Of Home Near

A week, next Saturday, at the Stork Club. Eight o’clock on the dot. Don’t you dare be late.

Steve checked his watch reflexively as he went around the side of the car. It was 7:58. It was also the Monday after Easter, which didn’t seem to have dampened the crowd’s enthusiasm at all. Little clusters of Allied servicemen and women stood around, reading newspapers by slitted flashlights and the tiny amount of illumination allowed by dim-out regulations; the Marines had just launched their invasion of Okinawa, the Soviets were besieging Vienna, General Bradley and Field Marshal Montgomery had trapped 370,000 Wehrmacht troops in the Ruhr. It was, as best Steve could remember, exactly what was supposed to happen.

For now.

He opened the car’s back door and offered Natasha his hand, which she took as she got out. Her gaze flickered curiously around the darkened street; it wasn’t as bad as it would have been six months ago, when London had still been under strict blackout regulations, but it wasn’t anything like what it would have been up in the twenty-first century, either. Not that Steve had any real experience with nightclubs or dancehalls there, but he knew what they looked like from the street. Above the door the Stork’s Club sign – a stork with a cloth bundle dangling from its bill – was only a dim rectangular shape.

Dum-Dum and Morita joined them as Steve shut the door behind Natasha; Peggy and the other Howling Commandos were already either inside or on their way. They were joined by a decent number of SSR personnel and, with any luck, Department X’s strike team so that they could all just get this over with. The bulk of the Stork Club’s clientele tonight wasn’t the SSR, of course, since that would have been near-impossible to arrange without detection, but there were enough SSR people around to back up the Howlies and keep an eye on all the exits. As far as the rest of the SSR knew, they were on the lookout for German spies making a last attempt at Captain America before he went to the front; the only people who knew they were looking for a Soviet team were the Howlies and the cryptanalysts.

Steve let his gaze flicker upwards, picking out the most likely places that the SSR would have put their snipers. In the blackout there wouldn’t have been much point, since without night vision goggles – not around in 1945, though Howard and Hydra had both had a few prototypes – London at night was so dark that Steve knew two separate guys who had concussed themselves by walking into lampposts. The dim-out that had begun the previous September allowed illumination equivalent to moonlight, which was enough for a good sniper to see by without using one of the bulky sniperscope night vision attachments that had just started to be used in the last year of the war. Bucky or Clint could have done it; he thought Natasha probably could have done it too.

His serum-enhanced vision picked out the slight irregularities on one rooftop and behind one window that suggested people there, though he didn’t let his awareness of them show. He was almost certain that Natasha had seen them too, going by the quick upward flicker of her eyes.

There was a tight, familiar feeling of anticipation in the pit of Steve’s stomach, the usual flush of nerves he was familiar with going into an operation. The longer he had been doing this, the higher the stakes had gotten; no one rolled sixes every time, no matter how good they were. Not even him.

“Ours?” Natasha asked Morita quietly, confirming his suspicion that she had seen the snipers.

“Yeah. Hall and Rodriguez,” he added for Steve’s benefit; the two men were from one of the SSR’s other operational teams. There had been a little conversation about having one of them move over to the Howlies to take Bucky’s position as sniper before Steve had gone down with the Valkyrie; the conversation had always ended when Steve came into the room.

“They’re good,” he confirmed to Natasha. What Steve would have preferred was to have Clint and Sam on overwatch, but that was an impossibility. There was enough crazy shit going on in WWII that no one in the SSR would have even blinked at a special forces operator who preferred to use a bow and arrow to a gun or another guy who flew on mechanical wings, assuming Thanos had been generous enough to send the rest of Steve’s team back in time with him. Bucky was supposed to be here; all his arrival would have engendered would have been relief and the same suspicions of espionage as Steve’s. Wanda and Vision would have raised a few eyebrows, but Rhodey and Bruce would have fit in just fine, with or without their suits. After the initial shock, Steve was pretty sure the Howlies and Thor would have gotten along like a house on fire, probably by setting a few houses on fire.

Steve knew both men well enough to be aware that Tony and Howard probably would have killed each other and that was just based on personality, not personal relationships.

“We work with what we got, Rogers,” Natasha said, her voice soft, and when he glanced down at her he saw her nod slightly. She had probably been having similar thoughts of her own.

“What we got is pretty good,” Steve told her.

Dum-Dum and Morita exchanged a look behind their backs; the two men were flanking Steve and Natasha and couldn’t have missed the brief exchange. They knew Steve well enough to guess what it had been about.

They had to go down a short flight of stairs to reach the Stork Club and the door opening to light, music, and the smell of cigarette smoke and spilled beer was a mild shock after the darkness of the night they had left behind them. In 2018, there would have been a DJ; in 1945, there was a live band playing “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” to which a number of Allied servicemen and women were performing an enthusiastic jitterbug.

“I hope you’re not expecting to do that tonight,” Steve said to Natasha, watching the dancers for a moment after leaving her coat at coat-check. “I never learned how to dance.”

“I can dance,” Morita and Dum-Dum both said in badly-overlapping near-unison and Steve glanced down, his mouth twitching in amusement.

“I trained in ballet, remember?” Natasha said. She elbowed Steve gently and added, “Didn’t Thor teach you how to dance?”

“Oh, yeah, that’ll go over well here.” To Dum-Dum and Morita he explained, “It’s like Irish step dancing. It’s not a partner dance.”

“Thor?”

“Friend of ours.” They had left Asgard out of their explanations of the twenty-first century, since it wasn’t relevant and was more likely than anything else to make Peggy and Phillips think they were crazy, especially given both Schmidt’s and Hitler’s obsession with Germanic mythology.

Most of the men and some of the women in the club were in uniform, so their appearance didn’t garner any immediate attention; just another three GIs and a woman in a blue dress. Steve spotted Kim Pantcheff sitting with Rose Roberts – Hana Korematsu was back at headquarters; one of the cryptographers was required to be on duty at all times – and a couple of the analysts and bomb technicians, then Irene Lorraine dancing with a GI Steve didn’t recognize. He couldn’t see Peggy or the other Howlies at a glance, but marked a few other familiar faces in the crowd, either on the dance floor or at the tables around the edges of the room. He hadn’t been in enough dance halls that he could immediately spot discrepant patterns or strays, but if Department X’s people were as good as the Red Room’s, then it didn’t matter; he wouldn’t see them anyway.

“See if you can get a table and find the others,” Steve said to Dum-Dum. “I’m going to go promenade myself.” He ducked his head to kiss Natasha briefly before he stepped away from his three companions.

Natasha didn’t tell him to be careful. They were well past that.

The back of his neck prickled as he began to make his slow meandering way through the crowd, turning his head from side to side as if he was searching for someone. Despite the music and the general festive atmosphere, Steve had the sensation that he was in enemy territory, like the occupied cities on the continent he had passed through during the war, aware that someone – maybe more than one someone – was watching him with their hand on their gun. Even before the past two years on the run he had gotten used to the feeling of looking over his shoulder and not showing off that that was what he was doing; since then it had become second nature.

The first rule of going on the run is don’t run, walk, Natasha’s voice whispered in his memory. He wasn’t on the run again, not yet, but the same principle applied.

There was a dreamlike air to his passage through the nightclub, in the flare of the women’s skirts on the dance floor and the steady pulse of the swing music, so unlike what he had gotten used to in the twenty-first century. Someone popped the cork on a champagne bottle near him and Steve flinched, startled by the sound and the spray of the liquid that caught the edge of his left hand. Flashbulbs popped nearby, a couple of photographers taking pictures of the dancers and various couples and groups at the round tables, making Steve jerk instinctively away as if they had been muzzle flashes instead.

He turned quickly at the sound of raised voices, just in time to see two soldiers shoving at each other, a third quickly getting between them. On his other side, one soldier wiped spilled wine from another’s shirt, both men laughing, the red liquid looking horrifyingly like blood in the room’s dim light.

I’ve been here before, Steve thought suddenly. Not the Stork Club; he would have remembered that. There was an oddly hollow quality to the memory, unreal somehow, and it was that which let him place it.

Wanda.

Three years ago in South Africa on Ulysses Klaue’s ship. It wasn’t an exact replica of the induced vision – no USO banner behind the band, the music was different, no MPs – but it was close enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck. Which meant –

He turned before Peggy could speak.

He hadn’t seen her before she had left headquarters, but somehow it wasn’t a surprise to see that she was wearing exactly what she had worn in Wanda’s vision – blue dress, silver earrings, a red silk flower pinned to her right shoulder. Whatever she had been about to say died unspoken at the expression on his face; after a moment where they just stared at each other, she said, “Are you all right?”

“I –” Steve hesitated. “I owe you a dance.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I’m not going to insist on collecting.”

Steve swallowed. “Maybe I want you to.”

Peggy’s eyebrows stayed up. She was quiet for a long few heartbeats, during which the song the band had been playing finished and there was a brief moment of silence before they started up again. Into it, she said finally, “Sometimes I wonder if any of this is real to you. If to you we’re all just – just playactors in some elaborate pantomime like those awful stage shows you used to put on, so you can say or do whatever you want because it doesn’t matter. Lie about her, wear that uniform, say that to me.”

“I know it’s real,” Steve said, swallowing again. The words hurt, but they were meant to; she knew him well enough for that. “That you’re real – you and Howard and Phillips and the Howlies –”

“Do you?” Peggy said. “Do you really? Because sometimes you don’t act like it.”

“This would be a hell of a lot easier if I thought it wasn’t real,” Steve told her. “A hell of a lot.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand you anymore, Steve,” she said. “I used to, or I thought I did, and now – it’s like one man went up in the Valkyrie and someone else came back. I want to understand and I can’t and you won’t let me.”

“Have you even tried?” Steve said softly. “Every time you’ve talked to me since I got here you’ve been trying to catch me out in one lie or another.”

“And you keep lying,” Peggy said. “It’s like you can’t help yourself. You wouldn’t have done that six weeks ago; it’s not who you are. Only now –”

Steve shut his eyes briefly, then opened them again, because if he was going to say this, then he had to look her in the eye when he did it. “Then maybe you never really knew me, Peggy, because I was always this guy. Maybe you only ever knew the guy you wanted me to be.”

“I don’t believe that,” Peggy said. “I won’t believe that.”

Steve swallowed hard. “Then maybe that’s the problem.”

A muscle in her jaw worked. She looked like she was on the verge of tears – Steve felt like he was on the verge of tears, though he didn’t know how much of that showed on his face. He wanted to reach for her, to do something to take even a little of that uncomprehending misery away from her, but he had just forfeited any right he had to comfort her. He started to open his mouth, to apologize, maybe, but he couldn’t do that either. She wouldn’t believe him and it would just be empty words, meaningless except as an attempt to absolve himself.

There was something horribly final about it, as if Steve had finally severed some last remaining tie to the life he should have had, to the man he should have been – his own choice this time, and not the one that fate or God or Abraham Erskine had made for him. For a wild moment, all he wanted to do was take it back, to shout that it was a mistake and that he still wanted this, this life, this woman, this person that no one had ever really laid to rest six years or six weeks or seventy-three years ago, the man that maybe he could have been. He wanted his life back, the same way he had wanted it every day for six years.

But it wasn’t his life anymore. It hadn’t been for a long time.

The woman who wasn’t really a Wren watched the man and the woman as they made their way through the nightclub, skirting the edge of the dance floor rather than cut across it. This was Lyudmila Plisetskaya’s first look at Captain Steve Rogers in the flesh rather than in a photograph and she studied him carefully, her head cocked a little to one side as if she was watching the dancers, not anyone in particular. A big man, handsome enough if one liked that sort of thing, with a predator’s wary eyes and the promise of restrained violence in his smooth stride. Neither was particularly unusual these days, but even across the crowded room there was something about him that made the hair on the back of Lyusya’s neck prickle. The most dangerous human being in the world, someone back at the House had called him once. At the time she had thought it ridiculous. Until now, Steve Rogers had just been a man, and she had met plenty of those.

It wasn’t so rare a thing to be a good soldier or even to be a good killer. Lyusya was one herself and she had been around them all her life. Even with the so-called Red Skull in the mix, Abraham Erskine’s serum had seemed like so much fantasy, more American propaganda to cover up what was more likely to be just a very good special operations team.

Maybe the rest of the Howling Commandos – stupid name – were just that. Steve Rogers wasn’t.

Her hands flexed watching him, wanting the security of a gun or a knife instead of a wineglass, and she knew why it was the House wanted him so badly.

The woman with him was nothing special, at least by a matryoshka’s standards; Lyusya recognized her from Irina’s files as SSR Agent Margaret Carter, Rogers’ old flame. She was too far away to have heard the fierce conversation the two had been having, but from what she had seen, it hadn’t been going well for either of them. Both man and woman still looked badly upset, which meant they were distracted now and would likely remain so for the rest of the evening.

Good, Lyusya thought, her fingers flexing again. She tracked Rogers and Carter as they joined the Howling Commandos and Rogers’ pretty wife at a pair of tables on the opposite side of the room, then let her gaze flicker quickly across the night club, mentally marking out the locations of each member of the task force. Lyusya herself wanted to get a close look at Natasha Rogers or Natalia Romanova or whatever her real name was before the task force moved in.

There was no hurry. They had all night.

Natasha read the expression on Steve’s face and knew immediately that he and Peggy had been fighting again. Are you serious? she thought, but there was no point in saying the words out loud; Peggy and Steve were both smart enough to realize how stupid it was. You’re doing this now?

Steve gave her a hangdog look as he took the empty chair next to her; there was a little shuffling as the Howling Commandos made space for Peggy as far away from Steve and Natasha as possible. They had pulled together two of the small round tables to sit together while Peggy went looking for Steve and Falsworth and Natasha had gotten drinks for everyone. So far, Natasha was interested to see, no one had paid too much attention to them; one passing GI had recognized Dum-Dum Dugan by his bowler hat, but hadn’t done anything more than drunkenly call out his name. Natasha was curious to find out if the recognition factor changed once Steve was in the mix.

She pushed a full pint glass to Steve and leaned over to murmur, “Are you all right?” in his ear.

He shrugged in response. “I just want to get this over with,” he said, his voice equally low.

And now you’re distracted, and Agent Carter is distracted, and the Commandos are going to be watching the two of you all night to make sure you don’t blow up at each other again, and Department X is going to find a way to use this somehow –

Natasha doubted that either of them had been thinking of that when they had started whatever-this-was, but as far as she knew Steve and Peggy hadn’t managed to have an un-moderated conversation that hadn’t resulted in tears, shouting, or both. Presumably tears on this occasion, since a shouting match would have gotten attention even in the crowded night club. Natasha couldn’t imagine how bad it would get if they actually ended up going to Germany tomorrow.

Steve sipped morosely at his beer, his gaze flitting occasionally over to Peggy; any thought of Department X had clearly gone entirely out of his head. Peggy was steadily ignoring him, but wasn’t talking to the Commandos either, all of whom looked uncomfortable; by now they all knew what the likely source of Steve and Peggy’s discord was.

“Game face on, Rogers,” Natasha murmured to Steve.

He nodded in response and pulled himself out of his slouch, wrapping his hands around his glass as he rearranged his expression to look less miserable. Natasha squeezed his knee beneath the table, aware of the quick flicker of Peggy’s gaze towards them. Steve turned his face away so that Peggy wouldn’t be able to read his lips and said quietly to Natasha, “I want to go home.”

There was a little of the blank grief in it that Natasha knew all too well from the past six years, his incomprehension colored now by the fact that for the first time in his life, home didn’t mean 1945.

“I know,” she told him. “Me too.” She put her fingers on his cheek and turned his head a little more so that she could kiss him, light but careful and more for comfort than anything else. When she drew back, Steve took her left hand in his and pressed his lips briefly to her rings.

“We’ll fix this,” Natasha promised him quietly. “One way or another.”

Steve’s gaze cut sideways towards Peggy and back to Natasha again so quickly she would have missed it if she hadn’t been looking straight at him. “I don’t think all of it can be fixed.”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it,” Natasha said. “Let’s get through this op first.”

After a moment he nodded, kissed her fingers again, and sat back in his chair.

Natasha picked up her own beer and took a sip; it was strong and hoppy, not her usual preference, but better than she had expected under the circumstances.

“So, Captain,” Dum-Dum said eventually, “who’s this fellow Mrs. Rogers said taught you how to dance? Thor something? Was he on your list of teammates?”

Steve and Natasha exchanged a look; after a moment, Steve said, “He’s not around all the time, so I don’t think I put him on the list.”

“Not a local?”

“You could say that,” Steve said. “He’s from – uh –”

“He’s not from around here,” Natasha said.

“Yeah,” Steve said.

“As in, not an American?” Peggy said, raising her eyebrows and looking suspicious.

Natasha exchanged another look with Steve, who said weakly, “Well…he’s not.”

“What, like he’s from outer space or something?” Morita said, laughing. “Aren’t there aliens in enough of your stories already?”

There were a few chuckles from the other Commandos that died away when they realized that Steve and Natasha weren’t laughing too. Jones said, “You serious, man?”

Steve made an exasperated gesture with one hand, then said, “You remember Schmidt’s obsession with mythology, how he used to go on about wanting to have the power of the gods so that he would be worthy of using the artifacts they had left behind on Earth?”

“According to Dr. Zola, you were the only person he was ever interested in having an extended conversation about the subject with,” Peggy said, her gaze fixed on Steve. Natasha doubted that she had missed the way Steve went still at Zola’s name.

A muscle worked in Steve’s jaw. “I don’t think I’d go so far as to call those conversations, given that three out of three times he was trying to kill me while yelling that we both had the power of the gods and I was wasting it. But I read his articles from before the war, the ones that were in our intelligence files. He was obsessed with it for years before he ever heard about Dr. Erskine.”

“Yes, I’ve read those articles,” Peggy said. “It was mad. He believed that all those stories about gods and giants and women sleeping in circles of fire were real, mythologized versions of events that had really taken place thousands of years ago. It’s how he and Heinrich Himmler began corresponding and what they ended up quarreling over before Hydra broke off from the Ahnenerbe. Schmidt believed that the – the gods – were really a race of superior beings that had visited Earth millennia ago and then left again. Since the official Nazi line is that the Aryan race is itself a superior race, that was a point of, shall we say, some disagreement.”

Steve rubbed at his forehead. “I hate to say that Johann Schmidt was right about anything, but, uh – he actually was right about this.”

Natasha interpreted the expressions on the faces of Peggy and the Commandos as, oh God, he has gone insane. Steve saw it too, looking resigned to being disbelieved again as he said, “Thor’s an Asgardian, human-looking aliens that were worshiped as gods on Earth by the Vikings and their ancestors. Asgard claims Earth and a bunch of other planets as being under their protection, so when the Chitauri attacked six years ago, Thor came to help out.”

Natasha noted with interest that he had left off any mention of Loki, presumably because he thought that would make the whole explanation even less believable than it already was. She doubted that it would have mattered; she could tell immediately that the other occupants of the table didn’t believe him anyway. Steve could tell too and his mouth worked silently, aggravated by the silent accusation of lying again, or maybe that the Commandos were revisiting the idea that he had been brainwashed. From what Peggy had just said, it did sound like the kind of thing that Hydra loyalists might believe.

Slowly, Falsworth said, “And this…Thor…taught you to dance?”

Steve dug a thumb into the skin between his brows. “Asgardian-style, yeah. He’s also got the only kind of liquor that’s ever had any effect on me, for what that’s worth.”

“And a magic hammer?” Peggy said scornfully.

Steve looked helplessly at Natasha and she shrugged in response; there was a good reason they hadn’t brought Thor up before. “Well –” he said, and then stopped, because there was nothing he could say that would sound less believable than the truth.

Peggy looked aside in irritation. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

Steve rested his elbows on the table and ran his hands back through his hair, his head bowed. He looked wearier than ever.

Natasha was accustomed to people thinking she was lying when she wasn’t; it came with the territory in her line of work. Steve was accustomed to people believing that Captain America wouldn’t lie. It was something that he had used to his advantage more than a few times over the course of the past six years. It hadn’t always worked, but even that was completely different from never being believed, especially when those accusations came from people he loved and trusted. Those people might still love him, but they didn’t trust him, not anymore.

Natasha met Peggy’s hard brown eyes and said, “Let’s not do this now. It’s not really the time for that discussion, is it?”

“I suppose not,” Peggy admitted after a long pause to make it clear that she wasn’t giving in just because Natasha had suggested it.

Natasha resisted the urge to snap, and let’s not have a cat fight about this, either, because she had never really expected to be in the kind of position where it would even be a question about any man, let alone Steve Rogers. Steve had made it very clear over the past six years that he wasn’t particularly interested in any of the many women or the handful of men who had been throwing themselves at him. She knew he had made a couple of half-hearted tries, apparently on the principle of the thing, but none of them had gone anywhere. Not even Sharon Carter, which Sam had told her about and which Steve seemed faintly embarrassed by. Natasha thought that he had wanted to be interested in her, the same way she had wanted to want Bruce a year earlier.

After a moment, Morita said, “You guys got any normal friends?”

Steve rubbed at his face and sat upright again. “Sure. Nat’s best friend is retired Army special ops and he lives on a farm with his wife and three kids. Mine’s a former Air Force pararescue.”

“That the one with the wings?”

“Yeah,” Steve admitted.

Morita and Jones exchanged a look and Steve dug his thumb into his forehead again.

Dum-Dum read his commanding officer’s obvious distress with his experienced NCO’s eye and said, “Hey, Mrs. Rogers. The captain ever tell you about the puzzle of getting five French chickens, one Italian cat, two German dogs, an Austrian parakeet, and the seven of us over the Seine in one boat? All during a new moon with German troopers on one side of the river and la Milice on the other, with the Maquis taking potshots at both of them and sometimes us the whole time?”

“No, I haven’t heard that one,” Natasha said, bemused and relieved by the change in subject. “Where did the animals come from?”

“This story does not make me look good,” Steve protested, but he looked relieved too.

“Really?” Falsworth said. “I think the cat on your head made you look properly dashing. Good reason to wear a helmet, though.”

“I had to get a new helmet after that because the damned thing clawed it up so badly –”

They all settled down to tell war stories, some of which Natasha had heard before from Steve and occasionally Bucky, but most of which were new to her. She and Steve had a few of their own to contribute, the ones that didn’t involve aliens, robots, Hydra, or anything else unusually extreme even by special ops standards. Despite the light tone of the storytelling, there was still an air of coiled watchfulness, all of them waiting for Department X to make its move.

Natasha could feel the other Widows there – the matryoshki, her foremothers. She knew they were there like she knew her own name, even if she couldn’t pick them out of the crowd, a dozen women as honed and deadly as knives. She could identify some of the SSR personnel scattered throughout the club, the half-familiar faces of people she had seen at headquarters, one or two she had spoken to before. One of those women would be Irina, the matryoshka who had confronted her the previous week. Natasha hadn’t met enough of the SSR women to have any idea who she was, just a handful of guesses that were more likely to be wrong than not.

They would only have one shot if they wanted to grab Captain America. Their mole in the SSR almost certainly knew that this was intended to be a trap, if only because there were an unusual number of SSR personnel in one place, but if Department X was anything like the Red Room, then that wouldn’t matter to them. If you knew they were there, then traps could very easily be sprung.

Sherman turned up while Natasha and Steve were wrapping up the story of one of their STRIKE ops, which fortunately hadn’t involved anything so odd that Peggy and the Commandos would immediately write it off as nonsense. It also involved Brock Rumlow making a fool of himself, to Natasha’s private satisfaction. Rumlow was a former Navy SEAL, which meant that the Commandos were happy to take Steve’s obvious dislike of Rumlow as normal inter-service rivalry rather than inquiring too closely about specifics after Steve and Natasha had explained what the SEALs were; they wouldn’t be founded for another seventeen years, though the Commandos had trained with their predecessors at the Scout and Raider School in Virginia.

One of the more frustrating but rather petty things about Rumlow turning out to be Hydra was that he and Steve had actually gotten on well enough that Natasha had begun cherishing the hope that Steve might unbend enough to make a real friend. She also suspected that Rumlow had wanted into Steve’s pants, but that hadn’t been going anywhere either. She was never going to tell Steve about that.

Sherman bounded up to their table with his camera in hand and said, “You’re not dancing!”

Peggy, on her second whiskey, said, “Oh, it’s you.”

Steve looked at Sherman with some alarm. “What?”

He brandished the camera. “I want to get some shots of you and Mrs. Rogers on the dance floor.”

Natasha watched Peggy’s face go hard before she got her expression under control and wondered if Sherman had any idea of the significance of what he had just said; she was almost certain that the answer was no. Captain America’s missed date was a potent part of the Captain America mythos back up in the twenty-first century, though neither she nor Steve nor any of the historians seemed to know where it had started, but apparently it wasn’t public knowledge yet.

Steve looked at the dancers, looked at Natasha, blushed, looked at the dancers again, didn’t look at Peggy, and finally turned his attention back to Sherman. “I don’t know how to dance.”

“How hard can it be?” Sherman demanded. “You don’t need to do any of the fancy stuff. What, you didn’t dance at your wedding? Go tell the band to play something slow,” he added without waiting for a response, looking pointedly around the two tables.

Dernier, looking deeply amused, got up to do just that.

Thoughtfully, Natasha said, “I don’t know if what we did at our wedding counts as dancing.”

Steve choked, since they hadn’t had a wedding and the only two options for that were violence or sex, though Sherman probably didn’t realize that.

Natasha leaned over to touch her lips to Steve’s ear – which Sherman promptly snapped a picture of – and said, “Buck up, Rogers.”

“I know, I know.” He kissed her quickly, blinked as a flashbulb went off while Sherman got that shot too, then got to his feet and held his hand out to her. Natasha took it and let him draw her to her feet.

“Is the Captain America Adventure Hour really necessary?” Peggy asked Sherman as Dernier came back, eeling his way adroitly through the crowd.

“Yes,” Sherman said promptly. “It’s great press, Agent Carter. Very romantic.”

Natasha drew Steve towards the dance floor both because he was starting to look upset again and because the current song was winding down. Sherman followed, camera in hand.

“Want to know something weird?” Steve said to her, his voice pitched too low for Sherman to overhear. “I’ve been here before – remember Wanda’s visions, back in South Africa three years ago? It’s almost exactly what I saw then, down to what Peggy’s wearing. Not all of it, but a lot.”

Natasha frowned. They still had no real idea what all of Wanda’s powers entailed any more than Wanda herself did. “Tony saw all of us dead, so I hope that wasn’t a vision of the future.”

“Thor was pretty convinced his was. And he did find Vision and the Stones.”

“Yeah, but not from Wanda; he went to England for that,” Natasha reminded him.

“Tony thought –” Steve hesitated, the way he always did on the rare occasions he had to bring Tony Stark up.

“I know,” Natasha said, just so he didn’t have to say it. “I was there too. Thor’s got the whole Asgardian thing going for him; Tony doesn’t. And anyway, mine definitely didn’t involve the future, so it must just be coincidence.”

Steve frowned down at her. “Are you sure?”

“I was sixteen and back in the Red Room, so yes, I’m sure.” She kept the bite out of her voice with enough effort that Steve heard it anyway and winced.

“I’m sorry.”

“God, Steve, it’s not your fault.” She touched her lips lightly to his – snap – and put her arms around his neck as the music changed. Jones drifted up beside them with the redheaded cryptanalyst Rose, while Dernier expertly drew in Irene Lorraine on their other side. Now that Steve had made his presence known to whoever was watching, the Commandos were taking care not to leave him alone. Not that Natasha was expecting the Red Room to make their move while Sherman was taking photographs.

He was tense against her, though his hands on her waist were unhesitating. None of his obvious distress showed on his face; even more so than Tony or any of the other Avengers who had grown up in the age of paparazzi and smartphones, Steve was always aware when he was being watched.

“It’s just me,” Natasha told him quietly, barely moving her lips; she didn’t want anyone to overhear them. “Talk to me.”

“Peggy hates me,” Steve said, just as soft. “Not because of you – not that it helps – but she doesn’t – she doesn’t –” He stumbled over the words, his brows knitting briefly together as he picked over what to say. “People are always thinking things about me,” he said finally. “I figured that out a long time ago when I was just a kid. Everyone likes to believe that it’s because of the serum, because of being Captain America, but when you’re as small as I was, and sick all the time the way I was, and you don’t have a father around – people think things. They were thinking different things after, but it’s not like I didn’t know they were thinking them. I always know.” His mouth worked silently.

“People like you and me don’t have the luxury of not having to know,” Natasha said gently. It was one of the things she had noticed about him immediately all those years ago, even when he had been so miserable that he had almost seemed unaware of everything around him. He hadn’t been; that had been part of the problem. It still was.

He nodded. “Yeah. I always thought – back then – that Peggy was looking past all that, past all the noise. Well, not always –” His expression clouded a little before he rearranged it back to neutrality. “– but most of the time. Or maybe I just wanted her to.”

There was nothing that Natasha could say to that which would make him feel any better, so she didn’t say anything. He didn’t need her to say it, anyway; he already knew it himself.

“Peggy said,” Steve said haltingly, “that it was like one man went up in the Valkyrie and another one came back. I used to think that too – I mean, I’ve told people that before. I’ve told you that before. But it’s not true. I was always this guy. And she won’t see that, which means she didn’t know it before, either.” He looked down, his mouth trembling a little. “I always knew she didn’t look twice at me before the serum, except the way you look at a cute kid or a funny dog or – you know. There were twenty other guys out there. What did she have to look at, anyway? But I thought – I thought.”

He bit his lip, then confessed, “Maybe it’s for the best. I said that to her, so maybe…maybe she’ll stop. God, I wish I could go ten minutes without someone telling me I’m either lying or an idiot for not knowing I’m lying.”

“Steve,” Natasha said softly, and when his gaze flickered downwards to her, she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, and tried to smile, not quite managing it. “Me too.” His grip on her shifted, moving from the swaying not-quite-dancing they had been doing into an embrace, and Natasha stopped bothering to pretend to dance to put her arms around him. He tucked his face neatly into the curve of her shoulder, his breath warm through the wool of her dress. Natasha heard a flashbulb pop as Sherman took another pretty picture.

Steve heard it too and straightened up again. His gaze slanted sideways, marking Sherman’s position and those of the two Commandos and their dance partners, then did a quick onceover of the neighboring dancers. Natasha had been watching them out the whole time Steve had been talking, with the practiced experience that meant she could keep an eye on their surroundings and listen to him the whole time. She knew him well enough to know that he expected her to do so; he wouldn’t be offended by it.

He looked a question at her and she shook her head in response. “They’re here, though,” she told him. “I can feel it.”

“Yeah,” he said, his mouth working briefly. “Me too.” He ducked his head and kissed her, more for comfort than anything else, Natasha thought, then his gaze went sideways again and back to her, very fast. He was tense under her hands as he drew back, his eyes going sharp. “We’ve got a problem.”

Adrenaline shot through her. “What problem?”

“I just saw Aleksey Lebedev,” Steve said. “That means Leviathan didn’t just send a Department X team. The Winter Guard’s here too.”

Lebedev settled his elbows on the bar next to Lyusya and gestured the bartender over. As he was waiting for his drink, he said out of the corner of his mouth, “Rogers made me.”

She didn’t look at him. “How?”

“The man has a photographic memory; I’d be more surprised if he hadn’t recognized me once he’d seen me.”

“Then you shouldn’t have let yourself be seen.”

“Bad luck,” the commando growled. “We can’t all be perfect china dolls. He had his tongue halfway down the throat of that pretty wife of his. If I had a woman who looked like that in front of me, I wouldn’t have eyes for anything but her tits.”

“Pig.”

The bartender returned with Lebedev’s pint of bitter. Lebedev paid up and took the drink, but didn’t turn around, using the mirror behind the bar to watch the night club. Lyusya kept her gaze fixed on the dance floor, watching Steve and Natasha Rogers as they left it and made their way back to their table, trailed by the reporter, the two Commandos, and the SSR women who had kept them company. The strike team wouldn’t have much time now.

“Get your men ready,” Lyusya told him. “We’ll handle our end. Don’t screw up again, Alyosha.”

“You have lipstick on your mouth,” Peggy said as Steve and Natasha returned to their table, managing to shed Sherman as they did so. Jones and Dernier joined them a moment later, releasing Rose and Lorraine, who melted back into the crowd.

Steve wiped it off with the back of his hand and said, “The Winter Guard’s here.”

Peggy sat up, adrenaline shooting through her. “What?”

“I saw Aleksey Lebedev, which means the rest of his team has to be here too. He and Mikhail Ursus are the only two who speak English well enough to pass, so I’m guessing the others are outside. Leviathan must have sent them to back up the matryoshki.” He was all business now, sounding more like himself that he had at any other point in the past week.

“Does he know you made him?” Dum-Dum asked, not looking at Steve. His gaze was moving instead, skating across the faces visible from where he was sitting. He knew better than to turn his head as he did so, which would have made it obvious he was looking for someone; he was trusting the rest of the Commandos to cover the angles he couldn’t see from where he was sitting. The others were doing the same.

Peggy didn’t bother. She hadn’t been with the Commandos in Poland when they had had their two encounters with the Winter Guard the previous year; she had read the reports, but there hadn’t been any pictures included, so she wouldn’t know the Soviet commando team when she saw them.

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “I only saw him for an instant.”

“You’re certain it was him?”

“Yeah. I don’t forget a face. He was in a British army uniform – he went to Oxford before the war, sounds like it when he speaks English. Ursus is fluent enough, but he can’t pass as British; he can probably get by as Polish if he’s in here too.”

There was a long moment of silence after he finished. The Commandos’ gazes never stopped moving, searching the crowd around them, but it was obvious they were waiting for something. Peggy didn’t realize what it was until Steve met her eyes, raising his brows in an unvoiced question.

Her mouth worked. You could only have one commander in the field and they hadn’t sorted out yet who it was going to be, him or her.

At the end of the day, the Howling Commandos were Captain America’s team.

Steve saw the acquiescence in her eyes and said, “Monty, Gabe, you’re outside. Make sure our guys out there know they’re looking for men too, not just women. Stay in ra –” He stopped, frustration on his face, then shook his head and corrected himself, “Keep your eyes open and watch each other’s backs. Lebedev’s guys are the best the Soviets have got.”

Peggy wondered what he had been about to say as Falsworth and Jones got up, talking casually to each other and fumbling for their cigarettes as if on their way out for a quick smoke. It took her longer than she cared to admit to remember the miniaturized radio equipment that Steve and Natasha had arrived with, since it had been locked up in Howard’s lab for the past two weeks. Howard couldn’t replicate it with what he had in London, though he had said he might be able to at his workshop back in the States.

She watched as his gaze crossed the room again, casually matter-of-fact even as he picked up his beer and took a sip. He had the watchful, wary air of a predator, deceptive as a big golden cat seemingly napping in the sunshine but ready to lash out at the first sign of danger.

The room had big mirrors paneling the walls, with another behind the bar. Steve’s gaze flickered across them and after a moment he said, “Lebedev’s at the bar with a woman in civvies – brunette, tall. They’re pretending they don’t know each other, but they’re talking; he’s facing the mirror and I can read his lips. I can’t see hers from here.”

“What’s he look like?” Natasha snuggled up against his shoulder, but her own gaze was as restless as Steve’s, that same quick predator’s flicker. Despite her relaxed pose – any casual onlooker would think she wasn’t concerned about anything except getting home and going to bed with the man whose lap she was practically sitting in – Peggy could sense that same sense of coiled watchfulness Steve had.

“Bigger than me, white-blonde, moustache. Army uniform – can’t see his insignia from here but I’d bet he’s got a captain’s stars; that’s his Red Army rank.”

“I see him,” Natasha said, following the angle of his gaze. “And her.”

Peggy made both man and woman a moment later, just as Morita said, “I’ve got them,” and Dugan nodded; Dernier was sitting at an angle where he couldn’t see the bar in any of the mirrors.

Steve’s mouth twitched. “He knows I made him.” He lifted his glass a little, as if in acknowledgment. “She’s moving. Looks like she’s headed to the restrooms.”

“I’m on her,” Peggy said, standing up and picking up her pocketbook. “You’re with me,” she added to Natasha, who flicked a glance at her and then at Steve, who nodded.

“They want you too,” he reminded Natasha. That had been clear in the messages Room 17 had decrypted. The handful that they hadn’t gnawed at Peggy’s mind, making her wonder if they had missed something important other than the fact that the Soviets had sent a second team in. That was bad enough.

“Don’t worry about me.” Natasha stood up and collected her pocketbook, as if she and Peggy were on their way to the ladies’ room. Her eyes never stopped moving, as cold and calculating as chips of emerald. “I think they’ll settle for just grabbing you.”

“We got him,” Morita said. “Don’t worry about us.”

Steve nodded again.

Peggy and Natasha headed off at an angle to the other woman, Peggy using her superior height – in heels she was as tall as most men in the room – to keep track of her passage. “She’s headed for the ladies’ room,” she told Natasha, who made a sound of acknowledgment.

“There,” she said. “See the blonde in the victory rolls, pink dress, two o’clock? She’s watching us.”

Peggy’s gaze flickered to the nearest mirror rather than turning her head. “I see her. How do you know what victory rolls are?”

“I read books. Ten o’clock, brunette, green dress.”

Peggy’s gaze flicked sideways. “That’s three. Is that all of them?”

“There are at least two more behind us,” Natasha said, her voice calm. “Don’t bother looking; I’m triangulating based off where the others are. They’re boxing us off. By the way, you are aware we’re walking into a trap?”

“That was the point of this whole operation,” Peggy said, grinding her teeth and biting her tongue on the urge to tell Natasha not to condescend to her. “Or weren’t you paying attention?”

“I was. I don’t want to get blamed if you weren’t.”

“I will never understand why Steve sleeps with you,” Peggy said through her teeth.

“Well, that makes two of us.” Natasha didn’t even look at her.

Peggy resisted the urge to punch her, reminding herself that for better or worse – probably worse – Steve loved her. Natasha had avoided sparring with her at Beaulieu; Peggy would have liked to believe it was because the other woman was afraid that she wouldn’t win in a fight, but she had the unpleasant feeling that it was because Natasha had known that she would. That, and Steve might have enjoyed watching it too much. Or worse, he wouldn’t.

She watched the mirrors instead, looking for the telltale sign of someone moving against the usual currents of the crowded nightclub, the faintest discrepancy in the room. She finally spotted it when she and Natasha were almost at the hallway that led to the loos, just the slightest suggestion of movement behind them. Up ahead, the brunette woman who had speaking to Aleksey Lebedev turned down the hallway. Peggy heard the door to the ladies’ room open and close as she and Natasha followed her into the narrow, dark space. The sound of the music behind them faded.

Behind them came the light clatter of a woman’s heels on the battered hardwood floor, like a lioness moving to flank a pair of gazelles so that her pride could have the kill, but Peggy didn’t look back to see which of their stalkers it was. She did let her gaze flicker sideways to Natasha, wondering if the woman was half as good as she thought she was. Peggy had known plenty of agents who were competent or even outstanding in the safe environs of the SOE and SSR training facilities and crumpled in the field. Some of them survived the experience. Most didn’t.

Steve might be irrational about the woman, Peggy admitted quietly to herself, but he had never suffered incompetence in the field and there was no reason to believe he would start just because he was screwing her.

Peggy slipped her hand into her pocketbook and closed her fingers around her pistol grip. She thumbed the safety off, ready to fire through the side of her handbag if need be, and went through the door.

She walked straight into Irene Lorraine’s fist.

Peggy had been expecting a gun, not a punch to the face, and the blow took her by surprise. As she staggered backwards, Lorraine’s left foot lashed out, connecting with Peggy’s right wrist and sending both pocketbook and gun flying out of her hand. Lorraine slammed another kick into her chest, knocking her into Natasha, and grabbed at Peggy’s wrist as she recovered to swing a punch at her, turning with the motion to send Peggy flying over her hip. Peggy hit the cracked tiled floor and rolled to her feet again, blocking Lorraine’s next kick with the outside of her thigh and ducking her next swing. Lorraine took the punch Peggy leveled at her stomach without flinching, her knee coming up hard into Peggy’s jaw and her foot into her chest an instant later, the blow knocking Peggy onto her backside. Lorraine kicked her again, in the ribs this time.

“That’s enough, Irina.”

Wincing, Peggy looked up at the sound of the hammer being drawn back on a revolver, less than pleased to see the barrel of a Webley Mark IV pointed at her by the dark-haired woman from the bar.

Lorraine lobbed a final kick at her and then stepped away, shaking her blonde curls back from her face. “You have no idea,” she said, “just how long I’ve been waiting to do that.”

“Traitor,” Peggy said, gasping. She pressed a cautious hand to her side and winced at what was almost certainly a broken rib, then had to lean over and spit out a mouthful of blood. She had cut her lip on her own teeth when Lorraine had kneed her and had the sinking suspicion that she had at least one loose tooth now as a result.

Lorraine just looked at her scornfully, then crossed the narrow room to retrieve Peggy’s fallen Walther PPK and her pocketbook. She tossed the handbag into the nearest sink and pointed the pistol at Natasha’s head.

The other woman hadn’t moved except to raise her hands, her pocketbook dangling from the crook of her elbow; Lorraine took it, checked its contents, and added it to the sink with Peggy’s. The blonde woman in the pink dress who had been following them came in behind Natasha, forcing her to step forwards into the room with Beretta pressed to the small of her back.

Well, Peggy thought, more annoyed with herself for still trusting him than she was for someone getting the jump on her, maybe Steve is willing to be an idiot for a pretty face and a good lay after all.

“Zdraste, Natalia,” said the brunette, who seemed to be the one in charge. She went on in the plummy English tones of the Oxbridge colleges, “If that’s really your name.”

“It’s my name.”

“Funny. When we passed that along, the House said there was no Natalia missing.”

“And you still believe the House tells you everything?” Natasha said, raising her eyebrows. “Because I know better than to assume that, especially when I’ve been under as long as you’ve been.” Her gaze swept up and down the brunette, unimpressed, and she went on, “It’s Lyudmila, isn’t it? Lyusya? Irina mentioned you.”

The brunette’s gaze flickered to Lorraine, who didn’t react, then she looked back at Natasha and said, “I’m Lyudmila. I run this henhouse.”

“And you’re doing a marvelous job at it,” Natasha said, “going crying to the House with every little speedbump. You didn’t need a full hand for Rogers, let alone the Winter Guard. I’ve got him right where I want him and you’re about to ruin it.”

Peggy tried to sit up; Lyudmila kicked her with the casual disinterest of someone knocking an inconvenient chair out of the way. None of the other women in the room, Natasha included, so much as looked at her.

“Where you want him,” Lorraine said, “isn’t where the House wants him.”

“The House isn’t here. I am. So are you. Though I guess if you used that thing you supposedly keep inside that pretty little head, you’d have had Rogers two years ago instead of letting Carter scare you off.”

Lorraine flushed. Peggy was too angry to respond to the provocation; all the things she could think about saying would undoubtedly result in getting kicked again. She wasn’t bothered by the prospect of taking a beating, but she didn’t want to risk getting knocked out before she found out exactly what was going on here. On the other hand, she was well aware that this wasn’t the sort of situation where any of the other four women gained anything from keeping her alive. Lorraine certainly couldn’t allow Peggy to walk out with a pulse.

Every piece of paper that crosses Phillips’ desk goes through her hands and has done for two and a half years, my god –

And Lorraine had passed it straight on to the Soviets with no one the wiser. Peggy had to make it out of this, because Phillips had to know. The SSR would be months untangling this disaster, even if finding out about Lorraine – Irina – whatever she was really called – was the worst thing that happened in the next ten minutes.

And Steve has to know.

Maybe Peggy should have felt triumphant about being proven right and to some extent she was, but mostly she felt sorry for Steve. Not only did no one like to be played for a fool, but even Peggy could admit that he was clearly crazy about Natasha. Crazy, perhaps, being the operative word.

“No one knows you,” Lyudmila said to Natasha, her face hard. “You come out of nowhere, you swear you’re one of us, but no one knows you. Not your name, not your patch, not your handler – and not where you met Steve Rogers, either. You just show up and expect the rest of us to take your word for it.”

“Well, it’s clearly not working,” Natasha said. “Are you sure the House likes it when you ask this many questions, Lyusya? Because that would be a change.”

Lorraine stepped forward, scowling, and pressed the barrel of Peggy’s gun to Natasha’s forehead. Natasha didn’t even flinch, just met her eyes. “Go ahead,” she suggested. “Pull the trigger. Then you’ll really never know and you’ll have a body to deal with – two if you count Carter.”

“We can handle a couple of bodies.”

“Stop playing stupid,” Natasha said. “It embarrasses you, the House, and the rest of us. You’re not going to shoot me. The SSR’s been reading your messages for weeks. I know you have orders to take me alive.”

“What?” Lorraine said, startled.

Well, Peggy thought, at least there’s that. It was a relief to know that one thing hadn’t made it into the SSR’s gossip mill and they had managed to keep the white whale decrypts to Room 17 and the Howling Commandos. Of course, now that was blown too.

“Where was your patch?” Lyudmila asked. “Where did you find Rogers? You’re not leaving this room until you answer both those questions. The osobisty can get the details out of you later.”

Natasha stared at Lyudmila for another long moment, long enough to let her know that she wasn’t bothered by the threat of Soviet counter-intelligence, then said, “Norway. The Tesseract wasn’t the only artifact in Tønsberg, just the only one Johann Schmidt knew how to use, so he set up a facility to study the others. Leviathan sent me in to infiltrate it in ‘43. I lost contact with my handler last year; I was never able to retrieve any of the equipment from Kirkenes.”

Where there had been a major Soviet offensive in 1944, later bolstered by Norwegian troops who had been evacuated to Britain early in the war. The Red Army and the Soviets had mostly liberated the Finnmark, the northernmost county in Norway, but according to the accounts Peggy had heard the German scorched earth policy had devastated the region during the Wehrmacht’s retreat. Tønsberg, where Schmidt had ostensibly found his secret weapon, was on the opposite end of the country. That didn’t mean it was where Hydra had set up its facility, but it was more likely. It was a long way from Kirkenes.

“Rogers?” Lyudmila prompted.

“They brought him in after the Valkyrie went down in February. He was injured from the crash. I convinced him I was OSS.” She smiled a little. “Things escalated from there.”

“You mean you dragged Captain America into bed.”

Natasha smirked. “Well, no one else was bothering. He’s a good lay, you know. He wanted it bad.”

“And there you were,” Lorraine said.

“And there I was,” Natasha agreed.

Whore, Peggy thought, but there was a trickle of doubt that went along with it too. It was the kind of story that Steve and Natasha could have been telling all along, more believable than the time travel tall tale they had both been stubbornly sticking to. Despite that, thinking about it made her sick. Steve in enemy hands, injured, scared –

And there she had been. It was a technique MI9 sometimes used to get German POWs to cooperate; Peggy’s Swiss-accented German was fluent enough that she had done it a few times during the months she had spent on loan from SOE to various other British intelligence services. Of course, she hadn’t slept with any of them.

“As easy as that?” Lorraine asked doubtfully.

Natasha shrugged. “Hydra had already done a number on him by the time I got to him. It was like taking candy from a baby.”

“You’re a dead woman,” Peggy said, her voice quiet.

“Not from where I’m standing,” Natasha told her, ignoring the gun still pressed to her forehead. She hadn’t even looked at Peggy, her attention fixed on Lyudmila. Peggy thought it was the first time she had ever seen Natasha’s gaze still rather than constantly moving. “Is that enough for you?”

“How did you get out?” Lyudmila said, apparently uninterested by the brief digression.

Natasha lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I have to save something for my debriefing back home. Is that enough?”

“Why does the House say they’ve never heard of you before?”

“I don’t know,” Natasha said. “Like I said, I know better than to think the House tells us everything, let alone the truth. So either shoot me or stop pretending you’re going to.”

Lorraine flicked a glance back at Lyudmila. She must have made some gesture that Peggy couldn’t see, because Lorraine took Peggy’s Walther away from Natasha’s head and the woman in pink, who had remained silent the whole time, stepped back. She didn’t put her pistol away, though.

Lorraine spun the Walther around on one finger and offered it to Natasha, grip first. She jerked her head at Peggy and said, “Kill her.”

Peggy pushed herself up onto her elbows as Natasha took the gun, but when she tried to get to her feet Lyudmila kicked her again. She fell back with a grunt, wincing, and said, “If you’re going to shoot me, I’d rather die standing.”

“That’s not really up to you, Agent Carter,” Lyudmila told her.

Natasha pointed the gun at Peggy, her beautiful face unreadable.

“You’re going to shoot me,” Peggy said, “and what? Go back out there and tell Steve that you lost me between the dance floor and the lav? You’d better make certain to wash your hands very well afterwards or he’ll smell the gunpowder on them, not to mention the blood. And then where will you be?”

“Don’t worry about Captain Rogers,” Lorraine said. “He’s being taken care of.”

“I told you, I have Rogers handled,” Natasha said. “What exactly do you think the Winter Guard is going to do, coldcock him and stuff him in the back of a van? It’s been tried by better men than Aleksey Lebedev.”

“Like I said,” Lorraine repeated, “Rogers is being taken care of. Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about it for two years.”

“And leave us with a body to deal with?” Natasha said. “You know the place is crawling with SSR personnel. When she doesn’t come out with me, someone will come in looking for her.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Lyudmila said. “There won’t be a body to find.”

“If you’re thinking about Hydra’s energy weapons, I’m pleased to inform you that that gun fires bullets,” Peggy told her scornfully. “I’m sure Corporal Lorraine has told you that those weapons no longer function.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Lorraine said. “The Germans never needed Hydra to destroy people.”

“So that’s your play,” Natasha said gently. “You’re going to cover up the kidnapping by blowing up the club and blaming it on a V-2 strike.”

“What?” said all four women, Peggy included, but Natasha was already moving.

She flung the pistol like a discus at Lyudmila, hitting the woman in the throat. She reflexively dropped her revolver as she staggered backwards, her hands coming up; Peggy caught it as she spun like a top on her rear end and slammed her heel into the woman’s leg, hearing bone snap before she jerked her leg upwards again, cracking her foot off Lyudmila’s jaw. There was a crash of shattering ceramic and Peggy turned hastily, scrambling to her feet as she saw Lorraine slide to the floor with her face all over blood and the remains of the nearest sink dripping water on her. The matryoshka in the pink dress was down too, her Beretta in Natasha’s hand.

“Lyusya?” called a voice from outside the door, presumably the matryoshki who had remained in the hallway to keep anyone else from coming in. “Is everything all right?”

Natasha pitched her voice to something closer to Lyudmila’s – not an exact match, but more similar than her own tones – and replied, “We need some help in here.”

The door swung open. Natasha grabbed the first woman through it and slung her at Peggy, who caught her and pressed the revolver to her forehead as Natasha dragged in the brunette in the green dress, spinning her around and slamming her elbow into the back of the other woman’s neck. She relieved her of her gun and two knives as the matryoshka slumped limply to the floor, tucking the knives into her bodice and chambering a round in the gun.

The woman Peggy was holding thrashed in her grip, trying to get free. Peggy avoided her attempt to knee her in the gut and dug the revolver barrel into her forehead, saying, “Where is the bomb?”

The matryoshka spat at her. She was a small, neat woman, shorter even than Natasha, with round pink cheeks, wheat-colored curls, and a furious expression. She looked at Peggy like she wanted to claw her eyes out and made a determined try at it an instant later.

Peggy fended her off and repeated her question as Natasha went down the row of stalls, pushing each door open with her gun barrel, practiced and professional. She came out of the last one with a gas mask container, which she slung over her shoulder by the strap before joining Peggy and the matryoshka. She considered them both briefly, green eyes so neutral she almost looked disinterested, then said matter-of-factly, “She’s not going to talk,” and slammed her pistol butt into the back of the matryoshka’s head.

“You don’t know that!” Peggy exclaimed as the other woman went limp in her arms. She dumped her hastily on the floor next to Lyudmila and stood glaring at Natasha over her body.

“We don’t have time for her to prove you wrong,” Natasha said. She flipped back the flap on the gas mask container to show Peggy its contents. “This payload isn’t big enough to fake a V-2, is it? I’ve only seen pictures, I’ve never seen an actual site.”

Peggy seized it from her and swore. She set the container down in the sink and then took the knife Natasha passed her as she set down to defusing the bomb. As she worked, she said, “No, they’d need at least half a dozen of these, maybe more, placed all around the club. This far underground it wouldn’t be obvious that it didn’t crater the way a V-2 does, not until they dug it out and maybe not even then. How did you know?”

“I didn’t.” Natasha was checking all five matryoshki for weapons and summarily dumping an alarming assortment of guns, knives, brass knuckles, and a few other accoutrements Peggy couldn’t recognize from a quick glance into one of the sinks. “That’s why they call it an interrogation.”

Peggy turned to stare at her. “Are you mad?”

“What, you think Steve married me for my good looks?”

“Steve didn’t marry you at all.” Peggy finished what she was doing and stood back, breathing hard. She wasn’t a bomb disposal expert by a long shot and it had been a while since the last time she had had to do it; now with the job done the reaction was starting to set in. She set the knives carefully aside and moved to one of the empty sinks to wash her hands, which were gummy with blood except where she had wiped them clean to work on the bomb. The powdered soap from the dispenser was gritty between her fingers. She wet a towel and started to wipe the blood off her face, wincing as she jarred her cut lip. Then she turned on Natasha. “You held a gun on me!”

Natasha looked surprised. “I didn’t pull the trigger. Wait – did you think I was telling the truth?”

Peggy stared at her, furious. “Yes!”

“You know the truth!”

“Forgive me,” Peggy said through gritted teeth, “if ‘I found Captain America in a Hydra prison and seduced him in order to convince him to defect to the Soviet Union’ is a little more convincing than ‘Captain America was frozen in ice for seventy years and then an alien who wanted to destroy the universe sent us back in time.’”

“Unbelievable,” Natasha said, rolling her eyes. She checked the clip in the Beretta she had taken, found the blonde’s extra magazines, and put them in her own pocketbook. “Bombs.”

“Bombs,” Peggy agreed. She retrieved her pistol and put both it and Lyudmila’s revolver in her pocketbook, keeping her hand on the Walther’s grip as she and Natasha went out into the narrow hallway. There was at least one matryoshka who had stayed out in the crowd and would realize immediately when Peggy and Natasha and not her comrades came out. They had to get SSR personnel into the ladies’ room before the unknown Soviet or any civilians came in.

She spotted Rose Roberts and Kim Pantcheff almost as soon as she came out. Both SSR officers stood up when they saw Peggy and she crossed swiftly to them. Rose said, “Peg, your face –”

Peggy waved that off, keeping her voice low as she said, “We have five unconscious enemy agents and a defused bomb in the ladies’ lav. Rose, you get our people in there and make sure they’re removed to headquarters – don’t let MI6 get them. Kim, I need you to evacuate the club as quickly as you can, but don’t cause a panic.”

“Bomb?” he repeated.

Peggy nodded once and reiterated, “Quickly but quietly.”

“On it.”

Peggy caught Rose’s arm as she made to go collect a few more SSR agents. When Rose looked at her, she said, “One of those enemy agents is Irene Lorraine.”

Rose’s eyes went wide. “Are you sure?”

“Very.”

Dernier was pushing his way through the crowd to them. “What happened?” he demanded as soon as Rose had gone.

Peggy gave him the same swift explanation she had just given Rose and Pantcheff, then expanded on the situation with the probable bombs.

“Bombs are no trouble,” Dernier said with his usual optimistic enthusiasm when it came to anything explosive. “At least two of our explosives technicians are here, including the new man, the paratrooper with the missing leg –”

“Find the bloody bombs,” Peggy ordered him. “And get them taken care of."

“Where’s Steve?” Natasha demanded. “Why aren’t you with him?”

“He’s with Dugan,” Dernier said.

“Where?”

Steve and the two missing Commandos weren’t in the club. Jones and Falsworth found Peggy and Natasha at the edge of the police cordon almost half an hour later, forcing their way through the crush of confused clubgoers who had been evacuated into the street and were being led away from the potential blast radius by the police and Civil Defense personnel who had arrived. Jones said bluntly, “Our snipers are dead. Throats cut. Looks like it happened before we got here. What’s all this?”

Peggy explained about the bombs, then about how exactly they had acquired that information. By now the captured matryoshki had all been loaded into the back of an SSR lorry and taken back to cells at headquarters, but none of the others or anyone from the Winter Guard had been found.

“Cover story is that it’s a UXB,” Peggy said; that was believable enough, since not every piece of ordnance the Luftwaffe had dropped during the Blitz had gone off and there were still unexploded bombs being found regularly. No one in London would find that remarkable, just annoying, especially since they were being evacuated before it had gone off.

“The captain?” Falsworth asked, sliding a look at Natasha, who flicked a glance at him in return. She had a tense, scared air to her, like her attention was divided for the first time that Peggy had met her. It was also the first time that Peggy had ever seen her afraid.

Peggy shook her head, fighting back her own attack of nerves. Steve hadn’t been presumed dead for so long that she had gotten used to him being missing, especially when she had just gotten him back again. There were SSR agents combing the surrounding area, but the combination of the dim-out, the clubgoers, the police, and the ARP was making it difficult. Peggy would have been out there with them, but at the moment she was the highest-ranking SSR officer here. That and the medics – there had been two SSR medics and a couple of FANY ambulance drivers in the Stork Club – had refused to let her do anything strenuous until they had checked her out.

“Wherever he is, he’s with Dugan and Morita,” Peggy said, trying to sound confident. “I can’t imagine better hands for him to be in.”

But the fear on Natasha’s face – the beautiful, dangerous woman Steve Rogers had bedded and lied for and quite clearly trusted more than he did Peggy, Howard, or any of the Commandos – frightened Peggy more than she cared to admit.

They were interrupted by the arrival of Colonel Phillips’ car, driving with blackout headlamps that directed the headlights down to the ground and in Peggy’s experience weren’t much better than driving without lights at all. Phillips and Howard both got out and Peggy blinked at Howard in astonishment, surprised that he would appear in such a public place. Officially Howard Stark had never been associated with the SSR and was still back in New York.

“Situation?” Phillips asked, at the same time Howard said, “Bomb?”

Peggy passed him the defused one that had been collected from the ladies’ room and gave her report to Phillips. She finished with, “Dernier and our bomb disposal unit are still in there, but given that nothing’s gone boom yet, we’re likely safe on that front. Unfortunately, no one’s seen hide nor hair of Captain Rogers, Sergeant Dugan, or Corporal Morita.”

Phillips glanced at Natasha, reading her stark features and silent expression, then looked back at Peggy, raising his eyebrows. Peggy nodded slowly; she supposed that Natasha Rogers had finally earned the benefit of the doubt, even if it had required holding Peggy at gunpoint to do it.

“You?” Phillips asked Peggy.

“A few bruised ribs, a black eye, and a split lip; I’ll live.” The medics had decided that the ribs probably weren’t broken, which was a relief, though she would have to get checked out again when she got back to headquarters.

There was a shout from the direction of the Stork Club’s front entrance and they peered down the length of barely-visible street, which didn’t do much good at this distance. Eventually Dernier came jogging up to them, looking less triumphant than Peggy would have preferred.

“The bombs are taken care of,” he reported. “There were eight total. We’ve also found Dugan and Morita.”

“Alive?” Falsworth asked, his voice sharp.

“What about Rogers?” Phillips asked.

Dernier took a deep breath. “Dugan’s just coming around,” he said. “You’d better hear it from him yourself.”

The lights were still on in the club when their party tramped in, the dance floor and the empty table eerie in their abandonment. Morita was laid out on a stretcher on the floor, with Dugan sitting in a chair next to him while a medic looked him over and one of the bomb techs sat nearby, the dismantled pieces of one of the Department X bombs spread out on a cloth in front of him. Dugan looked wobblier than Peggy had ever seen him before; she had to take a second look to make sure that Morita was breathing.

Dugan tried to stand up as Phillips approached, but the colonel waved him back down, pulling up another chair so that Dugan didn’t have to crane his neck to look up at him. “What happened?”

“We were tailing Aleksey Lebedev,” Dugan said. “Me, Morita, Rogers. Went into the back, where they keep the extra booze, and the Winter Guard and a couple of women cornered us. Lebedev told Rogers they only needed him, not the two of us, and he said he wouldn’t put up a fight as long as they let us go. We told him not to do it; he said he couldn’t risk it.” His gaze flickered to Natasha and he added, hesitating over the unfamiliar syllables, “He said, ‘tell Nat –’”

Peggy didn’t recognize the language, but Natasha evidently did. More surprisingly, Howard did too, because he said, “Since when does Steve speak Xhosa?”

Phillips and Peggy both looked at Natasha, who bit her lip, then translated, “He said, ‘if you don’t find me before they take me out of the country, you’re going to have to –’” She took a deep breath before she went on, “‘– you’re going to have to backtrail the Winter Soldier.’ Idiot,” she added, presumably that was her own contribution.

“The what?”

“It was a Russian super soldier project developed in the last months of the war and which continued after the fall of the Soviet Union,” Natasha said. “We’ve run into some of its results.”

There are better things to do with a super soldier, Steve had said when Peggy had been interrogating him. I’ve seen it.

“There’s also a twelve year gap between the end of the war and when the records we found start,” Natasha said, her jaw hard.

Howard flicked a thoughtful look at her, but didn’t say anything.

“What happened?” Phillips prompted Dugan.

“Mikhail Ursus coldcocked him from behind, then they must have knocked the both of us out too.” He looked down at his hands, as if he couldn’t comprehend not having put up a fight to keep his commanding officer – to keep his friend – from being kidnapped.

“We found them tied up in the back, next to another one of those bombs,” said the SSR bomb tech. He must have been the new one, since he had an aluminum crutch propped against his chair and Peggy had only the faintest memory of seeing him in passing at headquarters. Sorenson, Sousa, Samuels, something like that. He had looked curiously at Natasha at the mention of post-war events, but didn’t remark on it. “No one would ever have found even pieces of them – or most of anyone else in the club, either.”

“So Lebedev lied to Steve as well as kidnapping him,” Peggy said. She found a half-full bottle of wine on one of the nearby tables and took a swig from it, feeling like after the evening she had had, she had more than earned it. After a moment she wiped the neck of the bottle clean and offered it to Natasha, who looked like she needed it. “Well, I know who we can ask about where they’re hiding. That’s a conversation I’m looking forward to having.”