Of Home Near

Peggy spent the next thirty minutes waiting in the dark next to the phone box, resisting the now-instinctual urge to flee for the nearest Underground station or air raid shelter rather than stand here in the open. Even though she knew the Blitz had ended years ago, she couldn’t shake her impression that she had a target painted on her head, just waiting for a Heinkel bomber to drop a parachute mine on top of her. She had felt safer at night at the front than she did in London.

Eventually a pair of military lorries with their slitted blackout headlamps pulled up to the curb where she was standing. Colonel Phillips leaned out the window of the first vehicle and motioned her towards the back of the truck; Peggy hoisted herself up and closed the canvas flap behind her. When she turned around, she found all of the Howling Commandos there as well as Natasha Romanoff Rogers (to her resignation) and Howard Stark (to her surprise).

“Should you chaps be out of hospital?” Peggy asked, seating herself on one of the benches next to Gabe Jones and looking with concern at Dugan and Morita.

Morita, who looked like death warmed over, set his jaw mulishly and said, “We already lost him twice, we’re not going for a hat trick.”

Dugan passed Peggy her gear bag and said, “Face it, Peggy, you’re stuck with us.”

Since Peggy felt more or less the same way, she could hardly blame the two men for that, though concussions were nothing to make light of. The Commandos and Howard all looked politely away as she unzipped the duffle bag and began to change into her tactical gear, catching herself with a hand on Jones’s shoulder as the lorry began to move off down the street. At this stage in the war, Peggy had plenty of practice changing in moving vehicles, so it didn’t take her long to strip out of her frock and heavy woolen coat and shimmy inelegantly into battledress, pulling her hair loose from her collar as she sat back down to lace up her boots. In the dim light of Falsworth’s pocket torch, she could see that the Commandos and Natasha were all in their own tactical gear. Howard was wearing his leather flying jacket and looking determined.

“Surely you could have stayed back at headquarters,” Peggy told him, transferring her pistol from her pocket to her holster, double-checking the edge on her Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, and finally taking the Thompson submachine gun that Dernier handed her. She checked it over, then slung the strap across her shoulder and rested the gun on her lap.

Howard set his jaw stubbornly. “I’m not going for a hat trick on losing him either.” He bit his lip briefly, then confessed, “I’m sick of sitting home safe and finding out that he’s gone missing. Again.”

“Do you even have a gun?”

He produced a pistol from inside his jacket and leaned across the lorry to put it into her hand when she beckoned for it. “You’re the one who checked me out on firearms, remember?”

“I remember,” Peggy said grimly. The pistol was a Colt 1908 Pocket Hammerless, the same gun that the Americans liked to issue to general officers, and obviously studiously maintained. Howard was checked out on firearms; like everyone else at the SSR he had gone through the required combat training and could hit a target with a handgun, fire a rifle, and engage in a certain amount of unarmed combat. That didn’t mean anyone actually wanted him near a fight. Peggy didn’t think even Howard wanted to be near a fight, or at least not any nearer than cruising altitude, the way he had been when he had flown Steve into Austria a year and a half ago.

“Don’t worry,” Jones assured her. “Colonel Phillips told him he has to stay back with him and the trucks. He’s not going in until the building’s been cleared or there’s something that’s going to blow up that Jacques can’t handle.”

“Or someone needs him to press a button,” Falsworth added helpfully, ignoring the little harrumphing sound that Dernier made at this disparagement of his skills.

“I’m great at pushing buttons,” Howard affirmed. He met Peggy’s eyes and went on, “I don’t want to go in shooting, that’s your job. I just…I can’t wait back there again.”

Peggy looked at him hard, but she knew more than she preferred of what that was like and couldn’t blame him for it. “All right,” she said, handing him back his pistol. “But I’ll be very cross with you if you get shot or kidnapped by the Winter Guard. I’m sure they’d be very happy to haul you back to Russia along with Steve.”

“Not as cross as I’ll be,” Howard said, wincing at the idea. He checked the safety on the gun, then put it back into his jacket – probably a shoulder holster, Peggy guessed, rather than in an inner pocket. A shoulder holster would appeal to Howard’s sense of the dramatic.

Peggy turned her attention to Natasha as the lorry rattled over the darkened streets. The other woman had watched the exchange in interested silence, but except for the slight tilt of her head and the minute adjustments of posture necessary in any moving vehicle had remained as still as a statue.

“Where’s your rifle?” Peggy asked her, frowning. The modified Springfield she had been issued was nowhere in sight; Natasha only had her two Walther pistols.

“I don’t need it for this,” Natasha said. Her expression suggested that if she had her way she would be handling the whole mess herself. Peggy wondered briefly if she had tried to convince Phillips of that.

Peggy exchanged a look with Dugan, whose expression was about as dubious as Peggy felt. For an instant, Peggy thought, If she gets killed, then Steve –

She was self-aware enough to be ashamed that it had even crossed her mind.

“What’s it look like in there?” Jones asked, clearly eager to prevent a catfight in such close quarters with no means of escape.

Peggy dragged her attention away from Natasha in order to give them a rundown on the damaged warehouse and the ground around it. “In the dark and the fog coming in off the river, it was hard to tell, but it looks like that part of the docks got hit very hard, either in the Blitz or from flying bombs.” She couldn’t recall off the top of her head if any V-2s had struck in the Isle of Dogs. “Possibly both. With most of the rubble cleared away, there’s not much cover in the immediate area. The dark hurts them as much as us, though; they won’t be able to see us coming.”

“We won’t be able to see them, either,” Jones pointed out.

“Does night vision exist yet?” Natasha asked. “Infrared goggles?”

They all looked at her blankly, except for Howard, who said, “The Germans and the Soviets mount them on tanks, and they’ve got something a little lighter that they’ve been trying out on their infantry since last year. We’ve got a scope that goes on a rifle, does about the same thing, but not that many of them, so they just give them to the snipers and tell them to take notes. I was working on goggles a while back, but then, you know, Hydra –”

“So no night vision goggles,” Natasha said.

“Give me a week and tell Phillips and the Nazis to stop bothering me,” Howard said.

“We don’t have a week,” Peggy snapped.

“I just thought I’d ask,” Natasha said.

“Yes, well, they’re not available,” Peggy told her brusquely. She looked at Natasha hard, until she was certain she had the other woman’s attention, and said, “I’m lead.”

Natasha nodded.

She had trained with the Commandos and Peggy at Beaulieu and they had all seen her sparring with Steve, but the only people in the lorry who had actually seen her fight were Peggy and Howard, and both of those occasions had been rather particular circumstances. Peggy wasn’t pleased about finding out what she was like in an operation when it was Steve’s life on the line.

“That means I’m in command,” Peggy went on, just to make certain that Natasha got the message.

Her gaze flickered to Peggy’s, a little ironic, and she said, “This isn’t my first rodeo, Agent Carter.”

They pulled up just past the end of the bus line, where the expected sound of traffic, scarce as it was this time of night, would cover their approach. Peggy hopped out of the bed of the lorry to confer with Colonel Phillips and to get his confirmation that Howard wouldn’t be going anywhere near the fighting unless absolutely necessary.

The second lorry turned out to hold another SSR strike team, one of the black teams that operated unnoticed while the Howling Commandos took the spotlight; it was a common misconception that Captain America and the Howling Commandos were the only operational team the SSR had. They climbed out of the back of the truck and greeted Peggy before she and Phillips gave them their orders in a low murmur, careful not to whisper to keep the sibilants from carrying.

“Thames Division is out on the river along with some of our guys in case they try to make a break that way,” Phillips told them, spreading out a street map on the bonnet of the lead lorry while Peggy, Howard, the Commandos, and Three Team all crowded around. Falsworth held a pocket torch so that they could see, constructing a little tent over it with a spare jacket to hopefully conceal the faint glow. “We only have two teams in-country, though, so it’s whoever was around.”

Which usually meant whoever was back in London doing desk duty while they recuperated from an injury, agents who typically worked solo or in pairs, or the handful of recent transfers who had been seconded or invalided out of combat units. No one incapable, but not a coherent unit like the Commandos or Three Team, either.

“Sawyer, your guys form a perimeter here.” Phillips jabbed a blunt finger at the map and traced a rough semi-circle that backed onto the Thames; Three Team’s leader nodded in acknowledgment. “Carter?”

“We’ll approach along here.” She indicated the intended path, hoping the map was up to date; some of the bomb damage had been penciled in, but depending on when the annotations had been made it might be lacking anything more recent. “Monty, take Morita and go – here. Jones, Dernier, Dugan – here. Mrs. Rogers and I will enter here.”

They all looked at Natasha, clearly wondering if she could handle the operation. She looked back, arching her eyebrows a little as if to ask if they were serious. All she said was, “Do you want them alive or not?”

She might have been asking if Phillips preferred his eggs fried or scrambled.

Almost everyone looked askance at Natasha; Peggy didn’t think she had ever heard a woman be so blunt on the subject. She certainly wouldn’t have been, even if she had also been trying to decide how to phrase the same question.

“Take them alive if you can,” Phillips said, apparently unbothered by hearing a woman ask it, “but don’t worry about trying too hard for it. If they’re alive, we’ll have another argument with MI5 over what to do with them. If not –” He shrugged. “Then we can hand the bodies over to MI5 and it will be their problem.”

“Rather rough on the Security Service,” Falsworth murmured.

“Then they should have done their damn job,” Phillips said brusquely. “Stark, you’re with me.”

Howard nodded without even a token attempt at protesting or posturing.

“Carter. Stark.”

Peggy and Howard stepped aside with Colonel Phillips as the Commandos and Three Team went back to their preparations. “What is it?”

“Fella from the embassy lost the tail,” Phillips said. “The Reds have whatever got handed over to them.”

“Steve’s blood,” Howard said bitterly.

“Probably, yeah.”

Peggy drew her lips together, which made her wince a little; she didn’t have Steve’s accelerated healing and her split lip still ached. “Can MI5 intercept the diplomatic bag before it’s sent to Moscow?”

Phillips frowned. “If they’re up for violating diplomatic law, which I understand they’ve been doing for half the war.”

“If the Soviets can walk a commando team in here and kidnap Captain America, I don’t see why we shouldn’t rifle through their mail,” Howard said grumpily.

“Exactly,” Peggy said. “As this is MI5’s mistake, I believe they can do their best to remedy at least some of it.”

“Isn’t some of it our mistake?” Howard said.

“Whose side are you on, anyway?”

Phillips looked at them both in long-suffering disbelief. “Go get Rogers and try not to die doing it.”

“Yes, sir,” Peggy said promptly, giving him a snappy salute.

“And try not to get his wife killed doing it either.”

All three of them glanced over at Natasha, who was talking quietly to Falsworth and Dernier and studying the map. She looked sleek and dangerous in what Senator Brandt’s aide Sherman had dubbed her Liberty Belle outfit, her red hair black in the dim light of a few slitted pocket torches. She had taken her diamond engagement ring off, but the gold of her wedding band winked briefly in the dull glimmer of electric light before she pulled her fingerless gloves on and covered it.

“About that,” Howard said, fumbling inside his jacket again. Peggy followed him as he crossed back to Natasha and the Commandos, wondering what he was doing.

Natasha turned when he said her name, her eyebrows going up as Howard pulled his hand out from his jacket. Peggy couldn’t see what he held out to her until Natasha took it from him; since she had only seen them once it took her a moment to recognize the weaponized bracelets that had been with the rest of the tactical gear she had arrived with.

“I thought you said I wasn’t getting any of my equipment back,” she said, slipping them on over her wrists. The ends of the cylinders and central casing lit up briefly blue as she tested them, making the hair on the back of Peggy’s neck rise; it was almost, though not exactly, the same shade of blue as Hydra’s energy weapons.

Howard met her eyes, but all he said was, “Go get him.”

The drug had worn off a while ago, leaving Steve half-awake and wishing he wasn’t. His body was one solid ache the way it hadn’t been for a good long time. Despite that, his shoulder hurt damnably, as did the tooth he was already regrowing and what felt like several cracked ribs. At least when he had been unconscious he hadn’t been aware of having been beaten half to death, though that wasn’t exactly a new experience. It wasn’t a recent experience, but it wasn’t a new one, either.

Despite the physical pain, he would rather be awake than not, especially since Mikhail Ursus and Nikolai Krylenko were sitting on the other side of the room with a matryoshka Steve recognized from the Stork Club, playing cards, drinking wine, and smoking. He had the feeling that as soon as they realized he was conscious, they would drug him again rather than have another fight, unless of course they still wanted to kick the crap out of him. At least he knew that those two weren’t interested in talking to him.

Instead he kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady, listening to the sounds in and around the old building. His enhanced hearing wasn’t as good as Thor’s, but it was leaps and bounds better than a normal human’s – not that Steve had realized that back in 1943, since he had been partially deaf in his left ear for most of his life. He still had the habit of turning his head to better hear people talk – or to not hear them, sometimes, which didn’t work out when he had two better than average ears. It also tended to make people think that he wasn’t paying attention, which really didn’t work out. He had learned to read lips for circumstances where looking people in the eye was considered to be slightly more important than hearing every word they said. Steve had always had to look up anyway, so people usually hadn’t noticed if his gaze was focused on their lips rather than their eyes. When the serum had taken effect, he had thought that was how everyone else had always heard.

They were by the river, probably near the docks – what had later become known as the London Docklands, though Steve wasn’t sure if the name had already been in use during the war. What in the 21st century was a major business district crowded with skyscrapers was in 1945 still the home of the West India Docks. It had been hit hard during the Blitz and to the best of Steve’s knowledge there were still plenty of ruined buildings in the area. Depending where they were, there might not be any residential neighborhoods around; at night, it could be utterly deserted.

His ears picked out the sounds of other people moving around the building and the occasional voice, though he couldn’t make out the words through the walls. Besides Ursus, Krylenko, and the unfamiliar matryoshka, he identified Lebedev and the other members of the Winter Guard, Dottie, and two woman who were presumably both matryoshki. Nine people total. Nothing he couldn’t handle, even with a hole in his shoulder and a couple of cracked ribs, only he needed either his hands or his feet free.

Steve tested the carbonadium bonds for the thousandth time, careful not to make any noise that would get the attention of the three Soviet commandos on the other side of the room. He was almost certain that he could have broken them if he had had even a centimeter of slack; unfortunately, he didn’t have that right now. He might be able to get enough on his ankles depending what happened next; he could feel a slight weakness in the metal that hadn’t been there before, probably from the stain he’d been putting on them during his scuffles with the Winter Guard.

He turned his head very slightly as he heard the soft scrape of boot soles against rubble. It came from outside the building, not within it; he might have missed part of the strike team during his earlier headcount, but he didn’t think so. Listening closely, he identified more than one person out there, approaching stealthily in pairs and one trio along three different vectors.

Steve smiled.

The fog off the river was thick and heavy, not quite a true London pea souper, but dense enough that it lent an eerie air to their passage. Coupled with the blackout darkness, an enemy would have to be nearly right on top of them to see them. Peggy almost tripped over the SSR agent she had left here earlier to watch the warehouse.

They conferred in hushed tones before Peggy sent him back to the lorries to join Colonel Phillips. According to him, no one had come in or out of the building; he wasn’t certain how many people were inside, but estimated fewer than a dozen, more than five. Probably the Winter Guard and two or three matryoshki, Peggy guessed.

The block connecting this warehouse to its compatriots had collapsed in on itself; the other blocks were gone, the rubble carted off years ago, leaving only familiar empty scars in the landscape. From the outside, there was no sign of habitation; the building might have been abandoned for years. Peggy eased up along what remained of a window whose glass had been blown out, leaving it staring as blankly as the eye sockets in a skull. She peered in, keeping her body where it couldn’t be seen unless someone actually stuck their head out to look. It was as dark inside as it was outside. She watched for what felt like a long time but was probably no more than a few minutes, aware of Natasha facing outwards into the fog so that the two of them wouldn’t be taken from behind.

At some point in the past the iron window frame had been spiked, but the spikes had long since been removed or destroyed. When Peggy was certain that she hadn’t spotted any movement inside the long empty stretch of the warehouse’s first floor, she hoisted herself up and over. She landed with a crunch of broken glass that made her freeze, her gun raised as she waited to see whether or not anyone had heard. When there was no response, she half-turned so that she could still watch the warehouse floor and gestured Natasha to follow her in.

Once Natasha was inside – she had landed nearly soundlessly, broken glass or not – Peggy led the way across the warehouse, skirting the edges of the walls rather than cutting across the open length of the empty floor where they would have no cover. Despite the grime and rubble tracked through the building from the open windows and bomb damage, Peggy thought that the phantom scent of coffee and sugar still clung to the walls, the wealth of Britain’s empire brought to a juddering halt by the onset of the war.

The stairs were in an enclosed brick shell along the eastern wall. Peggy listened at the closed door for several moments, trying to keep her breathing calm and steady rather than hard and loud. When there was no sound from behind the door, she touched Natasha’s arm – it was too dark to be certain the other woman would see her hand signals – and stepped back from the door, leveling her Thompson at it.

Natasha opened it fast, and Peggy went through with her gun raised. Inside, the stairwell was somehow even darker than it had been on the warehouse, a pit of pure blackness. Anyone in it would be as blind as they were.

Peggy thought a curse that nice young ladies weren’t supposed to know and which she had learned from her brother long before the war, then pulled her pocket torch out from inside her jacket.

The thin beam of light illuminated a set of worn stone steps leading upwards. Peggy surveyed the stairwell briefly, then passed the torch to Natasha so that she could keep both hands on the Thompson. Natasha made a motion as if to take the lead up the stairs before Peggy gestured her back. She didn’t like the idea of having her back to Natasha Rogers, especially when the other woman was armed, but she wasn’t about to let someone else go in first.

The torch behind her produced just enough light that Peggy didn’t trip on her way up. She took the stairs quickly, listening briefly at the doors they passed. Five floors and an attic, she thought. Not the attic or the top floor because it would be too hard to escape if trapped, as well as being the place where light was most likely to carry. Not the lowest floors because they were too vulnerable. The third story, then.

She paused outside the door opening onto the third story. Over time, the wood of the door and its frame had settled, leaving visible a thin rim of light around the sides. It wasn’t very strong light, but it was there nonetheless. Peggy stood still, listening for what felt like a long time. There were voices beyond it, maybe – or it could have just been the sound of wind coming in through broken windows.

Natasha came up alongside her on the landing, holding the torch in her right hand with her left wrist braced on top of it, so that the pistol in her other hand would follow the beam of light. Her beautiful face was as cool and distant as a statue’s, except for her predator’s eyes, more like a wolf’s than a woman’s. Not for the first time, Peggy thought in disbelief, Steve sleeps with that?

If a woman like that was what Steve wanted, then it would never have been Peggy.

She shut her eyes briefly, then shoved the thought aside and nodded at Natasha. The other woman shut the torch off, leaving them in darkness broken only by the very faint illumination from beyond the door. Natasha stowed the torch away, then reached out with her free hand, keeping her pistol pointed at the door as she did so. She tested the knob to see if it was locked, then shoved it open, fast.

“He’s awake again.”

Steve opened his eyes since there didn’t seem to be any further point in pretending to be unconscious. Aleksey Lebedev and Dmitri Bukharin were standing over him, both well out of kicking range; both seemed to have learned their lesson about getting too close to Steve. Bukharin’s hand twitched towards the knife he kept in his sleeve as Steve pushed himself upright, wincing as the movement jarred his bad shoulder, but all Lebedev did was glance down at him in disgust before turning his attention back to his teammate.

“You said twelve hours.”

“Howard Stark,” Bukharin said pointedly, keeping a wary eye on Steve, “said ten to twelve hours.”

“Four hours,” Lebedev said, equally pointed, “is not even ten hours, whether or not it’s helped along by a kick to the head.”

“Christ, is that it?” Steve said, surprised and more than a little relieved. No one had been keeping him informed of the passage of time. “Maybe you’re just not as smart as Howard, you ever think of that one?”

Both men glared at him; he’d spoken in Russian to be sure that Bukharin got the point.

His relief wasn’t unalloyed. Four hours really wasn’t ten hours. It wasn’t even near ten hours, and he remembered from the last time he’d been badly hurt enough that Howard had had to dose him that even then he’d been on the downswing from ten to closer to nine. He and a few other people had suspected for years that the serum was continuing to mutate him, though since no one had his original fresh-from-the-VitaRays results and Howard had either destroyed or hidden the numbers he had taken during the war there was no way to be absolutely certain. The only person who had ever dared bring it up to his face had been Shuri, disappointed when Steve didn’t have a good answer for her. He knew Howard had been talking quietly about it with Peggy and Phillips ever since he had come back, but so far Howard had been diplomatic enough not to ask Steve outright.

If Steve was lucky, Howard had written the drug formula down wrong on purpose and kept the real one in his head; he was both familiar enough with corporate espionage and paranoid enough about Steve that he might have done so. If Steve wasn’t lucky…

Four hours wasn’t anywhere near ten hours.

To the best of Steve’s knowledge, there was no way that Bukharin could know that, a suspicion that was proven right when he protested, “Stark’s paranoid. Just because Irina said it was the right formula doesn’t meant that it really is –”

“Fix it,” Lebedev ordered.

Bukharin’s gaze flickered to Steve. “I can’t do that without a lab.”

“Then how do you expect to get him back to the Center?”

“I’m still working on that one.”

“Work faster.”

Steve cocked his head to one side, listening to the sounds outside the room, then said, “You fellas could probably save yourself some trouble and lay off.”

They both looked at him and Lebedev said, “What?”

Steve smiled, showing teeth. “It’s not going to be long now.”

Peggy slammed forward as soon as Natasha had opened the door, cutting off Natasha’s own entrance. For a moment the two women tangled in the doorway, which was long enough for the man in the hallway to turn towards them in astonishment, his hand moving to the pistol tucked into the waistband of his trousers.

He was close enough that Peggy could have reached out and touched him, so she did just that before he could do more than reach for his gun. She slammed a foot upwards between his legs, and as he started to collapse she bashed the stock of the Thompson into his head, which made a very satisfying dull crack. Natasha caught him and lowered him to the floor as Peggy swung her gun back up, covering the hallway in case anyone had heard the noise. She knelt and removed his pistol, shoes, and belt, using the belt and laces to bind his hands and feet before checking him over hastily for other weapons; she came up with a trench knife and a pair of brass knuckles.

Natasha unloaded the pistol and tucked the clip away in a belt pouch, then left the empty gun with the other weapons and the shoes in a neat pile out of the commando’s reach. Less than thirty seconds had passed by the time she straightened up, her pistol back in its holster and her hands empty. Peggy frowned at her, wondering why she didn’t draw her gun again, then shrugged and set the thought aside. Maybe she wanted to go as long as she could without shooting, since that would draw attention they didn’t want until they and the Commandos had evened the odds a little.

All of the warehouses in this part of the London docks were broadly similar, so it had been straightforward enough to plan their approach. Each block of the massive warehouses had enclosed staircases on either side, leaving the floorspace open for the goods that had moved through the city in bulk before the war. In this particular warehouse, part of this floor near the stairwell seemed to have been turned into offices, leaving a narrow hallway flanked by mostly closed doors. A few bare electric bulbs had been strung up to illuminate it, but with no windows here the light wouldn’t show from outside. Peggy and Natasha had approached from the east; the Howling Commandos were coming in from the west.

The two women hadn’t gone more than a few steps down the hallway when a door swung open and a woman stepped out. Peggy had just enough time to see her astonished expression before Natasha’s foot lashed out in a roundhouse kick that spun her all the way around, so fast that Natasha still caught the woman before she hit the floor. She lowered her the other woman’s body and repeated the same thing she had done with the first man as Peggy checked quickly inside the room the unconscious matryoshka had just vacated. It was empty of other people, but blankets were spread out on the floor, with packs as pillows, enough for four. The matryoshki, maybe, assuming that they weren’t willing to share sleeping space with the Winter Guard.

Natasha deposited the woman’s shoes and weapons in another pile and straightened up again. Peggy cocked an eyebrow at her, curious about the shoes, but she wasn’t about to give their presence away by asking. Right about now the Howling Commandos ought to be entering on the further side of the building; it would take them longer to approach than it had the two women. Peggy suspected that they weren’t going to be quite as subtle about it as she and Natasha had been.

Natasha opened the next door with her left arm raised and her fist closed, blue illuminating the ends of the cylinders on her bracelet. There was a crackling sound, a flash of blue light that made Peggy flinch, and a faint thump from inside the room before Natasha closed the door gently. She looked back at Peggy, pointing at the two limp bodies in the hallway and then back at the room before holding up three fingers.

Peggy wondered how many that left.

For a long moment Lebedev just stared at Steve, his expression blank. Steve met his gaze, letting everything that he was and everything he had seen show on his face. He’d faced down gods without blinking; a couple of Soviet commandos who had gotten too big for their britches was nothing.

He saw the moment when Lebedev remembered what Steve was, that he was something other than the annoyance they had been sent away from the front to retrieve. He’d seen enough during their joint missions to know that Captain America was something more than propaganda and a shiny star.

“Kolya, get out there with the dolls and search the perimeter,” he ordered, turning to look over his shoulder at the other two commandos remaining in the room; the matryoshka they had been playing cards with had left at some point. “Dima, the drug –”

Bukharin produced the leather wallet and pulled out a syringe, a hypodermic needle, and a fresh vial full of viscous-looking liquid. As he fit them all together, Lebedev walked a wide circle around Steve until he could get behind him, obviously with the intention of holding him still while Bukharin stuck him. A gesture brought Ursus over, warily circling Steve’s other side so that he couldn’t watch all three of them at the same time.

Steve flexed his wrists in the manacles, sending pain shooting up into his bad shoulder, then tested the restraints on his legs again. This was going to go poorly for someone, but he didn’t intend for it to be him.

Natasha was a little ahead of Peggy, moving with the soundless grace of a panther Peggy had seen in a zoo once, when one of the hallway doors they hadn’t cleared yet opened and a man on crutches came out. The open door also released the sound of male voices speaking in Russian.

One of them was Steve’s.

The man – Nikolai Krylenko – had just enough time to shout, “Aleks –”

Natasha was there before he could finish Lebedev’s name, sweeping his legs out from under him and slamming her knee up into his chin in the same motion. His crutches fell to the floor with a clatter as Natasha slung his unconscious body aside.

“Rogers, stop screwing around in there!” Natasha yelled.

Peggy felt rather than heard the approach of the woman behind her. She turned, bringing her Thompson up two-handed to block the woman’s downwards knife blow. The blade skittered off the metal of the barrel with a horrible scraping noise and Peggy kicked outwards without success, the woman twisting out of the way and dropping her knife as she did so. She caught it in her other hand, slashing outwards and catching the front of Peggy’s tunic with the tip of the blade. The fabric tore as Peggy jumped backwards, out of immediate arm’s reach.

There was a crash from behind her, sounding like it came from inside the room rather than out in the hallway. Peggy saw the newcomer’s gaze flicker quickly over her shoulder before going back to Peggy.

Without looking back at Natasha, Peggy said, “I can handle this. Go get Steve.”

“Don’t worry about us, Natalia,” the matryoshka agreed in broad American English. She was tall and blonde, with the same predator’s eyes that Natasha had. “Peg and I can entertain ourselves just fine. Isn’t that right, Peg?”

Peggy tossed the Thompson aside and drew her knife from the back of her belt. It was the favored weapon of both the British commandos and the OSS, seven inches of double-edged and sharply-tapered steel, dagger-like in contrast to the blonde’s single-edged Soviet combat knife. She settled into a fighter’s crouch, gripping the hilt so that her knuckles were parallel to the blade.

“Well,” she said, “one of us is certainly going to be entertained, but I wouldn’t be so sure it will be you.”

The blonde matryoshka grinned like a shark.

“Rogers, stop screwing around in there!” Natasha yelled from the hallway.

Steve had already started moving the moment Krylenko shouted, taking advantage of Bukharin’s moment of distraction to rock back onto his shoulders and slam both his feet up into the man’s chest. The commando went flying, hitting the wall behind him with an audible crunch.

Steve kept rolling backwards onto his shoulders and then into a crouch, ignoring the sharp pain in his bad shoulder as he got his manacled hands under his feet and then in front of him. The weakened chain on his ankles broke with a sharp crack under the pressure as he popped upright and Steve snapped a kick up into Ursus’s jaw, the trailing chain opening a cut on his cheek as the big man staggered back.

He jerked his head aside to dodge Lebedev’s punch, which was more reflexive than deliberately aimed, and grabbed his arm in both of his still-manacled hands. The bone broke as Steve twisted, making Lebedev cry out as Steve swung himself up, using the other man’s arm as leverage to do so. He caught Lebedev’s neck between his thighs and twisted, sending the bigger man crashing down with Steve on top of him. Steve rolled aside, flipping back to his feet and slamming a kick into the approaching Ursus in the same smooth motion. It knocked the commando backwards, directly into one of Natasha’s blows. Her fist slammed into his gut, then her knee into his chin and her booted foot directly into his chest as he bent over double, gasping. He staggered to one knee, and Natasha caught him with both hands and discharged her widow’s bites directly into his spinal column.

Steve swayed aside as she raised her left fist again. Lebedev had barely managed to make it to his knees before one of Natasha’s widow’s stings struck him. Blue energy crackled briefly across his body as he went limp and fell backwards with a thump.

“Howard gave you your bites back,” Steve observed, breathing hard. “You look good in that uniform.”

“And if you’re very lucky, you can take it off me later,” Natasha said, glancing over her shoulder at Bukharin, who still lay crumpled against the wall. She apparently decided that he was fully unconscious and came over to Steve. “Enjoying the hospitality of Mother Russia?”

Steve felt gingerly at his bruised jaw with his manacled hands, then grinned at her. “Well, I am now.”

The first rule of winning a knife fight, the combat instructor had said when Peggy had been at STS 21, SOE’s commando school in Scotland, is not to get into a knife fight.

Peggy had never been particularly good at following rules.

She feinted high, her knife darting out as if for the matryoshka’s eyes and then down at the last moment in a long lunge that should have ended in the other woman’s gut. The blonde matryoshka blocked it with the outside of her wrist, pushing Peggy’s right arm away from her as she slashed upwards with her own knife. Peggy twisted out of the way, feeling the edge of the combat knife touch the coarse fabric of her tunic, and tried to slam her foot down against the other woman’s calf even as she cut backhanded at her eyes, to no effect. The matryoshka blocked it, her own knife darting swiftly outwards to kiss the edge of Peggy’s jaw with a thin sharp cut, like a line of burning fire.

Peggy jerked her head back and brought her left hand arm up, forcing the matryoshka’s knife hand away from her at the same time that she moved in, another fast lunge intended to end the fight and end it fast. Instead the matryoshka slammed her right foot up, knocking Peggy backwards. In the narrow confines of the hallway Peggy bounced off the wall behind her, almost tripped over the body of one of the men Natasha had knocked out, and barely managed to duck aside before the matryoshka’s foot dented the wall where her head had been a moment earlier. Peggy rolled out of the way and scrambled to her feet as the other woman came at her. She made as if to make another lunge and then popped upwards, slashing for her face, for her eyes, at the same time she drove her left fist into the other woman’s belly.

That got a grunt in response, but no other effect. Instead the matryoshka caught the underside of her chin with the pommel of her knife, making Peggy stagger, but she barely managed to knock aside the downswing of the knife before the matryoshka could bury it in her neck. The other woman closed fingers like a steel hawser around Peggy’s right wrist just as Peggy grabbed hers, both of them striving against each other like highland stags during a rut.

Then she released Peggy and her knife in the same motion, dropping to catch the weapon with her now-free left hand, slashing backhanded at Peggy’s stomach. Peggy grabbed her arm with her left hand and twisted, forcing the other woman against her as she turned, her back pressed to the other woman’s chest. They were so close that Peggy could feel her breath against her ear as she shoved them both backwards, trying to catch the matryoshka between her body and the wall. Instead the matryoshka fell backwards, rolling as she did so and flinging Peggy over her shoulder. Peggy hit the floor and kicked out, her booted foot colliding with the other woman’s shin to keep her down before she could get up again.

She lunged forwards, half on her knees and off-balance. The matryoshka’s knife blade slashed across the back of her gloved palm, parting the leather and opening another sharp line in the flesh beneath it. Peggy’s fingers opened convulsively, the knife falling to the floor with a clatter. She scrabbled for it with her other hand before the matryoshka twisted, her right foot snapping off Peggy’s jaw and knocking her rump over tea kettle. Peggy’s vision briefly whited out, but she kept moving, her left leg lashing out and connecting with the other woman’s wrist, forcing her to drop her knife. Peggy dove for the weapon before the other woman got an arm around her throat and pulled her backwards, wrapping her legs around her hips to hold her in place.

“I thought you’d be better,” the other woman said against her ear. “I think I’m starting to see why Captain Rogers dropped you for Natalia. I mean, he is a freak if he’d go for one of us, but –”

“Is that what this is?” Peggy croaked, trying to get her own hands around the arm the woman had behind her head, bracing the arm she had across Peggy’s throat. “Jealous?”

“Over a man? Oh, Peg.” Her voice kept the same light tone as she went on, “Did you follow me from Shepherd Market? You tailed that idiot from the embassy, didn’t you?”

“We didn’t have to,” Peggy ground out. “One of your precious dolls talked.”

For a moment the other woman’s grip slacked – not long enough for Peggy to take advantage of it, but enough to know the words had had an effect.

“Irina Larionova spilled her guts while sobbing her eyes out,” Peggy snapped. It wasn’t an entirely accurate summary of her interrogation, but it wasn’t entirely inaccurate, either. “Maybe you ought to consider doing the same – the weeping is optional, obviously, though a good cry might do you good.” The words caught as the matryoshka tightened her grip again, but she managed to croak out, “Do you really think Natasha Rogers is the only doll who might want to stop playing house if she gets a better offer?”

“You lying little –”

Peggy gave up on the arm and dug her nails into the other woman’s inner thigh where it was wrapped around her hips. The matryoshka flinched in surprise, her grip slackening, and Peggy twisted free, slamming her elbow into the other woman’s face as she did so with a sharp crack of breaking cartilage. She threw herself sideways to seize her pistol as she came to her feet again, her aim fixed on the matryoshka, but the other woman didn’t get up.

Peggy drew in a shaky breath, pressing her free hand to her throat and wincing. Adrenaline didn’t normally have that much effect on her, but that had been much closer than she liked. There was blood on her face and on the back of her hand, both cuts shallow but stinging; Peggy wiped the blood from her chin and looked ruefully at her ruined glove. She flexed her fingers, relieved to find that she seemed to have full motion there, then retrieved her knife and went into the room Krylenko had come out of, keeping her pistol up just in case.

She lowered it a moment later, relieved beyond words to see Steve both conscious and on his feet as Natasha struggled to unlock his handcuffs. The other woman whirled as Peggy came in, the bracelet around her left wrist glowing with blue energy. She lowered her fist when she recognized Peggy.

“We’re all clear out here,” Peggy said, her voice still hoarse. She checked the pulse of the unconscious man nearest the door, keeping her pistol pointed at him just in case he wasn’t quite as unconscious as he looked. “What the devil happened to you?” she asked as she straightened up, holstering her gun.

Steve had clearly taken a beating recently; his face was bruised and there was blood on it, though that paled in comparison to the blood all down his left side where his jacket and shirt had been cut away to reveal bandaging on his shoulder. He glanced at the injury as if to remind himself of it and said, “Got beat to shit and then shot for my trouble, but I probably had that one coming.”

“Oh?” Peggy said. She checked the other two bodies, identifying them as Mikhail Ursus and Aleksey Lebedev. Lebedev had one of the little coin-shaped disks from Natasha’s bracelets stuck to his chest. Peggy reached gingerly down and pried it loose, turning it over between her fingers before she slipped it into her pocket.

Steve shrugged and then winced as the movement jarred his injured shoulder. “It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.”

“And drugged, don’t forget that,” Natasha said.

“And drugged. That one’s actually new.” He hesitated, looking at her, and then said, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Peggy said, wiping at the cut on her chin again and grimacing a little. She looked down at her hands, her gloves marked by shallow cuts from the fight, and flexed her fingers again; at least it didn’t feel like there had been any real damage. Knife fights usually ended with one party going to the hospital and the other to the morgue; she and the matryoshka had both gotten off lucky.

Both Ursus and Lebedev were out cold when she checked their bodies. Peggy sat back on her heels after she had tied both men’s hands with their belts, watching Natasha work on Steve’s handcuffs with a set of lockpicks. Given that Lebedev’s pockets had been turned out, apparently Natasha hadn’t been able to find a key.

Steve hesitated, looking at her and catching his lower lip between his teeth, like he was trying to think of something to say. Then he cocked his head suddenly and said, “Someone’s outside.”

Peggy and Natasha both turned towards the door, reaching for their sidearms, before Steve clarified, “It’s Dum-Dum, Jacques, and Gabe. Jim and Monty are coming up the stairs.”

Sure enough, Dugan stuck his head through the open door a moment later – or rather, he entered shotgun-first, then lowered the weapon as he saw Steve and the two women, his expression going slack with relief. “They’ve got him,” he called over his shoulder before coming the rest of the way into the room. “You all right?”

“Aside from the cracked ribs and the hole in my shoulder, but that’ll get better in a day or two,” Steve said.

Peggy looked up sharply. “A day or two?”

Steve glanced at Natasha, who shrugged back at him. After a moment, Steve said, “Probably closer to two than one.”

Peggy exchanged a look with Dugan. Both of them knew very well that the last time Steve had been shot it had taken the better part of a week for him to recover, which was still considerably faster than anyone else.

“Bozhe moi,” Natasha muttered, finally getting the handcuffs off. “I think you smashed this lock somehow.” She tossed the manacles aside and sat down to work on the ones on his ankles. “What is this stuff, anyway? I’ve seen you snap steel without breaking a sweat.”

“Some kind of vibranium alloy Dmitri Bukharin cooked up,” Steve said, rubbing at his wrists, which were raw and chafed. “Worked better than the drugs Lorraine stole from Howard.”

Jones put his head into the room, looking as relieved to see Steve as Dugan had been. “How many of them?” he asked.

“Nine,” Steve said. “Five Winter Guard, four matryoshki.”

“It’s Lebedev, Ursus, and Bukharin in here,” Peggy said.

“We’ve got another matryoshka downstairs and Krylenko, Petkus, and two more matryoshki up here.”

Peggy and Natasha both looked at each other sharply. “Two?” Peggy said, getting to her feet again. She followed Jones out into the hallway to join Dernier, who had just finished tying up Nikolai Krylenko with his own belt.

The blonde matryoshka Peggy had fought was nowhere in sight.

The Howlies finished clearing the building, then Morita used his radio to call in Phillips and Three Team so they could take care of the Winter Guard and the three remaining matryoshki. Steve was a little embarrassed by the number of SSR agents who had been called in for the occasion, though no one else seemed to be bothered by it. For better or worse Steve had never even considered that Phillips would bring in the whole division; for the last two years he had been working only with Sam and Natasha, with the very occasional backup of Wanda or T’Challa, and before that he’d been running the Avengers, which had never had more than six people on it at a time. Even SHIELD’s STRIKE teams were small, back when he and Nat had been working with Rumlow and his boys. Nick Fury would never have turned out the whole of SHIELD just for him, if only because he had always known exactly what his resources were and how best to deploy them. Or thought he had, anyway; he had never really gotten his head around Steve.

Back in 2018, Steve knew, Natasha would have done the whole op on her own and nobody would have even blinked. That had obviously never been an option here, even if it would have saved them all a lot of trouble. Well, someone would have had to come in afterwards and clear out the eight prisoners, but that was the kind of clean-up work STRIKE had done for the two of them during their SHIELD days.

He knew better than to say as much to Natasha where anyone from the SSR could overhear, though he suspected from the slight twist to her mouth that she was thinking the same thing. She and Peggy had sat him down out of the way while they cleaned and rebandaged his bullet wound with the contents of Dernier’s medical kit. Steve let them do so without protesting, drinking the remnants of the Winter Guard’s abandoned wine to rinse the taste of Aleksey Lebedev’s blood out of his mouth. Since alcohol – at least regular Earth alcohol, not Thor’s Asgardian booze – didn’t have any effect on him, it was like drinking water, except water would have tasted better.

He watched the two women warily, aware that they probably both knew he was doing so. Steve wasn’t blind; he knew very well that they couldn’t stand each other, even if they were both professionals who could work together long enough to get through an operation without taking potshots at each other. Neither Natasha nor Peggy would have ever dreamed of saying as much to him, but they both had to guess that he knew.

Steve cocked his head at the sudden sound of voices out in the hallway, where the Howlies had set up for the moment to avoid getting caught in the mess that was Steve, Natasha, and Peggy. They’d dragged Lebedev, Ursus, and Bukharin out earlier to join the rest of the prisoners; Morita had informed Three Team’s radioman that they were short one matryoshka. Searching for her in the blackout was pointless, especially in the deserted, bomb-scarred wasteland that was the Isle of Dogs at night. At this point the only way they’d find Dottie – Steve had confirmed it was her from a quick glance at the remaining matryoshki – was if she made her presence known.

He got to his feet as Colonel Phillips came into the room, followed by Howard, Dugan, and Morita. Peggy and Natasha both straightened up too, though Steve was the only one who saluted. “Sir.”

Phillips’s gaze swept critically over him, the corners of his mouth turning downwards in a frown as he saw the newly bandaged injury and the bruises on Steve’s face and torso; Steve’s shirt and undershirt were dead losses and his jacket wasn’t much better. His expression was long-suffering as he said, “Will that leave any permanent marks?”

Steve grimaced. “No, sir. Three days tops.”

“Three?” Howard said, practically vibrating with excitement, all of his earlier concern instantly replaced by delight.

Steve nodded glumly. It wasn’t what he would call a bad thing, but it was a noticeable difference from what it would have been the first time around in 1945. “Two really,” he admitted. “But to be sure –”

Howard looked dreamy-eyed, and Steve resigned himself to a relentless barrage of questions once they were back at headquarters. At least Howard would just ask questions, instead of poking and prodding the way the SHIELD doctors had done back at the New York SHIELD station and later the Triskelion. None of them seemed to have considered that Steve might actually know anything about his own body, not that Steve had been feeling particularly inclined to talk back then. He had found out later that Nick Fury had had all the samples and data the SHIELD doctors had taken destroyed, either out of SHIELD’s long-standing policy against ever working with the serum or out of his own paranoia. As best the Avengers had been able to figure later, Hydra had never gotten hold of any of Steve’s biological samples and only some of the data.

Phillips’s frown only deepened in response; he knew as well as Howard how fast Steve’s enhanced healing should have been. All he said was, “Any particular reason for the bullet or just your usual charm, Rogers?”

“Bit a couple of Aleksey’s fingers off,” Steve said. “He wasn’t very happy about that.”

There was a long moment of silence as everyone in the room but Natasha stared at him; she had known him longer than anyone else here and presumably had lost the ability to be surprised by anything he did a while back. He hadn’t done as much close quarters fighting with the Howlies as he had with STRIKE or the Avengers.

“I also broke his nose,” Steve added helpfully.

“You couldn’t have done that back at the club?” Morita demanded.

Steve hesitated briefly, then admitted, “I’ll get better if I get shot, and they weren’t going to kill me no matter what I did.”

Peggy’s jaw dropped. “Are you completely stupid?”

Steve shrugged, winced at the motion, and said, “Well, not completely.”

“It’s been an open question for years,” Natasha said.

Steve shot her a betrayed look and she grinned at him, raising her eyebrows. After a moment he just shook his head, bemused.

Phillips closed his eyes briefly, as if praying for patience, then said to Howard and Peggy, “Take him back to headquarters. We’ll finish cleaning up here.”

“What about the Winter Guard and the matryoshki?” Steve asked. “What’ll happen to them?”

“Prison,” Phillips said bluntly. “At least until the end of the war. We’ll keep hold of them tonight and transfer the Winter Guard to Station 99 tomorrow.”

That was the SSR’s prisoner-of-war camp in Scotland. Steve felt a muscle in his jaw twitch; putting the Winter Guard in the same place as their Hydra prisoners wasn’t his idea of a good plan, but he didn’t have a vote in the matter.

“MI5’s claiming any of the matryoshki with British or Commonwealth papers,” Phillips said. “OSS gets the Americans, except Lorraine. We get to keep her.”

Natasha made a small sound in the back of her throat, but when Steve looked over at her, her expression hadn’t changed at all.

“You have a problem with any of that, Rogers?” His expression suggested that if Steve did, then he should keep it to himself.

“No, sir.”

Phillips eyed him again, then said, “Stop making a habit of disappearing,” before he went back out into the hallway.

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Steve said to his back, though by then Phillips had gone.

“Could have fooled us,” Howard said, coming over to sling a careful arm around Steve’s shoulders in a brief embrace before he released him. “You want to maybe stop doing it?”

“I don’t do it on purpose!” Steve protested. He looked around, then spotted the discarded manacles and handed them to Howard. “Here. Present for you.”

He read Howard’s first thought on his face and had to hide his grin as Howard said, “Uh –” while manfully struggling to control his own response.

Natasha half-turned away, putting a hand over her mouth to cover her knowing smirk.

“It’s some kind of alloy that Dmitri Bukharin cooked up,” Steve explained. “I think vibranium and something else, but I’m not sure if there’s any actual vibranium in it; he called it carbonadium. It worked better than the drugs. I snapped the ones on my ankles, but it took a while and the right angle, and I couldn’t get the ones on my wrists with a bum shoulder.”

“You got the other ones?” Howard asked, his gaze sharpening. He ran his fingers over the metal thoughtfully, then held it up to the room’s poor light.

“Here.” Peggy passed the broken cuffs to him.

Howard hummed happily to himself, erotic thoughts apparently forgotten. “Thanks.”

Steve watched him with a frown, rubbing at his chafed wrists. “Howard, what are you doing here?”

Howard blinked and glanced up at him. “What?”

“You don’t go out in the field.”

“It’s London, Steve, not Nazi Germany,” Howard said, trying to make his voice light, then he met Steve’s eyes and went on more seriously, “The last time I stayed home you didn’t come back.”

Steve bit his lip, then nodded and put a hand on Howard’s shoulder. Howard fumbled the manacles into his pocket and reached up to grip Steve’s fingers briefly before he released him. “Thank you.”

“Don’t do that to me – to us – again,” Howard said, his voice cracking briefly.

Steve took a deep breath. “That one’s not really up to me.”

“What the hell were you thinking?”

Steve couldn’t respond immediately, mostly because Natasha had his dad’s straight razor in her hand and was engaged in scraping two days’ worth of dark blond stubble off his cheeks, working carefully to avoid jarring his bruises as much as possible. He waited until she pulled back to rinse the blade off before he said, “I was thinking I didn’t want to watch any more of my friends die. Besides,” he added, grinning up at her as she returned, razor in hand, “I knew you’d find me.”

“If you’d known that, you wouldn’t have given me that damn message and scared the hell out of me,” Natasha said. She put her right hand on his chin and turned his head so that she could finish shaving him, keeping him from replying until she had finished. She turned his head back and forth, inspecting the results, then released him and handed him a damp cloth.

They had arrived back at headquarters sometime around midnight, where the SSR’s medical personnel had immediately had their usual hysterical reaction to Steve’s nonchalant attitude towards his injuries. He’d had his shoulder cleaned and rebandaged again and his cracked ribs strapped up, for whatever that good that would do, and argued his way out of spending the night in the hospital, since he wanted a real meal, a bath, and Natasha, preferably in that order. He also wanted to sleep in his own bed – or at least what had passed for it since they had arrived in 1945 – instead of in a hospital bed.

“I was covering my bases,” he protested now, wiping his cheeks clean and then getting up to hang the towel up by the sink before returning to his seat on the bed. “It worked out, didn’t it? No harm done. I’m here; we got the Winter Guard and the matryoshki.”

“Minus one,” Natasha said pointedly.

Steve blew out his cheeks. “Minus one.” He wasn’t stupid enough to suggest that only one of Department X’s dolls on the loose was harmless. “What’s she going to do?”

“If she’s got half a brain, run,” Natasha said grimly, flipping the razor absently back and forth in her hand before she realized what she was doing and set it aside. “Though I wouldn’t bet on it.” She shook her head a little and started to wipe her hands dry with a towel. “There are protocols in place for getting made, especially if she’s already in contact with the rezidentura. It’s a lot easier for the embassy to get one woman back to Moscow than a commando team with an uncooperative prisoner in tow. Though it depends on what her orders are, too; I’d be surprised if she had the same orders as the Winter Guard.”

Steve nodded to himself, then asked, “You don’t think she’ll run? There’s no reason for Department X to think that she didn’t get caught with all the others, so they won’t be looking for her. And right now’s a really easy time to disappear.”

Natasha’s mouth twisted. “You have to know it’s an option to run before you can do it.”

“She knows about you,” Steve said. “So she knows the option exists.”

“I don’t think I really provide a compelling argument in 1945,” Natasha said. “Not much of one in 2018, either.”

“Hell of an ‘it gets better,’ though,” Steve said, smiling up at her. “I heard that’s what you did for Lorraine.”

Natasha rubbed the heel of her hand against her forehead, looking tired. “I don’t think I’d go that far. She’s a scared kid. They’re all scared kids. I was.” She shook her head, her expression bitter. “She’ll still go to prison.”

“Maybe not,” Steve said. He started to lean back on his hands, then had to straighten up again as the movement jarred his bad shoulder. “Zola didn’t, and he did a lot worse than pass information.” He felt a muscle in his jaw work and looked aside, though he was certain Natasha had seen the reaction. “Or not for long, anyway. They’ll probably put Lorraine in a cell next to him until they figure out what to do with them both – there’s an SSR facility up in Scotland where we keep prisoners and that’s gotta be where he is. Everyone’s been pretty careful about not telling me.”

“Worried that you’ll try to get revenge for Bucky?”

“Not that anyone will say it in so many words.”

She knew him well enough not to ask if it was something they had to be concerned about. “You didn’t answer my question, you know.”

Steve glanced back at her. “What question?”

“What the hell you were thinking.”

“I told you,” Steve said, “I didn’t want to watch any more of my friends die.”

Natasha put her hip against the sink and crossed her arms over her chest. “Steve…”

He chewed his lower lip. “It didn’t have anything to do with the future,” he said eventually. “Whatever that future is right now. I just…couldn’t watch them die. And Aleksey would have done it and not thought twice about it. I know,” he added before Natasha could say anything, “I know we’re in a war. I know we’re headed to Berlin as soon as I don’t have a hole in my shoulder anymore. It’s different when it’s a fight.”

“Is it?” Natasha said.

Steve licked his lips. “Yeah, it is. A fight’s…a fight. Anything else…” He let the words trail off. He’d seen a lot of people die over the course of the last eight years, or seventy-five, or however you wanted to count it. Clean battle, inasmuch as any battle could be clean, was one thing. The way Dr. Erskine had died, or Bucky going off the train, Howard in that video – what they had been doing to Vision back in Wakanda –

He shook his head. “We don’t trade lives,” he said. “That’s what I was thinking.”

Natasha looked at him for a long moment, then said, “Okay.”

“That’s it?” Steve said, glancing up at her. “‘Okay’?”

“What do you want me to say, Steve?”

Steve opened his mouth to respond, thought about it, and then admitted, “I have no idea.”

The corner of Natasha’s mouth curled up. “Okay, then.” She came over and rested her hip against the table, looking down at him.

Steve tipped his head back to meet her gaze. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I know it wasn’t about me.”

“It was just bad luck,” Steve said. “If we’d known the Winter Guard was going to be there, we could have done things differently going in.”

“That’s not your fault, Steve. You couldn’t have known.” She let her breath out slowly. “None of us could have known.”

Steve nodded a little. Falsworth had told him about the SSR snipers who had been killed outside the club. Maybe that would have happened anyway if they had known the Winter Guard was going to be there – but maybe it wouldn’t, either.

He rubbed his right hand over his jaw, his freshly-shaved cheeks smooth beneath his fingers. “Well,” he said, “if I had any doubts before that this was real, I don’t now.”

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “Was it the bullet, the beating, or the drugs that tipped you off?”

Steve bared his teeth delicately and snapped them together, making her laugh. “Hard to make that one up. The other stuff, maybe,” he confessed. “I have nightmares about it sometimes. You know that.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know that.”

What had happened to Bucky, the reveal of Hydra’s other Winter Soldiers, Ross’s numerous attempts to replicate the serum, whatever Pierce had initially intended when he’d sent twenty STRIKE operators into that elevator to take him alive – Steve did think about it. He thought about it a lot.

Natasha sat down on the bed beside him. She smelled of clean, well-washed woman, her body warm against his where they touched at shoulder and thigh. Steve turned his head and kissed her, slow and careful.

After a moment, Natasha pulled back and said, “Did you lose a tooth?”

“I got kicked in the head a bunch,” Steve admitted. “It’s growing back.”

“Jesus, Rogers,” Natasha said, shaking her head, then leaned in to kiss him. Steve put a hand on her waist, pushing the hem of her pajama top up to rub a thumb over the strip of bare skin it revealed.

Natasha climbed into his lap when Steve twisted at a bad angle for his cracked ribs and hissed briefly in pain. She rested her forearms on his shoulders, careful not to put any weight on his bad one, and looked down at him for what felt like a long time. Steve rested his right hand on her waist, meeting her gaze calmly before she leaned down to kiss him again.

“You scared me,” she said again when she drew back, her breath warm against his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Steve repeated. “I didn’t do it on purpose. I wouldn’t have done it if I thought I had a choice.”

“I know,” Natasha said. “I know you.” She pressed her mouth to his again, and this time the kiss went on for a long time before she said, “I want to take you to bed. I need to take you to bed.”

“I’m not going to argue,” Steve said against her mouth. “I love you.”

Natasha began to unbutton her top, then paused. When Steve raised his eyebrows, she said, “I don’t want you to hurt that bum shoulder more.”

“Bossy, bossy,” Steve teased. “You can be on top.”

“Who’s bossy now?” She finished unbuttoning her top and dropped it, starting to stand before Steve caught her around the waist and pressed a kiss to her breast, enjoying the feel of her skin against his lips.

After a moment he looked up at her again and smiled. “I love you,” he said again. “No matter what happens tomorrow.”