Of Home Near

Don’t do that to me – to us – again.

It was Natasha’s first conscious thought in the morning, before she had even properly woken up. The remembered voice was male, familiar; it took her a few moments of lying in the dark with her eyes shut, listening to Steve’s steady breathing beside her, before she recognized it as Howard Stark’s.

She had known for years that Howard Stark had been a little unhinged about Captain America, to put it mildly; her brief tenure as Tony’s PA had made that clear enough more than a year before SHIELD had pulled Steve out of the ice. His ghost had been a potent force at the Stark Expo even before Nick Fury had forced Tony to conjure him up, so near at times that Natasha had sometimes thought she saw him vanishing around a corner or heard his sardonic voice coming from behind a closed door. By then she had known that he had been one of the founders of SHIELD, head of SHIELD’s research and development division for more than forty years – a secret he had taken to the grave rather than share with his family. She hadn’t recognized his fingerprints on both Stark Industries and SHIELD until she had seen the SSR.

He'd left more of an impression on SHIELD. Howard had had very little to do with Stark Industries after SHIELD had been founded; Obadiah Stane had run it in everything but name. Steve’s original disappearance in 1945 had broken something in him, and the sharp edges left behind had cut at everything they’d touched – SHIELD, Stark Industries, Stane, Tony. Probably Maria Stark as well, though Natasha didn’t know enough about the other woman to see what marks had been left behind. Peggy Carter had had her own broken edges, and so had the Howling Commandos. Even Chester Phillips wasn’t immune.

These are his people, Natasha thought, feeling something twist inside her. This is where he’s supposed to be.

She rolled over and pushed herself up on an elbow to watch him in the shadowed darkness of the room, only dimly lit by a little of the thin morning light leaking in around the blackout curtains. Steve had slept on his back as a result of his injuries, but even in the bad light Natasha could tell that the bruises on his face had faded to the yellow-green that in anyone else would have meant they were nearly a week old. By the end of the day, probably earlier, they would be gone entirely. She had seen Steve beat to shit enough times in the past six years that neither the sight nor the knowledge of it was particularly shocking, which she could tell it had been to Peggy and Howard. The Howling Commandos were, presumably, accustomed to seeing Steve in the field.

This is his whole world, Natasha thought, watching him. I can’t ask him to leave it behind again.

It was, she knew, an entirely theoretical debate; nothing had changed in the past two days that made their return to 2018 any likelier. There had to be something they could do. According to Bruce, the Time Stone had been on Earth in 2018 in the care of some kind of consortium of magic-users; there had been rumors about them in SHIELD for years, though it had always been outside Natasha’s purview. From what she had heard, they had been ancient even in 1945, and maybe already in possession of the Time Stone.

She could just imagine trying to tell Peggy Carter and Chester Phillips that. Aliens and time travel were already a hard enough sell without bringing magic and the Infinity Stones into the mix.

Natasha started to reach for Steve, then thought better of it, not wanting to disturb his sleep after the week he had had; she knew he hadn’t been sleeping well even back at Beaulieu. The motion must have woken him anyway, because his hand shot out and closed around her wrist an instant before his eyes snapped open. There was no recognition on his face, just animal wariness. Natasha held still, silently cursing herself for not thinking about the fact that he had been a prisoner for two days and being touched unexpectedly there had never meant anything good.

After a moment he released her and slumped back, rubbing his hand over his face. “Sorry.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Natasha apologized.

“It’s okay.” Sounding a little weary, he added, “At least I know you’re not going to kick me in the head.”

Natasha felt her jaw tighten. Steve saw it and made an apologetic gesture in response, repeating, “Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” She leaned in again, careful to telegraph the movement this time, and kissed him slowly. The tooth he’d lost had grown back in overnight, she noticed after a moment.

Steve ran a hand appreciatively down her side, callused fingers light and familiar. “Missed you,” he murmured. “At Beaulieu, too.”

“Me too.” She had spent their five days at Beaulieu sharing a room with Peggy Carter, which hadn’t been pleasant for either of them, since Natasha was fairly certain Peggy wanted her dead. Peggy was too much of a professional to ever do anything about it, but that didn’t exactly make it better. By now Natasha had gotten Peggy’s measure and she thought that Peggy actually would feel better if she ever took a swing at Natasha. The problem was that if Peggy hit her, Natasha would hit back, and Natasha had trained her entire life to be a living weapon. She wasn’t too proud to throw a fight to make a situation easier, but by now Peggy had gotten Natasha’s measure and she would know the fight had been thrown. That would make the situation even worse than it had been before, which was saying something. Not to mention that Steve would get caught in the middle. Again.

She squeaked in undignified surprise as Steve suddenly rolled them over. He flinched briefly as the movement jarred either his bad ribs or his shoulder, but covered it up with another kiss.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” Natasha said against his mouth.

“But what a way to go,” Steve said, then kissed her quickly. “I’m just a little sore.”

Natasha resisted the urge to poke his bullet wound to find out just how little ‘just a little’ was. She cupped his face between her palms to kiss him deeply instead, then ran her nails down the line of his spine, feeling him shiver against her. “Prove it.”

When they got down to the canteen later that morning, it was to find Howard and Peggy having an argument. The Howling Commandos were seated at the same table, looking trapped, though their expressions all turned to relief as Steve and Natasha came in. Probably on Steve’s behalf rather than Natasha’s, he acknowledged silently, though from what he had seen last night they were a little easier around her than they had been previously.

Peggy’s gaze flickered in their direction to see what had gotten the Commandos’ attention, Howard’s gaze followed hers, and he literally stopped mid-word to say, “Your bruises are gone!”

Steve put a self-conscious hand to his face. “No, they’re not.”

Howard got up to come inspect him more closely. His eyes were bloodshot; Steve guessed that either he hadn’t slept at all the previous night or that he hadn’t slept much. Knowing Howard, he probably hadn’t gotten much sleep since the Winter Guard had snatched Steve from the Stork Club.

Steve had seen his face in the mirror while they had still been upstairs, so he knew the bruises from the last beating were still there, just faded almost to nothing; they’d be gone by noon. The handful of cuts where Ursus and the others had broken the skin would last a little longer, but not by much. His ribs and shoulder still ached and he had his left arm in a sling, but those would be fully healed within the next day too. The ribs, at least, Howard could compare with Steve’s injuries from his arrival three weeks earlier, not to mention the numerous times Steve had been injured between 1943 and his disappearance in 1945. Steve wasn’t looking forward to finding out the final tally there.

Howard started to reach for him, then thought better of it and asked, “How’s the shoulder?”

“A little sore,” Steve said, the same thing he had told Natasha earlier that morning, though under decidedly different circumstances. He had his left arm in a sling, more to remind himself not to use it than because he needed the support.

“Ribs?”

“Those are a little sore too.” He was also pretty sure they weren’t cracked anymore, but that wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have until he was certain, or at least not until after he’d had breakfast.

Howard bit his lip, looking like he wanted to do some poking and prodding, but didn’t push.

“What were you arguing about?” Steve asked to change the subject, sitting down next to Dum-Dum and reaching for the coffeepot at the center of the table. Dum-Dum carefully shouldered his arm aside and got it for him, pouring a cup full first for him, then Natasha, who had sat down on Steve’s other side.

Howard took the seat across from them; someone passed down his coffee cup from the other end of the table, where he had originally been sitting. “Phillips had the Winter Guard taken off to another facility, not back here. And the matryoshki from the warehouse,” he added as an afterthought.

“A more secure facility,” Peggy said pointedly. “This isn’t a prison and we only have a few holding cells here. All of which are occupied, at least for the next few hours.”

Steve didn’t need enhanced senses to be able to tell that the coffee was mostly chicory. He dropped a couple of sugar cubes into it and a measure of cream, though not as much of either as he would have liked. “Why do you want the Winter Guard here?”

“I want to talk to Dmitri Bukharin,” Howard said, as if the answer should have been self-evident.

Steve exchanged an exasperated look with Peggy, though she looked away when she realized what she had done, and said, “Why?”

“Because he’s brilliant even if he is a bastard and I want to know about the carbonadium,” Howard said. “And what he did to my drug formula.”

“I don’t think he did anything to it, Howard,” Steve pointed out gently. “From what he said it was pretty much the exact one Lorraine handed over. It just…wasn’t working very well.”

Howard frowned in what Steve had to interpret as sheer fascination, his spoon clinking against the ceramic as he stirred his coffee without seeming to be aware he was doing it. “Mrs. Rogers said something like that might happen.”

Steve shot a sideways look at Natasha as Peggy said, “She did?”

“I remember what happened when you were at Walter Reed four years ago,” Natasha pointed out.

He grimaced. “Oh…that.”

“‘Oh, that’?” Peggy repeated.

“I got shot a couple of times.”

“Walter Reed?” Dernier said, confused.

“Army hospital in DC,” Dum-Dum supplied.

“It actually joined up with Navy Med a year or so before I came out of the ice,” Steve said, which made the three U.S. Army soldiers at the table look as horrified as Steve had felt at the time. “It’s in Bethesda now. They kept the name, though.”

“That’s just wrong,” Morita muttered, making Steve smile briefly.

“He got shot four times and fell into the Potomac from a couple thousand feet up,” Natasha said.

“Three times,” Steve said firmly. “The fourth time I was stabbed.”

“Is that supposed to make it better?” Falsworth asked dubiously.

Morita snapped his fingers. “Oh, wait, that’s the thing you talked about before – the time you got shot by rogue government agents or something?”

“That’s the one.” It was as good an explanation as any, not technically incorrect, and didn’t raise any awkward questions that Steve had no intention of answering in 1945 unless it became pressingly relevant.

“What’s that got to do with Bukharin’s drug?”

Steve grimaced. “Drugs don’t work very well on me because the serum makes me process them too quickly to have much impact, same as alcohol.”

“I thought Mr. Stark came up with a workaround for that,” Jones said, frowning.

Steve exchanged a look with Natasha, who shrugged in response. She took a sip of her ersatz coffee and winced a little.

“I process drugs a lot faster now than I used to,” Steve said. “A lot. It was a nightmare for the doctors at Walter Reed, apparently, and it’s worse now.”

“How much faster?” Howard asked, curious. “Bukharin talk at all?”

Steve rubbed the heel of his hand against his forehead and admitted, “He and Lebedev said four hours.”

Howard’s spoon came to an abrupt halt against the side of his coffee cup. “Four hours?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I was busy being drugged, so I wasn’t keeping track of time,” Steve said shortly. He had meant to tell Howard this anyway, but he hadn’t anticipated doing it with an audience. He looked down at his own coffee and said, without meeting Howard’s eyes, “Lebedev was pretty pissed about it. Bukharin was definitely working off your notes, and those said –”

“Ten to twelve,” Howard agreed, his frown deepening. Steve didn’t know if the frown was from the numbers or the confirmation that Bukharin had gotten his formula. “How long was it four years – in Bethesda, I mean?”

Steve lifted a shoulder in a shrug and looked at Natasha, who said, “They had him on an IV drip and it still wasn’t working very well.”

Peggy started to say something, then frowned at whatever Steve’s face was doing and cut off Howard’s next question. “We’re transferring the matryoshki we arrested at the Stork Club today,” she said, her voice brusque. “Irina Larionova asked to speak to you – to both of you.”

“Lorraine wants to talk to me?” Steve said, relieved at the change in subject but more than a little surprised. “Why?”

Peggy’s mouth thinned. “How should I have any idea what goes through her head? You’re under no obligation to agree.”

Maybe not, but since without her Steve would still be enjoying the Winter Guard’s dubious hospitality he thought he owed her at least that much. He flicked a glance at Natasha, who nodded slightly, making Peggy’s frown deepen.

Steve didn’t have the energy at the moment to make a doomed-to-failure attempt to moderate Peggy’s hatred of Natasha. They hadn’t killed each other while he’d been with the Winter Guard and at this stage that was probably the best he could hope for. All he said was, “We’ll talk to her.”

The SSR’s cells were in the lowest level of the underground bunker, where it was always dim and damp and cold. Down here, in what some wit had nicknamed the Tombs, the concrete walls wept moisture and the chill sank into your bones almost immediately. The ceilings were no more than four feet high, meaning that Steve had to bend nearly double and even Natasha had to duck her head. The MPs stationed here whenever the cells were occupied were forced to sit in folding chairs crammed into the narrow hallway, since they couldn’t stand. It might have been considered a cushy job if it hadn’t been for how utterly miserable it was down here; it was a matter of private satisfaction to Steve that Arnim Zola had spent at least some time in these cells before being transferred to the SSR’s prisoner-of-war camp in Scotland. Steve hoped it had given him pneumonia.

There were six cells down here, tiny rooms barred with metal doors with narrow hatches just large enough to pass through a tray. A small tray. This was the first time Steve had ever seen all of them filled; five matryoshki and one stray Hydra officer Three Team had hauled back from the continent while the Howlies had been at Beaulieu.

“What do you think?” he asked Natasha, low-voiced. “Better or worse than the Raft?”

She frowned. “More honest, maybe.”

Steve had to agree with that. You probably weren’t going to get pneumonia in the Raft, but the sterility of the place had raised the hair on the back of his neck. If they hadn’t been leaving Ross’s guards behind, he’d have sunk it to the bottom of the sea on his way out after Sam’s and Wanda’s jailbreak. If they’d been able to fit all the guards into the Quinjet, he’d have done it anyway and dumped their unconscious bodies on the White House lawn. He’d thought about it.

Peggy, who had brought them down here, flicked a wary glance backwards over her shoulder but didn’t say anything. Her mouth was tight with disapproval; Steve had gotten the impression that she was taking Lorraine’s betrayal personally. The other matryoshki were just an embarrassment to the services; Lorraine was one of them. Or she had been.

Steve hauled back the cell door one-handed when it stuck after Peggy had unlocked it. Lorraine looked up at the sound; she had been lying on her back on the narrow cot crammed into the back of the tiny room, but she sat up as Natasha ducked her head even further to go in. Steve followed her, and Peggy closed the door behind them. She had agreed to stay out in the corridor, partially in order to let them out again and partially because there just wasn’t room for four people in the room as it was, especially if one was Steve.

He wasn’t sure what he expected from Irina Larionova, even though he’d known Irene Lorraine decently well. The difference wasn’t as stark as it had been four years ago when Hydra had pulled SHIELD’s skin from its grinning skull, but it was there nonetheless, a slight fluidity in her movement, a sharpness in her eyes. She’d broken her nose lately, he noticed, or someone had broken it for her. Steve’s money was on Natasha or Peggy.

“Miss Larionova,” he said.

“Captain Rogers,” she said, standing up and having to duck her head to avoid hitting it on the ceiling. She was still wearing the same dress she had had on at the Stork Club; there was dried blood down the front, probably from her broken nose. “Natasha.” Her gaze cut to the hatch in the door and she added dryly, “Peggy.”

Peggy, standing on her dignity, didn’t respond, but Steve could imagine her expression.

Lorraine hesitated briefly before she said, sounding a little uncertain, “Is that bad?”

Steve glanced down at his left arm in its sling. “I’ve been shot before, I’ll be shot again. Agent Carter said that you wanted to speak to us?”

“I’d offer you a seat, but –” Her gesture took in the bare little cell.

Since Steve wasn’t keen on spending the next few minutes doubled over, he said, “I’ve had worse,” and settled down to sit cross-legged on the floor. Natasha crouched beside him, her weight balanced so that she could move instantly. She could hold that position for hours and still be able to lash out at a moment’s notice; Steve had seen her do it.

After a moment Lorraine sat back down on the cot.

“How are you doing?” Steve asked her. “Accommodations aside.”

Lorraine grinned without humor. “I’ve had worse,” she said. Steve had the impression that he was being allowed to see the real Lorraine for the first time, that she was drawing back the veil she had been wearing for the past year and a half of their acquaintance to let a little of her true self slip out.

Or maybe not her true self. Maybe just the woman she had been hiding. They weren’t always the same thing.

Her gaze was fixed on him, waiting to see his reaction to the words. When he didn’t do whatever it was she had been expecting, she went on, “I’d probably have had even worse if you hadn’t just walked through that door.”

“Maybe,” Steve agreed. “But I’m here now. What matters is what actually happened, not what could have.”

Lorraine kept staring at him. Steve twitched a little under her concerted attention, self-conscious, but didn’t avert his gaze.

“You really are just like that, aren’t you?” Lorraine said finally.

“Like what?” Steve asked, raising his eyebrows.

The corner of her mouth curled up a little. “Captain America,” she said, but there was no mockery in the words.

Steve lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “It’s just me.”

Lorraine shrugged back at him, then looked at Natasha and asked, “Is it good? Being with someone who knows what you are and doesn’t think you’re a monster?”

Natasha’s brows knit slightly, but all she said was, “Yes. It’s good.”

Lorraine turned her attention back to Steve, smiling her flirt’s smile as she said, “Maybe I should have tried a little harder two years ago.”

Steve drew in his breath, not sure how to respond to that, but didn’t get a chance to say anything before she went on, “Or maybe you needed seventy years to be the kind of guy who gets hot under the collar for a girl like me. Or her.”

Steve’s head snapped up. “You –”

Lorraine met his gaze, direct and challenging. “Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, Captain. Stark loves you too much to question getting you back, no matter how crazy the story is. Carter and the boys and Colonel Phillips –” She shrugged. “They talk.”

“You were in the lab when we got there,” Natasha said, her gaze fixed on Lorraine.

The other woman lifted her chin in a nod. “I could never get into Stark’s private lab to take a look at any of your gear,” she admitted, and Steve breathed out slowly in relief; their radios and Natasha’s bites were the most technologically advanced pieces of their equipment, but it still wasn’t anything he wanted the USSR getting its hands on.

Lorraine cocked an eyebrow at his reaction before she went on, “But it’s in your eyes. And you –” She looked back at Natasha. “They’re going to burn,” she said. “That’s what you told me. ‘Not today, not tomorrow, not next week, not even next year –’ But you’re like me. And you’re from – when he is. So how long?”

Natasha let her breath out slowly as Steve glanced over at her. For a long moment he thought that she wasn’t going to answer, then she said, “Seventy-one years. The year 2016. Steve and I are from 2018.”

She took that in with a blink, but Steve could tell that her attention was on the first date, not the second. “Did you really kill him? The one who ran your House?”

Natasha bit her lip and shook her head. “No. I thought I did when I got out, ten years ago now, but it was a trick. He’s dead now, though. My sister killed him. I was there; it was real this time. And it burned, Irina Ilyinichna. All of it burned. But it’s a long time from now.”

Lorraine pressed her hands briefly to her face, then ran them back over her hair and straightened up again, nodding to herself. “The dates were wrong,” she said to Natasha. “Your dates. You said you didn’t remember your parents, but you’d have been old enough to know them when they took you. All of us are. The House doesn’t take babies, the way you said; it takes too long with babies. But no one else would have known – no one but one of us would have known any of that.”

Natasha nodded slowly. “I was born in 1984,” she said. “The House bought me from my parents when I was a baby, some of the others too. Most were…found. People get rid of little girls all the time. I went operational when I was seven; I got out when I was twenty-three.”

Lorraine looked at her for a long moment, then pulled her feet up onto the cot and hugged her knees to her chest like a child. “I do remember my parents,” she said eventually. “We used to live in Dnipropetrovsk. I had a little brother, he – died. My parents died. Everyone died. The man who…took me…used to go through the cities looking for the children who were still alive, the ones who would do anything to live just one more day. The strong ones, that’s what he called us.” She pressed her forehead to her knees, hiding her face, and said in English, “My brother didn’t just die, I –” She finished the sentence in what sounded like Ukrainian, which Steve didn’t understand, but given Lorraine’s age and what she had just said in English, he could guess.

He slid a sideways glance at Natasha, whose expression was unreadable; when she saw him looking at her, she mouthed quietly, The Holodomor, and he nodded. The massive famine in the early 1930s had killed millions in Soviet Ukraine and other parts of the USSR; orphaned children would have been easy pickings for Department X. Especially orphaned children who had made the decision to survive the only way they could in a land that Stalin was starving to death.

Steve knew all too well that you could do anything with someone who had nothing left to lose.

After a moment Lorraine turned her head away and said, “They like us to remember just enough to know how lucky we are that the House took us in instead of letting us starve like all the other kulaks. It’s better not to remember anything at all from back then. But I do remember my parents.”

When she looked back at them, her gaze was hard with challenge, as if expecting them to argue with what she had said. All Natasha said was, “What will you do now?”

“Because I can’t marry Captain America and have his babies like you?” Lorraine said, a slight bite to the words, like she was embarrassed that she had admitted as much as she had. She didn’t seem to notice Natasha’s flinch, or if she did, didn’t consider it worthy of remark. “Prison until I’m bored with it or someone gives me a better offer.” She shrugged again, sitting back up and folding her legs in front of her.

The corner of Natasha’s mouth tightened a little. “Maybe we’ll take a trip back to Russia after the war,” she said. “We might want company.”

Whatever Lorraine had been expecting, that wasn’t it. “Are you serious?”

Natasha tipped her head sideways in a shrug.

Lorraine looked at Steve, who shrugged too. “We’re here,” he said. “So…” He let the word trail off for a while before he finished. “We’ve got unfinished business.”

“With Leviathan?”

“And others.”

“Good luck convincing Colonel Phillips of that.”

Steve shrugged again. He didn’t intend to actually ask for permission. By this point it seemed unlikely that they were going to be able to get back to 2018, though part of him was still trying not to think too hard about that.

“The Winter Guard didn’t know about us,” he said. “You didn’t tell them?”

“I’ve never met any of them,” Lorraine said. “Lyusya wouldn’t have believed me, and I wasn’t sure until the other day, anyway.” She frowned at Steve over her drawn-up knees, then said, a little hesitantly, “What was it like?”

Steve looked away. “Everyone I knew was dead and aliens were invading, so it could have been better. It…did get better,” he admitted, glancing at Natasha. “But it took a while. It still gets bad for me sometimes.”

Lorraine nodded gravely, taking the comment about aliens in stride; Steve had no idea if she believed him about that or not. “But you’d rather be there than here?”

Steve rubbed a hand over his face. There were plenty of things he was trying not to think about too hard; at the top of the list was whether or not he and Natasha even had a shot at going home or if they had already changed too many things in 1945. There might not even be a home to return to.

He wasn’t going to say any of that to Lorraine. Instead he said, “It’s been six years for me. My life’s up there now. For years I thought I’d do anything to have this back, but…that’s not how it works.”

Lorraine nodded as if that made sense to her, and maybe it did. Sounding genuinely curious, she asked, “But you’d still rather have a doll than Peggy Carter?”

“I’m getting pretty tired of people assuming that I’d swap out one woman for another the first chance I got,” Steve snapped, badly annoyed, then took a second look at Lorraine’s face and realized that the question meant something different to her than it did to everyone else who asked. He shot a glance at Natasha, whose gaze was averted, her jaw tight.

I’m not the kind of woman who gets to have men like Captain America, Natasha had said weeks ago, the first time they had gone to bed. At the time he’d been hurt that she thought he’d give a damn and to some extent he still was, though between her, Dottie, and Lorraine he knew that it wasn’t really about him. They would have asked the same question about anyone; it just happened to be him.

“I love Natasha,” he said more gently. “All of her. There’s no ‘even though or ‘despite’ about it.”

Lorraine’s mouth twisted a little. “Even though,” she said, a little mocking but mostly curious, “you know what she is? A trained killer?”

“I’m a trained killer,” Steve pointed out. It was the thing that everyone but Nick Fury and Natasha had always forgotten about Captain America back up in the twenty-first century. Steve was well aware that he had the highest body count in the Avengers when it came to deaths he was actually responsible for, not like Tony’s high horse about SI’s weapons. Just because most of the people he had killed had been during the worst war in human history didn’t make them any less dead than the people Clint and Natasha had killed for SHIELD or the Red Room or the SVR. For that matter, Steve had done plenty of killing during his SHIELD days. “No one asks Nat if she minds about it.”

Natasha’s gaze slid sideways to him. “I don’t,” she said gravely.

“That’s good, it would be awkward at this point.”

“It’s different for you,” Lorraine said. “You’re not…like us.”

Steve lifted a shoulder in a shrug. At this point he doubted that there was anything much he could say to convince the two of them one way or another; he just had to trust that they knew. Or at least that Natasha did. That was the important part.

Lorraine kept staring at Steve. He met her gaze calmly, not sure what she wanted from him but unwilling to make her think that he wouldn’t give it.

She was the one who looked away first. “I’m sorry,” she said eventually, her voice small. “For – I’m sorry.”

“You were doing what you thought you had to do,” Steve said. For someone else he might have added for your country, but he knew from Natasha that that wouldn’t mean much to a Widow – a matryoshka, rather. “I’m okay. There’s no harm done there. And –” He hesitated, then went on, “You’re cooperating. That makes a difference, especially if you tell Peggy and the others what you passed on. Howard’s…not very happy right now –” That was probably the understatement of the decade. “– but he’ll calm down as soon as he knows for sure. And I’ll vouch for you.”

Her mouth twisted. “You think that will make a difference?”

“It can’t hurt and it might help,” Steve said. He got to his feet, barely managing to avoid hitting his head on the low ceiling, and held out a hand to help Natasha up. “Is there anything else we should know?”

Lorraine chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking, then said, “What if I don’t want to be a good girl and stay in prison?”

“Then I can’t help you,” Steve said. “It won’t be long now.”

“Until what?”

“The end of the war.”

Her brows knit. “You can’t know that.”

Steve cocked an eyebrow, trying to sound more confident than he felt as he said, “I’m from the future, remember? I know.”

It was the MP on duty who released them from the cell after Steve banged on the door; Peggy had vanished. The MP watched Lorraine warily as Steve and Natasha emerged into the narrow hallway, then shut and locked the door after them. Steve wondered briefly if he had overheard anything or if he had stayed at the other end of the corridor the whole time.

He and Natasha didn’t say anything until they had left the Tombs behind and gone a level up, where the empty interrogation rooms were. They stopped by the entrance to the stairs leading up to the next floor so that Steve could make an attempt at getting the kinks out of his spine, stretching as best he could with one arm in a sling and hearing a couple of vertebrae pop. He could hear the murmur of conversation coming from the floor above, picking out Peggy’s voice amongst the others, but didn’t bother to try and listen in on the conversation; if someone wanted him to know, they’d tell him. Natasha leaned against the nearest wall with her arms crossed over her chest, frowning.

“Talk to me,” Steve said gently. “What’s going on?”

Natasha shook her head, staring bleakly at the opposite wall. “She’s just a kid. Just another little girl the Red Room stole and turned into a killer. Maybe it was better than starving to death with a few million other people, but…she’s just a kid, Steve.”

“She’s out of it now,” Steve reminded her. “She can make her own choices.”

She nodded, but her expression was still troubled. “I got lucky that it was Clint sent after me and not anyone else. If it had been Rumlow or May or – or anyone else, really, they’d be dead and I would be – well. I’d probably be dead too, a long time ago. I hate that it was all just…luck.”

Steve went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “A lot of things are just luck,” he said. “If Dr. Erskine hadn’t happened to overhear me and Bucky at the Expo…so many things in life are just luck and choices. There’s a middle ground, but not as much of it as any of us would like.”

Natasha nodded again.

Steve frowned in the direction of the stairs, wondering if he had heard a step there, but when no one appeared he looked back at Natasha and said, “Lorraine got lucky too.”

“I know.” She chewed on a thumbnail, then said, “What Irina said in there about – about us, about me. You know that I…can’t. Have children.”

“I know,” Steve said.

Natasha looked down, not meeting his eyes. “Does it bother you?”

Steve shook his head. What bothered him was people making assumptions about what he did and didn’t care about, but he wasn’t going to tell her that. “I’m no good with kids,” he said, trying to keep his voice matter-of-fact.

She swallowed hard. “You don’t want to have little genetically perfect Cadets America?”

Steve raised his eyebrows, not willing to take the bait. “No one knows if what the serum did to me would go to any kid of mine,” he said. “Dr. Erskine told me that back in 1943. He said – he said he’d designed it not to, but there’s no real way to know without actually –” He lifted a hand, letting the words trail off, and shook his head. “You’ve never seen me before the serum, Nat. You can ask Bucky when we’re home if you want to know how bad it really was. Yeah, in 2018 some of it can be treated, but not all of it. I wouldn’t run that risk with anyone, especially not someone I cared about and especially not a kid. And that’s without factoring in getting kidnapped for the damn serum.” Which the previous two days had proven wasn’t just a pipe dream.

Natasha glanced up at him, frowning. “You’ve thought about this.”

Steve nodded. “Yeah.”

“And not with me.”

Steve glanced aside. He’d never had this conversation with Peggy, but he’d thought about it. It wasn’t something he’d known how to bring up, not when they had both been dancing around something that, in the end, had never come to pass. After a moment he just shrugged and tried to make his voice lighter as he said, “I’m really not good with kids. Bucky’s got some stories about that too.”

“Yeah, I bet.” A little tension went out of Natasha’s shoulders and she leaned against him. Steve put his good arm around her.

After a moment, Natasha said quietly, “Sometimes I think you’re the only person who’s ever really seen me. Other people have seen what they wanted me to be, or what I could be, or what I used to be, but you’re the only person who’s ever taken me exactly as I am. And it scares me a little. I don’t know that I like anyone being able to just…see me like that.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said.

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” Natasha reassured him. “I’m just not used to anyone being able to take one look at me and just – just know me the way you did six years ago. Even Clint…sometimes I think he still sees the kid he was sent to kill. And I was a kid then. Probably about her age.” She tipped her head back in the direction of the cells. “But by the time I was her age I’d been operational a lot longer than she’s even been with Department X.” Her mouth worked briefly, then she looked up at him again.

“It’s not that I ever thought you didn’t know,” she said slowly, “or at least not since the beginning – the details, anyway. You took one look at me on that deck and knew exactly what I was and you never even blinked. And it’s not that you don’t care, because you do, but not the way other people do. You care because it’s a part of me. And that’s…it. You don’t feel sorry for me, you aren’t afraid of me, you don’t see a weapon. You just see me. Sometimes I don’t even know who that is, but you always do.”

“You see me too,” Steve said. As she smiled up at him, he put his fingers under her chin and leaned down to kiss her, just a light brush of his lips against hers. When he drew back, Natasha rested a hand against his shoulder – the one without the bullet hole in it – and took a deep breath.

“You know that if I really had been born in 1918, then I would have been her,” she said, meeting his eyes. “Only I wouldn’t have gotten caught, because back then I was better than she is. And I wouldn’t have let Peggy Carter scare me off in 1943, either.”

“But you’re not her,” Steve said calmly. “You’re you.”

“I was her ten years ago, Steve,” Natasha said, frowning slightly. “I’ve done exactly what she’s been doing here, and a hell of a lot worse, too.” She let her fingers trail lightly across his chest before they curled around his tie, her gaze fixed on his. “And like I said, I was better than she is. A lot better.”

She drew him slowly down into a kiss, heavy with promise and invitation, molding her body against his. Steve put his good hand automatically on her waist, deepening the kiss as arousal twisted in his belly. Natasha stepped backwards, pulling him with her until Steve had her backed against the wall. She started to undo the buttons on his jacket one by one.

It was all Steve could do not to tear her clothes off and have her right there and then. He pressed his hand against the wall and pushed himself back, stumbling a little until he caught his balance. “Stop that.”

Natasha tipped her head back, watching him with her predator’s eyes, though this time there was something a little reckless and desperate in her glass-green gaze. Her mouth was slick and swollen, her lipstick smeared, and she was breathing hard. “Stop what?”

“Trying to convince me that you’re not good enough for me.”

Heat touched Natasha’s cheeks. She slumped backwards and said, “God damn you, Rogers.”

“Thanks, never heard that one before.” He leaned against the wall beside her and started to do up his jacket buttons again, taking his bad arm out of the sling to do so. His shoulder twinged a little, but not much. “Lebedev already tried to throw that in my face about the matryoshki, so…”

Natasha pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. “Is there anything that shocks you?”

“After the past couple years, it’s going to take a lot,” Steve admitted. “Well, I mean, getting slapped out of 2018 and back into 1945 did it, but…” He spread his hands. “Nothing about you.”

“Sometimes I wish it did,” Natasha murmured, then shook her head. She wet her thumb and turned towards him, saying, “Come here, you’ve got lipstick on your mouth.”

Her fingers against his lips made him shiver and shut his eyes; he still felt like he was going to vibrate out of his skin even with that light touch, that or forget what his logic had been about not having her right there in the hall.

“Sorry,” Natasha apologized, her hand stilling. “I’ll make it up to you later.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Steve said. He tipped his head back against the wall, breathing hard and concentrating on the feel of the cool brick against skin that felt too hot.

“Maybe I want to.”

He opened his eyes again as she stepped back and produced a handkerchief, wiping the lipstick off her thumb onto the cloth before producing a compact mirror and a tube of lipstick for herself.

“If you two are quite finished.” Peggy’s voice was icy.

Startled, Steve glanced up to see her standing on the stairs leading, with Rose Roberts hovering awkwardly behind her. With the way the narrow stairs turned, there was no way to tell how long she had been standing just out of view, listening. Steve was accustomed to filtering out most of what his enhanced hearing picked out and hadn’t registered her approach, especially since he had been focused on Natasha. Rose’s presence at least explained why Peggy had left them in Lorraine’s cell.

“Did something happen?” he asked.

He read it on Rose’s expression rather than Peggy’s, since these days Peggy usually looked at him like she was thinking about having him hung, drawn, and quartered. That or like she couldn’t believe how stupid he was being. He wasn’t very used to getting either from Peggy and he didn’t like it.

“The Y Service picked up another set of white whale transmission early this morning,” Rose said.

Steve frowned and exchanged a look with Natasha as she snapped the compact closed and tucked it and the lipstick away. He turned his attention back to Rose and Peggy and said, “I thought you got one of the Leviathan cipher machines and their codebooks.”

“We did,” Rose said, “but we’re still running the messages through Lyudmila Plisetskaya’s codes and we haven’t matched them yet.”

Peggy’s frown deepened, though at least it wasn’t directed at him anymore. “And there’s a chance that those codes may not match any of them if the messages weren’t intended for Plisetskaya.” She turned a suspicious look on Natasha and said, “Larionova told us that she didn’t have any transmitting equipment of her own and we didn’t find any in her flat.”

Natasha crossed her arms over her chest. “Dottie,” she said. “Just because Irina didn’t have any transmitting equipment doesn’t mean that Dottie didn’t.”

Steve rubbed a hand over his face and looked at Natasha. “Recalling her to Moscow?”

She frowned. “I don’t know.”

“We’re running the messages through Plisetskaya’s cipher machine now, but we have to go code by code,” Rose assured them. “And if it’s not any of them – it’ll just take us a while.”

“You’re sure it’s Leviathan and not someone else?” Natasha asked.

Rose nodded. “Their encryption is pretty distinctive, it’s just decrypting it that’s the problem.”

“Is Colonel Phillips going to delay the transfer?” Steve asked Peggy. “If the communique’s got to do with the matryoshki –”

“No,” Peggy said. She looked in the direction of the stairs that led down to the cells and added, “He’d rather not keep them here any longer than necessary, and I agree. Besides, the Security Service is likely to kick up a fuss if we don’t hand them over; they’re not very happy with us right now and delaying will only make it worse.”

“We’re caring about MI5’s opinion now?” Steve said wryly. Traditionally the SSR’s relationship with both MI5 and MI6 had been extremely fraught, though it was a little better with both SOE and the OSS. A little.

She sniffed. “They’re extremely unhappy with us.”

Under the circumstances Steve couldn’t really blame them. “Lorraine?”

“There’s another lorry coming for her and that Hydra officer Three Team brought back; they’re both going to Station 99.”

Since Station 99 would be more comfortable than the Tombs, Steve couldn’t really muster up a protest to that. Some of his hesitation must have shown on his face, though, because Peggy said, “Unless you’ve forgotten, Captain, we still have an appointment at the front and General Eisenhower has already expressed his concerns about your tardiness to Colonel Phillips. Given that we’re still in the middle of a war, the Soviets will have to wait.”

Steve exchanged an ironic look with Natasha. From his admittedly shaky knowledge of the Cold War’s origins, “the Soviets will have to wait” hadn’t been an insignificant factor.

Peggy’s hard gaze tracked the silent exchange, but all she said was, “Unless there’s something Larionova said that makes you believe otherwise.”

Steve shook his head. “I think she just wanted to know that I was all right.”

Her mouth thinned. “Then there’s no reason to delay getting shot of her.”

As Steve started to climb the stairs, she caught his elbow and released him as soon as he looked at her, like she couldn’t bear to be touching him for longer than it took to get his attention. “We’re going to have a conversation later that you’re not going to enjoy, Captain,” she said. “And you had best plan to tell the truth there, assuming you’re still capable of it.”

Habit told Steve to put on his tactical gear even for the short walk outside to escort Lorraine and the other matryoshki to the trucks transporting them to their respective prisons. It was what he would have done back in 2018 – well, back in 2016, anyway, before he, Sam, and Natasha had left the Avengers. In the field it wouldn’t have mattered; here in London it wouldn’t fly, not in 1945. He finally compromised by putting his shield harness on under his uniform jacket, where it would be hidden but the magnetic lock would still let him carry his shield. It wasn’t anything he’d done back in 1945 the first time around, but he had had enough experience with the matryoshki to be wary.

Natasha, either less constrained by the good manners of 1940s military protocol or simply wanting to make a point to the matryoshki, did put on her tactical gear – a clean set, not the same one she had been wearing the previous night. Steve admired the sway of her hips as he tried to figure out the best way to put his sling on with his shield in the way and if he still needed the damn thing.

They had spent the rest of the morning down in the war room with Peggy and the Howlies, adjusting the details of their planned drop into Berlin to account for the most recent intelligence reports from Germany. At this point Steve was grimly resigned to it happening; there seemed to be no reason that it wouldn’t, not when Leviathan and Department X had already destroyed any chance of their being here without blowing the future to smithereens. Steve was trying not to think about that too hard.

Predictably, it was raining when they went outside to the courtyard where the two trucks were waiting. The light drizzle damped Steve’s hair instantly, beading on the thick wool of his uniform jacket. Phillips, already standing under the portico with Howard, gave him a dour look and said, “Don’t let Senator Brandt see you like that or he’ll put you on a magazine cover.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” There was a collection of them back in the Avengers Compound, mostly because everyone else thought it was funny rather than because Steve wanted copies. Or at least there had been; for all Steve knew, Tony had lit them on fire after Steve had left. Assuming that there still was an Avengers Compound in 2018. Assuming that there still was a Tony Stark in 2018.

He glanced at Howard, whose expression was still deeply unhappy. Lorraine had compiled a list of everything she had passed on to Leviathan after Steve and Natasha had left her; Steve hadn’t seen it, but Howard’s response had apparently been to throw a chair and terrify most of his engineers. Steve couldn’t really say that he blamed him under the circumstances.

“How bad is it?” he asked Howard quietly.

“Bad,” Howard said shortly, then lapsed into his rarely-used Yiddish to expand on his feelings, which made Natasha blink and look at him in surprise. Howard switched back to English and just repeated, “It’s bad.”

Natasha shot a sideways look at Steve; he shrugged in response. He’d already known Howard was Jewish. He was also aware that Tony didn’t know, since Maria Collins Carbonell Stark hadn’t been and had raised Tony Catholic, though from what Steve could tell it hadn’t stuck; Tony was more lapsed than Steve was, which was saying something. It wasn’t Steve’s place to pass that information on if Howard had never done so. Not that Tony had ever given him the opportunity, since Steve could count on one hand the number of times that Tony had ever spoken about Howard to him.

Howard wasn’t so distracted that he didn’t catch the quick exchange. The corners of his eyes wrinkled and his mouth turned downwards in a frown, suddenly wary; it wasn’t exactly a secret, but it wasn’t exactly not one, either, the same way Howard sleeping with men both was and wasn’t a secret. Steve nudged Howard’s shoulder with his own, and after a moment Howard relaxed, though not before muttering another dire imprecation against Lorraine. Whatever Steve’s own confused feelings about Lorraine, he couldn’t blame Howard for his bad mood. She had passed on a lot of Howard’s work, both his own and the SSR’s research on Hydra’s technology.

“Has Room 17 decrypted that last set of communiques yet?” he asked when Howard finally stopped muttering.

“Not yet,” Phillips said. He started to say something else, but stopped when the door to headquarters opened again.

Peggy, the Howlies, and a small army of MPs were escorting the matryoshki and Three Team’s Hydra officer, who looked distinctly confused about what he was doing in this company. He looked even more confused when he saw Steve under the portico, since presumably no one had bothered to inform him that Captain America had rejoined the land of the living.

Like Lorraine, all the matryoshki bore the signs of having been put through the wringer. Steve had heard enough about the fight in the Stork Club to know that was mostly Natasha’s doing; having seen the results of her fights on plenty of other occasions, he wasn’t surprised. He didn’t know any of the women other than Lorraine, though he recognized the brunette who had been with Aleksey Lebedev at the Stork Club. She was visibly limping on a bandaged ankle. Lyudmila Plisetskaya, he remembered from the files he’d read. Alias Louise Pilkington.

Her gaze flickered to him and Natasha – to Natasha, really, though he saw her register his presence. She took in Natasha’s crisp uniform and the Howling Commandos patch on her shoulder and the corner of her mouth lifted a little in a sneer.

“He’s that good of a lay, is he, Natalia?” she said in the plummy tones of the Oxbridge colleges, and gave Steve a contemplative look that swept across him from head to toe. “You don’t think that one of these days he’s going to wake up and realize what he’s been going to bed with?”

A muscle in Natasha’s jaw twitched, but she didn’t say anything.

“Enough of that,” Peggy said shortly. She had one hand wrapped around Lorraine’s upper arm, keeping her away from the other matryoshki. “Get them out of here. MI5 has some lovely cells waiting for them and these two have a long ways to go.” She shoved Lorraine forward, walking her in the direction of the nearest truck.

Lorraine’s gaze flickered to Natasha and Steve. It meant that Steve was looking directly at her when there was a sharp crack that echoed across the stone walls of the courtyard. Lorraine jerked, a scarlet bloom blossoming at the hollow of her throat and spattering across Peggy’s face. Her mouth worked silently, opening and closing, then she coughed blood and collapsed.

There was another crack, which Steve only belatedly registered as a gunshot and not a car backfiring, and Plisetskaya fell, a bullet hole between her wide, staring eyes. A third gunshot in the space of as many breaths and another matryoshka crumpled like a puppet with her strings cut.

More on instinct than conscious thought, Steve turned and shoved Howard and Phillips back against the wall, out of the line of fire he had tracked automatically. When he looked back, barely a second later, it was to see that Peggy had dived for cover by the nearest truck, her pistol in her hand as she searched for the shooter along the roofline of the courtyard. The remaining two matryoshki were both down, four corpses and one dying woman spilled across the paving stones. Lorraine was still alive, blood bubbling at the corners of her mouth before she went still too. Natasha was already moving, her pistol out as the Howlies and the MPs scrambled for cover.

“Stay back!” Steve shouted at Howard and Phillips, then followed Natasha. He was vaguely aware of the MPs wrestling the Hydra officer back into the building as the German tried to make a break for it and got a rifle butt across the back of his head for his trouble.

Steve caught Peggy by the shoulder and barely dodged her reflexive punch. “Get Howard inside!” he ordered, then stripped off his sling and pulled his shield off his back, his gaze skittering across the rooftops surrounding the courtyard until he saw what he was looking for. “Romanoff!”

Natasha had seen the flash of blonde hair too. She caught his eye and backed up as Steve crouched, his shield braced on his shoulder, then threw herself forward in a run. She leapt at the last moment, hitting the surface of his shield dead-center with both feet as Steve used her momentum to toss her upwards. He waited long enough to make sure that she hit the roof of the target building in a roll before he slung his shield over his back again and followed, ignoring the sharp stab of pain in his bad shoulder.

He couldn’t go up as directly as he had sent Natasha. Instead he bounced off one of the walls at the nearest corner, hit the perpendicular wall and turned, pushing off in the same motion. Someone shouted behind him – it sounded like Dugan – but Steve didn’t bother looking back until he had pulled himself over onto the roof of the Foreign Office. He paused for an instant to take in the sight of the abandoned rifle there – an American-made Springfield with a telescopic sniper’s sight – and the five spent cartridges, then leaned back over the side of the roof and yelled, “Get someone up here!”

“Rogers!” Phillips bellowed up at him.

Steve ignored him and took off after Natasha, turning just in time to see her leap off the roof on the Whitehall side of the complex. Since it was Natasha, Steve wasn’t surprised to reach the edge of the roof and spot her crouched on top of a delivery truck on its way down the street. There was a second figure in a similar position on a truck further along, looking back over her shoulder at Natasha. From here, Steve had a clear view of her – blonde hair, black leather jacket, submachine gun slung over her shoulder. Dottie.

Steve glanced up the road, spotted a double-decker bus coming his way, and braced himself. When it passed by the building, he leapt, landing and sliding a little on the rain-slick roof before he caught himself and pulled himself up into a crouch. There was a shout from below him – a couple of shouts, actually, and Steve made his way to the front of the bus, stuck his head over the side to face the nearest window upside down, and said, “Sorry!”

He jerked quickly back up as someone tried to hit him through the open window with an umbrella.

“Here, get off there!” the driver bawled up at him.

“Working on it!”

Steve kept in a low crouch as he crossed to the other side of the bus, trying not to slip on the roof and wishing he was wearing shoes with a little more grip. He should have gone with his instincts and just suited up the way Natasha had. He gauged the distance between the bus and the next car, all the while running a mental calculation on whether he could just outrun a car. They weren’t in the middle of a high speed chase, so probably.

Or better –

As the bus passed Dover House, Steve spotted a dispatch rider standing by her motorcycle and looking up at Steve in astonishment. She had her helmet in one hand and had just come out of the building, so she probably wasn’t carrying any messages. Steve leapt, landed in a roll with a dull clatter of vibranium against pavement, and was on the motorcycle before she had time to react to his sudden appearance. The Triumph roared to life as he kicked it into gear; he heard the dispatch rider’s shout of dismay as he shot off down the street.

Like most dispatch motorbikes he had been on, it handled like a dream. Steve passed by the bus he had just left, hearing someone yell, “Wait, isn’t Captain America dead?” and had caught up with Natasha’s delivery truck a few seconds later.

He slowed so that they were even with each other and shouted Natasha’s name, getting the bike as close as he could manage. She crouched on the edge of the truck’s roof as the driver shouted at Steve, urging him away, then jumped. Her fingers dug into Steve’s shoulders as he peeled the motorcycle away from the truck, keeping it as steady as he could while Natasha pulled herself up behind him. There was a bad moment where he thought they were going to overbalance before Natasha got herself settled, gripping his waist under the curve of his shield.

Dottie – they were close enough now to see that it was definitely Dottie or Darya or whatever her name really was – had seen their approach. As Steve wove the motorcycle between cars, Dottie pulled something out from inside her black leather jacket and threw it at them.

Steve jerked the motorcycle sideways as the grenade went off, dipping low as cars honked and came to screeching halts around them. He brought the motorcycle upright again with a jerk of effort, Natasha leaning hard to one side to help him as the tires screeched and a spray of rubble stung his skin. He wasn’t even surprised when Dottie unslung the Thompson submachine gun from across her back and started shooting.

Steve had been shot at more times than he could count. He wove the bike back and forth as bullets snapped off the ground around him, cars and pedestrians both doing their best to get the hell out of the way before the driver of the truck Dottie was riding finally got the memo and slammed on the brakes. She went flying backwards across the roof of the vehicle, barely managing to catch herself before she fell off but losing her grip on the Thompson. Steve swerved around the fallen gun, then had to swerve again as the truck’s driver jerked the vehicle to one side, trying to dislodge Dottie.

The sudden motion sent her sliding off the roof. She caught herself on the driver’s side mirror, her feet scrabbling against the door. The driver shouted at her as Steve slanted the bike in close again, feeling Natasha brace herself to go for the other woman.

He was forced to swerve away as Dottie produced a sleeve pistol and shot at him, the bullets so close that he could hear them whistling past his head. Natasha tucked her face down against the slope of his shield.

The moment of distraction gave Dottie the opportunity to reach in through the open window on the driver’s side door, unlatching it. Steve swore as she swung herself inside. An instant later she shoved the driver out the open door. Steve bunny-hopped the motorcycle over the man as he hit the road just in front of him, barely managing to avoid running him over, and felt the drop on the other side jar his brains in his skull, not to mention his bad ribs and shoulder. He shoved his awareness of the pain away, concentrating on keeping up with Dottie and not hitting any pedestrians or other vehicles.

Up ahead, Nelson’s Column reared up in the midst of Trafalgar Square, surrounded by sandbags. Dottie veered the truck into a hard right onto the Strand against oncoming traffic, to the aggravated honking of every other vehicle on the road, then jerked the vehicle sideways, trying to slam into Steve. Steve avoided her adroitly. Behind him, Natasha stood up on the back of the seat, gripping his shoulders. The next time Dottie tried to slam him off the road, Natasha leapt, catching hold of the open door. Dottie tried to shoot her and Natasha jerked a leg up, kicking the pistol out of her hand. A moment later she swayed dangerously, nearly falling as Dottie jerked the truck again in an attempt to shake her loose.

Steve tried to keep the motorcycle even with the truck, but had to veer away again to avoid oncoming traffic. When he was clear of the milk truck he had almost gotten tangled up with, he reached back over his shoulder for his shield, controlling the bike one-handed as he angled in to the truck again. Natasha was still grimly hanging on, but hadn’t managed to get inside yet. Blue energy flared as she shot her left widow’s bite into the cab, but the wildly swinging door must have meant that her aim was off.

Steve swung the bike around and let the shield roll off his fingers in a smooth arc, the vibranium cutting effortlessly through the truck’s hood and into the engine block. It screeched to an abrupt halt, sending up gouts of foul-smelling black smoke, and Natasha went flying. She landed in a roll and bounced up again, even as Steve hit the brakes and vaulted off the bike, landing on top of the smoking hood. He had a glimpse of Dottie’s astonished but furious face through the cracked windshield, her blonde hair mussed, before she pointed a pistol at him and pulled the trigger.

Glass shattered around him, though the bullet missed. Steve caught the edge of the shield where it was stuck in the engine block and barely managed to jerk it free as he saw what was in Dottie’s other hand. He rolled backwards off the truck’s hood, hitting the ground hard on his bad shoulder and folding himself up behind the shield just as a grenade struck the pavement only a few feet away.

The shock of the explosion at such close quarters deafened him, showering him with chunks of broken pavement and hot metal where it had caught the edge of the nearest vehicle. Steve unfolded himself, his ears ringing, and looked up to find the truck’s doors hanging open and Dottie nowhere in sight. There was a crowd of horrified civilians and confused police officers gathered around, the latter trying to herd the civilians back. Steve stumbled to his feet, his gaze sweeping around for Dottie and Natasha. He spotted Natasha more by the disturbance she was causing in the crowd, which parted for her – or more likely, for the gun she was holding.

Steve followed her, shoving his way through the crowd with his shield. His hearing was coming back in bits and pieces, now here, now gone again, until it came back all at once as he came to a stop in front of the entrance to the Trafalgar Square Underground station, which was currently disgorging a number of newly arrived passengers, confused by the mayhem on the street. Other civilians were trying to shove their way into the station, either from five years of instinct after the Blitz or because they actually had trains to catch.

Steve forced his way through the knots of panicked people into the building, ignoring several shouts, but in the crowd of people he couldn’t spot Dottie, even before the lift rumbled and began to descend. He knew by the time he could get down to the platform the train would be long gone, and by the time they got to the next station she could be anywhere.

“Steve.”

He turned at Natasha’s voice and found her standing at his elbow. She was holding the black leather jacket that Dottie had been wearing. When he looked down at her, she just shook her head, and he shut his eyes briefly, ignoring the crowds jostling them and a ticket seller chirping indignantly at his other side.

They’d lost her.

Steve and Natasha walked the motorcycle back to its rider, who was still standing outside Dover House and having an impassioned argument with a harassed-looking SSR agent. Steve turned the motorcycle gravely over to the dispatch rider, ignoring the SSR agent’s yelp of horror at the sight of fresh blood staining Steve’s shoulder; his bullet wound had opened up again. The SSR had arrived at Trafalgar Square to try and contain the mess, though at this point that mostly involved getting into arguments with the Metropolitan Police.

By the time Steve and Natasha came in through the SSR’s King Charles Street entrance, the rain had lightened a little. It had diluted the blood on the paving stones of the courtyard, gathered in dark pools around the five bodies. Peggy was standing under the portico, talking with Colonel Phillips, Dugan, and Rose Roberts; she looked up with relief as Steve and Natasha came in.

Someone had covered the bodies up, the drizzle turning the canvas sheets pink where the blood had stained and ran. As Steve shook his head in response to Peggy’s silent question, Natasha went over to the nearest of the bodies and turned the sheet back.

Irene Lorraine’s blue eyes were glassy with death, blood still at the corners of her mouth and pooled at the base of her throat. Natasha knelt beside her and tried to clean some of it away with her sleeve.

“She was out,” she said to Steve as he crouched down next to her. “She was out.”

“I know,” Steve said, but he could tell from her expression that she didn’t hear him.

Peggy came over and stood on Lorraine’s other side, looking down at them. Steve glanced up at her and raised his eyebrows.

“It wasn’t just here,” she said quietly. “The lorry transporting the matryoshki we took last night at the warehouse was in a smash-up early this morning. There were no survivors; everyone there was shot twice in the head, execution style.”

“The Winter Guard?” Steve asked, his mouth dry.

“They’re still in custody.” Her mouth tightened. “For now. The colonel already sent Three Team to increase the security on them.”

Steve looked in Rose’s direction. He didn’t think a cryptanalyst would be out here without a good reason. “Room 17 decrypted Leviathan’s last message, didn’t they? Only not in time.”

“It was a kill order,” Natasha said quietly. She didn’t bother to look up and see Peggy’s nod, just went on, “I told her this was going to happen. I just didn’t think they’d be able to do it here.”

She reached out, her hand trembling a little, and closed Irene Lorraine’s – Irina Larionova’s – staring eyes. “I told her they’d put a bullet in her for failing them. And they did.”