Of Home Near

By the time Howard found her in his workshop, Peggy was already halfway through the three-quarters full bottle of brandy she had found in a cupboard. She winced as the lights came on, but all he said was, “That’s my stuff.”

“I’ll buy you another later.”

He dug out another glass and came over to sit beside her at the workbench, clearing away some of Steve’s gear before he splashed a couple fingers of amber liquid into the glass as Peggy shoved the bottle towards him. Then he slid Steve’s sketchbook free from under her hand, looking at the page where she had written out the timeline of everything Steve had told them. She had been drinking the whole time, so a few of the lines wavered badly, and the paper had crinkled where a few tears had dripped on it.

“Dum-Dum told me what happened,” Howard said eventually, running a finger down the page. He stopped on 1991, Howard & wife (Maria Collins Carbonell) murdered, his throat working silently. After a moment, he managed to say, “Do you believe him?”

“I admit some difficulty believing you would ever do something as pedestrian as marry a woman,” Peggy said.

“Hey, these genes deserve to be passed on. I could have a great kid.”

“Who grows up to attempt to murder Steve, apparently.”

He didn’t say anything to that, but eventually he said, “I don’t want to just notch him on my bedpost.”

“What?” Peggy said, confused by the non sequitur and wondering if she had had a bit too much brandy after all.

“Steve,” Howard clarified. “What you said before. I don’t want to just…notch him on my bedpost.”

Peggy looked over at him. She had had enough to drink that it left a soft, bright edge on everything, Howard included; after a moment she reached over and put her hand on top of his. “I always wanted Steve to say he loved me,” she said, trying to smile and mostly just feeling like she was going to cry instead. “I just didn’t expect the next thing he said to be that he loved someone else more.”

“Yeah,” Howard said. “Me too.”

Peggy swiped her thumb quickly beneath her eyes and took another gulp of her brandy. “Well, I suppose we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

“Yeah,” Howard said again, and knocked back his own brandy. “I guess we don’t.” He poured again, then asked, “You think it’s true?”

“I don’t know,” Peggy said. “I just don’t know.” She turned her glass in quarter-circles and admitted quietly, “He lied about Natasha.”

“Yeah,” Howard said for a third time. “I don’t like that part either.”

“You didn’t know?” Peggy asked him suddenly. “They were here for a week before Colonel Phillips and I arrived. You didn’t suspect at all –”

Howard poured more brandy into his own glass and held it up to the light, watching it for a few moments before answering. “I thought maybe – maybe – they weren’t actually married, just seeing each other,” he admitted reluctantly. “But I wasn’t sure and I wasn’t going to push it, since they both had the same story and it really didn’t seem like it was that important.”

“It’s important,” Peggy said quietly, but he didn’t seem to hear her.

“I mean, I knew he was crazy about her, he’s not that subtle about it.”

“Not that part,” she said, her voice sharp enough that he looked over at her, his brow crinkling a little in concern. Peggy had already spent more than enough time thinking about Steve and Natasha together, not helped by finding all the drawings Steve had made of her in her underwear and sometimes a good bit less than that. It was stupid and petty to be angry that Steve was sleeping with her; Peggy knew that he had been with girls during his USO days, though as far as she knew not while he had been with the SSR. That was different, though. He hadn’t married any of them.

He hadn’t lied for any of them.

“A Russian spy,” Peggy said bitterly, then remembered what else Natasha had said about Department X when she had been talking to Phillips and clarified, “A Russian assassin.”

She thought of that awful, blinding speed when Natasha had been sparring with Steve, that alien fluidity that let an ordinary woman keep up with a super soldier, and what that might look like in a real fight. In another woman Peggy might have admired it, because it was clear that Natasha’s speed and skill made up for some of the disadvantages most woman fighters had, but right now thinking about it just made her feel a little sick.

Maybe it had just been that one fight, but from the little Peggy had seen, Steve fought more like her now than he did like himself.

“Former,” Howard said, but he sounded a little uneasy about it too. “Former Russian spy.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“And Abe Erskine used to work for Hydra,” he reminded her.

“That’s different.”

Howard chewed his lower lip for an instant before he said, “Because Abe wasn’t screwing Steve?”

Peggy looked at him sharply. Howard met her eyes; it was Peggy who finally turned her head away. After a moment, she admitted, “Yes. And Steve never lied for him.”

“Lied for himself a lot,” Howard said. “I’ve seen his records.”

“That’s different,” Peggy said again.

Howard flicked a glance at her, looked as if he was about to say something, then changed his mind and just poured them both more brandy. Peggy sipped hers, watching Howard flip through Steve’s sketchbook. To his credit, he didn’t linger on the dirty pictures, but he did stop on the page of portraits and look at it for a long time before he went to the next page. He didn’t ask which of the unfamiliar faces was the man Steve had said was his son, but in Peggy’s opinion it wasn’t hard to guess.

“I want it to not be true,” she said suddenly.

Howard looked over at her again. “Which part?”

“All of it.”

He didn’t ask for clarification, just said, “Yeah, me too. And I believed him from day one.” He chewed his lip, then shook his head a little before he added, “And he’s still keeping stuff from us, damn it. He never used to do that. Well – not about anything that mattered.”

“And who decides what matters?” Peggy said bitterly. “Is the future – what he thinks is the future – really so fragile that a few unthinking words could wipe it out? Or so wonderful that it needs to be preserved at all costs?”

Howard scratched at his jaw. “Well –” he said. “It just might be. I’ve been thinking about that – about time travel, I mean.”

“Of course you have,” Peggy muttered. “Don’t tell me you’ve come up with a way to do what Steve wants and – and send him back.” She put as much scorn into the final syllable as she could; regardless of Steve’s obvious distress she just couldn’t bring herself to believe that absurd story. Yes, something had happened to him – no matter what it was, it had been something awful; as bad as it gets, like Howard had said the other day.

She couldn’t shake her fear that Natasha Rogers had been telling the truth when she had said that she was fucking him in order to convince him to defect. Just because she claimed it was her cover story didn’t mean it wasn’t the real truth; they only had her word for that. Her word and Steve’s, which right now wasn’t worth anything.

My word used to be good enough for you, he had said, and it was still something of a shock to realize that it wasn’t anymore.

“I haven’t figured out time travel,” Howard said regretfully. “For one, how they actually got here is one of the things Steve’s been keeping to himself – I’m pretty sure he knows more about the details than he’s been saying, though not enough to reverse it. For another…I haven’t figured out time travel. But I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” Peggy rested an elbow on the table and pressed the side of the glass to her forehead.

Howard flipped to a blank page in the sketchbook and dug around on the workbench for a few moments until he found a stub of pencil. “You read pulp magazines at all?”

“Why bother?” Peggy said. “I seem to be living in one.”

“Yeah, I get that feeling sometimes. Well, a few years back there were a bunch of letters in Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories –”

“Models of American literature, I’m sure.”

“– talking about what could happen if you go back in time and kill your grandfather.”

“What a foolish thing to do.”

Howard sketched a straight line on the paper in his draftsman’s hand and said, “The idea is that if you go back into the past –” He drew a curving line back from the end of the straight line to a point in the middle. “– and then you change something that means you can’t go back into the past in the first place.” He scribbled out the line under the curve then tapped the pencil against the point where the curve began. “Like killing your grandfather so you won’t ever be born. It creates a paradox, a contradiction, because if you go back in time and kill your grandfather, then you won’t be born so that you can grow up and go back in time and kill your grandfather.”

“What?” Peggy said. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Howard said. “It just doesn’t have a good explanation.”

“That,” Peggy said, “doesn’t make any sense either.”

Howard dug his thumb into his forehead, thinking, then said, “Okay, let’s leave granddad out of it and talk about Steve.” He drew an X on the page and said, “Look, according to Steve he crashed here, in February 1945, right? Then he’s frozen in ice for sixty-seven years until he comes out of it in 2012 and has various adventures until 2018, when he gets sent back in time to now, March 1945.” He drew a straight line from the X to the end of the page, put another X there, then drew a curving arrow back to a point just after the first X. “Meanwhile there’s a lot of stuff that happened in those sixty-seven years.” He put a few dots into the straight line and scrawled, War ends – SHIELD – CP dies – HS dies beneath them, then added a few more dots with question marks instead.

“Right,” Peggy said slowly. “If you believe him, which I don’t.”

“We’re ignoring that part for now,” Howard said. “Steve’s been saying all along that he’s worried about changing the future, right? And some of that might be good – I’d like to not be murdered, personally. And some of it might be bad, like if the war doesn’t end when Steve says it will.”

“Unless it ends earlier,” Peggy suggested.

“Sure. Maybe.”

“How could that possibly be bad?” she asked, glaring at him. “We’ve been in it for six years already; surely shaving even a few weeks off it can’t be a bad thing.”

“Yeah, but we’re talking about sixty-seven – seventy-three, really – years of knock-on consequences,” Howard said. “You know that poem about the horseshoe?”

“The one that Supply has framed on the wall over in their headquarters?”

“That’s the one,” he said, and quoted, “‘For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the rider was lost, for want of the rider the message was lost, for want of the message the battle was lost, for want of a battle the kingdom was lost, and all for the loss of a horseshoe nail.’ Say the nail gets nailed on, same as usual, and all the expected things happen – the rider gets where he’s going, delivers the message, we win the battle, we win the war, et cetera. With me so far?”

Peggy nodded.

“But what if someone – the rider, the king, whoever – goes back in time and when the horse throws its shoe, it can’t get it nailed back on? All of that other stuff doesn’t happen either.” Seeing her frowning – it was possible that Peggy had had too much brandy to make sense of it – he added, “What if Abe hadn’t overheard Steve talking to Sergeant Barnes back at the Expo? He told you that story, right?”

She nodded.

“And Steve got another 4F stamp and never made it to Camp Lehigh, so we pump some other guy full of the serum and stick him in the Vita-Ray machine instead. You think we still get Captain America out of that?”

“No,” Peggy said immediately. “No, I don’t believe that anyone else would have done what he did. Though it was Senator Brandt who was responsible for Captain America, not Steve. Steve would have done it without the silly name and costume.”

Howard shook his head. “No, it was Steve when it really mattered. Remember the fights he and Phillips used to get into about it back in ’43, after Phillips got him transferred back to the SSR? Lunatic,” he added fondly.

“But that was all years ago,” Peggy protested. “We’re talking about events that haven’t happened yet.”

“For us,” Howard said. “Not for Steve.” He tapped the pencil against the paper again and said, “For him all of this stuff happened a long time ago, most of it while he was – he was in the ice.” He stuttered briefly over the words, grief showing on his face. “Right now we’ve been working off the assumption that everything that’s happened over the past week and a half hasn’t had major effects on the future. But we don’t know that it hasn’t, except that Steve’s still here, and even that might not mean anything. Maybe we change something that means seventy-three years down the line Steve doesn’t come back in time, and he – he blinks out here. Or maybe he can’t go back, because the circumstances that made it possible for him to come back don’t exist anymore. We don’t know. There’s not really any way to know. Unless Steve blinks out of existence, obviously.”

“I think I need more brandy,” Peggy said.

Howard poured for her, then set the bottle down and drew another straight line on the paper. “That’s basically worst case scenario – that we know about, anyway, I mean, it’s time travel, there’s probably way worse stuff we can’t think of yet.”

“Is there a best case scenario?” Peggy asked. She reached over absently to touch the smooth, cool vibranium on the edge of Steve’s unfamiliar Wakandan shield, looking at the rest of Steve’s gear spread out on the workbench. Why remove the star? she wondered, staring at the empty spot on the chest of his uniform. It had obviously been there at some point, but the level of staining meant that it hadn’t been removed recently.

“Well, I don’t know about best, but I figure there are a few more options.” Howard waited until she was looking at him again, then drew the now-familiar curve back from the end of the line to its start, keeping the pencil tip on the paper. “We’ve been assuming that everything that happened since Steve came back is new, right? That it didn’t happen in the – the original timeline, I guess, where everything just went on the way it would have if Steve had…died.” He hesitated an instant over the last word.

“You’ve been assuming that,” Peggy said.

“Okay, Steve and I have been assuming that,” Howard allowed. “But what if it did happen?”

“What?”

“Steve’s said himself that he doesn’t know all that much about the end of the war, and the SSR’s records, to put it frankly, stink, not to mention they’re all classified; Steve and Natasha have both said that a lot of the files from the 1940s were never declassified, some were destroyed, and some were just lost. Seventy-three years, right? How much does the government – yours or mine – still have kicking around from seventy-three years ago?”

“More than they’d like and not as much as they should, I assume,” Peggy said slowly.

Howard made a gesture of acknowledgment. “So it’s not out of the question that everything happening now already happened – from Steve’s original timeline, I mean.” He traced the straight line to its endpoint with the pencil. “In other words, they always came back to 1945. Everything we do, everything Department X does – it’s always already happened. We’re not changing anything, we’re just…doing what was going to happen anyway.”

Peggy frowned, thinking through the implications. “That’s a rather unpleasant thought, actually.” The idea that she and Howard and Steve were all just playing out roles on a stage, reading lines already graven in stone rather than making any choices of their own – the more she thought about it the more she disliked it. “That’s awful.”

“I don’t like that one too much either,” Howard admitted. “I had a variant thought on that one, which is that everything that’s happening is – is self-correcting, I guess. It’s still going to lead to the same outcomes, but the details of how it gets there are fluid. A little more self-determination.”

“A very little,” Peggy said, still feeling disoriented. “Is there a door number three?”

“Yeah, but you’re not going to like it.”

“I already hate everything that’s happening,” Peggy informed him. “Come on, Howard, make it worse.”

“All right,” he said, and drew the now-familiar straight line and curve on the page, beneath all the other variations he had drawn. “Regular timeline, time travel,” he said, touching the point of the pencil to each in turn. “So far, the options have been that either by coming back here in the first place, Steve’s original timeline has been completely erased – which is kind of terrifying when you think about it – or no matter what happens, it’s going to come out all right. Got it?”

“For a certain value of the phrase.”

Howard brought the pencil tip down to the starting point of the line, the endpoint of the backwards curve, and drew another line at an angle to the first. “But what if instead of either of those, a new timeline branches off. So Steve’s original timeline continues as usual from 1945 to 2018, but now there’s a – a – call it a 1945-B, where he comes back in 1945. That’s where we are right now. So now there’s two timelines, 1945-A, the original, and 1945-B, ours. And whatever happens from here on just…happens.”

Peggy stared at him. “What?”

Howard spread his hands. “It’s time travel, Peg.”

“It’s nonsense, that’s what it is,” Peggy said. “Can you prove any of this?”

“No, it’s time travel.” Howard scratched at his ear, frowning. “I think the only way to find out would be to send Steve back and…and I don’t know how to do that. Not yet.”

“Do you want to?” Peggy asked, touching the vibranium shield again.

Howard put the pencil down and picked up his glass again, rolling it absently between his palms and looking at the way the light shone through the remaining liquor. “Peg, it’s Steve,” he said finally, his gaze on the battered uniform. “Of course I don’t.”

Steve was a warm, heavy weight alongside Natasha in the bed, reassuring in his solidity. She reached out to touch his hair gently, light enough that it didn’t wake him, still feeling an enormous sense of stunned astonishment that he was there at all.

They had slept together before – actually slept, not had sex – in the backs of Quinjets and SHIELD vans, in safehouses, on the couch in the Avengers compound, on the floors of abandoned warehouses. They had even shared a bed a couple of times, though Steve had offered to sleep on the floor back then and Natasha had told him not to be ridiculous; she wasn’t worried about her virtue, such as it was, with him. There were a few of the STRIKE boys where she had kept her hand on her gun when she slept around them, if she slept at all. Jasper Sitwell hadn’t been the only one who made assumptions about her, though in Sitwell’s defense – what passed for it, at least – he hadn’t been interested in her himself.

Not Brock Rumlow, though; Rumlow had always treated her with the respect of one predator for another right up until he had tried to kill her. And in a way, even that had been respectful, in the way only two killers could be to each other. If the grenade had worked out, it would have been quick.

Colonel Phillips had let them out of the interrogation room after another half-hour or so of arguing, though Natasha suspected that there was going to be more of that in the morning. She also suspected that ultimately Phillips was going to go with Steve’s suggestion, even though he didn’t like it and Natasha didn’t like it and Peggy Carter didn’t like it – the Howling Commandos weren’t too fond of it, either. It was interesting to see Captain America in context – Captain Steve Rogers, rather, since that was the part that mattered to the SSR; even Nick Fury had swayed the other way with Steve more often than not, despite his best intentions otherwise. Fury had never quite gotten to the point where he trusted Steve to make the plans all on his own. Phillips clearly had – maybe because he didn’t have seventy years of the legend of Captain America hanging over him, or maybe because at the end of the day he was a soldier, not a spymaster. It had only been a little over five weeks since Steve’s original disappearance and Phillips’s instinct was still to trust his officer, though he might well feel differently about it when it wasn’t one in the morning with a smoking crater two miles away, where a V-2 rocket had vaporized Whitefield’s Tabernacle and the five nearest houses to the church, as well as shutting down the St. Pancras Underground and rail station, which was only a street over.

Other rockets had hit in Stepney and Enfield; those were the ones they had heard about before they had gone to bed, and Natasha suspected there were more that had hit outside of London. It had the feeling of a bad night. One of the last bad nights that England would face, but they didn’t know that, and that didn’t make it any better right now.

It could be worse, Natasha thought mordantly. It could be the Blitz. Or Dresden. Or Chongqing. Or Warsaw. Even without the atomic bomb, there were a lot of options in World War Two and all of them were bad.

She touched Steve’s hair again, and this time he made a faint sound in the back of his throat, not really close to full wakefulness but aware she was there. Natasha leaned down to press a brief kiss to his forehead, feeling absurdly tender as she slid out of the bed and pulled the blankets up around him again; she knew Steve hated the cold.

Natasha pulled on a borrowed dressing gown over her pajamas against the damp chill of a English spring, but padded barefoot to the chair by the window, where she tucked her legs up beneath her feet and arranged the thick flannel folds of the dressing gown around her. She had had worse than March in London, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed it, either.

She hadn’t needed Steve to tell her – though he had – that he had lost his temper during his interrogation with Peggy Carter. They had both known that of the two of them, he was the one most likely to slip, and of everyone in the SSR, it was most likely to happen with Peggy. Phillips and the Commandos would both push Steve, but if he was going to slip, then it was going to be with her. Natasha knew Steve well enough to have a pretty good idea what had happened once she started in on him.

Despite the late hour – it was the dog-end of night, the time when men and women died without waking and not always because they had been stabbed in their beds – Natasha couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t that Steve had volunteered himself for something that was more likely than not to get him injured, captured, or killed; he did that twice a week and after six years she was used to it.

It was something of a shock to realize that the six years they had been friends and teammates and partners was more than three times as long as he had been with the Howling Commandos. Against that, the ten days they had spent as lovers was an eyeblink; Natasha was still slightly shocked at how little it had changed between them. Steve, she thought, would have treated her exactly the same whether or not they had been sleeping together, and because Natasha had never thought to do otherwise she did the same. She had the feeling that Steve would have been horrified if she had acted differently as a result.

The Schrade M2 she had taken from Irina was on the table next to Steve’s pencil case. Natasha picked the knife up and turned it over in her hands, twitching a corner of the blackout curtain aside to let in a thin gleam of waxing moonlight, enough that she could see. Beyond the window, London slept, darkened by the blackout – technically a dim-out since September of 1944, which allowed illumination equivalent to moonlight. V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets were launched from the continent, not from fighter planes, but the memory of the Blitz ran deep, and in spring of 1945 Allied bombers had been dropping thousands of tons of explosives on German and German-occupied cities in Europe. Even with Hitler on a desperate defensive, England would stay wary.

What would Irina have done if she had succeeded in seducing Steve back in 1943?

In 1943, Natasha thought, Steve would have married a woman if he had slept with her and then had to keep working with her. She didn’t know if he could have been convinced to defect to the Soviet Union – not during the war, certainly, but maybe afterwards. It was the sort of thing that had been done before; the Red Room didn’t just train killers.

Natasha put the knife down very quickly and scrubbed her hands against the folds of her dressing gown, sick with memory. It was the sort of thing that Natasha had done before. Compared to that, just killing was clean.

If she had been in Irina’s place in 1943, she would have done the same thing, only she would have succeeded at it. Natasha knew exactly what she would have done to seduce Steve Rogers in 1943, when he was still uncertain in his new body and in the sudden thrust from USO performer to special forces operative, and not yet entirely in love with Peggy Carter, who wouldn’t sleep with him anyway.

She could have done it. She could have done it very easily.

And back when she had been with the Red Room, she would have.

He might have turned her instead, Natasha acknowledged quietly to herself, the way Clint had ten years ago. Even in 1943, she suspected that Steve Rogers would have had the perspicacity to see past her knife’s edge sharpness, a weapon honed too far, so that the blade would turn against bone instead of cutting through it. And if Department X operated anything like the Red Room had – the conversation she had had with Irina suggested that it did – then she probably would have been as desperate for it in 1943 as she had been in 2008, not quite knowing that freedom was the thing she was aching for.

Agent Barton was sent to kill me, she remembered telling Loki six years ago, and that part had been true. He made a different call.

The shot I never took, Clint said sometimes when he was telling that story, but the truth was that he had changed his aim at the last second, and the arrow that would have gone into her eye socket had gone through the muscle of her calf instead. She had broken the shaft off and forced him to hunt her over the rooftops of Paris, until he had finally cornered her, exhausted and bloody and spitting at him like a caged cat, ready to claw his eyes out. Natasha couldn’t remember what he had said to talk her down – couldn’t remember if she had actually fought him, either, or whose blood had been under her nails when she had woken up in a SHIELD safehouse with her leg bandaged. Clint had been optimistic about her, but he hadn’t been overly trusting; he had tied her to the bed. Not that that had lasted; Natasha had tried to strangle him with a pillowcase five minutes after she had woken up and gotten herself free of the restraints.

And you? Yelena had said to her in Melina’s dacha. You got out. Dreykov made sure no one could escape. Are you going to say anything?

I needed out. The words had been on her lips, unvoiced. I had to get out.

And Yelena hadn’t? Melina hadn’t? All the other Widows – all the little fledglings, all the little girls who would die when they couldn’t meet the Red Room’s standards – remove all the defects, she still remembered Dreykov’s voice, a cold silken murmur in a night of terror and screaming –

Natasha could still remember the rattle of gunfire after Dreykov had picked out the girls he had wanted for the Red Room.

Natasha put her face down into her hands, stuffing the sleeve of her dressing gown into her mouth to muffle a hiccoughing sob. From now, from 1945, there were another seventy-one years of pain and terror and dead little girls before the Red Room came crashing down in 2016.

Like the Winter Soldier, the Red Room had had its hand on the throats of so many men and women and nations over the years that to remove it now meant that their world, their 2018, would never exist. Remove it now, and there would never be a Black Widow.

Remove it now, and Thanos would still come. Loki would still come. Malekith would still come. The Chitauri would still come. They would all still come, because Earth was just one piece on the great chessboard of the cosmos, and the changes wrought here wouldn’t change what happened out there, except that there wouldn’t be anyone to fight when they came anyway.

“Natasha?”

Steve sounded barely awake, but after a moment she heard the rustle of the sheets as he slipped out of bed and padded barefoot across the floor to her. He crouched down beside her chair when she didn’t respond, still blinking sleep from his eyes but more alert than he had been a few seconds earlier.

“Time travel,” Natasha told him, surprised by how steady her voice was. But of course it was. Dreykov and Madame B and the other trainers had made certain of that. “The Red Room.”

The thin glitter of cloud-covered moonlight through the flipped-back corner of the blackout curtains highlighted the bones of Steve’s face, darkened the hollows of his cheeks, silvered his hair, made him old before his time or exactly as old as he should have been. What he didn’t look like was the stunned, grief-stricken man Natasha remembered from the helicarrier, ready to do his duty but still barely comprehending what had happened to him. He didn’t look like the archive photos from World War Two, either; it was in his eyes now, the knowledge of everything he had seen and done and everything that he hadn’t in nearly seven decades of Sleeping Beauty slumber.

Natasha wondered, not for the first time, how much of that was in her own eyes.

“Yeah,” Steve said, and the corner of his mouth crooked a little in that same helpless grief. “Time travel.”

“Did I wake you up?”

He shook his head. “Woke myself up. It was about to start getting bad.” His gaze cut sideways, weary acknowledgment of the nightmares that never quite left him, then he asked, “Are you okay? Aside from –”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Natasha said, smiling wryly. “Not nightmares, just…couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop thinking.”

Steve nodded somberly. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

“Considering the alternative is letting the Red Room – Department X – get their hands on you…” Natasha let the words trail off until Steve nodded again. Then she said, “They weren’t the ones running the Winter Soldier.”

The context they had gotten from Colonel Phillips the previous evening had given them enough information to fill in a few of the blanks of Hydra’s patchy mid-century history. They had known from early on once the Avengers had started Hydra-hunting in earnest that infiltrating the upper echelons of the United States intelligence apparatus hadn’t been their only target when Schmidt’s original plan had failed; they had started with the Soviets even before the war. There was a twelve year gap between Bucky Barnes’ disappearance and the earliest date in the Winter Soldier file; as best they could figure, he had been found by Soviet soldiers and eventually found his way into the hands of SMERSH, the NKVD’s counter-intelligence division that ironically enough had already had a small but significant Hydra presence. Even Natasha had known that SMERSH and Department X had had a bitter rivalry that had outlasted SMERSH’s post-war dissolution and the transferal of its remit to the Third Directorate of the MGB, which had later become the KGB. The Red Room files Natasha had gotten from Dreykov had told her that neither Department X nor the Red Room had ever had anything to do with the Winter Soldier, which had been something of a relief to her.

“I know,” Steve said wearily, and Natasha guessed that he had been considering rolling the dice on getting captured solely to get to Russia to find Bucky Barnes. If they were running the risk of changing the future anyway –

But Natasha knew the Red Room, which meant she had a pretty good idea of what Department X was capable of, and if Steve went in there he was never coming out again. Not as his own man. And letting Department X get its hands on Captain America and potentially a viable super soldier serum was something that would change the future for the worse.

Steve ran a hand over his face, looking old in the chill moonlight, and said, “The only way to do this is for it to be real. And if we can’t –” He shied away from the possibility that they wouldn’t be able to return to their own time, the way they had carefully been avoiding discussing it for the past week and a half.

“We’ve gone to war together before,” Natasha said. “What’s one more?”

“Usually when we go to war we can’t change the future.”

“Steve,” Natasha said gently, “that’s what going to war is.”

She reached down to touch Steve’s face as he crooked a wry grin at her, letting her fingers trail along the sharp lines of jaw and cheekbone; he came upright as she drew her hand back, following her before he pressed his mouth warmly to hers. Natasha put her arms around his neck and deepened the kiss, shivering a little as he put his hands on her flannel-clad knees and slid them up her thighs to her waist. They were still kissing when Steve lifted her with his effortless super soldier’s strength; Natasha wrapped her legs around him, crossing her ankles at the small of his back as he carried her to the bed. Steve sat instead of laying her down when she pushed at his shoulder, helping her shrug off the dressing gown and then unbuttoning her pajama top. The chill in the room was a shock against her bare skin, but the warmth of Steve’s hands on her waist made up for it.

She had to stand up to shimmy out of her pajama pants and underwear, then helped Steve with his before she climbed back on top of him. They were both breathing hard before Natasha caught his mouth in a sloppy kiss, Steve’s fingers digging into her waist with convulsive need as she began to move. He loosened his grip a moment later, the way he was always aware of his strength, and flattened one hand against her back instead.

“Steve,” Natasha whispered against his mouth, her voice hitching at the end of his name.

He pulled back so he could see her, his gaze dark and his cheeks flushed even in the thin trickle of moonlight. “Yeah?”

“Steve, I love you,” Natasha said.

He caught her in another hard kiss, one hand coming up to tangle in her hair. Natasha wrapped her arms around his shoulders, concentrating on him, on the feel of him, until her breath was coming in sharp pants, riding the edge of orgasm until she came with a gasp. Steve followed as she was still shuddering and they spent a few minutes kissing until the chill of the night air penetrated Natasha’s post-coital haze.

Despite layers of flannel nightclothes and several heavy quilts Steve was still her preferred bulwark against the cold. They curled up together in the narrow bed, Natasha arranging the sheets and quilts to her liking. Her earlier disquiet was a distant memory, fading with the onset of sleep as Steve wrapped an arm around her and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

“I love you too,” he murmured, and Natasha leaned up to brush her lips lightly against his, feeling warm and safe and just a little frightened by the hugeness of it, but the rest of it balanced that out.

Peggy was fairly certain that Colonel Phillips knew she was hungover, but he didn’t comment on it. She flipped through what he handed her, trying not to squint too obviously and hoping she didn’t embarrass herself by throwing up over the cardboard folder and its contents. She and Howard had gone through the rest of the bottle of brandy, Howard spinning off into increasing flights of fancy about theories of time travel and what he called Quantenmechanik before he had corrected himself to the English quantum mechanics. Peggy wasn’t certain she had understood more than one word in five, but he had seemed happy to talk about what had up until then been pure theory. Despite the SSR’s esoteric focus, Howard’s day to day work was mostly practical engineering and the chance to spin off into theory had led to delighted spitballing and diagrams and equations penciled onto every flat surface in the workshop, aided by the liberal application of alcohol and the chance to occasionally wax poetic about Steve Rogers. Peggy hadn’t been feeling particularly poetic about Steve Rogers at the time, except for a certain value of the word that included profanity. She had mostly managed to restrain herself, but when she hadn’t, well, at least it had only been Howard there.

“Permission to speak freely, sir?” she asked.

“Granted.”

“This is a bad idea,” Peggy said, picking up the War Department identification card and unfolding it, turning it to one side to read the name and service. Most of the particulars had already been typed in – This is to identify: Mrs. Natasha Romanoff Rogers, arm or service: Strategic Scientific Reserve – but it was unsigned and the fingerprints and photograph would have to be taken today. Looking at it made Peggy grind her teeth, which in turn made her head hurt. She turned it upright again, frowning at the blatant lie of the December 3, 1918 date of birth but a little bemused to see that “color hair” was listed simply as light, neutrally encompassing both the dyed blonde and the auburn roots. The photograph would be in black and white anyway.

Peggy folded the identification card closed again and tucked it into the folder again. The next thing she pulled out was a marriage certificate for Steven Grant Rogers and Natalia Alianovna Romanoff, issued in London two weeks earlier, along with a marriage license for the same, unsigned by both parties. Peggy stuffed it back into the folder without looking more closely. It was fake anyway, even if it included what was probably Natasha's real name.

“We don’t really know anything about this woman except what she and Steve say,” Peggy went on, “and they’ve already proved that everything they say is worthless.” She felt a muscle work in her jaw, with a flash of real distress about having to say that about Steve Rogers, of all people, but it was the truth. “Going through with this means that Steve – Captain Rogers – will have a more or less free run of headquarters again. So will she. And after that they’ll be at the front, or at least he will be.”

Phillips nodded slightly in acknowledgment. “That’s a risk we have to take.”

“You are taking the word of a man who has been missing in action, believed dead, for four weeks and who now claims he has traveled through time from the future,” Peggy said slowly, “and that of a woman we know nothing about that except that she is a very skilled combatant that there is a Russian spy within the SSR involved in an operation to spirit Captain Rogers himself away to the Soviet Union, which is, technically, our ally.”

“Funny way they have of showing it,” Phillips muttered, which Peggy had to acknowledge. The news that there was a Soviet deep science division was a revelation to her too, though it probably shouldn’t have been. She wasn’t surprised that Phillips had known about it; she was surprised that she hadn’t.

“Captain Rogers won’t have a free run of a headquarters and neither will Mrs. Rogers,” Phillips said. “And when we do let them out, they’ll have you, the Commandos, and half the SSR sitting on them. You can handle that, right?”

“Of course,” Peggy said with mild affront. “But I still believe we’re being hasty –”

“Agent Carter, exactly how long do you think I could keep President Roosevelt or General Eisenhower from finding out that Captain America didn’t go down with Johann Schmidt and the Valkyrie in February? Whatever Rogers says about it.”

Peggy opened her mouth to protest, then hesitated. “Under the irregular circumstances –” she finally began.

“The moment these papers leave this building, the newspapers will know he’s back; I’m phoning the President later today and probably Ike after that, depending what Roosevelt says. Whether or not this works out, Rogers and the Commandos will be off to Germany within the week – probably to be airdropped on Berlin, if Patton gets his way; Old Blood and Guts would claw his own mother’s eyes out to get Rogers under his command.” Phillips’ mouth twisted a little; he and General Patton didn’t get along.

Peggy had vivid memories of the entire SSR field division being hauled from Greece back to England in preparation for the invasion of Normandy the previous year, since Roosevelt and Eisenhower had both insisted on having Captain America involved. Sometimes she wondered if the month they had lost there had given Johann Schmidt much-needed time; if they had been able to spend that time going after Hydra instead of with the Allied forces in England, then maybe he wouldn’t have been able to complete the Valkyrie –

There was no way to know now.

“Even if Captain Rogers’ loyalties are in question?” Peggy asked.

Phillips looked at her for a long moment and then said, “Do you really believe they are?”

Peggy looked down at the folder she was holding. “I…believe that he thinks he’s telling the truth. About everything but Natasha,” she added, the muscle in her jaw jumping again. “We already know he lied to us about that.”

Phillips nodded briefly in acknowledgment. “There’s a limited amount of time we have to carry this operation out,” he said. “I don’t like it, but that’s the truth. I could maybe keep it quiet for a week, but the whole point of this op is not keeping it quiet. But the moment they find out he’s back Ike and Roosevelt will want Rogers in Germany, Soviet spy ring or not. As far as they’re concerned, the Reds can wait. Hitler can’t.”

“We don’t know that there is a Soviet spy ring,” Peggy pointed out. “Or that it’s the Soviets at all. It could be Germany, either Hydra or Hitler – if Steve was turned, then sending him to the front might be exactly what they want.” They couldn’t bait a trap for Department X without making Captain America’s return to the land of the living public knowledge, and if Captain America was back, then SHAEF was going to react appropriately. That also meant coming up with a believable cover story for Natasha Rogers, which meant that as soon as the papers got hold of it the news that Captain America was married was going to make headlines across the United States. Peggy just hoped Senator Brandt didn’t turn up to make a bigger circus out of it than it was already going to be.

With a little sympathy, Phillips said, “I’m aware of that. But as someone once told me, it’s called faith.”

“And as someone once told me,” Peggy said, “I hope that’s of great comfort to you when they shut this program down.” She closed the folder and tied the string around it again to keep it closed, listening to the jangle of dog tags inside it.

She expected a rebuke from Phillips, but he just cocked an eyebrow at her and said gravely, “That’s a possibility too, Agent Carter. Dismissed.”

Peggy saluted and left, tucking the folder under her arm.

Peggy found Steve and Natasha in the gym along with all five of the surviving Howling Commandos, who were gravely watching Steve murder a punching bag and trying not to watch Natasha going through a series of warm-up stretches, as limber as an acrobat. Since she was wearing trousers and had stripped down to a vest, there was a lot to look at, though Peggy was vaguely interested to note that Steve wasn’t looking at all, too involved in putting the punching bag out of its misery. Presumably he was already familiar with Natasha’s body, though.

Her gaze flickered upwards as Peggy came in; Steve’s didn’t. When Peggy didn’t say anything, just went over to sit on a bench next to Dugan, Natasha returned to her stretches.

Dugan bumped a shoulder familiarly against hers and said, “So Phillips is really going through with it, hmm?”

“For better or worse,” Peggy affirmed, keeping her voice low. “Probably worse.”

Five weeks ago she would have been happy to watch Steve work out and Steve would have been happy to let her. The aesthetic appreciation was still there – that hadn’t changed at all – but now it was accompanied by a creeping sense of unease that overrode what Peggy was firmly telling herself wasn’t jealousy. She had been paying attention to the fight the other day, not to Steve himself; abruptly she remembered the dry notations on Steve’s medical chart, the new one. His numbers are up, and she could see it now in the muscle under his t-shirt, the way the punching bag shook under each blow despite Dernier bracing it and occasionally exchanging bemused comments with Steve in French. Faster, stronger, better reflexes – even if his numbers had been inching upwards since 1943, it had never been noticeable before.

It was noticeable now.

Steve slammed a final kick into the punching bag, making Dernier stagger under the force of it, and then stepped back, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead. He finally looked over at Peggy, leaning back on one foot in hesitation as she stood up.

“I need to borrow Mrs. Rogers for just a few minutes,” Peggy said, and watched Natasha come to her feet with liquid, boneless ease. “But before that –” She unwrapped the string from around the folder and fished out one of the two sets of dog tags in it, double-checked that she had the right one, and held it out to Steve. “Since you seem to have misplaced yours, Captain.”

He reached for them and she turned her hand over and spilled them into his palm rather than touch him, the chain coiling around the little slips of debossed metal. ROGERS, STEVEN G – They weren’t identical to his previous dog tags, since those had been issued in 1943 after he had been commissioned and the U.S. Army had changed the format again the previous March; the Americans couldn’t seem to decide what order to put their soldiers’ names in. Those hadn’t been the ones he had been issued with when he enlisted, either, since between enlisting in June 1943 and rejoining the SSR that November the Americans had finally realized that having their soldiers’ home addresses on their identification tags might be a bad idea. His serial number had changed when he had been commissioned, too; Senator Brandt hadn’t bothered with that, but Colonel Phillips had.

Steve poked at them with one finger and said dryly, “Oh, they got my religion right this time.” When Natasha’s eyebrows went up, he clarified, “The first two sets had a P instead of a C. Not that it matters that much, since my dad was Church of Ireland and Ma had her problems with the church because they weren’t too happy about her marrying a Protestant, but –” He shrugged.

“The Army didn’t like Captain America being Catholic?” Natasha said, sounding bemused.

Steve shook his head. “They were just wrong; it happens all the time. You’d be surprised how many guys have the same service number. I don’t think my religion ever really came up, since Bucky’s the one who cares about confession or going to Mass, not me. When we were growing up Ma hardly ever went other than Christmas and Easter, so it was always Bucky’s family taking me. Or he used to care, anyway, I don’t know if he’s been since –” He stopped abruptly and busied himself clasping the ball chain around his neck, tucking the tags under his shirt.

Peggy looked up at him in surprise. “You’re Catholic? Since when?” She didn’t think she had ever heard about Steve going to church or talking to the 107th’s chaplain.

“Since…birth?” Steve said, his eyebrows going upwards. “Or baptism, I guess. Which was the same day anyway since I was early and everyone thought I was going to die.”

Peggy stared at him, more taken aback by this revelation than she cared to admit. She had thought she had known Steve. She finally made herself say, “I need your signature. Both your signatures, actually.” She thumbed through the documents in the folder, found the marriage license, and pulled it out, passing it to Steve.

Natasha leaned over to look at it, her expression carefully neutral. Steve’s face was doing something interesting, but after a moment he took the pen Peggy offered him. He turned away so that he could brace the paper on the wall and sign it; Peggy started to look away, then stopped, frowning as a fragment of memory struck her. I love Natasha, Steve had said the previous evening during his interrogation. I’ll marry her if that’s what she wants when we get back. She had almost missed it in the mass of other nonsense he had said, in the face of his obvious distress.

Oh, Peggy said, sick with grief and betrayal and more lies.

They weren’t really married. He was just screwing her.

But he didn’t hesitate when he signed the license, and when he passed pen and paper to Natasha his hand touched hers in a brief caress as she smiled up at him.

“Different than the last time?” Morita asked, watching them both sharply. He and Dugan had heard what Steve had said yesterday too.

“Little bit,” Steve said.

“Church wedding?” Dugan asked.

“Eloped,” Natasha said, smiling wryly. She finished signing the license and handed it back to Peggy, who glanced at their signatures – Steve’s was unmistakably his own – and waved the paper to dry it before stuffing it back into the folder. She passed Natasha the other pair of dog tags without looking twice at them, though the other woman inspected them before putting them around her neck and tucking them under her vest.

Steve had more paperwork to sign for his so-called marriage, all backdated and some of it also signed by Colonel Phillips as his commanding officer. They were all the real forms, which Peggy could tell Steve knew. When he had finished, he said something to Natasha and leaned down to kiss her lightly.

Peggy looked away. Even if he had lied about it before, it was true enough now.

“Agent Carter?” Natasha said, her voice polite. “You said you needed me?”

“Yes, I need some fingerprints and a photograph for your identity papers,” Peggy said. “You may want to freshen up first.”

Natasha nodded gravely and retrieved her blouse and her shoes. As she was putting them back on and touching up her makeup, Steve said, “So Colonel Phillips agrees with me?”

“Colonel Phillips,” Peggy said, “is of the opinion that there is a limited period of time before you and the Howling Commandos are redeployed to the front and therefore if this operation is going to be carried out, then it needs to happen quickly.”

She expected Steve to protest, given how stringent he had been about not wanting to get involved in the war, but he just nodded, his expression grim. “Germany or the Pacific?”

“Germany,” Peggy said. “Our forces crossed the Rhine three days ago; with any luck we’ll be in Berlin within the month. You, possibly earlier. You are still interested in winning the war, aren’t you?”

Steve exchanged a look with Natasha, who shrugged in response. “Let’s just get this operation done with,” was all he said.

To Peggy’s relief, Natasha didn’t try to make any small talk with her while she was sitting for her photograph or having her fingerprints taken for her War Department identification card, her expression serious throughout both processes. She had done her hair so that the sticking plasters on the cuts on her neck didn’t show in the photograph and looked very pretty when she sat for her photograph, though given the general quality of government identity photographs that was no guarantee of how it would actually develop.

They passed off the completed paperwork to Irene Lorraine, who had taken both the photographs and fingerprints. In response to a question about her bruised cheek, covered up by makeup but visible at close range, Lorraine said that she had fallen down the stairs during the power outage the previous night.

Peggy accompanied Natasha to the toilet as she washed the inky residue from the fingerprinting off her hands, watching the obvious muscle beneath her blouse and trousers and the way the other woman’s eyes never quite stopped moving, using the mirror over the sink to watch behind her but not relying on it.

“What made you decide to join the – the Red Room, you called it?” Peggy asked, after first making sure that the door was closed.

Natasha’s gaze went to her in the mirror. “I didn’t decide,” she said calmly. “Usually the Red Room got its fledglings by picking up abandoned children or runaways from all over the world, but my family sold me to them when I was an infant, then had my mother killed to cover it up. Maybe the rest of them too, I don’t know. And yes, before you ask, Steve knows.”

Peggy saw her own red-painted mouth twist across Natasha’s shoulder. “What makes you so special?”

“Genetic potential, apparently.” Natasha frowned down at her hands, then turned the faucet off and wiped them dry on a towel before touching up her lipstick. “I don’t know any details, I only found out a few years ago. It was probably nothing; General Dreykov, who ran the Red Room while I was there, did a lot of…experiments.” Her mouth thinned, her eyes suddenly hard as chips of emerald, but she didn’t look away from her own reflection until she turned to put her back against the sink, meeting Peggy’s gaze.

Just for a flickering instant, there was something very like Steve about her, some air of indefinable danger. She remembered how fast Natasha had been when she had been sparring with Steve, the MP she had put in hospital the night she and Steve had arrived, the casual insouciance with which she had freed herself from the cell she had been in.

She had, Peggy remembered, been fighting aliens along with Steve – at least according to him.

Then she blinked again, and Natasha was only a small woman with the same hard-eyed gaze Peggy sometimes saw in the mirror.

“Stalin founded Department X after the civil war,” Natasha said. “It probably changed hands a few times before it ended up in the NKVD’s deep science division, since it’s not really deep science, just a very specialized spetsnaz. When I was there it was its own agency; I don’t remember the official name because everyone always called it the Red Room, the way everyone still talks about the KGB when they mean the SVR and the FSB – the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security. I think it became the Red Room in the sixties, but it might have been earlier. It’s always started with children, though in the beginning they started older and they started with boys and girls. They used to take children during the Povolzhe Famine, the Holodomor, things like that, or take the children of political dissidents – that was only in the first few years. Later they stopped bothering with that, like they stopped bothering with boys. Boys can always be soldiers, right? People look at men and expect killers. Not women like you and me, though.” She didn’t look away from Peggy.

“I suppose it started as a kind of state-sponsored terrorism. Stalin wasn’t exactly shy about having people executed or sending them to the Gulag, but it’s another kind of terror when people just…die. Sometimes a lot of people. Sometimes just one, as long as it’s the right one. And no one ever saw it coming. Just…rumors, even when it moved outside the Soviet Union’s borders, which it did well before this war. You can do that when you start with children. You can do almost anything.” Natasha’s mouth twisted briefly in a slight flicker of emotion. “Especially if you don’t mind killing them. Or getting them killed, which is the same thing. It was about one in twenty who survived the training when I was there.”

“To do what?” Peggy asked softly. She was achingly aware of her pistol in its shoulder holster, the way she had been during those days in occupied France years ago.

“Anything,” Natasha said. “Everything. I went operational in spring of 1992; I was seven. We were sent to America – Ohio.” She smiled briefly, inviting Peggy to share the joke of her cover story. “It doesn’t matter why now. I was there for a little over three years, just long enough to get a taste for what it was like to be –” She hesitated, her tongue darting out to touch her teeth before she finally said, “– real. I’d already killed people before that, of course. Not in the field, though I know girls who were in the field that young. The trainers would bring people in for us – criminals, dissidents, foreign operatives, traitors. It didn’t really matter. Sometimes they’d tie them up first. Other times they’d just put one or two of us in a room with them to see what happened. Sometimes they’d even give us a weapon, instead of hiding one in that room or not giving us one at all. Sometimes it wasn’t a room.” Her fingers flexed a little, as if an absent memory, and she rubbed her left thumb absently against the side of her index finger without looking down.

“When we left the Ohio op,” she said, “I was ten. I was there with another fledgling and two full operators, a man and a woman; we were posing as a family. She was another one like me, a Chernaya vdova. She was supposed to fly us to Cuba, only SHIELD caught up to us first and she was shot. So I flew us out. Three years later, the Red Room sent me to Andover – you know the school? The one in Pennsylvania. The vice president’s nephew, the Secretary of Defense’s daughter, and the CFO of Roxxon Energy's youngest brother were all there then, and the Red Room wanted to send a message. I spent twelve weeks there getting to know them, getting them to like me, to trust me, and then I made sure that all three of them were all in the wellness center – the hospital – at the same time and burned it down. No survivors. And the vice president and his friends got the message.”

Her voice was utterly calm, as if none of it mattered to her.

“Are you trying to scare me?” Peggy asked. “Because I ought to warn you that I don’t frighten that easily.”

“No,” Natasha said. “If I wanted to scare you, you’d be scared. I want you to understand who you’re dealing with, Agent Carter. Those communiques you intercepted, the ones from Department X? When they say ‘at all costs,’ they mean it. I was thirteen when I burned down the Andover wellness center and killed twenty-seven people to get at three. Department X and its operatives will burn London to the ground to get at Steve.”

Peggy felt a muscle in her jaw work, but all she said was, “They’re welcome to join Hitler in trying. He’s been at it since 1940.”

“The difference is that Hitler’s goal was to burn London to the ground,” Natasha said. “Theirs isn’t, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it.”

“So what makes a woman like that leave?” Peggy said. “Was it love, Miss Romanova?”

“It’s Mrs. Rogers,” Natasha reminded her, her eyebrows arching slightly. “And no. SHIELD sent an agent to kill me; he just made a different call instead of taking the shot. Not that it didn’t take him a while to talk me down and we both still have scars from it, but he gave me the chance to make my own choices – to be something other than just another trained killer.” A bitter little smile touched her lips, though Peggy had the impression she was being allowed to see it as the other woman said, “Of course SHIELD wanted more of the same when it came down to it. But they were better about the rest of it. And then the Chitauri came. And Steve.”

For an instant the gravity on her face lightened and she was only a young woman in love, like the girls Peggy had known back at Bletchley and in SOE’s offices over on Baker Street, the ones who had sweethearts deployed to the front or who had had whirlwind romances with American GIs moving through England on their way to the front. Then it was gone and the killer was there again, the woman who as a girl had hunted men through the taiga armed with nothing but her bare hands and lived to tell the tale.

“Does Steve know?” Peggy asked, her fingers twitching a little. She knew that Steve had hunted men, but that was war and they were men.

Natasha looked surprised to be asked, or maybe surprised that Peggy thought that it would matter to Steve Rogers. “Yes. Steve –” She hesitated, thinking, and then went on slowly, “Steve is the only person I know who’s ever taken me exactly as I am, not as who I used to be, who they think I am, or who they want me to be.”

Peggy had killed men before and not only in the cold clean combat of the Western Front, if such a thing existed; it was all mud and blood when it came down to it. Sometimes she dreamed about Bordeaux, about the hôtel particulier where the Laundri family had had their rooms and many of the Gestapo and Kriegsmarine officers had billeted. About creeping through the hallways with a stolen pistol in her hand and U-boat plans an awkward pressure in her garters, wondering how long it was going to be before someone found the bodies of Emeraude and Théo Laundri – or Marcel Baillargé or Wilhelm Balkenhol or Marie-Odíle Chabot or the nameless Wehrmacht trooper who had stumbled on her dragging Marie-Odile’s body into a closet. Emeraude and Marie-Odile had both been her friends, or at least thought they had been, and Théo had been a Vichy collaborator, but Marcel had been part of her Resistance cell. Peggy could still remember the expression on Emeraude’s face when she realized that she was going to die, in the instants before Peggy had pulled the trigger. But that had been war.

Even Peggy could admit that the operation had been an unmitigated disaster. Her entire Resistance cell had been killed or arrested – she still didn’t know what had happened to any of them, though there was no way it was good – and it had taken Peggy the better part of two weeks to make it back to England. Just to top it all off, by the time she had arrived SOE had already gotten the plans from another operative. She had puttered around the various sections of SOE in England and Scotland for the next six months – there was a joke that the letters stood for “Stately ‘omes of England,” given the number of country estates they had appropriated – until Brigadier Colin Gubbins, at the time SOE’s director of operations, had called her into his office and said, “I have a proposition for you.” She had been on a plane to America two days later and had met Steve Rogers just over a year after that.

Steve.

The whole time Peggy hadn’t taken her gaze away from Natasha, the way she wouldn’t have looked away had she been trapped in a small room with a tiger. And just as she would have had she been trapped in a small room with a tiger, her instinct was to run, even if doing so would have meant her death. It was as if the mask Natasha Rogers had been wearing had been set aside and, expecting a woman, Peggy had found a serpent instead – or, as Natasha had said, a venomous spider. Another one like me, she had said. Chernaya vdova. Black widow.

Steve sleeps with that.

Peggy had hunted men too, but that had been war.

She took a step forward, not sure what she meant to do – yell at her or strike her or shoot her – but before she had to make up her mind the door swung open and let in a WAAF wireless telegraphist who worked a floor up. “Oh –” she said, startled, clearly not expecting to see Peggy and Natasha there and just as clearly aware of who they both were.

“We were just leaving,” Natasha told her, glanced at her reflection in the mirror as if to check her lipstick, and then looked at Peggy, clearly waiting for her to take the lead.

It took everything Peggy had to turn her back on the other woman long enough to leave the room.

King’s Cross St. Pancras station was open again by the time the WAC and the Wren passed each other on the platform. The Underground had already stopped running when the V-2 had hit Whitefield’s Tabernacle, though there had been people sheltering in the station who had felt the world shake around them. The station itself hadn’t been damaged, though the portion of Tottenham Court Road where the destroyed church had been was blocked off.

The Wren and the WAC didn’t speak, just brushed past each other on the crowded platform; only someone who already knew what to look for and had keen eyes to boot would have seen the two women exchange newspapers. The Wren – whose real name was Lyudmila Plisetskaya – just tucked the newspaper under her arm, feeling the barely noticeable weight and regular shape of the packet tucked inside it. She didn’t look at it until she was back in her flat; the other matryoshki and the Department X strike team were sleeping elsewhere, but she was keeping her own room for now, since there was no need to raise early suspicion by vanishing. It was a pity that there was no way to predict where the V-2s were going to hit, or she could have passed off a temporary or permanent disappearance as a casualty of a rocket strike.

Lyusya Plisetskaya sat cross-legged on her narrow bed to unfold the newspaper and remove the thick brown envelope tucked within it. Photographs spilled out when she turned it over onto her threadbare quilt – one a portrait of a pretty light-haired woman in her late twenties or early thirties, the kind of photograph taken for identity papers, then photographs of an American War Department identification card for Natasha Romanoff Rogers, her enlistment papers for the Strategic Scientific Reserve, and a marriage license and certificate for Steven Grant Rogers and Natalia Alianovna Romanoff. All the forms were backdated. Tucked amidst them was a folded scrap of paper covered in dense chicken-scratch handwriting, which Lyusya decoded mentally.

sgr returning to active duty germany w/in 1 week made contact w/ sgr wife natasha romanoff rogers knew protocols dept x natalia surname unknown last post unknown handler unknown out of contact w/ dept asked for hold can we id?

Lyusya picked up the portrait photograph again, studying the woman’s unfamiliar face for a few moments, sorting through her memory of the other matryoshki she knew. She didn’t know all of them; there were more facilities than the one she had grown up in. Then she got up and went to the Arachne machine on her desk, rolled a blank sheet of paper in the way she would have done had the cypher machine been a real typewriter, and began to compose her message.

The response came very quickly.

SIXTEEN OPERATIVES MISSING TWENTY-SEVEN KILLED EUROPE 1939 TO 1945 NO NATALIA TAKE ALIVE WITH ROGERS ALL COSTS X