Better Days
Now
May 2018
Natasha found out that she still remembered where her holdout pistol was when her bedroom door banged open and she came up with the gun in both hands, the sheets puddling around her waist.
Yelena looked unimpressed by the greeting. “Is that how you say hello to Captain America?” she asked, closing the door behind her and flipping on the lights.
“Steve knows better than to surprise me,” Natasha pointed out. He was also almost as jumpy as she was, which she knew very well after six years of working with him and almost four years of living with him. She set the gun aside and pulled the sheets up to cover her bare breasts as Yelena stood by the door, looking curiously around the room.
Steve wasn’t here anymore or Yelena would have found out exactly how high-strung he was, but most of his clothes from the previous night were still scattered around and the shield was leaning up against the wall by the door. Natasha guessed that he had gone across the hall to his own room for a change of clothes when he had woken up, which she only vaguely remembered him doing. She usually slept lightly, but it had been appallingly easy to get used to sleeping with Steve.
Yelena stared at the shield for a few moment, then nudged it with one foot and came over to sit down on the bed, scooping up the sweatshirt Natasha had been wearing the previous night along the way. She tossed it at Natasha and said, “Put something on, that was traumatizing.”
“That was traumatizing?” Natasha said wryly, but she pulled the sweatshirt on over her head.
“Are you really going to marry him?” Yelena asked, still staring at the shield. “Or – stay married to him, whatever happened over there. Back there. Back then?”
“Assuming he hasn’t changed his mind about it in the past eight hours,” Natasha said. She drew her knees up and rested her folded arms across them, looking at the rings on her left hand. The diamonds glinted in the light as Natasha turned her hand back and forth. After a moment she reached to fish her dog tags free of her collar and pulled them off over her head, leaning over to drop them on the bedside table.
Yelena intercepted the motion, and after a moment Natasha released her tags into her sister’s hand. She rested her forearms on her knees again, watching as Yelena rubbed her thumb over the debossed letters. All they said was ROGERS, NATASHA R, with her backdated service number, the date of her most recent tetanus shot – given in 1945, since it wasn’t like she could prove she had gotten one in the 21st century – her blood type, and a C for Catholic, which she wasn’t but Steve was. Nobody had actually bothered to ask her religion, apparently figuring that whatever was true for Steve was true for her as well.
Yelena tipped her hand sideways, letting the dog tags and chain spill into her opposite palm, then repeated the motion a few times, watching the chain pool around the little slips of metal. “Why?” she asked finally.
Natasha raised her eyebrows, not certainly exactly what the question was about. “Well, I love him,” she said.
Yelena turned and frowned at her. “Why?”
“Is that a serious question?”
Yelena thought about it, tipping the dog tags back and forth a few more times. “Yes,” she said finally.
“Why do I love him?” Natasha repeated, a little disbelieving.
“Yes,” Yelena repeated. “I mean, he’s a little boring isn’t he? You know – Captain America.” She said it the way Alexei usually did, and Natasha smiled despite herself.
Then she remembered that Alexei was dead, snapped away to ash only moments after Thanos had dumped her and Steve in Howard Stark’s lab in 1945, and had to fight back a wave of grief. Yelena averted her eyes while she got herself under control and only looked back when Natasha said, “Steve’s not boring.”
Yelena made a face, pretending that she hadn’t seen Natasha’s display of emotion. “I mean, he’s handsome, if you like that sort of thing, just like all those old Red Guardian photographs of Alexei, which isn’t –” She stopped, squinting suspiciously at Natasha.
“What?”
“I’m just wondering if that thing everyone says is true.”
“What thing?” Natasha said warily. “And who’s ‘everyone’?”
“You know,” Yelena said. “That thing.”
“What thing?”
“That thing about women being attracted to men who remind them of their fathers.”
“What?”
Yelena made an expansive gesture. “I mean, come on, it’s obvious. They’re both super soldiers, they’re both tall and blond and blue-eyed –”
Natasha seized the nearest pillow and hit her with it. Yelena batted it away and grinned at her. “Come on, tell me I’m not wrong.”
“You’re wrong,” Natasha said. “Also, I think you need to stop reading so many magazines. You don’t have anything better to do than pick up Cosmo every time you’re buying groceries?”
“Ha!” Yelena said triumphantly. “I knew it!” She picked up the pillow and rested it across her knees. “So why do you love him? Aside from him being just like Alexei.”
“He’s nothing like Alexei,” Natasha insisted.
Yelena made a face. “So? Why?”
Natasha frowned at her, then decided to take her at her word. It wasn’t the same with Yelena as it had been with Irina Larionova; she and Yelena were the Red Room’s Widows, not Department X’s dolls, and it was 2018, not 1945. “Because he’s the only person who’s ever taken me exactly as I am.”
Yelena’s brows crinkled as she took that in and turned it over. “That’s a good thing?”
“Yes,” Natasha said firmly. She tossed the sheets aside and slid out of bed, grabbing her yoga pants and underwear off the floor on her way to the ensuite bathroom. “Can you get me a bra and a shirt? Top two drawers.”
She shut the bathroom door behind her; to her relief, Yelena didn’t follow her in. When she cracked the door open a few minutes later, Yelena passed her a black bra and an old Washington Capitals t-shirt. She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, looking away while Natasha pulled her sweatshirt off and the new clothes on.
“I met them, you know,” Natasha said, splashing water onto her face before she pulled a cabinet door open and tried to figure out if any of her skincare products and cosmetics were still good; she hadn’t been here in two years, after all.
Yelena glanced over, then turned to face her when she saw that Natasha was clothed. “Met who?”
“The matryoshki. Department X’s dolls.”
For what felt like a long time Yelena didn’t say anything, watching Natasha dig out a cleanser that wasn’t past its expiration date. Eventually, she asked, “What were they doing in London?”
“The same thing we always do,” Natasha said, more bitterly than she had intended. “There were about a dozen of them in England, embedded with various Allied divisons so they could report back to the NKVD. One had been with the SSR – the Strategic Scientific Reserve, Steve’s unit – for years as the CO’s secretary. When Steve came back with me, she contacted Department X and they sent a team to take both of us – Steve because they wanted the serum, me because she’d made me but no one knew who the hell I was.”
“Other than Captain America’s wife,” Yelena said.
“Other than that.” Natasha gripped the edge of the counter and stared at the mirror, feeling tired and old and a little sad. “They thought that if they could grab me too, then they would be able to keep him under control.”
Yelena made a questioning noise.
“It wouldn’t have worked,” Natasha said. “Steve’s not like that. Maybe with someone else, another woman, but me he knows too well. But they still thought he was the Steve Rogers from 1945; as far as they knew, he had only been missing for a month. And they weren’t sure about me at all.”
“Mmm,” Yelena said neutrally. “What happened to the matryoshki?”
“The SSR caught them and Department X killed them all before they could talk,” Natasha said.
A muscled jumped in Yelena’s jaw. She stared past Natasha, her face blank until she finally said, her voice rough, “Just things to be used and thrown away. The same as always.”
“Did you ever doubt it?” Natasha said bitterly.
Yelena shook her head. “No.”
She was quiet as Natasha finished washing her face and brushing her teeth, then the two of them went back into the bedroom. Yelena sat down on the bed as Natasha sorted through the clothes she had left behind two years ago. When she finally spoke, she had been quiet for so long that Natasha jumped.
“Ana got out,” she said. “She told us when Sonya and I went there to free her. She’d gotten out, I don’t know when. We didn’t really – get that far. But it had been before Dreykov died. She had a nice house, property, all alone in the country. She was on Dreykov’s lists, so we thought, you know, she was still one of us. But she wasn’t. She was out, or she thought she’d been out, I don’t know. She wasn’t brainwashed, the counteragent didn’t work on her, and she told us that she had gone into business for herself doing the thing that we were all trained to do.”
“Killing people,” Natasha said.
“Yeah,” Yelena said. “For money. Only she was on Dreykov’s lists or we wouldn’t have been able to find her, so – was she really doing it for herself or did she just think she was? You know – with Melina –” She shook her head. “Sometimes he let us out, or made us think he let us out, but he was always keeping us on a leash. Even you.”
Natasha turned to look at her sharply. “What?”
Yelena shrugged. “Well, no one was looking for him because of what you did, but even without that – what, you think he never sent out a girl in a red wig? It’s not as though anyone was going to check if SHIELD or Hydra or the Avengers was really sending the Black Widow after them. But you knew that.”
She stared at Natasha’s face, which must have been a study, and said slowly, “You – didn’t know that.”
“How the hell would I have known that?” Natasha said, her whole body numb. “I didn’t know he was still alive. I didn’t know there was still a Red Room.”
She sat down heavily on the corner of her desk, feeling like she had just gotten the wind knocked out of her. There had never been anything, no sign of someone using her name or her face in the eight years between her defection and the final destruction of the Red Room.
Or if there had been, Nick Fury had never told her, and he would have known. But he wouldn’t have told her.
“Son of a bitch,” Natasha whispered; she didn’t know if she meant Dreykov or Fury or both of them.
Yelena was watching her worriedly. “It’s not like he did it a lot,” she said, like that was supposed to be helpful. “But –”
“It only takes one time if it’s the right time,” Natasha said, her voice hoarse. She fought back her urge to throw up, shoving her horror ruthlessly aside; Dreykov was dead and gone and the Red Room with him, even if they would be sweeping up its ashes for a long time yet.
They are going to burn, she had told Irina Larionova seventy-three years ago, and they had burned, but not soon enough. It would never have been soon enough.
“Sometimes I think none of us really get out,” Yelena said quietly. “Not you, not me, not Melina, not any of the others. It doesn’t matter that Dreykov’s dead or that the Red Room’s ashes, because the Red Room, the real Red Room, is here.” She touched a hand to her chest. “And here.” She touched her forehead. “We’ll never really get out. We will always carry it inside us.”
“Sorry,” Tony said a while later. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think – I’m sorry.”
Steve stared at him a little blankly. They had moved to the island in the kitchen and Steve had been sitting with his head in his hands, watching Thor make coffee in a saucepan on the stove. He knew how to use both the coffee machine and the percolator; he just said that neither process really worked for Asgardian-style coffee, which he had only made a few times while they had been at Stark Tower. Steve wondered if he was just doing it now because he needed something that reminded him of a home that no longer existed and a people murdered in the vastness of space.
After a moment, Steve made himself say, “It’s okay. I know you didn’t –” He fumbled for the words before finally settling on, “– mean anything by it.”
“Maybe a little,” Tony admitted. “I just – I don’t know.” He rubbed at his forehead. “But I didn’t – not like that.”
Steve mentally filled in the missing words and said again, “It’s okay.” He felt empty and hollowed out, as if someone had taken an apple corer to his innards; after the past three weeks it felt unbelievable to be back here, in this place, with these people.
Tony shot a glance at Thor’s back and said, “Dad –” and then stopped, clearly torn between his desire not to distress Steve any further and his need to start figuring out the tangle of secrets he hadn’t even known Howard Stark had been keeping. Finally, like he had to ask something or explode, he said, “Was anything he said true?”
“Sure,” Steve said after a moment of hesitation. “He really was born in 1917 – he’s eleven months older than me, same age as Bucky and a year younger than Peggy. Was,” he added, and rubbed his hands over his face again, fighting back a wash of hollow grief.
“In Manhattan?” Tony said, clearly bracing himself for the answer to be no.
But Steve nodded.
“We still own a place on the Upper East Side,” Tony said, halfway between hopeful and resigned. It wasn’t quite a question.
Steve bit his lip, saw the aggravation flash across Tony’s face, and admitted, “I don’t know the street address, but I know he’s from the Lower East Side originally. It’s not in any of the biographies.”
Tony frowned, clearly picturing the neighborhood today rather than a century earlier, and Steve added, hesitating, “Like where Bucky and I grew up in Brooklyn – a tenement slum in an immigrant neighborhood.” He thought about the little Howard had said over the years and clarified, “Probably around Essex Street or Delancey Street, I’m not sure exactly.”
Tony blinked rapidly, still obviously thinking about the last fifty years of New York history, and said, “Why wouldn’t he say any of that?”
Steve took a deep breath, thought, sorry, Howard, and said, “Because Howard Stark isn’t the name he was born with.”
“What?”
“I don’t know what it is – was,” Steve said quickly, since Tony looked like he was about to have a heart attack. He put a hand out, hesitating, and Tony batted it aside. Thor had put down whatever he was doing and turned to watch them curiously.
“What –” Tony said again, spluttering. “Why – what –”
“I don’t know what it was originally,” Steve said again. “I really don’t, I’m sorry.” Knowing Howard, he had probably also destroyed any evidence of what it had been; from a few things he had let slip, Steve was also fairly certain that his parents were dead. “Howard’s always been paranoid about his reputation –”
Belatedly, he realized he had used the present tense again and bit his lip in frustration.
Tony stared at him, wide-eyed. “What did he have to be paranoid about? Apart from liking dick, apparently. Sorry,” he added in response to whatever Steve’s face had just done. “I didn’t – I just – why?”
Steve glanced at Thor, who shrugged in response; he probably had even less idea than Tony. Steve shook his head, more to himself than for the other two men, and said, “He’s Jewish. It was ‘34, ‘35 – I think that’s when I first started hearing about him in the papers. He would have been about seventeen back then. He still swears in Yiddish if he doesn’t care who’s listening. I remember that he got into it with Charles Lindbergh once in ’41 before Pearl Harbor, back when Lindbergh was doing his America First speeches. Lindbergh called him a warmongering dilettante and Howard said he was a spineless coward without a single moral bone in his body, it was all over the papers.”
“What?” Tony repeated.
Steve lifted one shoulder and said, “It wasn’t today.” He didn’t think he could sum up for Tony what the 1930s had been like, at least not right now. Maybe he’d get it; it was downright depressing how little international and domestic politics changed, sometimes. But Tony Stark had grown up rich and privileged, in an America that considered itself beyond certain things, and neither Steve nor Howard had had any of that.
“No shit,” Tony said hoarsely. He rubbed the heels of his hands furiously over his face and whispered, “Jesus. I didn’t know any of that – well, I think I heard about the Lindbergh thing, but – not the rest.”
Thor turned back to the stove and started pulling down mugs from the cupboard before carefully pouring out coffee from the saucepan. As he brought the mugs over, Tony said abruptly, “Did you know all of that the whole time?”
“Yeah,” Steve said.
“You never said anything.”
“You made it pretty damn clear you didn’t want to hear about Howard from me,” Steve said, trying to keep his voice even but not quite succeeding. “Ever.”
Tony opened his mouth to protest, probably in his usual automatic contrariness, then realized that there was nothing he could say to that and shut it again. Thor shoved a mug in front of him, his expression suggesting that he should take the loss without putting his foot in his mouth again. He passed a second mug more gently to Steve, then leaned his elbows on the counter in front of them, his big hands dwarfing his own mug.
Steve’s wedding ring chinked softly against the ceramic as he drew the mug close, inhaling the fragrant steam. Asgardian coffee – or at least Asgardian coffee the way Thor made it – was heavily spiced and sweetened with honey, heavy with ginger and cinnamon and other tastes Steve associated more closely with pumpkin pie than coffee. It wasn’t a surprise that Thor apparently hadn’t recognized diner coffee the first time he had had it.
It was the first time Steve had actually gotten a close look at Thor since he had arrived in Wakanda, since he’d been a little busy at the time and last night he had been too distracted. Up close, the scar that cut across his right eye was more obvious than ever, the disparity between his blue eye and the artificial brown one shocking. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes were more pronounced than Steve had ever seen them before; Thor looked like he was feeling every day of his thousand years of age.
He said helpfully, “My father told my brother and I that we had a secret insane elder sister whom he had locked away in Hel centuries before we were born and that she would be released upon his death, then he died and she broke my hammer, threw Loki and me from the Bifrost, and killed almost everyone in Asgard, so we had to summon the fire demon Surtur in order to destroy the planet and her alike in Ragnarok, the prophesied destruction of Asgard that for millennia my family had sought to prevent.”
Tony stared at him, open-mouthed, and then said, “Okay, you win.”
They both looked at Steve.
“I never met my dad,” Steve said. “He died at the Somme in 1918 and they shipped him home in a box to bury in New York. Biggest scandal there aside from what cemetery they’d put him in was that his family never forgave him for running off to America with my ma – they eloped.”
“Why –” Tony said.
“Because Ma’s family was Catholic and Dad’s was Protestant, which is why Ma got into it with the church back in Brooklyn about where to bury him,” Steve said. “Ma said her brothers told him they’d beat the stuffing out of him if he ever looked at her again, which is why they ran off to America. It was 1912,” he added for Tony’s benefit; he didn’t think the year would make much difference to Thor. “The Rogers family in Ireland still won’t talk to us, even though my ma wrote to them when I was born and when Dad died. The Ó Faoláins – my ma’s family – weren’t that much happier about it either, but they still wrote to my ma. Kept trying to get her to come back to Graiguenamanagh after my dad died.”
“Gra –”
“It’s in County Kilkenny. Dad was from Castlecomer. I’ve never been to either; the closest I’ve ever been was Belfast during the war, with the USO. I think Dad’s family moved to Lisburn after the war – the War of Independence, I mean, in Ireland.” Steve scratched at his jaw, shrugging. “No secrets, though, not much to keep secret.”
“Lucky him,” Tony muttered.
Steve raised his eyebrows. “There were fewer than fifteen hundred Americans killed by mustard gas in the Great War and he was one of them, so I wouldn’t go that far.”
Tony blinked, took that in, and said, “Okay, you make a decent point.” He took a sip of his coffee, blinked again at the taste, and then took another sip.
The three of them sat in silence, drinking their coffee, until Tony said abruptly, “Wait – if Dad was from an immigrant neighborhood, where did his folks come from?”
Steve shrugged. “I have no idea. Eastern Europe, maybe, I know he knows – he knew – people with connections in the Soviet Union, and a lot of Jews came over from Russia then, back before the revolution. But it could have been anywhere.”
Tony digested that, his eyes shuttling back and forth as he apparently tried to put together what Steve had just told him with whatever Howard had said over the years.
Steve stared down at his own coffee, wondering absently if he had ever crossed paths with Howard Stark – or whatever his name had been back then – in his own teenage years. It wasn’t too likely, but it wasn’t impossible, either.
“I want to kill Thanos,” Thor said.
Steve and Tony both looked up at him.
“Sounds good, buddy,” Tony said.
“Let’s hunt the bastard back to his hidey-hole and gut him like a fish,” Steve agreed, and the three of them solemnly clinked their mugs together.
“I thought it would be better when he was dead,” Yelena said. “Or different, anyway. Different better.” She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Maybe I just thought I’d be different, you know?”
“Yeah,” Natasha said quietly. “I know.” She straightened up and went over to sit down on the bed beside Yelena.
After a moment, Yelena added, “It’s better knowing that he’s not there.”
“Yeah,” Natasha said again. “Irina – the matryoshka who’d been under with the SSR – asked me that. How it felt to know that he was dead – the man who ran my House, that’s what they called it back then.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her it felt like I could breathe,” Natasha said.
Yelena nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
“I’d given her this story when we caught her,” Natasha said slowly. “Some of it the truth, some of it changed to fit what I knew about Department X. They, um – Leviathan sent the Winter Guard after Steve, sent the matryoshki after me, which didn’t work out very well for them. The SSR had me interrogate Irina, since I was the only one she hadn’t spent the last two years fooling.”
“What was she like?” Yelena asked curiously.
“Like us,” Natasha said. “But not. Young.” She pressed her lips together. “She wanted out, the way you want out when you don’t know getting out’s an option.”
Yelena swallowed, but nodded silently.
“Yeah.” Natasha looked down at her hands. “She was smart; she’s the only one who figured out that Steve and I were from the future. She made me before I realized that there was someone under with the SSR and she worked out that I knew enough of the right things but not in the right way to be a matryoshka. Department X doesn’t – didn’t – take babies. They took kids that were old enough to be useful after a couple years of training. Irina’s whole family died in the Holodomor. Department X went through picking up kids like her, little girls who didn’t have anyone left and who had already done everything they could to survive. I guess they figured anyone who could live through that might make it through training. And anyone they chose would have a reason to be grateful.”
“So they’ve never changed,” Yelena said bitterly. “Just like General Dreykov.”
“Just like him,” Natasha agreed.
“What happened to her? Irina?”
“Department X shot her in the head.”
Yelena didn’t say anything for a long time. Natasha was starting to get up when she said abruptly, “Do you know why Melina and I didn’t want you to help us free all the other Widows?”
Natasha turned back to her. “I know a lot of them blamed me –”
“You know he killed all the Widows in your generation, yes?”
“Yeah,” Natasha said, swallowing. “I know.”
“He made all of us watch, all the Widows,” Yelena said. “And not just watch. You know he never pulled the trigger himself.”
“Yes,” Natasha said again, her hands clenching into fists at her sides. “I know. Not the details, I didn’t know that, but – I knew about Dreykov.”
She didn’t bother asking if Yelena had been one of the Widows who had been forced to make that particular decision. In a way it didn’t really matter.
She stepped away, bracing her palms against the upper edge of her dresser and leaning against it with her head down, trying to get her breath back. In a way she had always known that Dreykov had had the Widows do his dirty work, if only because it would hurt more.
You got out, Yelena had told her two years ago in Melina’s dacha. He made sure no one could escape.
I had to get out. She knew better than to say it out loud in front of Yelena. All of them had had to get out. Her, and Yelena, and Melina, and Antonia Dreykov, and Oksana who had synthesized the counteragent and died before she had ever seen it work, and the woman Ana, and Irina Larionova and Lyudmila Plisetskaya seventy-three years and two days ago. All of them.
“Do you still blame me?” she asked without looking back.
Yelena was quiet for a long time before she finally said, “Sometimes. Not as much anymore. But sometimes.”
Natasha shut her eyes, her breath stuttering in her throat.
She heard Yelena draw in her breath, as if she was about to speak, then her sister let it out slowly without speaking. There was, Natasha suspected, a question that she didn’t want to know the answer to. Natasha didn’t think she wanted to know the answer either.
There was a vanity mirror on top of her dresser, the kind with a light switch on the side for extra illumination. Natasha stared at her reflection, for a moment not recognizing herself. For the first time in weeks she hadn’t pin-curled her hair the previous night and it hung loose around her face, the henna-dyed strands a near-perfect match to her red roots. Near-perfect, but not quite.
Except for the lipstick, makeup in the 1940s wasn’t particularly pronounced, but Natasha had been wearing it for long enough now that she could see its absence on her bare face. It would have been easy enough to do. None of the boys downstairs except Steve, who had spent months with the USO, would even notice, though she suspected Pepper and Yelena both would. She didn’t know enough about Carol Danvers to guess if the other woman would.
“I like your friends,” Yelena said to her back. “I thought they would be all – you know, self-righteous and heroic and ‘god bless America,’ but I like them.”
“I’m glad,” Natasha said without turning around. She started to sort through the makeup on top of her dresser, setting aside anything that was old enough she didn’t want to put it on her face.
“I’m serious,” Yelena insisted from behind her; something in the tone of her voice made Natasha turn around, flipping a tube of mascara between her fingers. That definitely had to go in the trash; she wasn’t going to screw around with an eye infection.
“So am I,” she said. “I’m glad you like them.”
“I mean, everyone was depressed and drinking and sad because of the apocalypse,” Yelena said. “So maybe it wasn’t the best time to meet them, but –” She shrugged. “I was surprised the Winter Soldier was here.”
Natasha raised her eyebrows. “Did they tell you –”
“Yes.” A wry smile touched her lips. “I think he’s a little afraid of me. It’s funny.”
“You know he’s shot me twice,” Natasha said dryly.
Yelena shrugged again. “So shoot him back.”
“He doesn’t do that anymore.”
“I know, I heard.” Yelena pulled her hair over her shoulder, picking at a few split ends. “The Red Room, Hydra, SHIELD, Department X – all the same.”
Natasha felt a muscle in her jaw twitch. “The Avengers?”
“Mmm.” Yelena put her head to one side, thinking about it. “You know, that Secretary of State, Ross, he’s been calling every few days and the last time Bruce Banner told him to go fuck himself and nothing happened, so, maybe not.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Natasha muttered, since that meant they were probably going to have to deal with Ross sooner rather than later. She turned to put the mascara down in the pile of cosmetics she needed to throw out and found a tube of lip balm with the seal still intact.
“I came here looking for you,” Yelena said. “Ana and Sonya were gone, I couldn’t find Alexei or Melina, couldn’t get hold of anyone else – I knew that you would be with the Avengers, if you were still – if you were still – it was before they released the names of everyone who was gone. That’s when Barton came, after they released the names and you and Rogers and Stark were at the top of the list.”
Natasha swept the expired cosmetics into a trash can and went back to sit down next to Yelena again. “Why did you stay?”
Yelena pressed her lips together, thinking about the question for a while before she finally said simply, “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
Natasha nodded to herself, looking down.
“You’re really going to marry Captain America,” Yelena said eventually, looking at the shield.
“He has a name, you know.”
“You’re really going to marry Steve Rogers,” Yelena said without turning a hair.
“Yes,” Natasha said. “You asked me that already. I haven’t changed my mind in the last half-hour.”
“That’s not – that’s not it,” Yelena said.
Natasha waited.
Yelena looked away from her, at the window this time. “All that shit they made us do, I don’t – I don’t – how can you stand letting him touch you?”
They tell you who to kill, who to fuck, who to be… She didn’t have to ask what Yelena meant by the question. “Because I know it’s him,” she said. “Because I know that I want him to.”
“How can you know that?” Yelena asked, her voice very small. She still wasn’t looking at Natasha, her gaze fixed on the window with its closed blinds.
Natasha glanced down at her hands, rubbing her thumb across her rings. “Sometimes I don’t,” she admitted. “But I know him. And I know that he would never, ever put a hand on me if I didn’t want him to.” She shrugged a little, more uncertain than she liked to admit. “Sometimes I trust him more than I trust myself.”
“Would you tell him that?” Yelena said slowly.
“I –” Natasha said, then stopped. She remembered kissing Steve back in the SSR after they had talked with Irina, that mad, reckless desire to ruin her own life because his unhesitating trust scared the hell out of her. Like if she tried hard enough she could just make him see.
Only he did see, and he had never given a damn about it, not six years ago on the helicarrier and not after they had fallen into bed together, either, even when weighed against the woman he should have married in 1945.
“I think he already knows,” she said finally.
Yelena shook her head, though it didn’t really seem to be denial, just like she had to clear the cobwebs out from between her ears. “I don’t know how Melina does it with Alexei,” she said. “And not just because it’s Alexei. Do you think he – he knows?”
Natasha shrugged. When they had first gotten to Ohio, she hadn’t been able to sleep through the night despite her training. Something about that big empty house had always kept her awake, even with Yelena asleep on the other side of the room, back when they had still shared a bedroom. She remembered creeping out of bed to wander through the house on silent feet, learning its shape, its feel, the places where the shadows fell the heaviest and what boards not to step on because they creaked. She had known that Alexei and Melina had started having sex pretty much immediately. She didn’t know any of the particulars and wasn’t interested in speculating twenty-six years later, least of all on how it had started out. She definitely didn’t want to speculate on what they had been up to recently. Back in the ‘90s Alexei would have just thought of the Widows as a very specialized spetsnaz, without any real awareness of what the Red Room entailed. He knew better now, but not when they had been inserted into that operation.
“When I joined SHIELD,” Natasha said finally, “Clint and his wife were trying really hard to – to integrate me into society, I guess. All the stuff I knew how to do when I was playing a part, but not when it was just me. I guess I didn’t really know who just me was. Some of it stuck, but –” She shrugged. “They set me up on a couple of dates, all people from SHIELD, and it just…it was just going through the motions, not much fun for them or me. They weren’t awful or anything, and none of them ended up being Hydra later, it was just – I didn’t want any of them, not really, and I was doing it just because I thought I should. At least the guy I slept with was decent about it afterwards – you met him.”
“Mason?”
“Yeah, he used to be SHIELD before it went tits up.”
“That explains a lot,” Yelena said.
Natasha didn’t bother to ask what she meant, since she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know. “The woman I slept with transferred to the Hong Kong station; that one didn’t go so well. I tried to have a thing with Bruce a couple years ago and that – that was also a mistake.” She looked down at her hands. “Especially because I was already hung up on Steve then, but I don’t think he knows that.”
“Then why bother?”
Natasha smiled wryly. “Women like me don’t get men like Steve Rogers. I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I should probably talk to Bruce about it, since we haven’t actually talked since he came back and we didn’t really part on good terms.”
Yelena raised her eyebrows. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“I kissed him and pushed him off a cliff because I needed the Hulk more than I needed Bruce Banner,” Natasha said. “And then I married Steve, so – uh, we should probably talk.”
Her sister wrinkled her nose. “That’s so complicated.”
Natasha shrugged, twisting her wedding ring around her finger. She didn’t really have a good response to any of it.
After a moment, Yelena added, “What about Captain America?”
Natasha smiled wryly. “Apparently Steve decided five minutes after meeting me that we should have a spring wedding, and thirty seconds after that that I was out of his league, so he just never mentioned it for six years.”
“I meant you, I don’t care about him.”
Natasha looked up at the ceiling, where she had stuck glow in the dark stars a few years ago in a fit of whimsy. “Steve –” she said slowly. “Steve is the only person who’s ever trusted me immediately even though he knew what I was. I don’t know if Nick gave him any files on me or not – probably not – but he took one look at me and knew exactly what I was and what I could do. Maybe not the details, but –” She shrugged. “I was the one he came to when he and Tony figured out where Loki was going. He just assumed I’d come with him, that I could deal with all of that. He didn’t look at me as a woman, or a weapon, or – or any of that, just as someone who wanted to help and who could do it, and who he trusted to do it.”
Time to go, Steve had said, as calmly as if they had known each other for years instead of less than a day. Even Clint had never done that; he had put his trust in her, but there had always been an edge to it.
“After New York, Nick – Nick Fury – partnered us together because he knew Steve would work with me and by that point he had figured out that Steve really doesn’t play well with most people. There was a lot of trial and error before he found a STRIKE team that would work with us.” And then they had all ended up being Hydra, but Natasha wasn’t about to go into that right now. “I was working with him almost every day for two years before everything went down with SHIELD. When I realized that I wanted him, that I was in love with him…” Natasha let the words trail off, then shrugged again. “Like I said. Women like me don’t get men like Steve Rogers. Anyway, I’d spent two years trying to set him up with other women and he hadn’t gone for any of them, so I didn’t think he was interested. Besides, he said he wanted a friend.”
“So you’re both idiots,” Yelena said, her eyebrows climbing.
“Thanks,” Natasha told her dryly. “Under the circumstances, you’re probably right.”
Most of the other Avengers wandered into the kitchen one at a time, most of them looking both surprised and relieved to find that Steve and Tony hadn’t killed each other, which neither of them found very gratifying. Steve noted with interest that everyone seemed equally surprised to see Thor up and about and conversing with them, though no one actually commented on it. Thor didn’t seem to notice, just leaned his elbows on the island, his coffee cup between his big scarred hands. He wasn’t talking all that much, just watching Steve and Tony as if to reassure himself that they were both still here. When Bruce came in, Thor turned his head a little to speak quietly to him, and after a moment Bruce put a hand on his arm, nodding slightly. As usual, Steve had to make an effort not to listen in, but he was used to that.
They all looked up as Pepper descended on the kitchen with her face as white as a corpse’s. Tony slid hastily off his stool, almost fell before Steve caught him, and held up his hands in a placatory gesture as he said, “Honey –”
“I woke up and you were gone!”
“Honey, I’m right here,” Tony said soothingly. He took her hand in both of his and put it on his chest, above the glow of his arc reactor. “See, right here? I just came to get coffee and got caught up talking with Cap and Thor.”
“You were gone!”
Rhodey, who had come in with Pepper, clasped Tony’s shoulder briefly as if he needed to reassure himself of the other man’s presence as much as Pepper did, then took the cup of coffee that Sam offered him and inhaled its steam gratefully. “Lot of that going around,” he said with a glance at Steve.
“Sorry,” Steve said.
“Pretty sure you didn’t do it on purpose,” Sam pointed out.
Steve snorted, which got a few odd looks. He poked at his cereal with his spoon and explained, “I had this exact conversation a couple of times in 1945.”
“Probably because you keep disappearing,” Bucky said helpfully, leaning on the island and eating an apple in small, neat bites.
“You’re one to talk,” Steve pointed out.
“Yeah, you should both work on that,” Sam said.
Steve scowled at him. “What happened to ‘you’re not doing it on purpose’?”
“Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work on it. And he was doing it on purpose.”
“Hey,” Bucky protested.
Sam pointed at him. “See?”
“Believe me, there’s a lot of that going around,” Rhodey said, with a significant look at Tony, who didn’t notice. He eyed the cereal remaining in Steve’s bowl. “They have that in 1945?”
Bucky picked up the box and looked at it. “Not anything with little marshmallows in it. You’re going to rot your teeth, Steve.”
“They’ll grow back,” Steve said. “And they don’t rot anyway. Lost another tooth when I got kicked in the head a bunch a couple days ago, though. It grew back.”
“There’s something very wrong with you,” Rhodey said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, people have been saying that one since 1918,” Bucky said as Steve spooned up more cereal. “Doesn’t seem to have ever had an effect.”
“To be fair, the first couple years people were saying it because they thought I was going to die,” Steve pointed out after he had chewed and swallowed.
When they all looked at him, he explained, “I was early, I was too small, and I was sick all the time.” He felt a muscle in his jaw work before he looked back down at his bowl of cereal. “After that –”
“You think normal people volunteer to get shot up with god knows what and stuffed into a radioactive box?” Bucky said, his voice very dry.
“Uh –” Bruce said.
“I don’t think you’re allowed to answer that one, man,” Sam said, taking the cereal box from Bucky and shaking it experimentally before pouring the contents into his own bowl.
Bruce grimaced. “This is probably the wrong crowd for that kind of question,” he agreed.
Bucky glanced around, taking in the other occupants of the kitchen – Steve, Bruce, Tony, Pepper, Rhodey, Sam, and Thor – and said, “You got a point.”
Rhodey drank some of his coffee, watching Tony and Pepper out of the corner of his eye, then turned back to Steve. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about time travel.”
Steve looked down at the remnants of his cereal, where a few stray marshmallows were still swimming around in faintly pink-tinted milk. “Always a great way to start a morning.”
The edge in his voice got him a couple of worried looks, which he ignored. Rhodey hesitated, then said, “We can talk about this later –”
Steve shook his head. “It won’t be the worst conversation I’ve had this morning,” he said. He tried to make his voice light as he added, “Unless you also want to know if I slept with Howard.”
“Under no circumstances whatsoever do I want to even think about that,” Rhodey said firmly. “I knew Howard Stark, remember? In the ‘80s, but –” He hesitated, glancing at Bucky, who looked away.
“Time travel sounds great,” Sam said hastily.
Bucky hesitated, his own gaze flickering to Tony, then seemed to come to a decision and said, “I spent two years making sure he didn’t sleep with Stark. Which took some –”
“I knew it!” Steve said.
“Oh, I can’t be hearing this,” Rhodey said, horrified.
“Time travel sounds great,” Sam repeated, his voice firm. “Let’s talk about time travel.”
“Your taste in men is shit,” Bucky told Steve, his eyes sparkling. “Always has been.”
“Hey!” Tony protested over his shoulder. “That’s my dad you’re talking about!”
Steve held up his left hand, his ring glinting in the glare from the overhead lights, and said, “Married, so can we please let this go? I shouldn’t have brought it up. Rhodey, tell us about time travel.”
“Please, god, let’s talk about time travel,” Bruce said, his face beet-red.
“Married to the most terrifying woman on the planet,” Bucky murmured, low enough that it was probably only meant for Steve’s serum-enhanced hearing. Thor’s Asgardian ears picked it up too; the corner of his mouth curled a little in something that wasn’t quite a smile and probably wouldn’t be a smile for a long time.
Rhodey still looked appalled. “I didn’t even know you liked men.”
“I didn’t know he liked anyone,” Bruce muttered.
Bucky and Sam, who had seen him with Sharon, exchanged a significant look.
“I’m going to kill all of you,” Steve said, wondering where Natasha was. Not that he thought that she wouldn’t join in the ribbing, but her presence would probably have provided a counterweight. Well, it was preferable to accusations of being too stupid to know he had been brainwashed into committing espionage, anyway.
Clint, who had just wandered in and was watching them with mild confusion, said, “I wouldn’t blame you. Is there more coffee?”
He helped himself to the coffee pot – they had switched to the machine, mostly because Sam and Bruce were actually capable of operating it – as Rhodey visibly scrabbled for his previous train of thought and Steve poured himself the last of the cereal. Mostly he thought things in the twenty-first century had a tendency to be too sweet, but right now he was enjoying the novelty of it again; sugar rationing in the war had been fairly severe, especially in England. Even Howard had only been able to do so much to get around it.
Tony and Pepper came back to the island, hand in hand, and Pepper helped him back into a seat; he still looked fairly wobbly despite the application of both coffee and food. Steve wasn’t willing to wager on how much of the wobbliness came from various revelations about Howard Stark, though he suspected that some of it did.
Rhodey finally got himself back together and said, “You said that the sorcerer back then – back in 1945 – told you that she was going to make everyone forget that you and Nat had been there, right? And that’s why Captain America showing up and leaving again didn’t change anything between your original disappearance and now.”
“Right,” Steve said.
“But you still left stuff behind,” Rhodey said. “Magic might be able to make it so that no one remembers you were there, but it’s not actually altering the fabric of reality.”
“That’s what magic is,” Thor said. When they all looked at him, surprised – he hadn’t been speaking much – he clarified, “Or at least our magic. Asgardian magic. I’m not certain of human magic.”
Rhodey blinked at him, open-mouthed, then shook his head a little and said, “But I don’t think that’s what happened here, because of Nat’s ring – the Tiffany one.”
Steve frowned. “What about it?”
“Where’d it come from?”
“Howard had his butler buy three of them in New York and then fly them to London,” Steve said, carefully not looking at Tony; he didn’t really want to know what Tony’s face was doing right now. “He wanted me to have options, I guess. I didn’t ask him to do it,” he added.
Pepper said gently, “No one thinks you did.” She looked at Rhodey. “What about the ring?”
“You said that Tiffany had been asking about it, right?”
She nodded. “As long as I remember.”
“Dad loved Tiffany,” Tony said. “He got Mom something from there every year for her birthday and Christmas – always picked it out himself. There’s a whole case of Tiffany jewelry in the Long Island house; I remember playing with it when I was a kid.” His jaw worked briefly and he glanced away.
So did Bucky, drumming his fingers on the countertop with a dull rat-tat like muffled gunfire. He pulled his hand back a moment later.
Steve rubbed his thumb against his wedding ring, resisting the urge to look between them, and repeated, “So what about Nat’s ring?”
“Well, she still has it,” Rhodey said.
“Uh-huh.”
“And as far as Tiffany knows, it’s still missing. It’s been missing for seventy years.”
“Seventy-three,” Pepper said. “There were all kinds of notes from the Jarvises; Tiffany has been asking about it since the ‘50s.”
“Why does everyone except me know this?” Tony demanded. “Did Dad know about it?”
Pepper gave him a pointed look that said, very clearly, How am I supposed to know? Then her expression went considering and she said, “There was a note from Edwin Jarvis from – 1956, I think, that the ring had been purchased on Mr. Stark’s request, but that Mr. Stark denied all knowledge of it.”
“What about the other two rings?” Steve asked.
“I’d have to check our archives,” Pepper said.
“He bought Mom’s ring special,” Tony said. “Took her to Fifth Avenue and everything, closed down the store so it was just them. So it’s not one of those.”
“It’d be kind of a dick move to give her a ring he bought for someone else’s girlfriend,” Clint observed. “I mean, it’s not like he was trying to save money.”
Steve tugged his wedding ring off and held it up to the light, squinting to see the engraving on the interior of the band, and said, “These are Tiffany too – and these ones he just had, since he gave them to us our first night there.”
Pepper held out her hand, her expression curious, and after a moment of hesitation Steve put the ring into her palm.
“He just had a couple of wedding rings? In your size?” Sam said, his eyebrows climbing. “And Natasha’s, I guess?”
“It’s Howard,” Steve said helplessly.
“Yeah, there was something really wrong with that man too,” Rhodey said.
“Hey,” Tony protested. He took the ring from Pepper, held it up, and added, “Not that you’re wrong,” before handing it back to Steve. “I was worried there for a sec that it would be engraved ‘to Cap from Howard,’ but, you know what, thank god.”
“You know no one called me that back then, right?” Steve said dryly, sliding the ring back on. He’d gotten used to having it there very quickly. “Not outside the pictures and the comics and the damn trading cards.”
“What?” Tony said. “Called you what?”
“Cap. What does this have to do with time travel?”
“Wait, what?” Clint said. “Have you hated that this whole time? It’s been six years!”
“It doesn’t bother me now,” Steve said patiently.
Sam looked concerned. “But it used to bother you?”
“Six years ago, but we’re a little past that now. Rhodey, time travel, come on.” After the past three weeks, he had forgotten how much dealing with the Avengers was like herding cats. Despite the Howlies’ wariness about his abrupt and apparently-inexplicable return, they were still a military unit in wartime and accustomed to working together in the field. On the other hand, two years ago the Avengers had tried to beat each other to death at an airport because no one had been willing to take five minutes and talk about what Helmut Zemo might be doing with five Hydra super soldiers in Siberia.
Sam saw the frustration on his face and knew him well enough to change the subject rather than push. He caught Rhodey’s eye and jerked his chin slightly.
Rhodey followed his gaze and read Steve’s expression with a glance. “Nat’s ring – people remembered it existed, there’s paperwork about it, but Howard bought it for you, right? He didn’t just have it lying around.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “That’s what he said, anyway, and I don’t have any reason not to believe him. It’d be a weird thing to lie about.”
“But that means that when you were back there, you changed the past – or you had an effect on it, anyway, an effect with repercussions today. Maybe you didn’t really change it, maybe whatever happened back there always happened.”
Steve poked at his bowl again. He and Natasha had theorized that, but there was no way to be absolutely sure, or at least they hadn’t thought so. Just because they thought that Alexei Shostakov’s serum had come from the blood the Winter Guard had stolen and passed onto the Soviet embassy didn’t mean that that was what had really happened; the USSR had stolen plenty of other stuff from the United States over the years. It could have happened anytime. “I guess,” he said. “So?”
“So whatever the Sorcerer Supreme did to erase everyone’s memory didn’t actually warp reality, just kind of – brainwashed the world, I guess, I think that’s what Wong said,” Bruce said slowly. “The SSR kept all kinds of records, right? I mean, they’re classified, but they still kept them. If Tiffany knows about the ring, then the SSR had to know too, but everyone knows when Captain America went missing…” He let the words trail off, frowning.
Bucky’s gaze went to Steve. “Every date I looked up was different.”
Steve raised his eyebrows, since Bucky didn’t talk about that much, but all he said was, “Phillips filed all the official reports with different dates, he was paranoid about – he was just paranoid. I went down on Saint Valentine’s Day, in February, but the news didn’t start hitting the papers until the beginning of March.”
“There was a problem with Nat’s SHIELD profile,” Clint said suddenly, setting his coffee cup down with a click of ceramic against tile. “Back in 2008 when she started working for SHIELD. It was some kind of fluke in the computer systems – they kept turning her up as already being in the SHIELD databases. It wasn’t from when she had been under for the Red Room, she’d never been with us, it was all old stuff that had just been digitized a few months earlier.”
When they looked at him, he explained, “In 2008, the CIA declassified a bunch of OSS personnel files from World War Two and gave them to the National Archives. Whenever the CIA or the FBI did something like that, SHIELD usually did it too because it looked good and it kept Congress from wondering what the hell we were doing – you know, transparency and all that. Fury had the guys in Records pull some old SSR files, just personnel files, not operational reports. Stuff that could be declassified or at least not too heavily redacted, mostly people who died in the war or big names like the Howling Commandos. There was some woman in there who was close enough to Nat that it kept screwing up the computer systems, but there was no way it could be her because it was sixty, seventy years old.”
“It’s digitized?” Steve said slowly.
“In the SHIELD databases, except Ultron wiped them when he was busy deleting stuff,” Clint said.
“The originals are in the National Archives in DC,” Bucky said. When they all looked at him, he lifted one shoulder in a shrug and said, “I went to look them up – not Romanoff’s, obviously, but the Howlies’ – mine. Yours. It’s public access. The National Archives only digitized one SSR personnel file and it was yours, even though it’s redacted to hell and gone. They’ve got like six OSS ones on the website, so – don’t feel too special.”
“Thanks,” Steve said.
“I can make a phone call and have someone go over there,” Pepper said, then hesitated. “Though under the circumstances –”
“What circumstances? The apocalypse?” Tony said. “Those circumstances? You think they might not be open?” he added, the corner of his mouth curling.
Sam tapped his fingers on the counter, thinking. “There are those Stark warehouses on the property,” he said. “It’s mostly old SHIELD stuff, but there are a few shelves of SSR boxes in the back. They’re all sealed with about seventy years of dust on top of them. No labels, just identification numbers and signatures and dates on the seal. I think most of them are from 1945.”
“What were you doing in there?” Tony asked.
Sam shrugged. “What, I live here, I can’t look around?” He looked back at Steve. “Could be there’s something in there.”
Steve bit his lip. “Maybe,” he allowed. “But what are the chances?”
Bucky snorted. “Stark and Phillips kept everything,” he said. “All of it had to go somewhere, right?”
“I guess,” Steve said slowly. He ate the last of his cereal, and then said, “There’s no harm in looking.”
“You know, that’s technically my stuff,” Tony said.
“Technically it belongs to the United States government,” Clint said.
“Technically if the files are still classified, then the only two people alive cleared to even look at them are me and Bucky,” Steve said dryly.
“Probably only you, your clearance level was higher than mine,” Bucky pointed out. When they looked at him, he shrugged and explained, “Officer.”
Thor collected Steve’s empty cereal bowl before he could take it to the sink himself. “Go,” he advised. “You lose nothing by doing so. I’d also like to know what you find.”
Steve frowned. “Do you know anything about time travel?”
Thor frowned in thought. “Only what I’ve read,” he admitted. “Not from personal experience. My brother would know – would have known –” His jaw worked and he had to swallow before he went on. “– would have known more.”
“Yeah, buddy, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think the last thing we need in this situation is Loki,” Tony said, obviously trying to keep his voice gentle but unable to completely control the edge in the words.
“He kinda grew on you,” Bruce murmured, but he kept his voice low enough to be ignored. Thor flicked a grateful glance at him anyway.
Tony tried to get up to join Steve and had to catch himself on the corner of the island as his legs went out from under him. Steve and Pepper both caught him before he fell, helping him back to his seat. “I’m fine,” he said hoarsely, and then, “I’ll catch up with you later, I just need to –” He waved a hand vaguely.
“You need to go back to bed,” Pepper hissed at him.
“I do not need to go back to bed, I’m fine, I’ve just been dying in space for three weeks, I just need to catch my breath –”
Pepper shot a pleading look at Bruce, who was the closest thing they had to a medical doctor at the moment.
“Right,” Bruce said. “Let’s just –”
“I’m fine –”
Bruce caught Steve’s eye. “We’ll be along if there’s anything interesting,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get hold of Wong, he might know more. If Nat comes down before you’re done, I’ll tell her where you are.”
“Thanks,” Steve said. He wasn’t sure if he actually was looking for anything or what he would do if there was anything there to find. It wasn’t as though he intended to go back to 1945; it wasn’t as though anything he found here would have any effect, since it was already over and done with.
Maybe he just wanted some kind of proof other than his own memories that it had been real. That it had been real to them, and not just to hm and Natasha.
There were seven old Stark Industries storage facilities on the property, just north of the main building and the hangar. To the best of Steve’s knowledge, they had been untouched by Tony’s several enthusiastic renovations of the compound, except that one of the doors had had to be replaced a few years ago after Sam had apparently crashed through them while testing a new wing prototype. Steve had never bothered to go in, since he had never had a reason to before and the contents were supposed to be all outdated SHIELD or SI technology.
Despite the early hour, the raccoon, Rocket, was walking across the wing of his spaceship with what looked like a wrench on steroids, shouting at the blue woman, Nebula, who was standing on the other wing and shouting back. They paused in their argument as Steve and his companions walked past and Rocket yelled, “Anyone dead yet?”
“Not yet,” Clint called back. “You guys need any help?”
“What we need is a ship that didn’t get hit by a moon and then repaired by some butter-fingered Terran,” Rocket grumbled, waving them on.
“Nice guy,” Clint said gravely to Steve. “For a talking raccoon. Well, he’s not really a raccoon, but –”
“You know what?” Steve said. “Let’s concentrate on one thing at a time right now. I’ve penciled the aliens in for later.”
Bucky eyed the repairs to the door as they approached. The scarring cut right across the old Stark Industries logo, which hadn’t been repainted, leaving only the edges of the logo visible. “What happened here?”
Sam looked shifty. “Training accident.”
Bucky and Clint both turned to stare at him as Steve hit the control for the door. “Training accident?” Clint repeated.
“Hey, shit happens,” Sam said defensively. “You use a stick and a string, man, don’t start with me.”
“He’s got you there,” Steve pointed out.
The lights came on as they emerged into the cool, climate-controlled expanse of the storage facility. Steve looked around with interest, taking in the long rows of shelves with their neatly-labeled cases. The labels didn’t seem to be particularly descriptive of the contents, since they consisted mostly of identification numbers and occasionally dates when he stepped over to the nearest one to look. Some of the cases had the mid-century incarnation of the Stark Industries logo on them, but more had SHIELD’s, mostly from the same era though a few seemed to be more recent.
Clint, looking at them, said, “You know, even though Howard Stark probably had his hand in half of SHIELD’s tech – maybe more than half back in the day – we never had a single piece of Stark Industries equipment until after New York. We were probably the only government agency without an SI contract.”
“Why?” Sam asked.
“Howard wanted SHIELD and SI completely separate from each other,” Steve said as they started down the long aisle. “Don’t ask me what was going through his head. No one knew that he had anything to do with SHIELD for almost fifty years, not even Tony; I’m not sure that his wife even knew.”
Sam and Clint stared at him. “What’s the sense in that?” Clint asked finally.
“Stark was a paranoid son of a bitch, that’s what,” Bucky said.
“About what? What did he have to be paranoid about?”
Bucky bit the inside of his cheek, but after a moment jerked his thumb at Steve and said, “Ask him, he was Stark’s friend.”
Sam’s mouth twitched a little. “Looked like a little more than that.”
Steve blushed despite himself. Bucky muttered, “Stark would have liked him to have been.”
“God, I knew you were –”
“That man,” Bucky said grimly, “would have been bad for you. I remember that.”
“You’re an idiot,” Steve told him firmly.
“Carter would have been be –”
Steve shot him a glare, and Bucky shut up. Clint said musingly, “I’m a little worried about what was going on in 1945 now – uh, original version, anyway.”
“Nazis, mostly,” Steve said. He eyed the shelves around them, not in the mood to keep harping on this no matter how entertaining it was for everyone else. He didn’t dare let himself start thinking about it again – about Howard being almost thirty years in the grave, about the too-slight weight of Peggy’s coffin, about the awful starkness of the newsprint announcing Dum-Dum’s death. If he thought about it once more today he was going to start screaming; he was a little surprised that he hadn’t done so already.
That probably would have really terrified Tony, he admitted grimly.
“Was there a fight in here?” he asked. There was a minor discrepancy in the shelving, dents in the metal shelves as well as the floor and ceiling that hadn’t been repaired, and when Steve frowned up at the ceiling he saw a bullet embedded near the top of one support pillar.
“Uh,” Sam said. “Ant infestation?”
“Scott?” Steve said dryly.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Training accident my ass,” Clint said, grinning. “I leave for five minutes and everything goes to shit –”
“With all due respect, Barton, fuck you –”
“Both of you shut up or I’m going back to 1945,” Steve said firmly.
“Can’t, Romanoff would never put up with it,” Bucky said, grinning. “I’m surprised she put up with it the first time.”
“It’s not like Thanos gave us a choice,” Steve pointed out.
The SSR file boxes were at the very back of the building and had apparently been untouched by the fight between Sam and Scott Lang. Steve looked around at them, frowning to himself; everything here seemed to be dated to the end of the war, when the SSR had packed up its London headquarters and taken itself back to the United States. As Sam had said, all of the boxes were sealed, with signatures on the heavy tape holding the lids in place.
Steve picked a box at random and heaved it off the shelf; the signature on the tape said, in faded, looping handwriting, Howard A.W. Stark 1 Sep 1945, which also coincidentally answered Steve’s questions about whether Howard had been in Los Alamos or London during the last days of the war, not that it mattered at this point. He pried at the tape with his blunt nails and then said, “Anyone have a knife?”
Clint passed him a Swiss Army knife and Steve pulled the blade out, then slit the security tape on the box and pulled the lid off. He leafed quickly through the contents, then replaced the lid and set the box aside. “This is going to take a while,” he admitted.
Sam pulled another box off the shelf and held his hand out for the knife. “What are we looking for?” he asked.
“Anything signed by Chester Phillips, Margaret Carter, or Howard Stark,” Steve said after a moment of thought, taking another box down. “That’s the command staff of the European division. If there’s any other name on there, it’s either from the Pacific division out in Hawaii or from one of the American stations – there was a lab in New Mexico and an office in Washington. There used to be one in New York, but I think all the staff went to London with Colonel Phillips.”
“Station 99?” Bucky asked.
Steve thought about it, then shook his head. “That’ll still come under Phillips’ jurisdiction – that was the SSR prisoner of war camp up in Scotland,” he explained to Clint and Sam. “They were supposed to ship the Winter Guard up there, but I don’t know what happened to them once we left. Lorraine was supposed to go there too,” he added, looking down at the box in front of him.
“Lorraine?” Clint asked.
“Colonel Phillips’ secretary,” Steve said. “She turned out to be a matryoshka – a Black Widow before they got the name, before it was called the Red Room.”
“What –”
“The Soviets had her killed,” Steve said, not in the mood to go into more detail. He slit the seal on this box and sorted through the contents, then sighed, replaced the lid, and pushed it aside.
They soon discovered that his first guess had been right. After the war had ended, the SSR had transferred from its London headquarters to Washington, with another station in New York City. At the time, its post-war mission hadn’t yet been determined; few of the wartime personnel had remained after being demobilized and its had had a lot of transfers in, personnel who had little knowledge of their original remit. All of the SSR’s wartime files from its foundation as the Office of Scientific Research and Development’s S-2 Section in 1941 to the closure of the London station in late 1945 had been sealed at the same time. Many had been unsealed over the years, but most, Steve found, had not only never been declassified but never even been opened. SHIELD had only had the barest idea of what the SSR had gotten up to during the war, most of that limited to operations directly related to Captain America and the Howling Commandos.
“Well,” Bucky said somewhere around the half-hour mark, “at least I know we saved the world a bunch, only apparently no one else ever knew that.” He settled the lid on another box and shoved it aside. “No wonder the SSR all ended up as cops for a while after the war, the new guys all thought we’d been like the FBI for freaks.”
“I didn’t know any of this,” Clint said, nose deep in a file and trying to keep his horrified expression under control as he kept reading. “And I think I wish I didn’t know it now. How the hell did you guys survive any of this?”
Steve and Bucky exchanged a look and Bucky said dryly, “We didn’t, in case you missed the memo.”
Clint finally looked up and winced. “Sorry.”
“Well, we got better,” Steve said.
They’d been at it for more than an hour when Sam said suddenly, “Steve.”
Steve pushed his box away – accounts of a 1942 operation in Egypt that preceded his involvement in the SSR and which read like something out of a movie – and knee-walked over to Sam’s side. Sam passed him a sheaf of black and white photographs stacked on top of the envelope they had been in.
For a moment Steve thought the photograph on top was an overexposure, since it was centered on a flash of brilliant white light that took up almost the entire sheet. Only at the edges of it could he see the shape of the room, the lab benches, the people –
The photograph below it was clearer, except for the motion blurs of scattering scientists. Irene Lorraine, who had been holding the camera, had perfectly framed Steve and Natasha’s abrupt arrival in the SSR. Steve caught a glimpse of his own startled face, his eyes wide and unseeing even while he had already been moving to get Natasha beneath him. He paged slowly through the photographs; he had known that they existed, but hadn’t seen them before.
“Steve?” Bucky asked; he had been quiet for too long.
Steve silently passed him the photographs and bent over the file box as Sam sat back on his heels. From the look of it, the contents had just been tossed in during the final frantic days of the SSR’s packing, months after he himself had gone down in the Arctic. He sorted out several folders on Hydra prisoners, another folder from the Pacific division, what seemed to be Howard Stark’s bar bills from 1939, and then found his own sketchbook near the bottom of the box.
He sat back to page through it, lingering only briefly on the sketches in the first third of the book, the ones he had done seventy-three years ago before he had gone into the ice. After that were the sketches he had done over the course of the past three weeks, more of them than he had realized of Natasha in various states of undress, before they were replaced by notes and diagrams in Howard’s fine draftsman’s hand. There was a scribbled page with a brownish stain on it that Steve thought were theories of time travel, then variations of his and Natasha’s uniforms and gear. Steve stared at them for a long moment, a lump in his throat, then made himself hand the sketchbook to Bucky, who was trying to look over his shoulder.
After some inspection, Bucky said, “Does Romanoff know you were drawing dirty pictures of her?”
“What?” Clint said, appalled.
“She’d better, she was sitting for them,” Steve said, feeling heat flush up his cheeks into the tips of his ears. He resisted the urge to snatch the sketchbook back from Bucky and cover up the pages with Natasha on them.
“How did Stark end up with it?”
“Peggy searched my room when they were busy accusing me of espionage and Howard got hold of it somehow,” Steve said.
“What the hell was going on with you two in 1945?” Sam demanded. “Or – you four, I guess.”
Steve flushed again. “I showed up out of nowhere with a wife after having been dead for a month, it didn’t exactly go over well. With anyone. Well, except Howard, he was just –” He sighed. “He was just happy to have me back.”
“Yeah, we can tell,” Clint said, holding up the photograph Lorraine had taken of Howard hugging Steve. “Also, you know, there was the kissing. Since when do you like guys, again?”
“Always,” Bucky said before Steve could say anything. “Only his taste in men sucks. The stuff he likes is much more attractive in women than in men.”
“Yeah, that’s enough of that,” Steve said firmly, settling the lid back onto the box and putting it with the others they had already searched. His ears were still burning. “Where’s the next one?”
“I don’t think Natasha and Howard Stark have anything in common,” Clint said dubiously.
“They’re both nuts,” Bucky said immediately. “And terrifying.”
“I don’t think we need to have this conversation,” Steve said.
“Was Howard Stark really – I mean, he was just a scientist, right? He’s not like Tony, he didn’t have a suit or anything.”
“You’ve seen the motorcycle in the museum display, right?” Bucky said as Sam shook his head at Steve, grinning.
“The one with the flamethrower?”
“Stark gave it to him as a birthday present in 1944,” Bucky said smugly. “Colonel Phillips almost had a heart attack.”
“Fury wouldn’t let me have another one,” Steve admitted. “I asked.”
“Jesus,” Clint muttered. “You and Nat do deserve each other.”
“Thanks, I think,” Steve said. He heaved down another box, this one with Colonel Phillips’ signature on the seal.
“What do you even need a flamethrower on a motorcycle for?”
“Flambéing Nazis,” Bucky said helpfully.
“What, like you don’t have flamethrower arrows?” Sam said.
“I have firestarter arrows, that’s completely different –”
Steve shook his head and sat down to open the new box. As much as the ribbing he was getting from the other Avengers aggravated him – and at the moment he was thinking about jumping out a window to get away from it – he could tell that there was an edge of desperation to it. If nothing else, it made a change from the barely-comprehensible horror of the Snap, which he had only known about for maybe sixteen hours; everyone else here had been living with it for weeks.
“This isn’t all there is?” Sam asked, holding up the sketchbook and the sheaf of photographs.
“There should be more,” Steve said. “A couple files, at least, and the gear we came with. Maybe the stuff they came up with to backstop Natasha, too. And Sherman took about a million pictures, but I don’t know if the SSR would have had them.”
“Sherman?” Sam asked.
“Senator Brandt’s aide,” Steve explained. “He used to shepherd me around the USO; when I went back to the SSR he basically ran the propaganda side of the whole Captain America thing. He took a lot of pictures of me and Nat for the papers, you know, ‘Red-headed Bombshell Knocks Captain America Off the Market,’ that sort of thing. I think they were in the process of introducing her into the comics too after they, uh…brought me back from the dead.”
Clint looked a little horrified. “Jesus.”
Steve frowned, flipping the Swiss Army knife between his fingers as he thought. “I don’t think anything about Nat ever had time to hit the papers, but The Stars and Stripes ran a piece on me coming back. Maybe it only ran in the London edition, but…” He shrugged. “There wouldn’t be nothing. Every issue can’t have ended up in the trash.”
“I mean, it’s magic,” Clint said uncomfortably. “Who knows how the hell that works.”
Steve shook his head, frowning, and slit the seal on the box. When he lifted the lid off, the first thing he saw was Natasha’s green vest, neatly folded up on top of another jumble of files and old Hydra equipment.
By the time Natasha and Yelena came out to join them an hour later, they had gone through nearly all of the remaining boxes and Steve was sitting cross-legged at the center of a circle of files and equipment, staring at all of it blankly and trying to put two and two together. None of Sherman’s photographs had turned up, but Natasha’s backstopped documents that gave her an identity before March 1945 was there, as were all of their equipment and the files about Department X and the Winter Guard. He had even found the false identity papers the SSR had created for their cancelled operation in Berlin.
“Steve?” Natasha settled her hands lightly on his shoulders from behind and leaned down to kiss him as he tipped his head back. Clint made a faintly strangled sound and Natasha glared at him.
“It’s all our stuff,” Steve said as she sat down beside him and picked up the nearest folder. It was Howard’s report on the equipment they had arrived with, typed up with but with hand-drawn sketches and annotations in his looping handwriting. “It was spread out over all of this –” He gestured at the boxes haphazardly stacked around them. “It looks like they were just throwing stuff in when they packed the London HQ up after V-J Day. I don’t – I don’t get how nobody could have known any of this. It’s here. But there’s nothing about it in – in anything. Not the books, not the Smithsonian, not SHIELD, not anything.” He swallowed hard and added, “Peggy didn’t know. Or – or if she did, she didn’t remember it anymore.”
Natasha put the folder down and picked up her vest, running her fingers over the green suede. “So what does that mean?”
Steve shook his head, his heart in his throat. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell happened back there. I don’t know anything.”