

“X marks the spot?” he said dubiously.

Natasha put a horizontal line over the top and bottom of the X, turning it into a ⧖, and looked up at Steve, watching horrified realization dawn in his eyes.

“I’m not the only Black Widow in the SSR.”