Of Home Near

This time they put Steve in an interrogation room, handcuffed to the table.

He could have gotten out if he really wanted to; the rooms were secure, but not designed to hold a super soldier. Steve could have snapped the chain on the cuffs and knocked the door off its hinges without breaking a sweat, lock or not, even with the guys they had in the observation room keeping an eye on him; he could hear their heartbeats if he paid attention. That wouldn’t have accomplished anything except making him look guilty, though, so all he did was stay seated and put his head down on his folded arms. He guessed that they had done the same to Natasha, but she had probably spent more time in this position than he had and knew perfectly well how to deal with it – better than he did, probably, without the option of brute forcing her way out of it. Not that she was incapable of doing that, either.

One of the odd side effects of the serum was that while he could get by with far less sleep than an unenhanced human, he could fall asleep much more easily than he ever had in the old days, his body storing up the extra rest against dry spells. It didn’t particularly help with the nightmares he had been plagued with since he had come out of the ice, which tended to wake him up two nights out of every five these days – down from five out of five six years ago – but it usually let him go back to sleep fairly quickly afterwards.

Sleeping with Natasha had helped more than anything but the passage of time, though he wasn’t about to tell her that.

He woke up when the door opened to admit Irene Lorraine with a tray. It held a glass of water and a plate of sandwiches; Steve drank the water and ate the sandwiches, and Lorraine removed the tray and empty dishes when she came back half an hour later.

“Not even a crossword?” Steve said wryly as she collected them.

“Sorry, Captain Rogers. Colonel’s orders.”

Steve accepted that and, because there was nothing else to do, went back to sleep, which he sometimes thought was the story of his life. Well, it was the story of just under seven-tenths of his life, which was its usual unpleasant thought.

By his count, he had been in the interrogation room for about seven hours before he heard the tumblers turn in the lock, accompanied by the little murmur from the observation room as the watchers changed – Phillips, Dugan, and Morita, from the sound of it. He raised his head from his folded arms as the door opened, still a little groggy from sleep, then sat up as Peggy came in.

Steve shut his eyes as she leaned over him to unlock his handcuffs, breathing in the familiar scent of her perfume; she had still worn the same one the last time he had seen her in 2015, before she had moved back to England. He felt her look down at him, the brief susurration of the air at the movement, and her hair brushed the side of his face as she finished unlocking the handcuffs. She could, he suspected, hear the sudden unsteadiness in his breath.

To his relief, she didn’t comment on it, just put the handcuff key away and went around to the other side of the table. Steve opened his eyes to pull the handcuffs off and let them fall to the table, rubbing at his sore wrists, then looked up as Peggy slid a strip of Typex printout across the table to him.

“Room 17 broke the code – today’s at least, they’re still working on yesterday’s.”

PROCEED TO LONDON RDV TASK FORCE SPARROWHAWK MISSION TAKE CAPTAIN STEVEN G ROGERS ALIVE AT ALL COSTS RPT AT ALL COSTS X

Steve blinked, read it twice, and then looked up at Peggy. “Who sent it?”

“We don’t know. Do you?”

He shook his head, but his mind caught on that X. “No. It was in English?”

“It was. Once it was decrypted, we didn’t need to translate it.”

The Germans transmitted in German, the Japanese in Japanese, the Soviets in Russian, and so on. Natasha would know if the Red Room – or its predecessor – would use English or Russian when communicating with their agents on English-speaking soil. There were other options, he supposed, especially with the end of the war in sight and the Allies already starting to look ahead to what would come next.

He put the strip of paper down and said, “So am I off the hook?”

“Well, we don’t believe you sent this message,” Peggy said, “given that you’re entirely capable of taking yourself out of headquarters and wherever you want to go from there. I think everyone in the SSR is well aware of that; you haven’t been gone that long.”

“Thanks,” Steve said dryly. “I think.”

For an instant the corner of her mouth lifted slightly in the ghost of a smile, but it was gone so quickly that if Steve hadn’t been watching her he wouldn’t have known it was there. Then Peggy folded her hands on top of the files in front of her and said, “You’re under suspicion of being a double agent, Captain.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” Steve said. “I’m not a double. If I was, I’d have come in with a story that’s actually believable.”

“I believe that argument has been made on your behalf by several people,” Peggy observed, and Steve smiled thinly.

“Howard.”

“He’s one of them.” A muscle in her jaw worked before she said, “But we all know you’re holding something back and not just whatever you say is going to change the future. Do you want to tell me the truth, Steve?”

“I’ve told the truth,” Steve said.

“When you’re lying to me, at least give us both the dignity of admitting that that’s what you’re doing.”

“I’ve told the truth,” Steve repeated, and that almost was the truth, since with one exception he had been talking around the things he didn’t want to say instead of outright lying about them. That one exception was Natasha.

“A truth you can’t prove and we can’t verify, since we have nothing to go of off except your word.”

“My word used to be good enough for you.”

“Yes, it used to be,” Peggy said. “That was before the Valkyrie. You were missing in action, believed killed, for four weeks before you turned up here. You and I both know that that’s more than enough time for Hydra – or any other player of the Great Game – to do any number of horrible things. Psychological conditioning, memory manipulation –”

“Brainwashing, you mean,” Steve said.

Her eyebrows went up. “Sorry?”

He tried to remember if he had heard the term before 2012, but the first memory he had was of Bruce explaining the concept after the Battle of New York in between debating with Tony about whether what Loki had done to Clint and Dr. Selvig qualified. He’d had a lot of conversations about it after Bucky, first with Sam and Natasha and later with T’Challa and Shuri – “Same thing. I don’t think the word exists yet. It’s, uh – it’s Chinese originally, something that happened during the Korean War. Which hasn’t…happened yet.”

“Brainwashing,” Peggy repeated, though her lips also framed the words Korean War. “Well, that’s certainly…evocative.”

Steve shrugged in response.

“Well, are you?” Peggy said. “Brainwashed?”

“If I was, I wouldn’t be able to tell you about it, would I?” Steve said. “But no, I’m not.” He touched the sheet of Typex paper again, then said, “Do you really think that anyone who could do this would waste a super soldier on espionage? Even me? Especially me?”

In 1945 Captain America just didn’t have the cultural cachet that seventy years of myth-making had built up. It had taken him more time than he cared to admit to realize that even in SHIELD there were plenty of people who thought that the USO’s version of Captain America was more or less accurate; he had had to gently break the news to more than one fanboy that while he had been in Europe with the SSR, the USO had still had an actor – a real actor – playing Captain America onstage and in the pictures, and that was the guy wearing the cowl in most of the trading cards produced after 1943, though the posters and comics had kept Steve’s face. Phil Coulson’s trading cards had been remarkable for being a complete set of the only run that had actually featured Steve.

Steve knew that he had made trouble for Phillips by insisting on staying Captain America, down to the uniform and shield, both of which Howard had been only too happy to help with. Philips would have preferred – and had said as much, frequently – that Steve go back to being a regular soldier, since the SSR was still a clandestine division and having their main special operations team led by a celebrity wasn’t useful by anyone’s standards. Even Steve had to admit that it had come back to bite them a few times, mostly on the occasions when General Eisenhower or one of the other higher-ups had decided they needed a super soldier around more than Colonel Phillips did; the invasion of Normandy had been the highest profile of those.

But Steve had wanted to have Captain America mean something, not just leave it behind with the USO like a hermit crab moving on for something newer and better. He had wanted the Captain America in the pictures and comic books to actually have something real behind him, not just the fairy tales created during his USO days. Hydra’s existence hadn’t been declassified until long after the end of the war, so most of his publicized adventures, and later those of the Howling Commandos, had only been loosely rooted in reality, but the Captain America behind it all had been real. That had mattered to him.

It had been lost somewhere along the way, too, but it came down to the fact that in 1945 Captain America didn’t have all that much more sway than any other GI, when in 2018 – even at the top of Interpol’s red notice – he’d had political weight to throw around. Steve was uncomfortably aware that in 2016 he had almost certainly cost Matthew Ellis his reelection over the Sokovia Accords, though in hindsight he supposed the former president had had his reasons for supporting them. Steve couldn’t agree with them, but he could understand them. Ellis would have been a better bet than the current guy, who had gone on a dozen public rants about Captain America on the campaign trail before the Accords and had been unbearable since. Not that he hadn’t been unbearable before, too; he gave New Yorkers a bad name.

None of that he really wanted to tell Peggy, and it was impossible to explain the cultural weight that Captain America held seventy years along, anyway. He just repeated, “No one’s wasting Captain America on espionage. There are better things to do with a super soldier.”

She frowned a little. “You’re very certain of that.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” Steve said carefully. Something about his tone made her look at him sharply, and because he couldn’t tell her about Bucky – he couldn’t, because in the first place she wouldn’t believe him, and in the second there was nothing they could do about it right now, as much as he wanted to run off looking.

“Do you want to explain that rather remarkable statement?”

Steve looked down at the printout again. TAKE CAPTAIN STEVEN G ROGERS ALIVE AT ALL COSTS. “You and I both know that Abraham Erskine wasn’t the only person working on the serum, and I’m not just talking about the guys back at Alamogordo who’ve got my blood samples. Nobody got it exactly right, but a few people got close enough for government work.”

He looked aside, his jaw working. He knew that there had been a lot of experiments aimed at replicating the serum over the past seventy years, of which the Hulk had actually been the best case scenario even if it was the elephant in the room. Nick Fury had done his best to keep the long, bloody history of the super soldier serum from Steve, which hadn’t been difficult; Steve hadn’t wanted to know and SHIELD, oddly, had never worked on it, long-standing policy from the forty years Howard Stark had spent as head of SHIELD’s science division. On the long list of things Steve had never told Tony was that the serum Howard had been taking to the Triskelion the night he and his wife had been murdered had come from the Stark Industries labs, a clandestine project Obadiah Stane had been running and Howard had stumbled on. You had to read between the lines of both SHIELD’s and SI’s files to realize that Howard Stark had had almost nothing to do with SI for years; he had been the face of the company, but he had spent the bulk of his time at SHIELD – something which in 2018 still wasn’t publicly known. Steve wasn’t sure that Tony realized that, either, given that the longest conversation they had ever managed to have about Howard Stark had been while Tony was trying to kill Bucky.

You dumb bastard, I loved him too.

Some of that must have shown on his face, because Peggy’s eyes narrowed. Despite the skillfully applied makeup around her eyes, Steve could tell that she had been crying, and he could guess why. There was a faint air of fragility to her now that hadn’t been there before either in 1945 – the first time – or in 2015, when he had seen her last.

There was no trace of it in her voice when she said, “Is that what you think this is about? Trying to replicate the serum?”

Steve shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a safe enough guess, but it’s not like I’ve made a lot of friends in Europe. It could be someone looking for revenge.”

“It could be,” Peggy agreed. “But you know what the difference is between you and any of these other hypothetical super soldiers? You can walk into the SSR and they can’t.”

“Yeah, and that’s worked out really well for me so far, hasn’t it?” Steve said dryly. “Even Howard’s had me and Nat locked up for the past week and right now I’ve just spent the past seven hours handcuffed to a table, so if that’s the plan, it’s a terrible one.”

“Your last plan involved getting captured by Hydra and nearly shot and that was before you got on the Valkyrie.”

Steve shrugged again. “I get nearly shot four days out of every five, that’s not special.” He made himself look her in the eye and said, “I know Howard must have showed you the gear Nat and I came in with, so you know it’s not what I left with, and you know it’s not what could be manufactured right now.”

“Howard said he could make it,” Peggy said.

“What, by hand? Yeah, he probably could.” If Tony could make the first Iron Man suit in a cave with decades-old tech, secondhand tools, and first rate SI bombs, then Howard could probably replicate most of Steve’s gear, especially since he and Natasha didn’t tend towards the high tech. Most of what they carried wasn’t completely out of science fiction the way something like the War Machine or Falcon suits were, and Steve knew Howard well enough to know he could make just about anything if he set his mind to it. “But I bet he told you our gear wasn’t made by hand.”

He saw a muscle work briefly in Peggy’s jaw and knew he had guessed right.

“I swear that it’s the truth,” he said. “I know it’s crazy – believe me, I know. I lived through it; no one knows better than I do how crazy it is. But it is the truth, I swear on my life –”

“You do realize that your life is exactly what’s at stake, don’t you?” Peggy said sharply. “Or don’t you remember the punishment for treason in a time of war? Or espionage, for that matter. Do you think they’ll shoot you or hang you?”

“I thought you thought I was brainwashed,” Steve said. He had been threatened by Thaddeus Ross and Alexander Pierce on similar counts; the difference was that Ross had actually meant it. Pierce would never have bothered with dragging Captain America through a trial; Steve still had occasional nightmares about what his original plan had been when he had sent Brock Rumlow and the rest of the STRIKE team into that elevator.

He let his breath out slowly through clenched teeth, trying to force himself to relax. “Is there anything I can say that will make you believe me?”

Peggy looked at him for a long moment, the silence stretching out between them along with the beating of his heart. He could hear Peggy’s too, a little more rapid than usual; she was upset. If he concentrated, he could make out the sound of Phillips, Dugan, and Morita in the observation room, identifying each man by the unique timbre of their breathing and heartbeat.

“No,” Peggy said.

Steve’s hold on his temper shattered. He flattened his palms against the table and half-rose – he heard movement in the observation room, Dugan and Morita readying themselves to dash in and do their best to stop Steve if he looked like he was going to get violent. “I don’t want to be here,” he snapped. “I was in the middle of a fight when Thanos sent me and Nat here to get us out of the way.”

To get him out of the way – he was pretty sure Thanos hadn’t much cared about Natasha one way or another – but since it all led to the same outcome that part wasn’t important.

“Six years ago I would have done anything for this,” Steve said. “Anything. But right now I’m in a war with an enemy I couldn’t have dreamed of back then. I have people depending on me. I have a team. I have friends and a woman I love. I also have an unimaginable number of people who are going to die if I don’t get back there, and that’s if time travel works the way Nat and I are hoping it does. I don’t have time to keep playing is you is or is you ain’t with the SSR, and that was before whatever the hell this is!” He jabbed a finger down at the printout.

Peggy was on her feet too. “None of it is real, you idiot! You’re smart enough to realize that, even if you aren’t acting like it right now. I don’t know what happened to you between getting on the Valkyrie and now, but I don’t think you do, either!”

“What happened is that the god damned Tesseract ate Schmidt up and then I flew his plane into an ice bank just off Greenland and then I drowned, Peggy!” Steve snapped. “And the last thing I thought about was you. And then I woke up sixty-seven years later and everyone I knew was dead but you. My whole world was dead. Do you have any idea what that’s like? Do you want to know how everyone I know died? Because I do. Phillips broke his neck horseback riding in ’57; his ranch hands went looking when he didn’t come back that afternoon and found him. Monty died of terminal liver cancer in ’86. Gabe came back to work for SHIELD and got shot on the job in ’65. Dernier got to live a long and happy life and then fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck in 2004. Jim was a Congressional rep for California for thirty years and then died in office in ’93. Dum-Dum died the day before I woke up in 2012 and they didn’t tell me until after the funeral. Howard was fucking assassinated in 1991; he was beaten to death and it was covered up with a car crash. They all died. Everyone died. I woke up and everyone I knew was gone except you. Everything I knew was gone. There was nothing left. There was barely a Steve Rogers left, because everyone remembered Captain America, not me.”

Peggy was white to the lips, her eyes wide. “And me?” she demanded. “What about me?”

Steve shut his eyes and then sat down heavily, rubbing his hands over his face. He suddenly felt heavy with exhaustion, sick with grief and weariness and the stress of just being here, when he had thought he had packed all of it away years ago. After a moment of hesitation, Peggy came around the side of the table and perched on it next to him, reaching out to lay a hand on his shoulder. Steve flinched briefly away from her, but she didn’t let go.

“Steve,” she said gently. “What about me?”

“When I came out of the ice in ’12,” he said eventually, his voice hoarse, “and they told me you were still alive, I was so happy. I didn’t even care that – I just felt so lucky to still have you. For four years.” He passed a hand beneath his eyes, unsurprised to find his cheeks wet with tears. “I buried you two years ago in London. I wasn’t there when – I was in New York with my team.” Watching the Avengers come crumbling down around him and wondering why no one else seemed to realize what was coming, just before the rest of his world had come down with it.

“It’s not just that my whole world burned when I wasn’t there to see it,” Steve managed to say. “It’s not just losing everything I had – almost everything that made me me. It’s – when I was growing up, before the serum, I was sick all the time. You’ve seen my medical records – the real ones, I mean. When you’re that sick – when you’re that sick all the time – you stop thinking about the future, because you’re probably not going to have one. My dad didn’t live to see 25, but that was mustard gas. I was just…me. When I got the serum, that was the first time I started thinking that I might actually have a future. A week, next Saturday, at the Stork Club, right?” He tried to smile and couldn’t. “That burned too.”

“Steve…”

Steve put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. “I knew what I was doing,” he said, his voice thick; he was crying and the tears were dripping down onto the metal table and crinkling the edges of the printout. “It was my choice. You’d have done the same thing – so would Bucky, Howard, Dum-Dum, any of us. It’s just that no one else would have had to live with it afterwards, and I do.”

“Steve,” Peggy said again, and her hands moved across his back and shoulders, like she was intending to pull him into an embrace.

He didn’t let her, though she didn’t take her hands off him. “I can’t do this again, Peggy,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t, I won’t. I loved you – I still love you. But I love Natasha too and I’ll marry her if that’s what she wants when we get back. But I can’t do this again. I can’t – I won’t do it to you, I won’t do it to myself, I won’t do it to Nat. And I swear to God that that’s the truth.”

He felt her go still at the mention of Natasha, but before she could say anything, there was a distantly muffled boom audible even this far below the surface of the earth. Wherever the V-2 rocket had hit had been close enough to Whitehall that they could hear it even here, with a very faint rattle of the glass in the two-way mirror.

“Bloody hell,” Peggy said, with the exhausted fury of someone who had lived through the Blitz in 1940 and 1941 and the V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks that had begun the previous year.

And then the lights went out.

Natasha had been asleep when the V-2 hit – not asleep, not really, but the light, wary doze of the spy or the soldier, sitting alone in an interrogation room with her head pillowed on her arms, which were handcuffed to the table. She came all the way awake immediately at the muffled boom, not startling upright but opening her eyes while still keeping her body slack. She knew bombs well enough, but she hadn’t been through enough rocket attacks to have a good idea of where it might have struck to be audible in SSR headquarters. She didn’t particularly want to go through enough rocket attacks to know that.

She did sit up when the lights went out about thirty seconds later, just close enough to the sound of the V-2 impact that it could have been a result of the power lines going down. Natasha thought that the delay between might have been too long for that, but she didn’t know 1940s electrical grids well enough to be certain.

She was certain of it when the door opened, revealing that the hallway outside was just as pitch-dark as the inside of the interrogation room before it closed again. The steps that followed were the light pad of a medium-sized woman in stocking feet wearing a uniform skirt – she would have taken her shoes off to not give herself away with the click of her heels – and Natasha smiled thinly in the darkness before the sharp tip of a knife pricked the skin just behind her right ear.

“You have five minutes before the generators kick in,” the other woman said – American accent, but that didn’t mean anything; Natasha’s accent was American too. She was also certain she had heard the other woman speak before, but their relative isolation meant that she couldn’t put a face and name to the voice. “Talk fast.”

“You haven’t asked me any questions yet,” Natasha said. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just scream. And don’t say you’ll kill me. Use that finka and then you’ll have a corpse to deal with and a lot of questions to answer. I don’t think you want that. Corpses are so messy and inconvenient.”

Finka was Russian slang for “Finnish knife,” the weapon of choice for Russian criminals since the early part of the 20th century – that was to say, now. A version had been adapted by the Soviet army during the Second World War and was still in common use amongst civilians in the 21st century; Natasha had a couple in various gear caches around the world. She was betting that the other woman would recognize the term too, since a real American probably wouldn’t. Maybe wouldn’t. There was always the chance that she was a real SSR agent who wanted to question Natasha without the niceties that Captain America’s wife got, though Natasha suspected Peggy Carter wouldn’t let anyone else hold a knife on her when she could do so herself. She also suspected that anyone with half a brain had Peggy in with Steve right now. Presumably not at knifepoint.

Switching to Russian instead of English would have been a dead giveaway that she was an amateur. If anyone was walking by, the sound of a foreign language like Russian would make ears perk up and heads turn, even if the words weren’t clear. The sound of two women speaking English, no matter how quietly, wouldn’t have the same result. They weren’t whispering, either; the sibilants carried and drew attention. Natasha wasn’t sure how soundproof the interrogation rooms were in 1945, though she suspected the answer was “good for 1945, not as good as in 2018.”

The other woman traced an X on the back of her neck with the tip of one finger, her manicured nail scratching lightly at Natasha’s skin. Natasha couldn’t return the gesture with her hands cuffed to the table, but she said calmly, “Which are you?”

She had seen enough of the women in the SSR to know that most of them were young, like the bulk of servicewomen in the armed forces; Peggy Carter at 27 was on the older side and Natasha’s 33 unusual. It would have been unusual in the Red Room too; Black Widows didn’t have a long life expectancy and she doubted Department X’s matryoshki were all that better. Worse, probably, with the war on. Projecting calm and seniority would, hopefully, go a long way.

There was an instant of hesitation, and then the other woman said, “Irina.”

“I’m Natalia.”

“What are you doing with Captain Rogers?”

“Screwing him,” Natasha said bluntly, then had a moment’s concern that the term wasn’t used that way in the 1945. It must have been, though, or at least the context made it clear, because Irina made a noise of bemused acknowledgment.

“I tried that once. It didn’t work.”

“I’m not surprised.” Natasha shoved everything else aside, including her faint embarrassment at even bringing Steve into this, and let her focus narrow like the blade of a knife. She became the woman she wanted Irina to think she was, the woman she would have been if ten years ago she hadn’t made that split-second decision to trust Clint Barton. “He needs a woman, not a girl and not a nervous virgin.”

“Stuck-up bitch,” Irina muttered under her breath after her initial tensing at the insult to her. The comment wasn’t aimed at Natasha; she had taken a guess based on what she had seen of Peggy Carter and the other women of the SSR and had apparently guessed right.

It wasn’t something Steve would have noticed, even as observant as he was. Not only had Peggy Carter gone to a Swiss finishing school in the 1930s, but she was college-educated – if Natasha remembered correctly, she had a degree in French literature from Oxford, the kind of thing that was appropriate for a well-bred young woman to have – and had had the glamorous experience of serving at both Bletchley Park and in the Special Operations Executive before she had been transferred to the SSR. She was also older than most of the other women and outside the usual chain of command in the FANY (which was her branch of the service), the WAAF, the Wrens, or the WACs; she didn’t wear any insignia on her uniform apart from her SSR pins. She didn’t have all that much to do with the other women of the SSR, apart from the codebreakers; she socialized mainly with Howard Stark and the Howling Commandos. She had also set her cap for Steve Rogers almost immediately upon his return to the SSR in late November of 1943; Natasha had quietly found out from Rose Roberts, during one of the few opportunities she had had to talk with anyone in the SSR, what Howard had meant when he had said that at least she hadn’t shot Steve this time. She actually had shot him, or the shield anyway since Steve had gotten it up in time, when she had caught another woman at the SSR kissing him.

It was the kind of situation that was guaranteed to create resentment amongst many of the other women in the SSR, all of whom were younger and the bulk of whom were American or the kind of British that didn’t have Peggy’s posh public school accent. Steve, raised in a Brooklyn tenement and who could have no more gone to college in 1943 than he could have flown to the moon by flapping his arms, was an officer mostly by sheer good luck; he was a lot closer in background to the enlisted men and women in the SSR than to Peggy. Natasha knew from experience that when you spent a lot of time deep cover, it was only too easy to lose track of yourself – to make friends and enemies among the people around you, to pick up their loves and hates. Or dislikes, at least, and if Irina had made a pass at Steve –

“You expect me to believe that you’re so good that you convinced him to throw over Peggy Carter and marry you, even though he’s been hung up on her since 1943,” the other woman said scornfully.

“No,” Natasha said. “I convinced him to lie to Peggy Carter about marrying me.”

That got the expected moment of hesitation before Irina said slowly, “I wasn’t told you were coming in.”

“I wasn’t told there was already an operative here,” Natasha said. Moving painstakingly slowly so that she didn’t rattle the handcuff chain, she slid her hand into the sleeve of her blouse, where she had put the hairpins she had palmed before they searched her. She had kept them out of sight through sleight of hand; easy as taking candy from a baby. The SSR was very, very good, but Natasha had been doing this longer than they had existed. She let the sound of her voice cover the tiny tick of the pins moving the tumblers in the lock. “I’ve got Rogers right where I want him; I don’t need anyone else screwing that up.”

“You’re in my henhouse,” Irina said, her voice a little sharp. “The House knows about Rogers being back. Or didn’t you tell them?”

“I lost most of my gear a while ago,” Natasha said, calm and a little bored, letting the other woman fill in the blanks.

“There’s already an operation to extract Rogers back to the House in motion, with at least a full hand coming to London,” Irina said. “If you ruin it –”

“If I ruin it?” Natasha said scornfully, then used the same term for what was presumably Department X that Irina had. Matryoshka, doll, dollhouse…House. “I can get Rogers to walk out and think it was his own idea, instead of the House coming in guns blazing, which is what it’s going to have to be if you want to get him out of the SSR.”

“You’re handcuffed to a table.”

Natasha shrugged, making the knife prick her skin and open a thin line that trickled hot blood down her neck. “Because the House overreacted when you told them about Rogers and got the SSR’s attention. They’ll get over it when they realize Rogers doesn’t know anything.” She smiled thinly, though she knew the other woman couldn’t see it. “And neither do I. They want to believe him, Carter and Stark and Phillips, and Allied High Command wants Captain America back in action.”

“Carter wants your head on a pike for snaffling Rogers.”

“And the harder she pushes about it, the crazier she’ll look,” Natasha said mildly, muffling the sound of the handcuffs coming free by closing her hand over them.

“The colonel won’t put up with a hysterical woman,” Irina said, sounding briefly intrigued before she continued, “Your mission wasn’t to turn Rogers; no one knew he was still alive. The House doesn’t reward initiative.”

“No, it rewards results,” Natasha said. That wasn’t entirely true in the 21st century and it might not be now, but it was the kind of thing a Widow – a matryoshka – would want to believe. “Tell the House to wait. It’ll look better for Rogers to walk out, and maybe I can convince him to bring Stark with him then.”

“I can’t do that,” Irina said. “By the time I can get a message to Lyusya the task force will already be here. And I don’t know you,” she added suspiciously, like she had just realized that at no point had Natasha told her how she had found Steve. “Where was your last post?”

“Abroad,” Natasha said. “I don’t know you, either.” She waited a beat, then said, “I had a chance to move on Rogers and I took it, same as you. Only when I did it, it worked. That’s all you need to know. And by the way,” she added gently, “you’re out of time.”

She had been counting in her head since Irina had come in and now she pushed off with one foot against the floor, turning in the same smooth movement and ducking the reflexive sweep of the knife. Natasha took the shallow cut it left along the side of her throat without flinching, grabbing the other woman’s wrist and twisting until the knife came free even as she caught Irina’s free hand in hers and brought it around behind her back. She slammed Irina facedown against the table, catching the knife as the other woman released it and touching the tip just behind her ear.

“I’ve let you talk out of respect for the House,” Natasha said, “but if you ever pull a knife on me again, it will be the last thing you ever do.”

“Bitch!”

“Yes,” Natasha agreed. “But a bitch who’s got Captain America between her legs. Don’t forget that.”

Irina snorted, the sound slightly muffled by her awkward position. “Is this love, Mrs. Rogers?”

“Love is for children,” Natasha told her. “He owes me a debt.”

Irina bucked under her, trying to get free, and Natasha leaned on her to keep her down. “Do we have an understanding?”

“Bitch!” Irina said again, and then broke her cover and repeated it in Russian. “Cyka!”

“Don’t be a baby,” Natasha told her. “What is this, your first assignment? You’re embarrassing us. Do we have an understanding? Do we?”

“Yes,” the other woman grated out through clenched teeth.

“Thank you for your cooperation.” She flipped the switchblade closed and patted Irina’s cheek before she let her up. “If you hurry, you might make it back to wherever you’re supposed to be before the generators kick in…maybe.”

Natasha kept her knife.

She could have kept Irina there until the lights came back on, which they did about thirty seconds after the other woman had left, but a real Department X operative wouldn’t have risked her cover. If Irina had made a pass at Steve back in 1943, then he could probably identify her, though Natasha knew that in 1943 as well as 2018 – well, up to 2016, anyway – there had been plenty of women throwing themselves at Captain America. He had never seemed much interested in any of them – not in the men, either, though there had been fewer of those since it had never been public knowledge that Captain America was bisexual.

Because he’s been in love with you for six years, apparently.

From 1943 to 1945 – the first time – it would have been Peggy Carter he had been in love with, of course, and that was the one woman in the SSR they knew wasn’t a matryoshka. Well, not the only woman; the cryptanalyst Hana Korematsu, a Nisei from Washington State who had two brothers in the 442nd and the rest of her family in Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho, definitely wasn’t. Her niece was the Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2018, oddly enough, and a staunch opponent of the Sokovia Accords.

Natasha sat down on the edge of the table next to the discarded handcuffs as the bare bulb in the interrogation room flickered back on again, resting the switchblade on her knee as she rubbed a hand over her face, shedding the last remnants of the woman she had been pretending to be for Irina. She was a little shaky with it despite her years of experience, because she could so easily have been that woman, even after leaving the Red Room. Jasper Sitwell, who had been less subtle than he liked to think, had once suggested that she stop trying to cut out the middleman and fuck Steve herself, with what Natasha had later suspected was the presumption that a former Red Room operative could be bought by Hydra and bring a smitten Captain America with her.

Bastard, Natasha thought, but he was long dead, and she sighed and let the resentment go. She wasn’t that woman; that was the part that mattered.

The cuts on her neck, when she touched her fingers to them, were shallow, but the blood would show against her dyed hair. That would mean questions she didn’t particularly want to answer until she had spoken with Steve. She wet her fingers and scrubbed the blood from her skin and hair as best she could, trying to decide by feel if it had gotten onto the collar of her blouse.

The knife turned out to be an American-made Schrade M2 switchblade, standard issue amongst U.S. Army paratroopers and used by some SSR field operatives. According to Steve, the SSR liked to recruit from paratroopers when they could get them, which wasn’t often since paratroopers were usually fanatically loyal to their units, on the grounds that anyone crazy enough to jump out of an airplane into enemy territory was probably crazy enough to take the SSR’s shenanigans in stride. It was a single-edged utility knife rather than a double-edged combat knife; paratroopers carried it to quickly free themselves from their parachutes when necessary. Closed, it was only four inches long, small enough to slip into a pocket, which couldn’t be said of a combat knife like an Army M3, Marine ka-bar, or British commando Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.

Natasha flicked it open to check the blade – razor-sharp and carefully maintained – then closed it again, tucked the knife into her bra for Steve to find later, and said out loud, “Shit.”

Power cuts weren’t uncommon these days – in fact they were extremely common – but they weren’t always connected to rocket strikes. The SSR had generators specifically so that they wouldn’t be incapacitated when there was an outage and by now Peggy knew exactly how long they took to kick in, which was how she knew the pause between the sound of the V-2 strike and the power going out was too long, as was the fact that the generators didn’t respond within the next minute.

She still had her hands on Steve’s shoulders, feeling him go still as he registered the discrepancy too. He was probably fine; he could see in the dark, or at least in much lower light levels than an unenhanced human. Peggy let go of him to find her lighter and flick it open, the tiny flame illuminating his face in the close dark of the room. It made him look older and more tired, emphasizing the hollows of cheeks that weren’t quite as youthful as they had been when he had first come out of Vita-Ray machine in 1943 – more like the Steve she remembered from before the serum, in fact, which was a rather startling thought.

“It wasn’t me,” he said, suddenly alert again despite the lingering tears on his cheeks.

They both looked over at the door as it opened. Someone in the hallway outside had an electric torch, but beyond that it was obvious the lights were out there too; Peggy’s lighter and the backlighting of the torch concealed the newcomer’s identity until Colonel Phillips said, “You know about this?”

There was a moment of thought from Steve before he said, “I don’t know the date, but there was a direct hit on a church near St. Pancras in February or March. Has that one happened yet?”

“No,” Phillips said, then, “Stay with him.” He stepped away as Dugan and Morita came in, both with electric torches of their own, and Morita pulled the door shut behind them.

Steve slumped back in his chair, rubbing his hands over his face and scrubbing the last of his tears away. Peggy tucked her lighter away as she took the torch Dugan offered her.

He leaned against the side of the table and looked down at Steve. “Any of that true?”

“Jesus,” Steve said wearily. “Do you people ever stop?”

“You’re the one who taught us not to,” Dugan reminded him, and Steve looked away.

“Come up with a believable story next time,” Morita suggested.

“Well, if Nat and I had been planning this, we would have,” Steve said, annoyed. “Instead of getting slapped out of the middle of a fight with a lunatic who wanted to wipe out half the universe.”

“You still on about that?”

“It’s the truth.”

“You know there’s never been a Japanese-American elected to federal office,” Morita said, his mouth twisting.

Steve glanced up at him. “Hana Korematsu’s niece Reiko – her brother Yoshi’s kid, the one who’s a staff sergeant in the 442nd – is Speaker of the House right now. Second in line to the presidency,” he added with the shadow of a grin.

Morita blinked once, blinked again, said, “Huh,” and then scowled and added, “Yoshi Korematsu doesn’t have a kid. Or a wife.”

“She was born in 1957, so he’s got some time. The congresswoman’s got four older sibs, too.”

“You know you can’t prove any of that, right?” Morita said.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Steve said, sounding annoyed again.

“Or any of the rest of what you said, either.”

“Obviously.” Steve rubbed a hand over his face. “Aside from a couple of insane conspiracy theorists who wouldn’t believe a word I said anyway, I usually don’t have to explain my own backstory to anyone, so this is new to me.”

“Conspiracy theorists?” Peggy asked.

“Same kinds of guys who think the CIA killed JFK or that the Battle of New York was an inside job – none of that means anything to you.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Peggy said, and when Steve flicked a wary glance upwards at her, added, “I’ve heard of New York before.”

“The CIA’s the Central Intelligence Agency,” Steve said wearily. “Formed after the war, it absorbed a lot of the OSS. John F. Kennedy was president in, uh, 1961 to 1963, he’s alive now; he was assassinated in ’63. The Battle of New York’s another name for the Chitauri invasion in 2012.”

“So where do you rank on that list?” Dugan asked in a chummy kind of way.

“Just above MKUltra, because I’m real,” Steve said grumpily.

“Which is –”

“Human experimentation the CIA spent twenty years doing and then frantically trying to cover up,” Steve said, his mouth twisting. “Couple of Rebirth scientists worked on it – not Howard.”

“And where does your marriage fall on that list?”

“What does my marriage have to do with any of this?” Steve said, sounding exhausted.

“Quite a lot,” Peggy said. “Especially if you’re – what was the word you used earlier? Brain-wiped?”

“Brainwashed,” Dugan supplied. “Funny word.”

“I’m not brainwashed,” Steve snapped, “I’m not a double, I’m not lying. I don’t see how I can convince you of any of that since I don’t have any way of proving it, but it is the truth. For what it’s worth, most of it wasn’t fun for me, either.”

“And your wife?”

“What about my wife?” Steve demanded, his gaze flickering up towards Peggy again. He touched the wedding ring on his left hand as if to reassure himself.

Dugan stepped over to Peggy and put a hand on her arm, turning them both so that Steve wouldn’t be able to read their lips. It was a pointless gesture, since his serum-enhanced hearing meant that he would hear whatever they said anyway, but gestures mattered. Out of the corner of her eye Peggy saw Steve shake his head and look ostentatiously aside. Morita folded his arms over his chest and leaned back against the table, watching him.

“This isn’t going anywhere,” Dugan said. “Maybe if you’d been able to push him a couple minutes ago, before the lights went, but right now we’re back to same old, same old.”

They both looked over at Steve again. He looked back, his irritation plain on his handsome features, which were a little sepulchral in the light of the two torches. Older? Peggy asked herself silently, not for the first time in the past few days. Six years was just that awkward amount of time to show on some people and not on others; she couldn’t look at photographs of herself from 1939 without feeling as if she was looking at a complete stranger. On the other hand, six years ago put everyone in England very firmly before the beginning of the war, so perhaps that wasn’t the best judgment to use. Seventy years definitely would show – on anyone but Captain America, since Howard had once quietly told her that he wasn’t entirely sure that Steve Rogers would age normally anymore. He barely even scarred.

Peggy went back to the table and sorted through the folder for a moment before she found what she had been looking for. She flipped the sketchbook open and slid it across the table to Steve, shining the torch down at it so that he could see.

“You went through my sketchbook?” he demanded.

“What part of ‘suspected of being a double agent’ don’t you understand?” she said. She tapped a finger against the page. “Identify these people, please.”

It was one of the pages of faces and busts he had drawn. Steve shot her a betrayed look, then leaned over it and said, “Clint Barton, James Rhodes, Maria Hill, Sam Wilson, Wanda Maximoff –” as Peggy’s finger moved from one sketch to another. “Thor, Nat, King T’Challa, Bucky Barnes –”

He hesitated, shut his eyes briefly, and said, “Tony Stark –”

Peggy’s head shot up. “Stark?”

Steve shook his head, but it was in frustration, not denial. “He’s Howard’s son. And he hates me, for the record; I haven’t seen him in two years since we…tried to kill each other.”

Peggy’s eyebrows were still raised towards her hairline. It wasn’t an enormous surprise to hear that Howard had a child, given his general tomcat ways, but it was still something of a shock. Not to mention – “Tried to kill each other?”

Steve’s jaw tightened. “It’s a long story.”

“Shorten it,” Morita suggested.

He shook his head again, but said, “Tony and I were – friends, I guess, before; we worked together. He’s got a suit…that’s not important.”

Peggy guessed that meant something other than the product of a Savile Row tailor’s shop, but didn’t interrupt him.

“I found out something about how Howard and Mrs. Stark – Howard’s wife, Tony’s mom –”

“Howard got married?” Peggy interrupted. “To a woman?”

“In 1965,” Steve said, his mouth twitching a little. “Her name was Maria Collins Carbonell; I don’t know much about her, since she died twenty years before I came out of the ice. Tony was born in 1970.” He rubbed at his forehead before he went on. “I found out something about how Howard and Mrs. Stark had died and kept it from him. Tony found out and, uh, took it badly.” Steve bit his lip. “There was a guy, a Sokovian with a grudge against us, who’d set it all up. He – anyway, it didn’t go well. Tony’s the one who took the shield. Threw Howard in my face about it, too.” His jaw worked again and he looked away. “Happy now?”

Peggy exchanged a look with Morita and Dugan. Like everything else Steve had said, there was no way to confirm the story, though it had the ring of truth about it. But like everything else, it was obvious he was leaving some important element out.

Natasha? she wondered; two years ago put the date around what both Steve and Natasha had claimed for their marriage. As well as what Steve had said about Peggy herself.

I buried you two years ago.

No, it’s nonsense; he made it all up, Peggy told herself firmly. Or someone made it up for him. The fact that 2016 seemed to have been a busy year made it seem even likelier than it had already.

She tapped a finger against the sketchbook again to get Steve’s attention and said, “These others?”

His gaze flickered warily up at her, but he named the other three portraits on the page as Shuri, Okoye, and Nick Fury. Peggy flipped the page over, to the big humanoid monster with the gauntlet.

“That’s Thanos,” Steve said. “The guy we were fighting.”

“Right,” Morita drawled. “How was that working out?”

“Well, he kicked the shit out of me and then slapped me back seventy-three years in time, so not great.” His jaw worked again, and he added, with anger rather than sarcasm this time, “He probably killed Tony, too.”

Who might or might not actually exist.

Peggy flipped pages, ignoring the interested looks Morita and Dugan both shot at the sketches of Natasha Rogers in varying states of undress – which made Steve go red when he realized Peggy had seen them – and the sketches of people they knew. “These?” she asked, pointing to more monsters.

“The aliens Thanos dropped on Wakanda,” he said.

Peggy looked at Morita and Dugan and rolled her eyes before asking, “What were you doing in Wakanda?”

“Fighting aliens,” Steve said dryly. “We were actually doing fine before the big guy showed up.”

“I’m sure,” Peggy said chillingly. She turned past the next few pages – buildings, Natasha, Howard, Natasha again, Peggy herself, more portraits of some of the same people he had identified earlier, Natasha in her underwear – to the last page, the one with the hourglass symbol on it. “What is this?”

Steve’s gaze flickered upwards again, but before he had a chance to lie to them there was a faint whine and the lights came back on. Peggy and Morita both clicked their torches off and Peggy set hers aside on the table, then tapped the page again. “What is this?”

Steve rubbed a hand over his forehead. “It’s something Nat and I were talking about. It’s not important.”

“I’ll decide what’s important,” Peggy said. “What is it?”

He shook his head.

Peggy flipped pages back until she came to the drawing of Natasha in her skin-tight tactical gear, with the same hourglass symbol on her waist. Peggy pointed to it and said, “Is it this?”

Steve sighed. “Yes.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just a symbol.”

“That you didn’t want to say anything about five seconds ago?” Dugan asked. “That has something to do with your wife?”

“Your so-called wife?” Peggy said.

“She is my wife,” Steve insisted. “It’s just a symbol. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Then why is it in your notebook?”

Steve ran his hands back through his hair and didn’t respond.

Peggy flipped back to the drawing of Natasha in her underwear, tapped a finger against the faint X in the corner of the page without saying anything, then left the sketchbook where it was and picked up the strip of Typex paper she had shown Steve earlier.

PROCEED TO LONDON RDV TASK FORCE SPARROWHAWK MISSION TAKE CAPTAIN STEVEN G ROGERS ALIVE AT ALL COSTS RPT AT ALL COSTS X

Steve’s jaw worked briefly as he looked at it, then his eyes narrowed as Peggy’s finger indicated the X at the end of the message.

“That X is on all of the white whale communiques we’ve decrypted so far,” Peggy said, pulling some of the others out of the folder and showing them to him. “Hana and Rose thought that it might be punctuation at first, or maybe a signature, but it’s not, is it? What is it?”

Steve bit his lip. “I’ve never seen these messages before,” he said, not answering the question.

“Captain, I’m sure you’re aware how suspicious it looks when you keep –”

They all looked up as the door opened; Peggy had her pistol out a moment later, pointed at the woman who had just come in. She had been expecting Colonel Phillips; she hadn’t been expecting Natasha Rogers, who was supposed to be handcuffed to a table in another interrogation room. A locked interrogation room.

“Steve,” she said.

“Nat.” He started to stand up; Dugan put his hands on his shoulders and shoved him back down. Steve shot an annoyed look at him, but didn’t try to stand again. Not that all three of them could have stopped him if he had really wanted to stand up, let alone leave.

“Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere else right now, Mrs. Rogers?” Peggy demanded.

Natasha held up her left hand, dangling the open handcuffs from one finger, and said, “I need to talk to my husband.”

“That is not going to –”

Steve’s nostrils flared and he said, “Are you bleeding?”

This time when he stood up he ignored Dugan’s attempt to keep him in place. Peggy grabbed his arm as he made to step past her and he stopped, his expression torn.

“Don’t,” she said softly.

For a moment Steve hesitated, then he pulled free and went to Natasha. It left Peggy standing with her hand still upraised, her fingers still curled to hold onto him, before she closed her hand into a fist and let it fall to her side.

“I’m okay,” Natasha told Steve quietly as he put a hand up to push her dyed blonde hair aside, revealing the thin lines of a pair of cuts along the side of her neck. They were shallow, but were fresh enough that they were still bleeding sluggishly to stain the collar of her white blouse. “That thing we were talking about? I had a little visit while the lights were out.”

“What thing?” Peggy demanded. She had to adjust her aim slightly so that she wouldn’t hit Steve if she had to pull the trigger, but even if she did he would probably be fine; she had seen his enhanced healing at work before.

“Will you please put the gun down?” Steve said, his gaze flickering towards her.

“No. What thing?”

Natasha looked a question at Steve. He nodded slightly in response, the same spare gesture Peggy had seen him use a hundred times before with the Howling Commandos. Natasha frowned back at him, he arched an eyebrow, and after a further moment of hesitation she nodded too. She flicked a glance at the two-way mirror and Steve shook his head to tell her the observation room was unoccupied; Peggy didn’t think that even his enhanced vision could see through it, but he would be able to hear if there was anyone else in the other room.

Peggy, Dugan, and Morita watched this brief exchange in mild fascination. They had all been on the receiving end of that officer’s nod before, because he might have come to it late and irregularly, but Steve Rogers was a good officer and he knew his people. Or he had, at least. Right now Peggy didn’t know anymore.

Steve looked over at Peggy, hesitated for an instant at whatever he saw in her face – good, she wasn’t feeling particularly generous towards him at the moment – and said, “You’re going to want to get Colonel Phillips for this, and maybe Howard.”

Peggy caught Morita’s eye and jerked her head at the door. He went, moving past Steve and Natasha as Steve drew her away from the door and over to the table. Peggy kept her pistol trained on Natasha as Steve sat her down on the table and checked the cuts on her neck again. Natasha dropped the handcuffs on the table and said, “Steve, I’m fine. I made her do it, since otherwise there wouldn’t be any proof.”

“That’s proof?” Dugan asked.

“Who’s her?” Peggy demanded.

Steve looked a question at Natasha, who shook her head. “I think I’ve heard her voice before, but only once or twice.” She pushed his hands gently away, touched the cuts herself, and said, “Reminds me of Washington, hmm?”

“Christ, I hope not,” Steve said grimly.

“You’re right,” Natasha said, smiling briefly up at him, and his expression softened a little in response. “No one’s tried to shoot you in the head even once today.”

Steve’s gaze flickered over to Peggy’s pistol. “Not yet.”

“What happened in Washington?” Dugan asked in a friendly kind of way.

“Almost got shot in the head by rogue government agents,” Steve said. “A couple of times.”

“You did get shot four times,” Natasha said.

“Yeah, in the torso. Not the head. That one would probably be fatal even for me.” He touched the spots for Dugan and Peggy to see, then said, “This one was actually a knife.” Steve looked over as the door opened again, admitting Morita, Phillips, and Howard, the latter with a couple of grease stains on his face and his sleeves rolled up. Assassinated, Peggy remembered Steve saying, and a chill went down her spine despite her best intentions to go on believing that it was so much nonsense. Beaten to death and it was covered up with a car crash.

Peggy had seen what it looked like when men were beaten to death.

If Howard saw the expression on her face, he didn’t show it. “Someone sabotaged the power – they might have got lucky and gotten away with it if we hadn’t just rejigged the backups after Steve came in, because everything would have kicked in normally otherwise,” he said to Peggy, then registered her gun and blinked.

She lowered the weapon and holstered it as Phillips’ gaze swept over Steve and Natasha. He looked grimly resigned by the other woman’s presence, since presumably Morita had warned him when he had found him. His sharp gaze took in the sketchbook and Typex printouts on the table, the discarded handcuffs, and the blood on Natasha’s collar before going back to Steve.

“Rogers, do you have any idea how much easier my life was while you were dead?”

“Sorry, sir,” Steve said, not sounding it.

“Well, get on with it.”

Steve took a deep breath, straightening up from where he had been leaning against the table, then said, “You’ve got a mole in the SSR. A woman.”

Phillips blinked, nonplused.

“Really,” Peggy said, the word too flat to be a question. “Me, I suppose?”

“No, an American,” Natasha said, glancing at her. “I didn’t see her and I didn’t recognize her voice, but I don’t know most of the personnel here.”

“Why would Hydra try and sneak a woman agent in here?” Dugan said doubtfully. “Not really Schmidt’s style.”

“Not Hydra,” Steve said. “The Soviets, their deep science division.” He looked at Morita and Dugan and added, “Remember Lebedev and his team in Poland back in ’44 – last year?” he corrected himself. “They worked for Soviet deep science, but we always knew the Winter Guard wasn’t the only team they were running, the same way the Howlies aren’t the only team we’re running.”

“Well, the question still stands,” Peggy said. “Why would the Soviets try and sneak a woman agent in here? And why a woman?”

“Probably when they started they just wanted to keep an eye on what you were doing,” Natasha said. “As for why a woman – because, Agent Carter, people don’t see women unless someone makes them. A woman can go places a man can’t, especially right now, and no one will suspect her of being anything other than another pretty face. You and I both know that.”

Peggy felt a muscle in her jaw work. She did know that, and the knowledge of it usually grated on her. There was something about Natasha’s coolly impersonal tone that made it worse, like that unfairness was just another weapon in her arsenal. She remembered Jones saying that Natasha was so exactly Steve’s type that she might have been made for him and couldn’t see it in the other woman’s icy calm.

“The two of you want to consider explaining instead of just making wild accusations?” Phillips asked.

“You’ve got a Soviet mole in the SSR,” Steve said.

“You said that already.”

“A woman from a program called Otdel – Department – X, part of the Soviet deep science division,” he went on. “Deep cover, probably as an American enlisted servicewoman – a WAC, probably, I don’t think we have enough civilians for her to be one of them.”

“Leviathan’s Department X,” Phillips said, and Peggy looked at him in surprise; he clearly recognized the name, even though it didn’t mean anything to her. “I thought that was a myth.”

“It’s real enough,” Natasha said. “I don’t know exactly what it looks like right now, but in our time it’s called the Red Room.” Her jaw worked briefly.

“Leviathan?” Peggy asked Phillips.

“The NKVD’s deep science division,” he said. “It’s a covert organization inside their covert intelligence organization – you’re right, Rogers, they were the ones running Lebedev and his team. There have been rumors for years that they were up to some nasty stuff, including in Department X. Mind control, psychic powers, genetic manipulation – and good old-fashioned assassinations. Story is that they take little kids, train ‘em to be perfect soldiers.”

“That one’s true,” Natasha said. “They’ve worked on the others in the past, but the Red Room specializes in perfect soldiers, perfect spies. Department X does too.”

“So do we,” Howard pointed out mildly, and when they all looked at him, he gestured to Steve.

“Thanks,” Steve muttered.

“And you think one of these…perfect spies is undercover in the SSR?” Peggy asked. “That’s a rather extraordinary conclusion to come to, don’t you think?” Her fingers twitched and she wished briefly she hadn’t put her pistol away.

“The one here approached me when the power was out,” Natasha said. “She wanted to know what I was doing with Steve.”

“She have a reason to think you were going to cooperate with her?” Phillips asked, his gaze fixed on her.

Natasha took a deep breath. “She made me,” she said. “Probably when Steve and I were sparring the other day, since it’s the only time I’ve really been out. There’s a – a house style that’s fairly distinctive if you know what you’re looking at.”

“A house style,” Peggy said flatly. “A fighting style.”

“Yes.”

“And you have it because –”

“Because I’m not really from Ohio,” Natasha said. “Before I worked for SHIELD, I worked for another organization – it would be the NKVD now, but when I was there it was Russian Foreign Intelligence, Sluzhba vneshney razvedki, the SVR, and sometimes the FSB, Federal'naya sluzhba bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service.”

“I thought it was the KGB,” Steve said.

“The KGB went out with the Soviet Union in 1991, but I started there,” Natasha told him. “Everyone still thinks of the KGB, not the FSB or the SVR; it’s easier to say.” She looked back at Peggy and Phillips. “I was on loan from the Red Room. I defected to the United States in 2008, ten years ago.”

There was a long moment of silence before Peggy looked at Steve and said, “Did you know about this?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“And you lied to us.”

He looked a little pale, but nodded again. “Yes.”

“Why would you do that?” She winced as soon as the words were out; there was a plaintive note in her voice that she hated.

Steve couldn’t meet her eyes. “We didn’t think it was going to matter,” he said. “And it…confuses things.”

“In the future, Rogers, it matters,” Phillips said, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “We’ll get back to this later. What did you tell this mole, Mrs. Rogers?”

“That I was fucking Steve in order to convince him to defect after the war,” Natasha said, then looked quickly at Steve and added a little worriedly, “I did tell you that whatever I said probably wasn’t going to make you look very good.”

“This is not the worst thing anyone’s ever said about me,” Steve said. “I don’t think it’s even the worst thing anyone’s said about me today.”

“Yeah, buddy, you aren’t doing great on making yourself not look, uh, brainwashed,” Morita told him.

Howard looked interested. “Brainwashed?”

“Psychologically conditioned.”

“Later, Stark,” Phillips said. “I’m guessing you got something out of her too, Mrs. Rogers, even if it wasn’t her name, rank, and serial number.”

“Yes,” Natasha said. “There’s a team of operatives coming to London to kidnap Steve and take him to Russia; I’m guessing Department X wants to jumpstart their own super soldier project and they don’t want to risk losing Captain America again. She said there’s a full hand coming in, which means at least five people, maybe more. Her London contact is someone named Lyusya – probably short for Lyudmila, probably another undercover operative from Department X; there are so many women in the British and American armed forces right now that it would be easy to sneak a couple more in. The mole doesn’t have a way to contact Lyusya from inside the SSR, so the otdel only just found out about Steve, and they won’t know about me until your mole can get to her contact and she can tell them.”

“Our Task Force Sparrowhawk, possibly,” Peggy said, indicating the Typex printouts and relieved by the puzzle; having something substantial to think about helped a little with the stunned hurt. “They’re mad if they think they can get Captain Rogers out of the SSR.”

“Maybe not,” Howard said. “It’s just a building. A really, really secure building, but it’s just a building. No building’s impregnable.”

“The women they have in England have probably been here for years,” Natasha said. “Under normal circumstances, they would just stay where they are until they’re demobbed after the war ends and then go back to Moscow with everything they’ve learned, but Department X wants Steve badly enough that they’re willing to blow all or most of their operatives at once to get him. Getting their hands on a real super soldier would be worth it. Their super soldier project only had one success and that wasn’t until the 1980s – obviously they don’t know that yet.”

Steve dug the side of his thumb into the skin between his eyes, looking tired but unsurprised, then leaned over and whispered something in her ear. She shook her head in response and he sat back.

“I thought you were worried about changing things,” Phillips said to Steve.

“I am,” Steve said grimly. “The problem is that it stopped being up to me about the minute I got here. I don’t want to get so in my head about it that in trying to keep something bad from happening, I make it get worse anyway because as far as anyone else knows, this is just how it is.” He and Natasha exchanged a look before Steve added, “This is definitely not something that happened originally.”

“Mmm. You have any idea who this woman is?” Phillips asked Natasha.

“She told me that her name is Irina,” Natasha said, “but I assume she’s not using her real name here. I never do.”

“There are four Irenes and an Eirene in the SSR,” Howard said. “And an Iris. And two Eileens. But one of them is English – Irish, sorry, Steve.” They all looked at him and he said, “What?”

“And she said she made a pass at Steve once,” Natasha said.

They all looked at Steve, who flushed.

“Do I even want to ask?” Peggy said. She could think of one Irene in the SSR who had done more than just make a pass at Steve.

“That doesn’t narrow it down much,” Steve said, slowly going more and more red. “Two of the Irenes and both Eileens did. And…some other people.”

“Jesus,” Dugan muttered.

“I didn’t take any of them up on it,” he protested. “Unless you count – never mind.”

“Yes,” Peggy said. “I remember that occasion quite well.”

“Oh, is this the time you got shot?” Natasha said.

“I did not get shot,” Steve said.

“He got shot,” Howard said.

“In the shield!” Steve protested. “Not me!”

“All of you shut up,” Phillips said. “Allies or not, I’m not too happy about the idea of half a dozen Soviet spies running around London trying to get their hands on Captain America.”

“Well,” Steve said, looking unhappy, “I have a suggestion.”

Phillips made a get on with it gesture at him.

“Set a trap,” Steve said, and then grinned wearily, “You’ve already got your bait.”