Of Home Near

“It’s not called the Red Room yet,” Natasha said. “Not until the sixties, I don’t know the exact year. Stalin founded it in the twenties after the civil war, a special forces program in his deep science division. They started with boys and girls, but they got rid of the boys pretty quickly; it’s easier to recruit from grown-up soldiers there. It’s still Department X now, I think – probably part of the NKVD, the –”

“Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. I know who they are.” Steve’s Russian was old-fashioned in the 21st century, but perfectly fluent – not old-fashioned in 1945, of course. Like most of his languages Steve had picked up bits and pieces in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York and gotten up to full fluency during the war, with the help of the serum. For whatever reason his Russian had a strong Lithuanian accent, which Natasha personally thought was funny since it was such a sharp contrast to his slangy Berlin German and laconic Lorraine French; Steve had the oddest collection of regional accents in his languages Natasha had ever heard. All a little archaic, of course; he hadn’t had to speak them often enough in the 21st century to adjust to the minute changes seventy years gave them. He had picked up a few new languages when he had been working with SHIELD, though Natasha supposed they wouldn’t do him much good in 1945 London even if they were ever allowed to leave SSR headquarters; there was a reason he hadn’t had to know Arabic or Mandarin back then.

She nodded in response to his words. “I don’t know when they started using the Black Widow name; I’m pretty sure it’s not around yet. Matryoshka – like the nesting dolls, right?” She waited for Steve to nod. “That’s – that’s about all I know about the Red Room’s history. It’s not really something Dreykov was ever interested in passing on.”

She looked down at her hands, flexing her fingers; for an instant she thought she could see blood caked beneath the nails, drying across her knuckles, caught between her false wedding band and her skin, then she closed her fists and looked up at Steve. They were sitting knee to knee on the bed, their bed, and the only expression on his face was concern.

“Were they in the war?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Natasha said. “They must have been, but there were – there are, right now – so many intelligence and security agencies in Russia. And they’re all so damn secret. And the Red Room – Department X – is the most secret of all.” Her jaw worked for an instant as she looked aside. “Even Fury wasn’t sure it was real until Clint dragged me in, sixty-three years from now. There were rumors all through the Cold War, though.”

Steve reached for her hands, folding his fingers around hers. “Do you want me to tell Phillips now?” he asked her. “He’ll listen to me. He might not believe me, but he’ll listen.”

“What are you going to tell him, Steve?” Natasha said tiredly. “That your pencils weren’t where you left them? That there was an X on your drawing of me in my underwear? And that I recognized it because everything I told Howard Stark a week ago was a lie?”

“Not everything,” Steve said.

“You mean my name and the fact I used to work for SHIELD?” Natasha said dryly. “Except we didn’t tell them that SHIELD is gone, did we? Unless you told Colonel Phillips this morning?”

He grimaced and shook his head.

“You tell me,” Natasha said, “what Chester Phillips and Peggy Carter are going to think if you go in there and tell them that your fake wife knows that there’s a deep-cover Russian agent in the SSR because she used to work for that same agency, the one that takes little girls away from their parents and trains them to kill people?”

Steve bit his lip. “Key word there is ‘used to.’”

“No, Steve,” Natasha said. “The key word there is ‘Russian.’ And for Peggy Carter, probably ‘fake wife.’”

He looked down, teeth pressed against his lower lip again, but he didn’t let go of her hands. “That part’s not relevant.”

“I think it’s pretty relevant to her,” Natasha said gently.

“Not to me. And not to this. And it’s –” He swallowed. “It’s not Peggy that we have to convince, just Phillips.”

“He’s not even convinced we’re telling the truth about where we came from, is he?”

“No,” Steve admitted, sighing. “No, he’s not. Maybe in a week, once the last couple of doodlebugs hit where I said they would, but not now. I don’t know what he thinks. I don’t think he knows what he thinks.”

Natasha nodded, unsurprised. She hadn’t seen much of Colonel Phillips besides that first meeting in Howard Stark’s office and a few words before she and Steve had been able to spar for the first time since they had arrived, but she had known a lot of men like him over the years, good and bad and everything in between. Phillips was probably more mentally flexible than some of those she had met – he had to be to run the SSR and deal with Captain America’s antics, which had driven even Nick Fury up the wall more than a few times – but he needed more than convincing words to get there.

“There’s no proof,” she said. “Putting aside my reliability or lack thereof, I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what she wants, either here or with me.”

After a moment, Steve nodded, his expression grim. “Is there anything you can do that would lure her out? Something to let her know you got her message?”

“Steve, it’s 1945,” Natasha said. “I was born in 1984. I don’t know any of the code now. I don’t know any of the protocols; I don’t think any of it was still the same when I went operational in 1992.” She saw Steve do the math for how old she would have been when she had gone to Ohio with Alexei and Melina and then blanch. She couldn’t meet his eyes, looking aside as she went on, “I can probably fake it for a little while when she reaches out to me again, hopefully enough to figure out who she is and what her mission is. But until then…you tell me if just this is going to be enough for Colonel Phillips, let alone Agent Carter.”

Steve looked down at their joined hands, breathing in deeply before he shook his head.

“Yeah,” Natasha said softly. “That’s what I thought.”

“You think she’s going to make contact again?” Steve said eventually.

“I would,” Natasha said. “I don’t know how big Department X is right now; I don’t think it can be anywhere near the size of Dreykov’s Red Room, so she probably doesn’t know everyone. But I could be wrong, because it’s 1945 and I don’t…I don’t know, Steve. The NKVD was huge, but I don’t even know if the deep science division – the Soviet equivalent of the SSR or Hydra – I don’t even know if it really is a part of the NKVD right now or if it’s a separate agency all together. I don’t even know its name. Did you ever have anything to do with them?”

“With the NKVD?” Steve lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “We never ran any joint ops on purpose, but we had run-ins with a Soviet team twice last year, when we were in Poland. Same team, led by a guy called Aleksey Lebedev – called themselves the Winter Guard. They were going after Hydra too, but Lebedev wouldn’t tell me why; apparently not the same reason as us. He really didn’t like that we were in Poland, but we managed to get out of it without killing each other.”

“The Winter Guard was – is – real?” Natasha said, startled. “I thought they were a myth, just more propaganda.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth curled up a little in amusement. “That’s what Lebedev said about me the first time.”

“The spangly costume gives it away, Cap,” Natasha said gravely.

He rolled his eyes. “You know Howard made it for me, right? But I did the design.”

And do you know Howard Stark is in love with you? Natasha wondered, watching him. Even though she had barely been out of their room over the course of the last week, she had picked up enough SSR gossip to realize that it was common knowledge. From what she knew about Howard Stark after the war, he had never fallen out of love with Steve, either, even after he had married Maria Collins Carbonell in 1965. Meeting Howard Stark had explained a lot about Tony’s complex feelings about Steve and Captain America.

Steve was still thinking. “The NKVD has a liaison officer over at Baker Street – that’s the Special Operations Exec’s headquarters, British irregular warfare – but it’s not like it is with us. With the Americans, I mean; the SSR’s a joint service agency, but SOE and the OSS work together all the time. They don’t always work together well, but they do work together. And at least we don’t shoot the RAF down the way the Soviets did in Poland last year.”

Natasha winced. “I thought that was just a rumor.”

Steve’s mouth twisted ironically, but all he said was, “In other words, I don’t know if we ever had anything to do with them on purpose, but the Howling Commandos weren’t – aren’t – the only operation that the SSR is running, just the most well-known. And they used that sometimes, because if people were looking at the Howlies – at me – then they wouldn’t be looking the other way.”

“It’s a classic for a reason,” Natasha said, grinning at him; SHIELD and the Avengers had used that technique themselves a few times in the past six years.

He rolled his eyes in response; Captain America usually wasn’t the distraction in such circumstances anymore, since Thor or Tony could pull it off to better effect. Returning to the main subject, he said, “What would you do if this had happened back up in – in the twenty-first, I guess? And you were still with the Red Room?”

Natasha grimaced, not liking to think about hypotheticals that involved the Red Room, and Steve said softly, “Sorry.”

“No, it’s all right.” She squeezed his hands briefly before she released him and sat back, thinking. “If I was deep cover in an enemy agency – allied or not – and someone I thought was another Widow came in, I’d be worried about my op. It might be that she was sent in by our handlers back at the Red Room, and if so, then she would try to make contact with me. If she didn’t, I’d assume it was coincidence. My op takes precedence, but that doesn’t mean I want to blow hers out of hand. We’re trained not to go running to our handlers at the slightest interruption, but I need to know if she’s really another Widow or if she’s an enemy agent. There are other women who do this work. So I reach out – something little, something only another Widow would recognize. If she recognizes it, then I do something more direct, but at the end of the day I need to know why she’s here and what her op is.”

“Sounds pretty reasonable,” Steve said. “Do you think any of that would be different now?”

Natasha thought about it, then shook her head. “Just the protocols. I’m not going to know any of the codes, but if I can convince her I’ve been deep cover long enough, I should be able to work with that. The war –”

“Yeah,” Steve said softly. “The war.” He sat back and rubbed at his forehead. “What do you need me to do?”

“Just keep doing what you’re doing,” she said. “I’ll play it by ear, but you should probably know that whatever story I come up with probably isn’t going to make you look very good.”

He snorted. “Literally everyone I know already thinks I got captured and brainwashed by Hydra, you can’t make me look worse. You should have heard the Commandos trying to dance around it today.”

Natasha sighed. They had known that this was going to happen and there was no good way around it, because if you hadn’t been dealing with Avengers-level threats over the course of the past six years, the truth really did sound ridiculous. “How are you doing?” she asked.

Steve lifted a shoulder in a shrug, opening his mouth to reply and then hesitating. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t know.” He lifted his hands helplessly, the strain on his face suddenly obvious. It was his whole world outside that door, the world that he had been torn away from six years or seventy-three years or five weeks ago, and every day he had to get up and look it in the eye again.

Natasha put her arms out for him and he came easily into them, turning his face down against her shoulder as she held him. He wasn’t crying – he had done a fair amount of that over the past week – but he was shaking. Natasha stroked a hand over his hair, holding him against her.

After a moment, Steve straightened up, rubbing at his forehead again. “It’s like a horrible dream, all of this. Everything I ever wanted, right there for me to have, only it’s not real, not really. Like when I woke up six years ago, only a thousand times worse.” He shook his head briefly, then looked up at her through his lashes, absurdly long for a man. “Sometimes you’re the only thing here that feels real.”

Natasha laid her hand alongside his cheek and leaned forward to kiss him, with the usual little thrill that hadn’t gone away over the course of the last week. You left places, sometimes, or were taken from them, and sometimes you got to go back and sometimes you didn’t. Either way you were never the same person you had been before, no matter how earnestly you wished it.

Steve kissed her back, then said softly against her mouth, “I would, you know.”

“Mmm?”

He pulled back enough to meet her eyes, a little color in his cheeks and his ears slowly turning red. “Marry you. If you wanted,” he added hastily. “Not if you didn’t. I’m not proposing.”

Natasha looked at him for a long moment, her mind gone briefly blank, then kissed him again. “When did you decide that?”

The corner of Steve’s mouth crooked a little. “About six years ago.”

Natasha stared at him. “In New York?”

His cheeks went even redder. “Yes.”

“You are unbelievable,” Natasha told him, kissing him. “What brought this on?”

“You seemed worried about the ‘fake’ part,” Steve said, scarlet now. “I just thought – sorry, I –”

Natasha kissed him again to shut him up, her head spinning a little but the Red Room forgotten. “You don’t have to propose just to get laid tonight; that was going to happen anyway.”

“I wasn’t proposing,” Steve started to protest and then gave it up in favor of kissing her.

That escalated pleasantly until much later Steve was asleep beside her, breathing steadily and his skin still a little sheened with sweat. Natasha sat up to fix the handful of pin curls that had come loose, hoping that she had found all the pins so that she or Steve didn’t roll over them in the middle of the night. The sex had left her feeling loose and languid, aware of every inch of her body – and Steve’s, for that matter, the reassuring solidity and warmth of him, his shocking aliveness. It seemed impossible that he had ever been frozen, even though Natasha had seen pictures and knew how horribly dead he had looked in the days between sleeping and true waking.

She had been afraid, just a little, that he had slept with her because she was his only link back to the twenty-first century and without something to hold onto, it would be only too easy for him to do what Peggy Carter and Howard Stark and the Howling Commandos all wanted: come back. Natasha wasn’t naïve enough not to believe that part of Steve wanted that too, not when there was a Captain Rogers-shaped hole just waiting for him to step back into. Natasha wanted him; she didn’t want to be his lifeline.

She ran a hand over her pinned hair to make sure everything was in place, then turned the light off and curled up next to him. Steve stirred a little, not really in danger of waking up, but Natasha murmured him back to sleep anyway. Mine, she thought, satisfied and still a little disbelieving. It had only been a week, after all.

Natasha wasn’t used to wanting things and certainly not to wanting things and then getting them. She had long since put Steve away in a box of I want this man but I can’t have him, because women like her didn’t get to have men like Steve Rogers. She was happy enough to be his friend and then his partner, because while Steve generally liked people he didn’t have many actual friends. There was a warm glow to being one of the elect, the person he looked to for advice and to watch his back – even in Germany, when everything had been going to hell in a handbasket, he had never really seemed to be in doubt about her. Just waiting for her to come to terms with herself, no matter where that led.

The Wren was asleep when the keys on the Arachne machine, which only seemed to be a typewriter began to move without being touched, a crackle of electronic static accompanying the clatter of the keys and the low rumble of the rotors turning inside the machine. She came awake all at once, her left hand beneath her pillow for the switchblade she kept there. It also found the little metal key for the handcuff on her right wrist, which kept her arm extended over her head where the other cuff was fastened to the headboard of the bed. It was an indulgence she only kept to when she was sleeping alone and didn’t expect to be disturbed – not one she had been able to keep up when she had been billeted with other women during training or in those flame-filled nights of frequent air raids, when you could be up and out of your bed half a dozen times before dawn if you didn’t go to a shelter. It was a little hard to explain to a roomful of other Wrens, too.

She relaxed only a little as she recognized the sound of the Arachne machine, switching her grip from the knife to the key so she could unlock the handcuff from her wrist. With the room’s blackout curtains drawn it was pitch dark; she found a stub of candle by touch, along with the Zippo a smitten American GI had gifted her with the previous year. The soft bloom of candlelight illuminated the tiny room as she padded barefoot over to the desk and sat cross-legged in the chair, waiting for the message to finish transmitting and decrypting. One of the reasons she had chosen this boarding house were that the bedroom walls were thick enough that the unavoidably noisy clatter of the Arachne machine couldn’t be heard in the adjoining rooms – the crackle of static of the wireless connection, the staccato tap of Morse code, the clank of the rotors inside as they turned encrypted Morse into decrypted English so that the cipher machine could eventually spit out something other than nonsense letters.

It didn’t take long. She had rekeyed the Arachne machine for the next day’s code settings before she had gone to bed, knowing that in a situation this serious she might get new orders overnight. She had been right.

REINFORCEMENTS INCOMING NEW MISSION PARAMATERS TO COME FIND AND RETRIEVE PREPARE FOR EXTRACTION FOLLOWING MISSION COMPLETION X

The canteen was almost deserted in the morning, since most of the SSR staff was billeted outside headquarters and didn’t take breakfast there except in emergencies. After Howard’s lockdown, most of them were relieved to spend as little time in the building as possible, which meant that Peggy and the Commandos had privacy as long as they kept their voices low.

“Well?” Peggy asked, dropping a lump of sugar into her tea and stirring while wishing she could empty the whole sugar bowl in. One thing that had been nice about being in America in the first half of 1943 had been Howard’s ability to absolutely ignore rationing and food shortages, which was a little more difficult for even him to manage in England. On the other hand, there had been all the Americans.

Not that she was immune from them in the SSR, of course, but by the time they got here they were generally broken in.

Jones poked at his powdered eggs with his tin fork and said, “Well – it’s Steve. But we knew that already.”

Now that they had actually seen Steve, he and the other Commandos looked a little uncomfortable about the idea of discussing their erstwhile commanding officer’s affairs out of hand, even to Peggy. At the end of the day, they were Steve’s team, not hers, and would be until the trumpets sounded for Judgment Day.

“He was happy to see us,” Falsworth supplied, after the same miniscule hesitation as Jones. “But you saw that.”

“I did,” Peggy confirmed. She scraped butter across her toast – not much butter and too-dry toast, as usual – and waited. As the silence at the table dragged out, she finally said, “Don’t forget that Steve – that Captain Rogers – is under suspicion of being a double agent. I doubt any of us truly believe that he would do so of his own volition, but he can’t account for his whereabouts for the four weeks between the disappearance of the Valkyrie and his arrival here. Not with a believable story, at least.”

“What, the time travel tall tale doesn’t have you convinced?” Morita asked, after a quick glance around to make sure there was no one else in earshot. The only other occupants of the canteen were a couple of sleepy-looking wireless officers seconded from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, seated in the opposite corner of the room.

“I have a few doubts,” Peggy said. “Many of them begin and end with how sheerly unlikely it is.”

That got a few nods, a sideways glance from Dugan, and Dernier looking steadfastly away. Peggy gritted her teeth against the urge to defend herself against the accusation that she just didn’t want to believe that Steve might have married another woman; none of them had actually said as much.

“What did he say?” Peggy asked eventually when no one else said anything, and when that didn’t get a response, went on, “Gentlemen, I’m well aware that it’s Steve Rogers we’re speaking of, not some poor rear gunner whose Lancaster was shot down over Dresden and who actually did walk back. You all know him well enough to understand that if something terrible did happen to him, he wouldn’t thank you for trying to protect him out of loyalty. He’s given details to both Howard and Colonel Phillips and if he gave another set to you, then we can see if they all line up and maybe, just maybe, get to the bottom of this.”

They all turned to Dugan as the sergeant and ranking NCO, who didn’t look happy about being put on the spot that way. His gaze flickered quickly to the canteen door.

“If you’re worried about Steve joining us, you needn’t be,” Peggy said, her mouth twisting a little. “He and his – Mrs. Rogers – aren’t allowed out without a guard. They eat in their room. Howard’s foolish about Steve but he’s not actually a fool.”

“He gave us the time travel story,” Dugan said reluctantly after another long pause that he tried to cover up by pouring himself more coffee and doctoring it. “Said Schmidt went up in smoke before Steve flew the Valkyrie into the ground.”

Peggy had to coax the story out of them, prodding for details and then checking them against the notes Howard and Colonel Phillips had made when they had both grilled Steve. She wasn’t certain whether she was hoping that the particulars matched up or that they didn’t, but all of them did; Steve didn’t seem to have slipped up once. Partway through Howard came in and sat down with them, plowing through his meal with the single-minded focus that meant he had probably been up for most of the night after he had finished showing the Commandos Steve’s gear.

“It can’t be Schmidt,” Morita said bluntly, when Dugan had finished. “Nobody crazy enough to blow up half the world would be, hmm, subtle enough to do this with Steve. Which doesn’t mean one of his pet nutjobs didn’t pick up where he left off. His saner nutjobs, the ones who didn’t want to push him while he had all the big guns, but don’t want to go crawling back to Hitler or get picked up by Stalin either. We know a few of them are still out there.”

When they looked at him, he added, “Not that I’m saying that Steve’s lying and Hydra did pick him up, it’s just that the whole frozen in ice, aliens, time travel thing is nuts.”

“It’s the girl I’m wondering about,” Jones said. “Look, she’s – she’s Steve’s type, exactly.” He shot a sideways glance at Peggy, who didn’t let herself react, and after a moment he went on, “On the one hand, you couldn’t have done better if you’d designed her in a lab for him. On the other, it’s just so complicated. There are a lot of ways someone could have done this without adding in all the other stuff.”

“Maybe someone did,” Falsworth suggested. “Design her in a lab for him, I mean.”

“You guys are all so cynical,” Howard said.

Peggy turned on him. “Howard, do you really believe that Steve was frozen in ice for seventy years –”

“Sixty-seven.”

“– before being found and thawed out, however that would work, and has spent the past six years fighting aliens, only to get married along the way before being sent back through time to March 1945? Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve all seen things these past few years, but we don’t’ actually live in a comic book: we live in the real world.”

“Yeah, it is ridiculous,” Howard said. “And like everyone else here has said at least a hundred times, Hydra or Hitler or the Soviets or whoever could have just dropped Steve a mile from the front lines for the troops to find. Plenty of shot-down airmen have been out there a hell of a lot longer than Steve; no one would have blinked twice if he’d come in that way. Hell, it probably would have gotten him straight in front of Eisenhower or Montgomery well before he got back to us. So why not do that? Why bother with the time travel story?”

“‘It’s so mad it has to be true’ is not the convincing argument you think it is,” Peggy snapped. “Just because Steve shows up with a wedding ring and a sob story –”

“Oh, he didn’t show up with a wedding ring,” Howard said. “I gave him and Mrs. Rogers the rings.”

For a long moment Peggy just stared at him before she finally said, “What?”

Howard repeated himself, which was not as helpful as he seemed to think it would be, then said, “Whether or not they’re actually wearing their rings – Mrs. Rogers said they don’t when they’re in the field, which is why they didn’t have them on when they got here – it doesn’t change anything. But it does make it a little easier for her to get along here. Besides, you know Steve’s the kind of guy who’d wear one.”

“Did you just have a couple of wedding rings lying around?” Jones asked, bemused.

“Handier than you’d think,” Howard told him.

“For what?”

“Oh, you know,” Howard said casually. “Stuff.” He turned to Peggy and said, more gently this time, “Look, Peg, have you actually talked to Steve at all? Really talked to him, I mean, not just been in the same room while someone else was talking to him. I have. You should too.”

“I’ve been somewhat busy,” Peggy said, which wasn’t all that much of an excuse, but would have to do for now. It was stupid and petty and selfish; she had told the truth when she had told Rose yesterday that they hadn’t made any promises to each other – they hadn’t even ever talked about it, not outside that last desperate radio conversation. He was as within his rights to take up with another woman as she was to step out with another man.

Howard looked at her for a long moment, then said, “Come on, Peg, let’s take a walk. You know I like to stretch my legs in the morning.”

“Howard, I don’t need –” She didn’t know if she wanted to finish that with to be coddled or to have sense slapped into me or something else entirely. She just said, “Fine,” and drank off the last of her now lukewarm tea before turning the cup over on top of the saucer. They took their trays of dirty dishes over to drop off, then went out the door and took several turns into the courtyard they shared with half a dozen other agencies, some of which were even real. Even at this early hour there were already a few off-duty servicemen and women smoking in the damp, chilly air.

Howard did a quick couple of circuits around the courtyard, Peggy’s heels clicking on the pavement as she kept up with him, then came to a stop so abrupt that she almost ran into him, though she noted he waited until they were well away from any doors or windows or anyone else in the courtyard. He turned towards her and said, “You know whatever happened to Steve was bad, one way or another. As bad as it gets.”

Peggy frowned at him. “Why are you so eager to believe that his mad tale is true?”

“Well, I’ve had an extra week to get used to the idea,” Howard said. “And I saw him when he got here.”

“Does an extra week really make the story any more likely?” Peggy said.

“Maybe not,” Howard admitted. “But it doesn’t make it any less, either.” He scratched his head and added, “Peg, be honest with me. How much of this is about the fact that Steve married a woman who isn’t you?”

“Don’t be absurd,” she told him stiffly, despite the fact that she had been asking herself that question for the past day and a half. “We weren’t married, or engaged, or even seeing each other. He’s perfectly within his rights to marry as many women as he likes.”

“Generally the law frowns on that sort of thing.”

“Don’t be flippant,” Peggy snapped. “It’s different for you.”

His brows drew together. “Different how?”

“There was never any chance that you – oh, never mind!”

“No, I want to hear you say it,” Howard said, his jaw working briefly. “What was there never any chance of?”

Peggy looked aside, irritated; even as angry as she was she did another quick onceover of the courtyard to make doubly certain there was no one close enough to overhear. “Everyone knows you want to notch Captain America on your bedpost, Howard, but even if you’d managed it what do you think was going to happen after that? It’s not as though a man in your position – or Steve’s – could ever –”

Howard grabbed her arm. “Okay, that’s enough of that.”

His gaze flickered quickly around them, because what was an open secret in the SSR was still a secret, and a dangerous one if anyone ever decided to push it. Howard Stark wasn’t universally loved by a long shot; there was always something to be found if one of his enemies really wanted to dig and had a good reason to believe they would find something eventually. Peggy was almost certain – almost – that Steve didn’t sleep with men, but she knew that Howard did occasionally. In her less generous moments she believed that his parade of cinema stars and fashion models was to cover up the fact that he basically preferred men; he had never made a pass at any of the women in the SSR, or any other woman in uniform for that matter, which put him head and shoulders above some of the men Peggy knew.

After a moment Howard released her, looking surprised by his own reaction. “I’m sorry.”

Peggy looked aside. “Oh, damn it all,” she said wearily. She probably should have apologized too, but she couldn’t bring herself to; it was true, after all. Instead she sighed and sat down on the edge of the portico that ran around the interior of the round courtyard, digging for her cigarettes. She didn’t smoke often and mostly kept them on her to trade or for use as bribes, but right now she wanted both the nicotine and the ritual of it.

Howard sat down beside her and lit her cigarette with his monogrammed lighter, and they sat passing it back and forth for a few minutes in silence until Peggy said abruptly, “It’s the not knowing that’s the worst of it. If there was a way to prove his ridiculous story – or anything else, for that matter –”

She still hated the idea of another woman with Steve, especially when what she had seen during their sparring match the previous evening gave her overactive imagination too much to chew over. She had also had some fairly unpleasant dreams in that direction last night, which made her feel both sordid and petty.

“He’s alive,” Howard said soberly. “And nine days ago he wasn’t. That’s not nothing.”

“No, it’s not,” Peggy said, holding onto that, the way she had been holding onto it since she had walked into Howard’s office not even two days earlier. The worst thing that could happen has already happened. Anything that happens next is a gift. “But I wish to bloody blue blazes we knew for certain what happened to him between getting on the Valkyrie and now. You know that even if he’s telling us the truth, he’s not telling us everything.”

“No,” Howard echoed. “No, he’s not.”

Even half a decade into the war men and women still came and went freely from London. Fewer men than women, these days, with so many men in Britain serving overseas. FANYs stationed at ambulance posts in Croydon and Streatham and farther afield, Wrens and WAAFs from Bletchley Park, ATA pilots from a dozen airfields, even Land Girls up for a day away from the fields. There were Americans, too, Canadians, Jamaicans, Indians, Australians – what seemed like half a planet filtered through England as the might of the Allied army drove relentlessly onwards to Berlin. Some were in uniform, others in civilian dress, eager to forget for a few hours before they got back on the trains leading out of the city.

No one noticed an extra few women getting off at Kings Cross and Euston.

In truth they weren’t even extra; all of them had done the same thing before for days out with girlfriends who really were Wrens or Land Girls or WAAFs, any of the women’s services that had proliferated with so many men away in Europe. They didn’t arrive together, of course – they had all been stationed at separate posts across England. Most were English, or at least seemed to be, along with an American nurse, a WAC clerk from Camp Griffiss, and a wireless operator from the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division, who took the longest to arrive, since she had to take the train all the way from RCAF 6 Group’s headquarters in North Yorkshire. They came in alone, pretty girls amongst thousands of others in the city –

And then they vanished.

“That will be all, Private, thank you. Close the door.”

There was an edge to Peggy Carter’s polite smile as she dismissed the MP who had escorted Natasha downstairs. He saluted and left, pulling the door shut behind him and leaving the two women alone.

Natasha hadn’t really expected an interrogation room, not for Steve Rogers’ alleged wife, and she wasn’t surprised by the little room with its hand-me-down furniture or the coffee service on the battered marquetry table. The latter was probably a legacy of the building’s previous life in government service, though it had seen hard wear at some point and had probably been in storage before it had found a second life in use here. The former was what she thought was probably standard U.S. Army issue, a plain aluminum coffee pot and matching milk jug and sugar bowl, with white ceramic cups and saucers that would have been at home in any American diner in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. The other furniture was odds and ends from the past two hundred years, including what looked like a military cot whose origins hadn’t been disguised by the patched blankets and pillows piled on top of it. Breakroom, she decided, or whatever the current term for that was.

“Since it’s just us girls, I thought something cozy,” Peggy said. “The woman officers use it when we want to have a lie-down or a cuppa between shifts.”

‘Just us girls,’ Natasha thought wryly. Right. She had read the parts of Peggy Carter’s service record which had been in the SHIELD files she had released four years ago, which was about seventy percent of it. It had began in August of 1939, when Bletchley Park had gone operational days before the Nazi invasion of Poland and ended in September of 1995, when she had retired from SHIELD after the double blow of the North Institute’s destruction and some kind of extraterrestrial fiasco that had happened that same summer. Although officially her retirement had been voluntary, two major SHIELD snafus within a matter of months had given her political enemies the leverage needed to push her out after almost half a century. Reading through the lines of the files, Peggy had also never really recovered from the shock of Howard Stark’s assassination four years earlier, which SHIELD – for reasons that were obvious now but had been an embarrassing mystery for twenty-three years – had never been able to solve.

Natasha had never actually met her in the present day, though she had driven Steve the first time he had visited Peggy in 2012, and waited in the warm sunlight of the parking lot until he had come out. He had made it to Natasha’s car before he had broken down crying. The closest Natasha had come to her otherwise had been at her funeral. But right now that was more than seventy years away; the woman in front of her now was still young, grieving the man who had still been on the radio with her when he had flown Johann Schmidt’s bomb-laden plane into the frigid Arctic Ocean.

The two women sat down on opposite sides of the little table and Peggy poured them both coffee. From the scent of the fragrant steam, it was the real stuff, which Natasha had already learned wasn’t a given. They both took a minute to doctor their coffee to taste, which meant milk for Natasha and sugar for Peggy.

There were a couple of cardboard file folders sitting at the edge of the table on Peggy’s side, marked with the SSR’s eagle insignia. Natasha didn’t have to read the neat copperplate labels on them to know that they were for her and Steve; the one on the bottom was noticeably thicker and was presumably Steve’s.

Peggy picked up the file on top and flipped it open, moving her cup and saucer aside to do so as she said, “I know Howard spoke to you before, but this sort of thing isn’t really his area of expertise. Let’s start with the basics, shall we? Your name?”

“Natasha Rogers,” Natasha said; she wasn’t worried about slipping out of her cover identity, which was barely a cover at this point.

“And your maiden name is Romanova?”

“Romanoff,” Natasha corrected gently. “Natasha Ellen Romanoff.” The question had told her where this was going, though she didn’t let any of it show on her face, just sipped her coffee.

“And you were born –?”

“December 4, 1984. I’m thirty-three.”

Peggy’s gaze flickered up to her, a tiny frown knitting the skin between her brows. She was two years older than Steve, or had been until 1945, anyway, which made her four years younger than Natasha and Steve were now, minus Steve’s years in deep freeze. “Have you been married before?”

“No.”

“Engaged?”

“No.”

“Mmm.” She wrote something down and then asked, “Where were you born?”

“Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio,” Natasha said. “We actually lived in Miamisburg, it’s a suburb of Dayton – my parents are still there.” They destroyed my birth certificate, so I reinvented it, she heard Yelena’s voice whisper in ghostly memory. My parents still live in Ohio. My sister moved out west.

“Your parents’ names?”

“Alexander and Melanie Romanoff. My mother’s maiden name was Voss.” She was sticking as closely to Anglicizations as possible, since that was least likely to raise eyebrows. It might be a little paranoid, but paranoid was just a shorter way of saying better safe than sorry. She was also uncomfortably aware that within the next few days she and Steve might have to come back and say, sorry for all the blatant lying, but you’ve got a trained Soviet assassin in the SSR and I know because I used to be one too, but they had agreed to burn that bridge when they came to it.

The questioning continued for another two hours, by which point Peggy was starting to look a little frustrated and Natasha was mentally compiling a report about the SSR’s current mission capabilities, ongoing operations, and political problems. Peggy was a decent interrogator, but Natasha had been doing this for longer than Peggy Carter had been alive – in 1945, anyway – and she usually did it from this side of the table, too. Two hours of this, plus their brief meetings over the past few days, told Natasha exactly why the Special Operations Executive, desperate as it was for qualified operatives, had been willing to second Peggy Carter to the SSR. She had the skills for black ops and the willingness to do most, if not all, that that entailed, but she was so straightforward that it became a liability in the field. That was fine in a regular fight; it got people killed in covert operations. Usually other people, and the wrong kind of other people.

“You seem to have an answer to everything,” Peggy said eventually, picking up the coffee pot and then setting it down again; it was empty, apparently.

Natasha met her eyes, calm, and said, “Well, you’ve been asking me about my life; I’d be a little worried if I didn’t.”

The way to do undercover work like this was to be that other person, to believe it body and soul, and her cover story was close enough to her own life that it wasn’t much of a stretch. It was the woman she might have been with the Red Room erased from her life, the woman she might have been if she and Yelena and Alexei and Melina had never gotten on that plane in Ohio. She and Steve had discussed whether or not using a cover story was overcomplicating it, but the truth was that Natasha’s history was more likely to make things worse than better.

Of course, at the time they hadn’t anticipated there being another Black Widow – a matryoshka, at the moment, not yet a Widow – in the SSR.

Natasha rubbed her thumb over her wedding ring, watching the way that Peggy’s gaze flickered towards the motion for an instant. She said, “Howard said he gave you and Steve the rings, since you weren’t wearing any when you arrived here.”

“Mine’s in my jewelry box back home,” Natasha said mildly. “Along with my engagement ring. Steve’s is in his pencil case. We don’t wear them in the field.”

“Or your dog tags?”

“No dog tags,” Natasha said. Steve’s original dog tags from WWII had gone into the Smithsonian along with the other 99% of his surviving belongings; he had a set the U.S. Army had issued him in 2012 – he had been seconded to SHIELD, not demobilized; only the circumstances of that arrangement were unusual – but he didn’t wear them and Natasha had no idea where they were now. Back in his closed-up room at the Avengers compound, maybe.

Peggy looked at her for a long moment, then reached inside her jacket and pulled something out of an inner pocket, setting it on the table between them and opening it with a flick of her thumb. Natasha glanced at it and said, “Does Steve know you have his compass?”

“He left it with Howard,” Peggy said.

Natasha didn’t bother to point out that Peggy Carter manifestly wasn’t Howard Stark and just said, “I know. My gear’s there too.”

“You’re not jealous?”

“He’s married to me,” Natasha pointed out dryly, and willed herself to believe it with everything she had. Under normal circumstances she never worried about slipping out of her cover identity; this part of it was close enough to the truth that she couldn’t shake the niggling fear that she might. She made herself remember Steve’s mouth on hers, his hands on her body, the sturdy warmth of him against her during the chilly nights – central heating might have been invented by 1945 but it was terrible – the flash of his grin in the morning, the way he was out like a light post-coital, when she knew that under normal circumstances his nightmares were bad enough that he often didn’t sleep through the night. It wasn’t just the sex, either; they had sat in the back of a Quinjet patching each other up plenty of times, or shared a couple of beers over a pizza and a bad movie, gone into fights together –

After a moment, she met Peggy’s eyes and said, “When Steve came out of the ice, everything he had was gone. Everything. Almost everyone he had ever known was dead, all of his possessions had either been lost over the years or were in storage at the Smithsonian – there was a big exhibit there that opened in 2013 – and he only had two things left, that compass and his shield. Why would I grudge him that? I have a history too.”

“Where’s the shield now?”

“It’s gone,” Natasha said. “I don’t know where. I wasn’t with him when it happened.”

“I thought you were partners.”

“We are,” Natasha said calmly. “That doesn’t mean we’re with each other all the time, and it doesn’t mean he tells me everything. I don’t tell him everything, either.”

“Never mind ‘love, honor, and obey,’ hmm?”

“Who said that was in our vows?” Natasha pointed out. “Neither of us is good at obeying, which I assume you already know about Steve.”

The corner of Peggy’s mouth crooked a little in acknowledgment of that truth, then that instant of shared good humor fled. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Ja, ich spreche Deutsch,” Natasha said. Yes, I speak German. Peggy’s was Swiss-accented, probably learned at some finishing school before the war; Natasha’s was neutral Hochdeutsch with a very faint Saxon tinge to the vowels, not as strongly regional as Steve’s 1940s Berlinerisch, though she had heard him speak it often enough that she could have replicated it, or most other regional accents in the twenty-first century, for that matter. If Peggy went on a little longer she’d be able to perfectly mimic her schoolgirl Swiss German, too.

They repeated this with French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Peggy’s clumsy Polish and Japanese, which told Natasha they had exhausted Peggy’s impressive language repertoire and also what her suspicions about Natasha were. Natasha considered and discarded pretending ignorance; she knew all the languages Peggy had tested her on and another half-dozen besides, and it wasn’t that unusual for a field operative.

“Do you want to keep going?” she said dryly instead – in Greek, this time; she knew from Steve that the SSR had run an operation there in late spring 1944, and then had to rush it when General Eisenhower had high-handedly ordered Captain America and the Howling Commandos back to England to participate in the invasion of Normandy. The official files had been lost, which meant that two years ago Secretary Ross hadn’t thought to look for Steve in Athens and Natasha had. Lucky for both of them, since Steve had been there, using his mother’s soft County Kilkenny accent and passing as Irish instead of American. It apparently hadn’t occurred to anyone other than her that Captain America might be passing as something other than American; it had even taken Natasha a few weeks. She switched to Norwegian and added, “Because I can do this all day.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Peggy said, looking unimpressed. She said it in English, but the fact that she knew what Natasha had said meant that she had at least understood both languages. Or could guess the gist of the remark.

She looked at Natasha for a long moment, her expression hard, then picked the compass up and snapped it shut. She didn’t put it away, though, just turned it over between her fingers before she set it down again and put her hand over it. “Let’s lay our cards out on the table, shall we?” she said, waiting a beat before she finished, “Mrs. Rogers?”

Natasha met her gaze mildly. “Don’t let me stop you, Agent Carter.”

“You’re lying,” Peggy said bluntly.

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “About what?”

“Potentially everything from what you had for breakfast to your name to what you’re doing with Steve Rogers,” Peggy said.

“Well, that one’s easy,” Natasha said. “Being married to him, and I’m assuming you don’t want the finer details of that.”

Peggy’s perfect red lips turned down in a slight moue of distaste.

“I had the same thing for breakfast as everyone else here and I’ve told you my name,” Natasha said. “I’m not Hydra. I’m not NKVD, either – that was your next question, wasn’t it? I know enough about the war to know that Russia has better things to do right now than play games with the SSR; if they got their hands on Captain America, they wouldn’t send him back.”

“You seem very certain of that.”

“I’m good at my job, Agent.”

“And what’s that?”

“Same thing as Steve, without the superpowers,” Natasha said, still mild.

“Backwards and in high heels, I suppose?”

“I’m five foot three, Agent, I need the extra height,” Natasha said. “And someone has to watch his back, since he’s not very good at doing that himself. He trusts other people to do that for him.”

“Yes, he does,” Peggy agreed. “Even if he doesn’t know it.”

Peggy finally left the interview-cum-interrogation feeling as though she had gone a dozen rounds in a boxing ring, though it had barely even come to harsh words, let alone fists. She let her gaze flicker sideways for an instant to Natasha Rogers’ calm, beautiful face; the other woman looked unbothered by the hours of questioning. Peggy had to fight back the uncomfortable sense that she had been the one being questioned, not the other way around, though she didn’t think Natasha had actually asked more than a handful of questions that weren’t rhetorical.

God, she’s good, she admitted silently to herself, reluctantly impressed. It hadn’t even occurred to her at the time that Natasha had been winkling information out of her the whole time Peggy had been asking her question after question. Worse, she wasn’t sure exactly what Natasha had taken away from the interrogation. How in blazes did she do that?

And then, thoughtfully, does Steve know she can do that?

She had her answer a moment later, as Steve himself emerged from the men’s wardroom along with Howard and the Commandos. The women’s wardroom, which the SSR woman officers used between shifts, had been named by a group of Wrens early on in the SSR’s existence; both here and at Bletchley the Women’s Royal Naval Service had made up for being stationed dirtside instead of onboard ship by giving nautical names to everything possible. Not all of them had stuck, but a few had.

There was a quick, silent exchange between Steve and Natasha as they saw each other that consisted entirely of shared glances and culminated in a brief grimace on Steve’s part and a sigh on Natasha’s. Peggy, Howard, and the Commandos exchanged a few looks of their own, wondering what that had been about. Then Peggy looked more closely and thought, Steve made a mistake.

Natasha was a professional, though a professional what remained to be seen. Probably a spy, no matter what she said about doing the same job as Steve. Steve was a professional too, but he was a soldier. A damned good one and a covert operations specialist, but a soldier nonetheless. If one of them was going to slip, it was going to be him.

Peggy caught Dugan’s eye and jerked her chin slightly to the side. He left the small group to join her, exchanging places with Natasha as she went to tuck her hand into Steve’s and say something to Howard that made him laugh, though the other Commandos were all eyeing her with wary suspicion. Steve took her hand, but his gaze flickered quickly to Peggy, his expression torn before he looked away.

Peggy’s gaze lingered on him for a moment before Dugan cleared his throat gently. They went back into the men’s wardroom – the male SSR officers had picked up the name from the Wrens – and shut the door, since otherwise Steve’s serum-enhanced hearing would be able to pick out the conversation even from other side of the war room.

“Tell me,” she said.

Dugan shook his head, looking weary. “He’s good,” he said. “Better than he used to be. Good enough that he probably wouldn’t have slipped if it was anyone but us, like yesterday –” He rubbed the heel of his hand against his forehead, briefly dislodging his bowler hat. “You know, I think they’re just seeing each other, not actually married. Or at least that she doesn’t use his name.”

“Did he say something to that effect?”

“Called her ‘Romanoff’ twice.” From his expression that hadn’t been all. Peggy waited, and eventually, Dugan winced and went on, “He started to say something about Bucky – about Sergeant Barnes – and Natasha and then stopped. Changed the subject real fast.”

Peggy’s breath caught in her throat. “Sergeant Barnes has been dead for six weeks. Or seventy years if you believe their ridiculous story.”

“Yeah, I know. And Steve knows – you know he can never hide anything, and you could tell from his face that he knew he’d said the wrong thing just as soon as he said it.” Dugan rubbed at his face again.

“So someone did mess about with his head,” Peggy said, feeling sick, and then with a flush of shocked rage, “Someone did this to him.”

That was followed almost immediately by a sense of ashamed relief; she didn’t know if she had ever really thought that Steve and Natasha might be telling the truth, but if Steve was talking about a dead man as if Bucky Barnes was still alive and well then any remaining question about their story’s veracity was answered. Time travel and aliens were too big; this was something that Peggy could fix.

Dugan made a gesture that could have been acknowledgment, then said, “The thing is, he did slip and he knew he slipped. I don’t –” He hesitated. “It doesn’t feel right,” he said finally.

“Of course it doesn’t feel right,” Peggy said. “Hydra or Hitler or the Soviets got into his head –”

“No, no. I mean, he feels like Steve. Only – Steve a few years down the line, like he says.”

Peggy looked at him in frustration. “‘What he says’ is impossible.”

“Is it?” Dugan questioned. “We’ve all – seen things – over the past couple years. You’re the one who said that to us, remember?”

“Dugan, Sergeant Barnes is dead,” Peggy said. “You were there; there’s no chance he could have survived, is there?”

“I wasn’t on the train,” he reminded her. “But where he went over – no, not a fall from that height. But –” He shook his head again, frustrated, then took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair. “There’s something weird going on here, Peggy. Really weird.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Peggy said dryly. “I thought it was perfectly explicable myself.”

Dugan snorted. “Yeah, right. But it’s not – I don’t think it’s what it looks like.”

Peggy frowned at him. “And what does it look like?”

“What you think it looks like, I mean,” Dugan said reluctantly. “You think she’s running him, don’t you?”

She shrugged and admitted reluctantly, “I’ve no idea.”

Dugan nodded, grim and unhappy about it.

Peggy felt her mind ticking absently over options, the way they had done back at Bletchley, which spurred a new one. “Why don’t you take her and Steve up to Room 17 to look at the white whale? Maybe one of them can make something of it.”

Dugan blinked at her, startled by the apparent non sequitur. “They’re not cleared for the white whale – well, Steve is – was – but –”

“No one’s managed to figure out anything about the white whale since 1939,” Peggy pointed out. “Either they recognize it and we learn something for a change or they don’t and nothing’s lost.”

“If I’m taking them to see the white whale, then what are you doing?”

“Something that we probably should have been doing regularly,” Peggy said.

The room that Steve and Natasha shared looked like every other converted bedroom at headquarters; they had a higher number than the surrounding government buildings just because they so often required personnel to stay around the clock. Peggy let herself in with the master key she carried and closed the door behind her, standing still for a moment to get a feel for the room.

All the gear that they had arrived with was still in Howard’s workshop. Steve’s footlocker had been at headquarters, so he had gotten his own possessions back; everything Natasha had was borrowed from SSR stores. It wasn’t likely that there would be anything here to find, but it wasn’t impossible, either.

Peggy started with Steve’s footlocker, which she had searched five weeks ago after the Valkyrie had vanished in order to make sure he didn’t have any classified material in it. All that was missing now were the clothes that he was wearing, his shaving kit, and his sketchbook; the latter was on the table by the window and his shaving things were by the room’s small sink. Peggy went through Natasha’s case next, all very serviceable and unexceptional, except for the silk lingerie, which she guessed Howard had probably provided; it was the sort of thing he would do. She ran her hands beneath the furniture, feeling for irregularities in the wood and metal, and didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. She turned down the sheets on the bed and felt the pillowslips, then pushed the mattress up with a grunt of effort; nothing hidden there.

The faint musk of sex and sweat lingered on the sheets as Peggy made up the bed again to look undisturbed. She felt her jaw tighten; some part of her had still been hoping –

She pulled the covers back up with more force than probably necessary, then had to check the foot of the bed to make certain it wasn’t disturbed. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t already known they were shagging.

The only thing she hadn’t looked at was Steve’s sketchbook. Peggy set his pencil case aside after going through it quickly, then flipped the sketchbook open. She had given it to him for Christmas, along with new pencils from a shop in London, and the first third of the book was filled with sketches she recognized from going through it after the Valkyrie’s disappearance – landscapes from Austria, France, and England, a group of anonymous GIs sitting in the back of a commandeered German lorry, the Howling Commandos as various kinds of dogs, Howard covered in soot and with his hair standing on end after an experiment had gone wrong, Peggy herself sitting with a tin cup full of French champagne the Commandos had liberated –

Peggy had to smile at the memory, which wasn’t that old. The Commandos had come back to the camp with two jeeps full of champagne, Guerlain perfume, and a couple of trussed up Hydra scientists. They had turned the latter over to Howard – he had complained that he would have preferred the bubbly – and distributed the former lavishly amongst the 107th and SSR command staff, to everyone’s delight. Peggy still had the bottle of Mitsouko Steve had given her tucked away; it wasn’t her usual scent, but that wasn’t the point.

Natasha, she had noticed, wore Vol de Nuit, probably from that same haul. Either Steve had had it stowed away or Howard had, and one or the other had given it to her.

It was the scientists they had captured who had tipped the SSR off about Arnim Zola being on the train where Bucky Barnes had died.

Peggy turned the page. When she had gone through it before, Steve’s drawings had ended with a page of hastily-sketched portraits from that day, a pocketful of vignettes of Peggy, Howard, Phillips, and the Commandos sorting out the champagne and scent; she could remember Steve sitting in the driver’s seat of the jeep with the sketchbook braced against his knees, watching them and smiling.

The page after it wasn’t blank anymore. Instead it held a startlingly intimate drawing of Natasha Rogers, looking back over a bare shoulder marked with the ugly scar of a gunshot wound; there was another one just over her left hip, visible in the portrait because she wasn’t wearing anything except a smile. Peggy flipped the page over to find the next one filled with the faces of people she didn’t recognize – a handsome Black man, a worried-looking young woman, Bucky Barnes with his hair grown long, another man with a short-cropped beard and a long scar over his right eye –

After that was what seemed to be some kind of monster, a big humanoid with a gauntlet-like glove on its left hand, gemstones marking the knuckles. Peggy stared at the drawing for a long moment, wondering at it, then went back to turning pages. Natasha again, with her clothes on this time, then Howard with the expression of astonished delight he wore whenever he looked at Steve these days, then another page of monsters, six-limbed creatures with too many teeth and a couple of humanoids, a horned female and a male in some kind of headdress, both in odd armor and carrying weapons.

Aliens? Peggy thought, looking at the page, and then, But he made that up.

She turned the page. The next one was little vignettes of landscapes and buildings – a blocky, angular building with a stylized A on the side, a massive panther statue at the top of a cliff, the Chrysler Building in New York, the Parthenon in Athens, the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, an unfamiliar tower with the same stylized A and a little of the same aesthetic. She looked back at the panther, trying to remember where she had seen it before, and then thought, Wakanda. She had seen a few pictures somewhere, or maybe a drawing; they had some kind of obsession with panthers.

The vibranium shield that Steve had brought back with him, the forearm guard with its sharpened point and its stylized panther claws, had been from Wakanda.

But that didn’t make any sense. Although a member of the Allies, Wakanda was barely even in the war; the fighting in Africa hadn’t touched its borders, to the best of Peggy’s knowledge. Howard had had some dealings with them in the early part of the war, before Peggy had been transferred from SOE, and was still their contact within the SSR; it was how he had ended up with the chunk of vibranium he had used to make Steve’s shield. There were no Wakandan troops that she knew of deployed in either theatre of war, though they had sent money and supplies to the Allies and there was an unconfirmed rumor that there were a few Wakandan operatives in either SOE or the OSS. None of that ought to have mattered here, since Wakanda was on the other side of the world from the Valkyrie’s presumed route and Steve shouldn’t have been anywhere near it.

The next page was Natasha again, wearing some kind of skin-tight black uniform like the one that Howard had shown them in his workshop, though this one had different lines and a stylized symbol like an hourglass on the decorative belt at her waist; her utility belt sat low on her hips. Her hair was different, longer and shaded to suggest it was darker than the bleach blonde she had now; she was standing in front of some kind of aeroplane and had one arm upraised, her fist angled downwards to give the weaponized bracelet she was wearing a clear shot. She had made the same automatic gesture at the tail end of the fight with Steve yesterday.

There were other small sketches of Natasha and a few other people around the edges of the page – Natasha with her hair and uniform slightly different, though still wearing the same hourglass symbol; Peggy recognized Bucky Barnes and some of the other people from Steve’s previous sketches. He had given Phillips a list of his teammates and the colonel had passed it on to her, but she didn’t know which name went with which face. Wanda Maximoff was probably the worried-looking girl, but she didn’t know which man was Sam Wilson or James Rhodes or Bruce Banner.

“Good God, man, don’t you think about anything else?” Peggy muttered when she turned the page and found another sketch of Natasha in her knickers and bra. “Surely the novelty’s worn off by now.”

She started to flip past that, then stopped and looked at the page again. There was an X in the upper right corner, traced so lightly that she had almost missed it. Peggy touched her fingers to it, frowning – it wasn’t like Steve to leave that kind of mark behind on his artwork, no matter how casual his sketches were – before turning the page. The only thing on the new page was an hourglass symbol, less stylized than the one on Natasha’s belt in the drawings: an X with horizontal bars over the top and bottom, turning it into an ⧖.

“What in blazes?” Peggy said, staring at it in bewildered consternation.

“The white whale?” Natasha said, sounding bemused. Her gaze flickered quickly to Steve in a silent question.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the wall, aware of Howard, the Commandos, and the two codebreakers all watching him; Hana had slipped out when they had come in, probably to get Colonel Phillips, which left Pantcheff and Rose. “It’s a wireless signal the Y Service has been intercepting since – what, 1939?” He glanced at Pantcheff, who nodded once, short and wary.

“One of the earliest we picked up once the Y stations went operational.”

“Y for wireless, the Secret Intelligence Service listening stations,” Steve explained to Natasha. “MI6 tossed it to the SSR because no one could ever figure out where it was coming from, who it was going to, or what it says.”

“Yeah, and anything really weird comes to us,” Morita said. “Because we don’t have anything else to do, you know?”

“I’ve heard that one before,” Natasha said.

“We broke Hydra’s codes a while back, so it’s not theirs,” Rose said, which was an oversimplification of the way cryptanalysis worked, but everyone in the room knew it and it was easy shorthand to keep from explaining one of the most closely-held Allied secrets to a complete stranger. There were high-ranking officers who didn’t know the extent of the Allies’ code-breaking efforts; it hadn’t become public knowledge until 1974 and there were still parts of it that were classified in 2018.

Pantcheff had one hand out of sight beneath his desk, like he was expecting to have to pull out his pistol and shoot Natasha. He had asked Howard and Dugan three times if Peggy was sure that Steve and Natasha should be in Room 17, where the cryptanalysts sweated over British Typex machines, the CCM adaptation that allowed it to read American messages encrypted on the ECM Mark II, and one of three captured Hydra Enigma machines; they used the same machines as the rest of Germany, though like the various branches of the German military they used their own encryptions. Typex machines could decrypt Enigma encryptions if they knew the cribs, but occasionally the cryptanalysts had to run multiple decryptions simultaneously.

“The white whale’s never been high-priority because there just aren’t that many transmissions,” Rose went on. “Maybe one or two every couple of months. Only thing is that after the lockdown ended two days ago, we had two transmissions that same night, and then a burst of them yesterday and today – eight of them so far. We’ve never had so many at once.”

“Makes you think, huh?” Morita said, his gaze flickering to Steve and Natasha. As the Commandos’ wireless operator, he had more to do with the cryptanalysts than any of the rest of them.

Steve and Natasha exchanged a look, but all Steve said was, “Well, I wasn’t sending them.”

“Yeah, we’d have noticed that,” Howard said. “We don’t have a Y station here, but you couldn’t hide a wireless signal coming from inside headquarters.” His mouth twisted a little; Steve met his eyes and nodded slightly. It was Howard’s job to be paranoid; Steve wasn’t about to blame him for that, and he saw a little of the strain on Howard’s face lighten at that acknowledgment.

He turned his head a little at the sound of steps from outside in the hallway. Room 17 wasn’t really large enough to have this many people in it; Falsworth and Jones stepped out into the hallway so that Colonel Phillips and Hana Korematsu could come in, and Dugan and Dernier both inched closer to the walls.

“Where’s Carter?” Phillips asked.

“Had an errand,” Dugan said. “Should be back in a couple of minutes.”

Steve looked down, biting his lip; he knew Peggy had been avoiding being in the same room as him and presumably this was more of the same.

Phillips frowned, but made a carry on gesture at the codebreakers.

Pantcheff picked up where Rose had left off and said, “The communiques the Y stations picked up today and yesterday must be using the same encoding sets, because there’s repetition in each of the daily sets – they’re changing over daily, probably at midnight our time or theirs, depending where they are. If we had any idea what they were taking about, we’d finally have our wedge. But –” He spread his hands helplessly.

There was a blackboard on one side of the room, on which someone – Hana from the handwriting – had written out the four-letter blocks of repeated cipher, apparent nonsense letters. Steve stepped over to look at it.

Peggy had explained to him how mechanical encryption worked two years earlier. Someone fed a plaintext message into a cipher machine – a German Enigma, a British Typex, or an American ECM Mark II – and the rotors inside scrambled the message, producing ciphertext that would be incomprehensible without that day’s setting for the rotors. In the 21st century, a computer could brute-force decrypt it, running through thousands of possible permutations in a matter of minutes or even seconds. In 1945, decryption was more hands-on. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park and the other Allied cryptanalysis stations relied on being able to identify common words or phrases that often appeared in enemy messages. Once those had been found, they could feed those settings into their own cipher machines and hopefully decrypt the rest of the message.

Natasha followed him to the blackboard, frowning at the gibberish and probably thinking longingly about computers herself.

Steve’s mind picked over the letters, turning options over absently; you couldn’t just look at an encrypted message and read it as plaintext, not now and not in 2018, not without having some idea of what you were looking for. Cipher machines like the Enigma and the Typex didn’t create a simple substitution cipher, like the ones he and Bucky had used when they were kids, swapping one letter for another. You typed a letter on the machine – they looked like overgrown typewriters – and it set the rotors inside turning, one after another, so that when it spat out ciphertext even two of the same plaintext letters wouldn’t be the same once encoded. Howard had taken one of the captured Hydra Enigmas apart to see if its inner workings differed from the regular German Enigmas – they hadn’t – and showed the process to Steve while he was putting it back together.

Steve had found out back when he and Bucky were screwing around with writing in milk and copying codes out of pulp magazines that he could read a simple substitution cipher at a glance if he knew that he was looking at one. His photographic memory predated the serum and he had always had a good eye for patterns – good enough that if he had known it existed he probably would have been recruited for the Signal Intelligence Service, the U.S. Army’s codebreaking division; his health wouldn’t have mattered then. Thinking back on it, he was pretty sure that Peggy and Phillips had intended to transfer him there if he hadn’t been picked for Project Rebirth.

Dr. Erskine, of course, had earmarked him for Rebirth almost as soon as they had met.

He counted letters, running the options back and forth in his mind. He wasn’t trying to read the ciphertext as much as he was trying to feel it the way the codebreakers did, mentally subtracting the spaces between the four-letter blocks in which the Morse code was transmitted and filling them in elsewhere, experimenting with the shape of the nonsense letters. It was a little like looking at a Rothko, though he didn’t think he could have articulated the comparison in any meaningful way, though unlike a Rothko understanding hit him all at once rather than slowly sneaking up on him.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered.

Natasha looked over at him sharply. “Steve?”

“Rogers,” Phillips said. “You want to share with the class?”

Steve didn’t answer, staring at the board and willing it to be something other than what it was before he picked up the chalk and wrote the decryption beneath the nonsense letters.

CAPTAIN STEVEN G ROGERS