Of Home Near

“Lift your left arm?”

Natasha did so, allowing Howard Stark to make a minor adjustment to the cuff of the tunic-style jacket he was fitting on her. His expression was intent with concentration, two dress pins sticking out of the corner of his mouth, and his hands were unerring as he made the modification with quick, neat stitches. For some reason it was the least like Tony Natasha had ever seen him look, even though she had seen Tony make similar quick alterations to the Iron Man suits a hundred times before.

Sunlight spilled in through the room’s bow windows, which looked out over the lawn where Howard had landed his plane a few hours earlier. Going by the room’s big desk – now heavily battered from use – and empty bookshelves – mostly covered up by maps and charts – Natasha suspected it had been a study in the building’s previous life as a manor house. Howard Stark had commandeered it upon arrival to do uniform fittings in, since along with the new shield he had brought uniforms for both of them.

He drew back when he was finished and took the pins out of his mouth to ask, “How’s that feel?”

Natasha worked her arm experimentally, then warned Howard to step back and went through one of her shorter kata. He watched without any of the half-expected erotic interest, his attention totally focused on the motions and her new tactical gear.

“Good,” she told him when she had finished, a little to her own surprise, but she supposed that if he regularly made Captain America’s uniforms he had to know the importance of flexibility.

The corner of his mouth curled up a little, as if he had guessed the direction of her thoughts, but all he said was, “Try it with the gear belt,” and handed it to her.

Natasha inspected it as she took it from him. Howard had clearly been paying attention to the gear that she had arrived with; he had consulted with her on the design for the new uniform, with Steve doing the initial sketches. The tunic came down past her hips to mid-thigh, with the front fastening at her left shoulder like a motorcycle jacket. The gear belt was made of black leather and was actually two belts crossed over each other, joined by a rivet that let them flex; the holsters were empty at the moment, as were the utility pouches.

She buckled the belt on and shifted around a little, testing the placement, then went into a brief tumbling routine. Howard watched with that same clinical, calculating interest, his gaze sharp; he made a couple of notes in his sketchbook as she came upright. “How’s that feel?”

“Straps here and here on the holsters, or they’ll flap around.” Natasha pointed them out. “Like Steve’s got,” she clarified when he frowned.

“No, I know what you mean. For a lady – a married lady –”

“God forbid that anyone in the United States Army or the Wehrmacht learns that a woman has legs,” Natasha said dryly, rolling her eyes. “If anyone is looking at my legs, that’s their problem. Especially in the middle of a fight.”

“Point taken.” Howard nodded absently and jotted it down in his sketchbook – actually Steve’s sketchbook, she was amused to note; apparently Steve hadn’t succeeded in getting it back from him yet.

“Am I going to get any of my own gear back?” she asked, rubbing a thumb over her bare wrist. She was expecting the answer to be no and wasn’t surprised when Howard shook his head.

“But I brought some stuff for you to look at,” he offered encouragingly. “You can give it a try and keep whatever you like. And Dugan said you’d be taking over as sniper, so I brought some rifles for you to try out too.”

Howard chewed on the end of his pencil for a moment before he finally said, “You know about the Commandos’ last sniper –”

“Yes,” Natasha said. “I know about Bucky Barnes.”

Howard nodded grimly and looked away, then sat down heavily on the chair he had dragged over from behind the desk, bracing his sketchbook on his knees as his pencil moved over the page.

“Did you design the Howling Commandos’ uniforms too?” Natasha asked eventually, unbuckling the gear belt and weighing it thoughtfully in one hand. “I know you did Steve’s, and I know you supply the Commandos with weapons and tech –”

Howard nodded. “Steve did most of his himself, but I made it,” he said. “I helped with the Commandos, yeah. Steve did some of it, they did some of it, I did some. What do you think?” He held the sketchbook up and turned it around so that she could see.

He had a fine draftsman’s hand, without the sense of suspended life that Steve’s sketches had. Natasha wondered briefly what he would have made of the CAD programs Tony used or if given the option, he would still draft his designs by hand the way Rhodey did when he was working on the War Machine suit.

“I like this rig,” she told him, and Howard nodded, making a few more notes to himself.

“I can have that done today, it’s a minor fix,” he said. He took the gear belt from Natasha and set them both down, then looked at her for a long moment before saying, “I’m glad Steve got married. Or whatever,” he added with a solemn wink. “It’s good for him.”

For a moment his expression was wistful, then his gaze flickered sideways, as if he was embarrassed that he had let the emotion show.

“Did you and Steve ever –” she began, and then stopped, uncertain how to end the question. Or if she should be asking it at all; this wasn’t the twenty-first century, and even there it wasn’t a harmless inquiry.

Howard looked back at her, wary now and frowning a little, but whatever he saw on her face seemed to reassure him. “What, and get both of us shot by Peggy? That wouldn’t do the war effort any good. She’d do it, too. Anyway, Steve’s been a little busy fighting a war.”

“Do you know who the woman was that Agent Carter caught him with in 1943?” Natasha asked, with a mental tick of observation that he hadn’t bothered to deny that Steve liked men as well as women. Not that either one of them was saying anything outright, just half-spoken asides. “I’ve heard the story, but no one will say who –”

“Sure,” Howard said. “But I don’t think you have anything to worry about; Steve’s crazy about you.”

“I’m not worried, I’m curious,” Natasha said. “Or did Agent Carter push her out of the SSR?” She didn’t think Peggy Carter was that petty, but if she was, Natasha wanted to know about it.

“She’s still here,” Howard said. “It was Irene Lorraine, Colonel Phillips’ secretary. Steve came in looking for me and she cornered him.” He grinned, amused at the memory, and explained, “It was right after we got back to London from Italy and Phillips got Steve transferred from the USO to the SSR, so the big rescue was all over the papers. Apparently she was thanking him on behalf of the women of America, only Peggy caught them. Scared the hell out of both of them.”

He chewed absently on the end of his pencil, then shot a look at the closed door and went on slowly, “I don’t know how much Steve’s told you – I guess it wouldn’t really matter up then in 2018 – but he and Peggy…they were and they weren’t, you know? They didn’t go out to dinner, they didn’t go dancing; I don’t know if they ever even kissed. But he had her picture in his compass and if he hadn’t gone down with the Valkyrie, then –” Howard shrugged. “They might have gotten married later, yeah, but they never actually talked about it. Stupid thing to do in a war,” he added, then thought about it and grimaced, making a vague gesture with the pencil towards himself as if to say, but I did the same thing.

He flicked another glance at the door again while Natasha was chewing over what to say in response to that. “Don’t repeat this to Steve or Peg,” he warned, and waited for her to nod before he went on. “It’s not that Peg didn’t like Steve back then, because she did, and it’s different now, obviously, but she set her cap for him as soon as he came back from Austria and not a minute earlier, no matter what anyone else here says about it, including Steve. And that was it as far as she was concerned. There were girls like that in my old neighborhood,” he added knowledgeably, “not that any of them ever had anything to do with me back then.”

“There are women like that everywhere,” Natasha said dryly. It wasn’t a personality type that usually survived the rigors of the Red Room, but she had known one or two Widows who had managed it.

She considered Howard with a little more interest. The Stark family’s origins were a farrago of obfuscation, fairy tales, and what Natasha was fairly certain were a few outright lies, though she wasn’t certain how aware of that Tony was. Howard Stark had told the newspapers several contradictory stories over the years, one variation of which was on the Stark Industries website, and the only consistent point seemed to be that he had been born in Manhattan in 1917, though which part of Manhattan was up for debate. Natasha also strongly suspected that the family name had started out as something a lot less Anglophone than Stark, though she wasn’t sure if that was Howard’s doing or if it had happened at Ellis Island; both seemed equally likely. She wondered if Howard would tell her if she asked.

Howard slid a third look at the door and started to say, “Steve –” and then stopped, chewing on the end of the pencil again. Finally, he said, “I think if either he or Peg had pushed harder, it would have gone further between the two of them, but neither one of them ever did. In a way it is – it was – probably easier that way. I mean – it is when people make assumptions. Easier, I mean. Leave enough gaps in any story and people will fill them in for you – hell, you’ll start filling them in yourself.”

He sat in silence for a few moments, his expression abstracted; Natasha thought about his playboy reputation, that he hadn’t married until 1965, the few things Tony had said about his father and his parents’ marriage – the way Howard looked at Steve when he thought Steve didn’t know. For that matter, the fact that he hadn’t looked at her with anything more than aesthetic appreciation over the course of the past two weeks and change.

Eventually Howard shook his head and said, “I’m surprised Steve had the guts to ask you out.”

“There were extenuating circumstances,” Natasha allowed, accepting the change in subject. When Howard’s eyebrows went up, she explained, “We were on the run from the government, so I don’t think he thought he had all that much to lose.”

Well, it was technically true; Interpol still had red notices out on them back up in 2018, and Thaddeus Ross would be happy to have both of them drawn and quartered.

“Sounds like quite the story.”

“You have no idea,” Natasha said.

Howard took her unwillingness to expand on that in stride; for all Natasha knew, he assumed that instead of dinner and a movie, she and Steve had consummated their mutual interest in the back of a truck while on the run, which wasn’t even that far from the truth, minus the truck. He looked back down at the sketchbook in his lap as if he had forgotten it was there, then at the chewed end of his pencil in equal surprise. He glanced up at Natasha, down at the sketchbook, and up at her again; she raised her eyebrows in response.

“You okay with the color?” he asked. “I thought we’d match you and Steve, give the photographers something to coo about.”

Natasha blinked at him, though by now she was used to Howard Stark’s rapid changes in subject, then realized that he meant her new uniform, which was dark blue with a little red detailing down the sides and sleeves, with the Howling Commandos’ winged insignia on the left shoulder. Both the red and the blue were a little lighter in color than any of Steve’s recent uniforms, either because of changing aesthetics between 1945 and 2016 or because they would show up better in the black and white photographs the newspapers used. She hadn’t had a chance to see Steve’s new uniform yet, though she doubted it could be all that different from his last WWII uniform.

“It’s fine,” she said, then cocked an eyebrow at him and said, “Do I really have to worry about photographers? Isn’t that mostly Steve’s problem?”

The Howling Commandos had featured a little in some of the old newspaper articles and newsreels she had seen, but most of the attention had been on Captain America until the 1960s, when there had been a resurgence in Howling Commando stories for a few years on both sides of the civil rights movement, not helped by Gabe Jones’ death in 1965. It had been on the job for SHIELD, but SHIELD’s existence hadn’t been publicly known until 1975, when along with the NSA it had been revealed as part of the Church Committee hearings that had followed the Watergate scandal. Even in 2018 there was a persistent rumor that Jones had been assassinated; knowing about Hydra’s interference in SHIELD, Natasha wasn’t sure that he hadn’t been, but there had been never been any proof.

“Nope,” Howard said. “Come on, Captain and Mrs. America? The papers and the newsreels will eat that up. If Ike and Monty weren’t running roughshod over the Germans right now Senator Brandt would probably have the two of you doing photoshoots for a week. Instead Sherman – you met him the other day when he was taking pictures of Brandt and Steve – will have to squeeze them all in tomorrow, and a couple more at the front after you arrive.”

Natasha grimaced. She had done the publicity circuit up in the twenty-first century, but hadn’t enjoyed it anymore than Steve had; unlike Steve, she also wasn’t used to it. At least then that had been as another Avenger, rather than as Captain America’s wife. She didn’t enjoy being defined in relation to Steve – to Captain America, really – but it kept anyone from looking too closely at her own entirely fictional background and with any luck it wouldn’t have to last.

“They’re not expecting – I don’t know, a demure secretary, are they?” Natasha asked warily. “Or a nurse, or –” She knew women had done just about every job but combat in the Second World War, but she was also aware that not all of those jobs had equivalents in the twenty-first century.

Howard snorted. “What, for Captain America? Only if you listen to Roxxon’s faradiddle – they sponsor the Captain America Adventure Program.” When Natasha’s eyebrows shot upwards, he explained, “It’s a radio show. Roxxon is –”

“I know what Roxxon Energy is,” Natasha said.

This time it was Howard’s eyebrows that went up. “Roxxon Oil Corporation now,” he said. “I’ve been trying to buy them out for years, but Hugh Jones – that’s the CEO – hasn’t been having it. Cap’s sweetheart in the show is some nurse who’s always getting herself kidnapped by Nazis, when she’s not mending split trousers or making dinner for five hundred. I keep telling Peggy she should sue for defamation.”

“Not Steve?”

Howard’s mouth twisted. “Steve doesn’t have any legal right to his name or image. Well, the Captain America name, anyway, not the Steve Rogers part. The United States government can license the rest of it to anyone they want.” A muscle in his jaw twitched and he looked away. After a moment, he added, “I’ll get my lawyers on it after the war, though Brandt’s people are pretty good.”

“I know,” Natasha admitted. “Steve’s still having that fight up in the twenty-first, mostly unsuccessfully.”

They both looked over as someone scratched at the door. Steve’s voice, slightly muffled, asked, “Are you decent?”

“Come back in about ten minutes so I can finish ravishing your wife,” Howard called back, winking at Natasha.

“You couldn’t handle my wife,” Steve said, taking that as an invitation to come in. He was still in his olive drab army uniform, not the tactical gear Howard had brought for him; presumably he was waiting until Howard was done with Natasha and could do any needed adjustments on him. He grinned when he saw her and said, “You look really good.”

“Apparently we’ll match,” Natasha informed him, leaning up to kiss him as he came over to inspect her new gear more closely.

“Oh, the papers will love that.”

“Better put your ring back on when you go back to London,” Howard advised him. “For the cameras. And the jewelry industry; they’ll love it. Make sure if anyone asks you tell them it’s Tiffany. Speaking of –” He set the sketchbook aside and leaned over to dig through one of his duffle bags.

Natasha looked down at her wedding ring and said to Steve, her voice light, “Why, darling, I didn’t think you cared enough to get me Tiffany.”

“Tiffany and I have a long-standing arrangement,” Howard said, coming upright with three small blue boxes in his hand. “Cartier’s nice, but they’re French and Cap’s a New York boy. Make sure you tell the papers that, okay?”

“Uh-huh,” Steve said. “When did I have time to go back to New York and go jewelry shopping?”

“You were missing for a month, you had plenty of time,” Howard said. He opened all three boxes, balancing them carefully across his broad engineer’s hand, and showed them to Steve. “Your choice.”

Steve’s ears went red. “You’re asking me?”

“She’s your wife,” Howard pointed out.

“When did you have time to go back to New York and go jewelry shopping?” Steve said, slowly going more and more scarlet. “Or did you just have these around too?”

Howard waved that off. “For emergencies.”

“What kind of emergency calls for diamond rings?” Steve said.

“This one?”

“He’s got you there,” Natasha pointed out, amused. “No, you pick,” she added as Steve tried to turn Howard and the jewelry boxes towards her. “I trust your taste.”

Steve’s blush deepened even more, but he studied the contents of the blue boxes intently before he took the one on the left. Howard clapped the lids back on the other two jewelry boxes and beamed at him.

“Actually, Jarvis got them for me,” he said, and when Steve and Natasha said, “JARVIS?” together, explained, “My butler, Edwin Jarvis – haven’t you met him, Steve? I guess not. He mostly keeps everything together back on the home front, so he hasn’t been in London a lot since we got here. I had him go down to Fifth Avenue and pick up some options. He’s English like Peg, got great taste, very classy.”

Having served as Tony Stark’s PA for a brief period of time she preferred not to think about, Natasha could only imagine how Edwin Jarvis had reacted to that particular request.

“It’s nice,” Steve said, his ears bright red. He looked at Natasha, hesitating, and she offered him her left hand in response. He slid the ring up over her finger to nudge closely against her wedding band, diamonds winking in the light. The ring had a slim gold and platinum band with two small marquise diamonds framing a brilliant-cut diamond that wasn’t so large as to be ostentatious, but also couldn’t be much less than a full carat, either. It snugged up against the wedding band as if they had been made to match.

For a long moment she and Steve just stared at each other, her hand still in his, and then Natasha said, “I think we’ve been doing this backwards. Do we get divorced next or does one of us actually propose?”

The corner of Steve’s mouth curled up and a little of the anxiety left his eyes. “You want to get divorced?”

“Not just now.” Natasha leaned up to kiss him, then held her hand up to watch the way the diamonds winked in the light. “I’m not wearing this in the field,” she observed, not least because she could guess how much money Howard Stark was willing to casually lay out for his best friend’s engagement ring, even ex post facto. She knew how much a Tiffany ring cost in the twenty-first century and presumably the same, minus inflation, was true here.

“Wear it for the cameras,” Howard advised, and didn’t wait for a response before he turned to Steve and said, “Shield?”

“Paint’s drying,” Steve told him, biting his lip briefly.

Howard started to say something, then hesitated, studying Steve’s face. Natasha had gone outside with the Howling Commandos after Howard had already landed, so she hadn’t heard what Steve, Howard, and Peggy had been talking about, but she had seen the expression on Steve’s face. Steve never talked about what had happened in Siberia with Tony Stark and Bucky Barnes, but she knew he had left Germany with the shield and hadn’t had it when Natasha had finally tracked him down to Greece. She doubted that he had told Howard and Peggy any more than he had told her. Probably less than that, since they didn’t have any context for Tony Stark, Bucky Barnes, or the Sokovia Accords. Having met him, Natasha suspected that Howard would have sided with Steve over his own son, not that she was planning to tell anyone that. She also suspected that that would have been equally true if he had actually met his son.

“I’ve got some gear for you two and I need to fit your uniform,” Howard said finally, “but that can wait. I gotta go talk to Peg anyway.”

Steve looked at him with gratitude and said, “Thank you, Howard.”

Howard clapped him on the shoulder and beamed good-naturedly at Natasha before he drifted off towards the door, carefully shutting it behind him and leaving them alone for the first time since they had left London.

Steve’s shoulders slumped. “Howard,” he said, like that was an explanation.

Natasha held up her left hand again to inspect the ring. “Well, you have to admire his commitment,” she said. She didn’t bother to ask if they really expected reporters asking about it; she had been a public figure long enough to know the answer to that particular question. “And Mr. Jarvis’s taste. I’m kind of curious about the other options now.”

She smiled at Steve to let him know she wasn’t serious, and after a moment the corner of his mouth curved upwards. “We’re lucky it was Howard – or his butler – who picked them out or it would have been rubies, sapphires, and diamonds.”

Natasha stared at him disbelievingly. “What, as in red, white, and blue?”

“Yeah, that’s popular right now back in the States,” Steve said, his mouth twitching.

“On one ring?”

He nodded again. “If it had been anyone but Howard picking out rings – or Edwin Jarvis, I guess –” He grimaced and Natasha filled in the blank; nothing but the best and most patriotic for Captain America.

“Tony must have named JARVIS after, well, Jarvis,” Natasha mused; Steve shrugged in response, suddenly looking very tired.

Natasha put a hand on his elbow and said, “Are you all right?”

He shrugged again. “Didn’t sleep well. And Peggy –” He looked aside. “I didn’t actually expect Howard to show up with another shield,” he admitted.

“Where did he get the vibranium?” Natasha asked.

Steve’s mouth twisted in wry amusement. “Apparently he’s friends with the king of Wakanda and asked nicely. Which is news to me; T’Challa never mentioned Howard, Tony – well, he also never talked about Howard.”

“T’Challa might not know,” Natasha pointed out, diplomatically not mentioning Tony. “The war was a long time ago – or, well –”

“I know what you mean,” Steve said. He put his hands on her shoulders and stepped back to get another look at her uniform. The corner of his mouth curled up again and he said, “We are going to match. The papers will love it.”

He dipped his head and kissed her gently, a little shy until Natasha put her arms around his neck and deepened the kiss. After four days sleeping apart and only seeing each other in the company of others, she was shocked at the rush of desire that followed the taste of his mouth, the feel of his skin, the smell of him.

She had been with just enough people after she had left the Red Room to determine that she wasn’t particularly interested in sex for its own sake; what she cared for hadn’t been a factor in the Red Room, of course. She had wanted to want Bruce more than she had actually wanted him and convinced herself that she did until it had finally come down to it, the same way she had almost succeeded in convincing herself that it was pointless to want Steve. Natasha had been more than a little afraid, the first time they had slept together, that she wouldn’t be interested anymore once having sex with him was no longer theoretical. When he touched her, though – mouth, hands, body – as if all those years of working together, fighting together, training together, had been leading to it, to just the two of them wrapped around each other in the night as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.

It fell away now as Natasha kissed him, like they were teenagers necking behind the bleachers in a film. She curled her fingers into Steve’s still-overlong hair, licking into his mouth, pulling him against her, into her. He came easily, one hand moving to her waist, letting Natasha walk them backwards until the backs of her thighs hit one of the room’s big desks. Steve lifted her easily up onto it, then rested his forehead against hers, breathing hard.

Natasha kept her hand on the back of his neck and said softly, “Talk to me.”

“Nat, I’m scared.” His voice was barely more than a whisper. “Not about changing the future – not only about changing the future – but –” He hesitated, sorting through his own thoughts, and finally said, “It’s not – not real to them. I don’t know if they think I’m crazy or lying or if they just can’t believe it, because you – you don’t. Not something this wild. When I – came out of the ice, it was a long time before…” He shook his head, and Natasha remembered his stunned disbelief on the helicarrier six years earlier, still trying to make sense of a horrifying impossibility. “You can know something and not believe it, you know?”

“Yes,” Natasha said softly. “I know.”

Steve nodded. “It’s not like with Fury six years ago. He wanted Captain America and got him, but the Captain America he got was me, not the guy from the pictures.”

“Nick didn’t want the guy from the movies,” Natasha reminded him. “That was Coulson. Nick wanted the guy from Colonel Phillips’s reports.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth quirked a little. “If you’ve ever read Phillips’s reports, then you’d know that the words ‘Rogers is crazy as a fox’ are on a couple of them.”

“I think Fury wrote that on his, too.”

“Can’t blame him,” Steve admitted. “But Fury only knew the guy from the reports and the movies and the newspapers. Everyone here knows me. Or at least,” he added wearily, “they know the guy I was six years ago, the guy who went into the ice. And maybe I don’t, not anymore. But they do. And they keep – keep pushing. It’s not malicious, not really, it’s just…I don’t know. They expect me to be the other guy, so they keep treating me like him. Only I’m not him anymore. But I could be, or close enough, at least. All I’d have to do is just…let them do it. And it would be easy.”

“And part of you wants to,” Natasha murmured. It wasn’t a question, but Steve nodded anyway.

“Six years ago I would have done anything for this,” he said, like he had said before. “I still have days where I hate being –” He fumbled for a moment with the words. “– up there. Even with you and Sam and Bucky, Wanda, Rhodey – there are days when I can’t bear it.”

“I know,” Natasha said; anyone who had been around Steve Rogers for any period of time knew. He couldn’t even get drunk to deal with it the way most people she knew would have done. His periods of black misery were rarer these days than they had been six years ago, but even now they still sometimes lasted for weeks.

“At least back home no one thinks I’m lying about what happened to me,” Steve said, sounding very tired. “Or no one that matters, anyway. Here…” He let the word trail off, his eyes shut tight.

Natasha couldn’t imagine how awful it would be to have everyone you loved disbelieve you about the worst thing in your life, the one thing that defined you above all else.

“Even Howard doesn’t believe it, not really,” Steve went on after a moment. “He doesn’t think I’m lying, he just…doesn’t believe it. Peggy doesn’t. The Howlies don’t. Phillips doesn’t. And the truth is that it doesn’t even really matter right now, because we can’t do anything about it and it doesn’t change anything. We’re still here. Whatever happens with Department X, we’re still going to the front. It’s almost enough to make me start wondering if I am imagining it.”

“You’re not,” Natasha told him quietly.

“I know,” Steve said wearily. “But sometimes I start to wish I was.”

“I don’t like this,” Peggy said bluntly, spreading out the Typex printouts that Howard had ferried up from London. There weren’t many of them, all of them short; not all of them had been decrypted, and the jumble of letters on the encrypted messages stood out like a sore thumb. “We’re certain that these are all white whale transmissions?”

“That’s what Room 17 said,” Howard said, glancing up from the adjustments he was making to some of Natasha Rogers’ gear. “You know I don’t mess around with that stuff, so you’ll have to take their word for it.”

Jim Morita tapped a finger against one of the decrypted messages, which said only, NO SOAP, and said, “Sounds like they’re waiting for us to get back to London. Or for Steve to get back, anyway.”

“Which does suggest that our mole isn’t aware of Beaulieu’s location,” Falsworth said, sounding relieved; all the official documents only referred to the estate as Special Training School 31, with no hint of its location or real name. SOE had over seventy establishments scattered across Great Britain, all codenamed and obscured in so much bumf that it was nearly impossible to determine where any individual site was unless you already knew. Beaulieu, with its complex of country houses – every agent in SOE was supposed to go through the so-called “finishing school” on the estate, though not all actually did – was a major site; if SOE had had to shut it down because the SSR had made a mistake it would be…well, not catastrophic, but certainly more serious than a minor hiccup.

The four NO SOAP messages all dated from the days since the Howling Commandos had left London and had probably been easy to decrypt after the first one, since they consisted of the same number of letters even if the code had changed each day. The longer message that had been transmitted around midnight, after the codes had changed, hadn’t been decrypted yet.

“American slang,” Dum-Dum observed, picking up another strip of paper.

“Not that that means much,” Peggy said; slang had been passed amongst the members of the Allied forces with as much frequency as venereal disease. No soap meant that the sender had had no opportunity to do whatever it was that they wanted to do – snatch Steve off the street, presumably.

Department X would have one chance to do exactly that before Captain America and the Howling Commandos went off to join the American forces at the front. She, Steve, Natasha, and the Commandos had planned it out here at Beaulieu rather than back at the SSR; as far as the rest of the SSR was concerned, it was Captain Rogers’ one public excursion before he left London, which hopefully the mole had passed to the Soviet strike team. If she hadn’t and the Soviets didn’t make a try for Steve, then they wouldn’t have another chance before the Commandos departed for Germany, assuming the team didn’t try to intercept them on their way either to the airfield or in flight. The latter seemed unlikely, but most of Peggy’s life over the past few years had been unlikely, so they weren’t counting the possibility out.

The new shield gleamed in the room’s electric lighting on one of the other tables, a reminder of what was at stake. Steve, fully aware of what was expected for Captain America, had painted it in exactly the same shades of red and blue that the previous shield had borne and it sat drying out of the way, with Steve’s new gear piled up on the table beside it where he couldn’t miss it when he returned. He had done the paint job with the quick, confident brushstrokes of someone who had done the same thing a dozen times before, freshening it up after a few too many bullet scars or on rare occasion stripping all the old paint off and redoing it completely. There had been something eerie about watching him do it this time, like stumbling on a ghost doomed to repeat its last actions over and over until Judgment Day. Something reassuring, too, in seeing Steve doing something so familiar, when so much of what he had been doing over the past two weeks hadn’t been.

Peggy set the still-encrypted printout aside and looked around the room. Falsworth, Dum-Dum, and Morita were all gathered around the table that held copies of all the white whale transmissions, both decrypted and encrypted, along with the horrifyingly thin file on Leviathan that Phillips had compiled for them, which Morita had picked up and was leafing through. Dernier and Jones were sitting with Howard, having a highly technical conversation in French about some of the new equipment he had brought.

She found Steve and Natasha still in the study Howard had temporarily commandeered. For a horrified moment when she came in Peggy thought that they were having sex; Natasha was sitting on the edge of the desk and Steve was standing between the cradle of her thighs, his face buried in her shoulder and their arms around each other.

Good God, man, it’s been four days, surely you can go without for that long –

Then Natasha turned her head sharply at the sound of the door opening, her gaze sharp and intelligent, and Peggy saw that at least they both still had their clothes on. Which she was well aware didn’t mean they hadn’t been having sex, except that Natasha was in trousers, not a skirt.

After a moment Steve looked up too and stepped away so that his wife could hop down from the desk and stand beside him. She was wearing the same army-issue paratrooper boots as he was, rather than the low-heeled pumps WACs usually wore; the top of her head came up barely to the underside of his chin, the way it had when they had been sparring barefoot back at headquarters.

There was a little heat in Steve’s cheeks, like he was embarrassed at being caught with his wife – or the woman he claimed was his wife, anyway, even if by now everyone that mattered had figured out the truth.

“Howard needs to fit your new uniform,” Peggy informed him, directing her gaze at a point over Natasha’s head; she was four inches taller than the other woman. “And I need to color Mrs. Rogers’ hair.”

Natasha blinked. “My – hair?”

Her bleach blonde bob – she had left off curling it at Beaulieu, which Peggy considered rather dépassé – had an obvious inch of red roots. Even if the first rule of intelligence work wasn’t don’t be noticed, it was the kind of thing that was unacceptable for the introduction of Captain America’s wife to the newspapers and newsreels.

“Your hair,” Peggy confirmed, and after a moment Natasha nodded. When Steve looked down at Natasha, frowning a little, she made a gesture towards the crown of her head and understanding spread across his face.

He bent his head to kiss her briefly. “I’d better not keep Howard waiting or he’ll get bored and blow something up,” he said, nodding to Peggy before he left, boot heels clicking on the battered parquet floor. The Montagu-Scotts, to whom the estate belonged, were going to have a job of a time getting Beaulieu back up to snuff when the war ended, she thought distractedly.

She got Natasha ensconced in the largest bathroom and pulled on an artist’s smock to protect her clothes as the other woman stripped out of her new uniform tunic and undershirt. “Either Howard’s been busy or Steve has,” Peggy observed, eyeing the new diamond ring as she mixed henna with hot water. “And unless I’m much mistaken, Steve hasn’t had the time.”

“Howard brought some options for Steve to choose from,” Natasha said, running her fingers through her hair. “Apparently reporters will ask about it.”

Peggy sniffed. “Vultures.”

“A reporter back home once asked me in a live press conference if I wore underwear with my suit,” Natasha said. “So if you’re wondering if it gets better, it doesn’t.” The corner of her mouth crooked up a little in memory. “Steve almost went over the table at him. For some reason no one ever thinks Captain America might have a temper.”

“Especially when it comes to his girlfriend’s underthings,” Peggy said blandly.

Natasha’s gaze flickered to her; she had caught the distinction between “girlfriend” and “wife.” “We weren’t seeing each other then.”

“And what did the press say about your hair?” Peggy asked, considering the bullet scar on the back of Natasha’s shoulder before the other woman covered it with an already-stained towel. SOE didn’t go in for hair dye normally, but it was best to be prepared for all occasions. Hair dye could do wonders in an emergency, as long as you the time to apply it.

“They didn’t,” Natasha said. She hesitated a minute, not meeting Peggy’s eyes – not guilty, just looking away, like she was running options through her head – and finally went on, “Same reason they didn’t say anything about Steve’s beard. We’ve been on the run.”

Ah. Peggy thought, another missing piece slotting into the jigsaw puzzle Steve and Natasha had told them. It made more sense than it didn’t. She bit her tongue on a sarcastic, How romantic, and said instead, “For a good reason or was Steve just shooting his mouth off to the wrong person? He does that.”

“He does that,” Natasha agreed. “But yes, for a good reason.” She sat when Peggy told her too, rearranging the towel and pulling free a few stray strands of pale hair that had gotten caught under it.

Peggy pulled on gloves so that she didn’t stain her hands and started to glop the greenish mess of henna onto Natasha’s blonde hair. With a start, she realized that it was the closest she had ever been to the other woman. This is the woman Steve sleeps with, she thought. He’s had his hands on her body, his tongue in her mouth, his –

She stopped that line of thought before it went any further and concentrated on coating all of that fine pale hair, pushing Natasha’s head forward. “I know you and Steve aren’t really married,” she said. “Though with a ring on your finger and a signed license, maybe that part doesn’t matter to you anymore.”

Natasha let her breath out slowly, but didn’t say anything. Peggy massaged henna into her hair with more force than was probably necessary, feeling Natasha wince slightly beneath her hands.

She knows everything about me, Steve had said, and from someone else it might have been a threat or a curse; from him it was just a simple statement of fact. Peggy could tell from the way that he had said it that he hadn’t meant the sort of things that could be gleaned from a newspaper article or a personnel file; everything went beyond how he took his coffee or if he went to church or his preferred brand of pencils.

Peggy hadn’t even known he was Catholic.

“For what it’s worth,” Natasha said eventually, “I told Steve when we got here, after we’d figured out what had happened, that he didn’t have to – to stay with me. I’ve seen a lot of shit in my life and what happened to Steve is some of the worst. Not the worst –” Peggy, her hands frozen on Natasha’s skull, felt the other woman’s jaw work briefly. “– but it’s up there. If he had a second chance, I wanted him to have the option to take it.”

Peggy forced herself to start moving again, dolloping more henna onto Natasha’s hair, which was beginning to take on the general color and consistency of swamp mud. “Do you really think that Steve would do that?”

Do you really think I’d throw over a woman I love because I might have a chance at someone else? Steve had asked Peggy only a few hours ago, sounding genuinely shocked. Do you really want me to be the kind of guy who’d do that?

Peggy would have liked to say no, since she had known too many men who would and did do just that, including the man she had thought she would marry in the spring of 1939, when all of Europe had still been holding its breath waiting to find out if war really would come about. But it would be different, she thought, if it was for her and not someone else.

She saw Natasha’s face do something complicated in the mirror before she said simply, “I’m not the kind of woman who gets to have men like Steve Rogers.”

Peggy didn’t ask what she meant; Natasha had told her herself back at headquarters. Traitor, she thought, though her hands didn’t stop as she continued to massage henna into Natasha’s hair. Spy. Assassin. Which was just another word for murderer.

Peggy had killed men in cold blood, but that had been war.

She knew Steve well enough to know that none of that mattered to him.

She took a deep breath, resisting the urge to scream, and said, “Tell me what happened two years ago.”

“In 1943?” Natasha said. “You’d know better than me.”

“In 2016.”

Natasha didn’t respond immediately, though her gaze went a little abstracted, apparently sorting through what to and what not to say. Peggy didn’t push her, just glopped more henna onto her head. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe that she was finally going to get the whole truth, but she thought she was going to get more than she had the last few times.

“The Sokovia Accords,” Natasha said finally. “SHIELD was disbanded in 2014 and the Avengers operated independently for two years, which made a lot of people very uneasy, including the United States government and the United Nations – um, they succeeded the League of Nations, except the UN can actually do things. Sometimes. Not always. And they usually don’t do it well. In 2015, there was a major incident in Sokovia that resulted in a lot of civilian deaths and the destruction of the capital.”

“Sokovia?” Peggy said, trying to remember when she had heard – or more likely seen – the name before; it only sounded vaguely familiar. “Isn’t that part of the Soviet Union?”

Natasha arched an eyebrow. “The Soviet Union stopped existing in 1991. I’m not sure what Sokovia’s status was – is – in 1945, but in 2015 it was an independent nation. Was. It dissolved after there was a smoking crater instead of a capital city. We got most of the people out, but we couldn’t stop it. There was another incident in 2016 in Nigeria that had us back in the news, and the United States used it to pressure the United Nations into ratifying the Sokovia Accords, which would bring all enhanced individuals under the control of a UN panel.”

“Enhanced individuals?” Peggy questioned.

“People like Steve, who have had something like Erskine’s serum, or other biological enhancements. People who use certain types of technology, like Tony’s robotic suit or Sam Wilson’s wings. Or people like me,” Natasha said, with a bitter twist to her mouth. “Who have a very specific skillset and think they should use it for something other than killing people for money.”

Peggy felt a muscle in her own jaw twitch. “That’s very vague.”

“Yes. There are other things in the Accords too, but that’s the relevant part. By ‘UN panel,’ what it actually turned out to mean was the personal control of the American Secretary of State, who at the time was – well, still is – a former U.S. Army general named Thaddeus Ross. Ross has been involved in two separate attempts to reconstruct the super soldier serum, once in the 1980s and once in the 2000s.” A muscle jumped in Natasha’s jaw. “I’m sure that’s not what the UN thought when they were writing the Accords and I’m sure that’s not what Tony thought when he was arguing for them – it wasn’t what I thought – but that’s what ended up happening. Ross chased me across half of Europe, which I don’t think the EU – the European Union – was happy about either.”

“Tony – Stark?” Peggy said. “Howard’s son? The one who hates Steve?”

“That’s the one,” Natasha said.

“The one who tried to kill him?”

“This was when he tried to kill him,” Natasha said, her mouth twisting again. “The Avengers split over the Accords – Steve refused to sign and about half of us went with him, half sided with Tony.” She frowned a little. “You – Peggy Carter, the Peggy Carter up there – died in the middle of it. It wasn’t an assassination,” she added quickly, even though Peggy hadn’t said anything. “She was just a hundred years old. Then someone bombed the UN in Vienna while they were trying to ratify the Accords and framed a friend of Steve’s for it, someone else who had gotten a version of the super soldier serum, another enhanced. Steve went after him before the UN task force could and things escalated from there.” She bit her lip, studying her reflection in the mirror.

“It was a set-up by a former Sokovian special forces officer,” Natasha went on after a moment of thought. “He found out something about Howard and Maria Stark’s assassination in 1991 and used it to get Tony and Steve alone in a decommissioned Soviet bunker in Siberia, where they had been working on another version of the serum. He wanted revenge on the Avengers for what had happened to Sokovia and used the Accords to break us up, and to make sure that Steve and Tony were alone when they got there. I don’t know what happened up there. Steve never talks about it and Tony and I haven’t been on speaking terms since the Accords. Steve went in there with the shield and he didn’t have it when I found him in Greece six weeks later.”

“What did he find out?” Peggy asked, frowning.

“I don’t know,” Natasha said. “I wasn’t there.”

“Why not?”

“Because contrary to popular opinion, my life doesn’t revolve around Steve Rogers,” Natasha said. “You’re not exactly seeing us the way we usually are.” She glanced aside. “I signed, I changed my mind, I helped Steve and B – I helped Steve get away before Tony went after him, which he did anyway, and then I tried to get out of the job, to retire. It lasted about two days before something came up that I had to deal with, and when that was over with, I went and found Steve. And then we broke everyone else out of prison. That’s why we’ve been on the run.”

Peggy didn’t miss her slip, the first one she thought she had ever heard Natasha make. So Steve wasn’t alone. She just said, “And both of you came back to fight aliens?”

“Yes,” Natasha said, raising her eyebrows. “What? Wouldn’t you?”

Peggy didn’t answer that. “Why did you go after Steve?”

“Because it was the right thing to do,” Natasha said. “I do that more often than people think.”

“And you were sleeping with him.”

Natasha blinked once. “No. We weren’t –” She stopped, hesitating, and bit her lip before she went on. “We weren’t sleeping together then. That came later.”

And Peggy knew.

“You weren’t sleeping together until you got here,” she said, feeling curiously hollow. Her hands seemed to know what they were doing as she smoothed the last of the henna onto Natasha’s hair, then twisted it up into a turban to protect it for the few hours it would need to set. She stripped off gloves and smock, automatically checking her reflection in the mirror.

She was a little shocked at how normal she looked. There should have been something there, Peggy thought, some sign of the revelation, but the closest thing to that was a slight tremor of her lips.

It doesn’t matter, she told herself. If he’s been sleeping with her for two years or two weeks, it doesn’t make a difference.

Steve had promised her just that morning that he wasn’t going to lie to her anymore.

It did make a difference.

She was aware of Natasha’s wary expression as she adjusted the turban slightly, then wiped a few stray streaks of henna from her neck before pulling her clothes back on. She didn’t bother to either affirm or deny what Peggy had said, just watched her with that now-familiar calculation in her green eyes. Not for the first time, Peggy wondered what the hell Steve saw in her apart from her looks and her right hook.

“Do you love him?” she asked, and was gratified to see the slight flicker of surprise in Natasha’s eyes; she hadn’t expected the question.

“Yes.”

There were a lot of things that Peggy could have said to that, many of them cruel, but she bit her tongue on all of them, just busied herself cleaning up and washing her hands. Natasha came over to help, but Peggy waved her back, wanting something to concentrate on rather than her sense of betrayal.

“Are you really willing to do this?” she asked Natasha eventually. “This might be Steve’s war, but it isn’t yours. And I thought you were afraid of changing the future.”

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “That ship’s sailed,” she said. “We’ll deal with it when it comes up. Besides, I’ve had Steve’s back for six years, I’m not about to stop now. Especially when the Red Room – when Department X – is involved.”

A muscle in her jaw worked briefly, but she didn’t look away from Peggy.

“Colonel Phillips sent over the SSR file on Leviathan,” Peggy told her. “I’ve read it. It’s not very long. There’s nothing in there confirming Department X’s existence, just a few rumors.”

“They weren’t the world’s most secret covert agency for almost a century because they advertised their existence,” Natasha said. “Even Hydra came out of the woodwork well before they did.”

“Hydra,” Peggy said, “has never been interested in being a secret, given that Johann Schmidt wanted to take over the world by destroying half of it. It’s hardly much of a comparison.”

Natasha made a gesture that Peggy assumed was an acknowledgment of a hit, since she had seen Steve make the exact same motion a few times over the course of the past week.

“All we really know about Department X is what you’ve told us,” Peggy said, “which presents something of a problem when every other word out of your mouth has been a lie.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Oh, forgive me, perhaps it’s only every third word. Is there anything real about you? Certainly not your hair color.”

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “Then why do you keep asking me questions if you’re not going to believe the answers? I know you don’t believe Steve, and that’s Steve. He’s much more trustworthy than I am.”

“He’s hardly that at the moment,” Peggy said. “You got Steve Rogers to lie for you. That’s impressive.”

Natasha laughed, brief and sharp. “Nobody gets Steve to do anything, least of all me.”

Peggy had to acknowledge that one as true. “This operation – both of these operations – depend on you and Steve doing what you say you will. But it’s a little hard to trust someone when you don’t know who that someone really is.”

“Yeah,” Natasha admitted. “Well, I have trouble with that one too. According to Steve, it’s called faith.”

Their disparate group arrived back in London late the next morning. Howard Stark had spent the night at Beaulieu and flown back just after dawn, but everyone else returned to London via truck, which Peggy and Dum-Dum traded off driving while everyone else napped or played cards in the back. Natasha played pinochle with the Commandos while Steve slept with his head on her thigh; she had already heard from him that he had had nightmares again the night before.

He woke up while they were winding their way through the labyrinth of London streets on their way into Whitehall and joined in on the last hand of the card game, which he had taught Natasha, Rumlow, and the STRIKE boys back during their SHIELD days. It had taken Rumlow and the other STRIKE operators longer than any of them would admit to realize that Captain America counted cards, though Natasha had figured it out the third time Steve had neatly cleaned them all out at poker.

They arrived back at the SSR’s King Charles Street building and hauled themselves and all their gear out of the truck and into headquarters, where Natasha immediately recognized the frantic bustle as the usual last-minute preparations for a major operation – two, in this case. Colonel Phillips was over at Grosvenor Street having an argument with the Office of Strategic Services, but Senator Brandt’s aide Sherman was pacing anxiously in the men’s wardroom (he was apparently barred from the war room) and pounced on Steve as soon as he appeared. He exclaimed at Natasha’s hair, since that meant he couldn’t use the photographs he had taken the last time he had been there (the henna had rendered it its natural color, or close enough to match her roots, at least), and hustled both of them and the Commandos off to get their uniforms on and pose for photographs against a succession of suitably neutral backdrops. Peggy Carter vanished almost as soon as he appeared; Natasha thought about it and remembered that she hadn’t been present in any of the old photographs of the Howling Commandos she had seen from the war. Her involvement with the SSR, Captain America, and the Commandos had apparently only become public knowledge in the early 1950s, after the SSR had been formally dissolved and a few new details about Captain America had been declassified.

“I could be back with the USO,” Steve said during a brief break in the photoshoot for Sherman to do something with his camera, his voice pitched for Natasha alone. “Used to do this sort of thing all the time.”

“You prefer a greenscreen?” Natasha asked dryly. They had done their fair share of photoshoots like that back home.

Steve considered that gravely. “Is it weird to say this feels more authentic?” They were standing in front of a painted backdrop of what Natasha thought was supposed to be an island in the South Pacific.

“Well, more honest, maybe,” Natasha said, before Sherman bellowed at them to stop talking and stand still. He took photographs of Steve on his own, both in his Army service uniform and in his new Captain America uniform, then with the Howling Commandos, then with Natasha and the Howling Commandos, then just with Natasha.

This last was startlingly intimate in a way Natasha hadn’t anticipated. She had had photoshoots with Steve before, though usually with the rest of the Avengers and watched over by an eagle-eyed Stark Industries representative – a SHIELD one, back after the Battle of New York. That photoshoot and subsequent series of magazine articles had focused on Steve, but had included (heavily doctored) features on Natasha and Clint as well. Tony had gotten his own set of magazine articles; Bruce and Thor had managed to escape it by virtue of simply not being there until the Avengers’ splashy public return to New York.

But back then she hadn’t had Steve’s name and his ring on her finger. She guessed almost immediately that Sherman didn’t really see her as anything other than a new and interesting accessory to Captain America; he didn’t take any photographs of her on her own, just told her where to stand or sit and where to put her hands, always careful to make sure that her wedding and engagement rings were showing. He was less conscientious about making certain to show Steve’s ring, which Steve had put back on when they left Beaulieu, but there were plenty of those pictures too.

Irene Lorraine, who had been dragooned into helping Natasha with her hair and makeup, murmured, “Captain Rogers is being very patient,” as Natasha stepped aside when Sherman decided he wanted more photographs of Steve and the Commandos.

Natasha had been through enough photoshoots with Steve that she had written off his long-suffering willingness to pose and take reshoot after reshoot as his usual good-naturedness, but right now it was obvious that it was practice instead. “He’s not usually this patient?” she asked Lorraine, checking her lipstick in the compact the other woman held up for her.

Lorraine considered. “I think Sergeant Barnes always chased the photographers off after about fifteen minutes.”

“Mrs. Rogers!” Sherman called, beckoning her, and Lorraine snapped the compact shut and pushed Natasha back into the makeshift studio.

“Sorry,” Steve whispered to her, rolling his eyes a little as he replaced his shield on his back.

“Gun!” Sherman called peremptorily; Morita passed Natasha the M1903 Springfield rifle she had been issued, which had a sniper’s scope and a couple of other unofficial Stark modifications Howard had done for her the previous day. She slung the rifle over one shoulder and suffered Sherman to arrange Steve around her, telling them both where to put their hands and at what angle to tilt their heads.

“Left hand on his chest – next to the star, not on it – look up at him – hand on her waist – a little further forward – can you move that rifle barrel back? – look at her, not me – part your lips a little, Mrs. Rogers –”

“He knows this is a real gun, right?” Natasha whispered to Steve. She had had a couple of conversations like this with photographers back in the twenty-first century when she had flatly refused to even consider pointing her pistols at the camera, no matter how dynamic the photographers said the outcome would be. America had enough problems with gun violence without the Avengers trying to make it look sexy and as one of the only three Avengers who actually used a gun Natasha refused to be a part of that. Nobody ever tried to make Rhodey or Sam pose suggestively with a pistol, though she also suspected that their flashy suits made it essentially irrelevant for them. Even in the United States of America the ability to fly trumped guns most of the time.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Steve muttered back, his lips barely moving as the shutter clicked. “By the way, I think you missed the part where the guys who make the comic books are going to introduce Cap’s resurrection and his new girl.”

“Wonderful, I always wanted to be in a comic book.” There had been a couple of tries towards that end up in the twenty-first century, but between the Avengers’ unstable political position and the amount of money necessary to license the Iron Man name and image, the big comic book publishers had never gotten far with it and the indies had stuck with knock-offs until the Accords fiasco had made it inadvisable to do even that. Natasha was guessing that that wasn’t a problem for the WWII Captain America propaganda machine.

The photoshoot ended about five minutes later when Colonel Phillips came storming in and threw Sherman out. As Steve and Natasha relaxed, he looked them both up and down before ordering them to go get changed so they could be prepped for the Berlin operation.

“You know, this is not how I expected to spend my trip to the past,” Natasha told Steve wryly, when they were back in their bedroom changing out of their tactical gear.

He raised his eyebrows. “You had expectations?”

“SHIELD had a lot of contingencies,” she admitted. “They’ve run across all kinds of weird stuff over the years.”

“No one ever prepped me for time travel,” Steve protested.

“I think they assumed you had that one covered.”

He considered that for a few moments, then nodded. “I can see that.” He pulled his uniform shirt on over his undershirt and buttoned it up, then draped his tie around his neck and began to tie a Windsor knot.

It made an interesting contrast to his SHIELD days, Natasha thought as she pulled on her own clothes; like Peggy, she was in a uniform without any insignia other than SSR pins, though in her case it was cut more like an American WAC uniform rather than a British FANY uniform. Back at the Triskelion they would both have stayed in their tactical gear even if they weren’t expecting to go into action immediately, which was regular protocol for field operatives. It would have been unthinkable here; she had figured that out from Steve’s reaction back in 2012, which had been muted – almost everything he had done back then had been like that, except on the rare occasion when something broke through his stunned misery – but still a little shocked.

Natasha stopped Steve with a hand on his chest when they were both dressed again. He stopped and looked down at her, his eyes warm. Despite the uniform and the fact that his hair had finally been cropped back to regulation length, he really didn’t look like he had back in 2012. Even though he hadn’t been a shrinking violet six years ago – not after a year and a half hunting Nazis and Hydra through the bloody, war-torn wasteland of the European front – there was something colder and harder about him now. Six years ago he had still been walking through the wreckage of his own world; now he was the one who had made the decision to burn his own house to the ground, and he had done it twice, first with SHIELD, then the Avengers.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

He grimaced. “Well, Peggy hates me, we’re stuck in 1945, the Red Room wants to kidnap and dissect me, I have to do the whole dog and pony show for the Army again, we’re getting airdropped into Berlin to kidnap Hitler, and there’s still a lunatic from space who wants to wipe out half the universe, assuming we don’t wipe out the future first. And I’m pretty sure half the people I know are still worried I was brainwashed by Hydra.”

“Peggy doesn’t hate you,” Natasha said. “If she hates anyone, it’s me; she’s just angry with you.”

Steve frowned. “I don’t think that’s better.”

“And to be fair,” Natasha said gravely, “I don’t think Department X actually wants to dissect you. I think they’d just settle for locking you up and taking regular blood samples.”

“That’s definitely not better.”

“Or brainwashing you.”

“Even worse.” He sat down on the side of the bed and rubbed his hands over his face, looking very tired. “If we’re stuck here –”

“Then we go to space and kill Thanos before he gets the Stones?” Natasha offered, sitting down beside him.

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I don’t hate that option, assuming we could get there.”

“And then there’s that part.”

He tipped his head down against her shoulder as Natasha put her arm around him. She touched her fingers to his cropped hair, feeling Steve’s breath warm against her neck. Eventually, without looking up, he said, “I know it was my idea, but I’m not thrilled about getting staked out for Department X like the goat in Jurassic Park, either.”

“You watch too many movies, Rogers,” Natasha said.

“You showed me half of them, Romanoff.” He lifted his head and kissed her very gently, then got to his feet again and offered her a hand up. “Well,” he said tiredly, “let’s get the goat and dinosaur show on the road.”