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SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 8:44 AM
Harley is still in a bit of shock from seeing his father in a morgue; on top of that, having two famous supersoldiers meet him in the waiting room… He finds himself in a blue-tinged haze of shock.
It’s quite a day.
Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes have Harley sign a couple forms—one a heavy-duty NDA, the other something he doesn’t recognize—and then the two sit across from him in a well-furnished sitting room across from the original space. Neither Captain America nor the Winter Soldier looks the way they appear on television. They’re dressed in civilian clothing—sweatshirts and loose-fitting jeans—hair shaggy and unkempt. Steve Rogers is a bit tame, not at all the bold and brazen hero he’s so used to seeing; the supersoldier doesn’t speak much, instead looking to the dark-eyed Winter Soldier to lead the conversation.
“I’m sorry about your father,” says the Winter Soldier, crossing his black-clothes arms. The man shoves a wave of oily hair back from his face and sniffs quietly.
If this was any other time, Harley would be starstruck. But his father was just murdered. “Did you do it?” he asks, ignoring the supersoldier’s apology. “What happened, you use my dad as a human shield?”
The man’s eyes darken. “No,” he says, curt. He explains, in a gravelly low voice, some recent news story Harley barely remembers hearing about: a couple of missing kids found up in some New Hampshire mountains. Drug trafficking or something like that. “Your father,” he explains, “was held captive by the same people who kidnapped those kids.”
Harley blinks. “You’re saying he was kidnapped?”
Steve Rogers nods. Harley notices then, for the first time, that Steve Rogers is wounded. His face is mottled with old bruising, and his arm is in a cast, his sweatshirt rolled up around his elbow to reveal it—the blocky white cast goes all the way over his thumb.
Harley’s never seen Captain America injured before, not even on TV.
“And the people who kidnapped him… They did this?”
Bucky Barnes nods, too, and his shaggy hair moves slightly with his head.
“He died,” adds Captain America, looking weary, “trying to save the kids.”
They try to explain more of what happened to Harley—talking about some enhanced teenager who was taken as ransom, about another group of drug addicts who were found inside—but Harley doesn’t understand most of it. He’s still hung up on the fact that his father died doing something good. “Was it fast?” he asks quietly.
Barnes’ mouth forms a taut grimace; his nostrils flare. “He was shot in the leg first,” the supersoldier says, his chin dipped low. “And then the head. The bullet was at such close range that it essentially shattered part of the skull and sent a shockwave through the brain—destroying his brain matter faster than it could’ve sent any pain signals to the rest of his body. So… he probably didn’t feel a thing.” He reaches forward then, and he pats Harley’s elbow lightly. “As it goes, it’s a pretty good way to die.”
Harley snatches his arm back.
It’s not long before Captain America’s smartphone is buzzing; the vibration moves it slightly over the oak table. He picks it up and, frowning at the name, presses it to his yellow-bruised ear before it can reach the third ring. The voice is loud and clear, despite being over the phone. “Get over here now. Now, you hear me?”
Bucky Barnes has gone rigid beside him, eyes trained on his blond companion. The voice continues, “We’re taking the kids back to New York pronto. Meet us on the roof of your building in thirty seconds, do you understand me?”
Glancing momentarily at Harley, Steve Rogers stands up and speaks fast into the phone. “Happy, we’re at the morgue with a kid—the doc’s son—”
Loud and frantic arguing on the other end, and then a light double-beep as the man on the other line hangs up. Captain America looks up then, blue-eyed and hard-faced, and he says, “We gotta go.”
Bucky grunts, “What happened?”
Steve Rogers stares at his phone. “The suspects—the—the guys from the bunker… They’re dead.”
Bucky blinks; Harley still has no idea what’s going on, but then they’re up and moving, the Winter Soldier lugging Harley forth by his upper arm and shoving him up a back-flight of stairs. “How many?” the Soldier asks, shoving Harley forward again even as he protests.
Bucky Barnes has a handgun in his palm now, pulled out of the waistband of his pants—how the hell did he get a gun in here? He aims it near the window, then the other window—and then closes the curtains with a violent yank.
“Six,” Steve says, swallowing. They’ve reached the roof now, and Harley keeps trying to interrupt with What’s going on? and Let go of me! and running for the stairs but the Winter Soldier grabs him firmly by the arm, stopping him. “They found them earlier today—across two states. Killed themselves in their cells last night. Potassium-cyanide pills.”
The Winter Soldier’s nostrils flare again; there’s the faintest trace of dark makeup in the creases of his eyes and nose. “Goddamn it.”
“There’s seven left, all being moved across the state to keep them all alive—protective custody.” Steve shakes his head, his eyes still half-wide from shock. “It’s HYDRA, it’s gotta be—”
“It's not HYDRA ,” asserts Bucky and, when the other man shrinks at his tone, lowers his voice a few decibels. “I told you it’s not.”
“Hey!” shouts Harley, his arm still caught in the Winter Soldier’s vibranium fist. “What the hell is going on?”
The two supersoldiers look at him, surprised, as though they forgot he was there entirely. And, before either of them can begin to explain, a gray mass appears in the horizon—above ranges of trees and mountains— the Quinjet .
The jet is so loud that the world becomes a whirlpool of rumbling sound; Bucky grabs the kid and drags him backwards as the Quinjet nears, reaching them so quickly that a rush of smoky wind shoves them back a few steps, blasting all their clothing tight to their bodies. It hovers over them and lands neatly in the center of the roof; the ramp lowering to reveal several armed Avengers. “Get in,” says the red-haired Black Widow, nodding at them both.
A fist grasping his collar—like a mother cat biting her kitten’s neck—and the Winter Soldier tosses Harley onto the Quinjet.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 8:58 AM
The doctor’s kid tucks his hands into armpits as soon as he’s inside the plane. The Quinjet’s gangplank shuts behind them with a thunk , and “Who’s this?” asks Happy, waving tersely at the boy.
“Doctor’s son,” says Bucky, as Steve lingers next to him. “At the morgue with us when the news broke. Thought he might be a target, too.”
Happy just nods and pushes him inside as the jet rises from the rooftop. The kid—Harley Keener—looks around the jet, blinking, hands deep in the pockets of his too-big overcoat. Rhodey guides him to a seat in the wall and points out the seatbelt for him—which the kid quickly clicks and then tucks his hands back into his pockets, yanking out his phone and thumbing in his password.
“Nope!” Nat snatches up the phone before he can do anything, whips out her gun, and fires into it twice. Cracks spiderweb over the phone-glass, and she tosses it back it into the jet’s mini-bathroom with one angled throw. It must hit the toilet, because then there’s a sharp flushing sound followed by silence. “Pepper’ll get you a new one—something encrypted. Sorry, Зайчик.”
Harley opens his mouth as though to protest and then shuts it, folding his arms and observing the room in a squinty, teen fashion.
Around the room: Harley buckled into his seat next to a cautious Rhodey, Clint and Nat huddled together arguing, Happy pacing, Sam Wilson flying the plane, Pepper on the phone as she stares wistfully at Tony, and finally Tony cradling a hospital-gowned Peter Parker—the kid wrapped in white sheets like a swaddled baby—and patting his back in gentle touches while Banner velcros a blood pressure cuff around the kid’s emaciated arm. And in the other corner, quiet and buckled into their seats at the wall of the Quinjet, is the Paxton-Lang family: the mother holding little Cassie—her shaved head now thickly bandaged—and the stepfather sitting beside them.
Bucky puts his hand on Steve’s back and guides him to a seat, too. Steve’s been so quiet since the bunker—always staring emptily at walls and folding his arms in front of his chest. But now he clasps Bucky’s hand as they sit side-by-side, buckled into the jet seats.
At a velocity of just under the speed of sound, the jet ride should only take twenty minutes; but barely twenty seconds in, the Avengers are already arguing about who should stay and who should hunt down the suspect-killer.
“I’m going after him,” says Rhodey, his War Machine suit clasping around him. “I know the laws—and the rest of you would probably kill the man as soon as you saw him.”
Nat snarls, pointing with one black-gloved hand, “Your government-affiliated ass would let him go as soon as you were told to, Nuremberg!”
They’re all saying things they don’t mean—muted shouting in their attempts not to frighten the kid. Bucky can barely hear Tony whisper to the kid as he’s stroking his dark, matted hair.
Rhodey snaps back, “I’m going to do what’s in Peter’s best interest!” His gestures are blocky and mechanical inside the suit, but his faceplate is up. “And that doesn’t mean leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake, Romanoff! There’s been enough—”
“So if it came down to it—you’d… what? Leave the kid in danger just to save a life?”
“I never said that—”
“Look at him, Rhodes!” adds Clint, the purple-suited man turning on a dime. His black leather armguards only accentuate his point as he gestures at the haggard spider-kid in Tony’s arms. “Look at him! These people ripped this kid to fucking shreds and now you’re deciding to grow a conscience?”
“I KNOW WHAT HE LOOKS LIKE!” Rhodes shouts, and, when Peter stirs, whimpering in his sleep at the sound, he lowers his voice. “I know what he looks like. I’m just trying to make sure no one else comes after him for anything else!”
It goes on like this as the jet flies through New Hampshire, until finally Steve suggests going after the guy, which Bucky shuts down in a heartbeat. “Stevie,” he says firmly, warning.
Steve’s got a hand on the back of his neck, his torso bowed slightly in his seat; his seatbelt strains. “I’m fine,” he says gruffly. There are dark lines there—on the back of his neck—like the remnants of super-healed scratches; Steve shifts his fingers over them, clamping down, as though he can feel Bucky’s gaze on his neck. It takes Bucky a moment to remember where they came from; he feels sick when he remembers. “I can do it.”
Nat’s eyes train on him, and the red-haired widow looks suddenly much taller than she is. “Not in your condition, Rogers, not on your life—”
Beside him, his Steve shifts, raising his shoulders a bit, trying to make himself look bigger than he is. It’s a trick Bucky remembers from when Steve was a kid—always trying to make himself a bigger target, a bigger threat. It never worked then; it never works now. “I said I’m fine, ” he insists, but his whole body suggests otherwise, as he’s still crouched down as though trying to protect his body from further damage. “I’ve fought in worse conditions than this, Nat,” he adds, but he doesn’t fight her too hard on it.
The only people—other than Nat—who know about what happened to Steve are Bucky, Tony, and Peter Parker, and herself. The rest of the Avengers only knew he’d gone missing for a day; they didn’t know the specifics. The injuries are enough, though, for them to put Steve on the bench.
“Look,” says Happy, and where the fuck did he come from? “If Barnes is going, we need someone enhanced to stay with Tony and the kid—to be there in case something happens at the Tower. The witness-killer could be enhanced.”
Dr. Banner glances up from where he’s working on the unconscious spider-teen. “What the hell am I, Hogan? Chopped liver?”
Nat scoffs. “No offense, Bruce, but you’re not exactly a consistent playing card!”
The doctor stands, snapping off his rubber gloves. “Oh, come on—I haven’t had an incident in months —”
Hogan again, stepping up to stand before the shaggy-haired doctor and pointing accusingly at him. “You’re a loose cannon, Banner—we need someone we can trust! I’m not putting the kid in that kind of danger!”
“Danger? Danger?” Clint echoes, slapping Happy Hogan’s hand away from Dr. Banner and jabbing his finger into the larger man’s chest. “Aren’t you Director of fucking Security? Why didn’t you know about this? Why didn’t you do something?”
“I didn’t know!” Hogan yells, shoving Hawkeye backwards and into the closed ramp-door. “I didn’t fucking know!”
The jet’s flying at around seven hundred miles per hour now, as fast as they could possibly go without causing more injury to the kids’ fragile forms. Across the room, the doctor’s kid—Harley Keener—is glancing worriedly from one Avenger to the other, silent but taking in the entire scene, his hands gripping the buckles of his seat’s harness.
Hawkeye throws a punch at Hogan—then Hogan at Hawkeye, who’s blocked by Natasha; she takes his momentum and twists his arm, sending him sliding across the jet floor in his loafers. Then they’re all hitting each other—Nat takes several pummels to the face and Happy takes even more punches in return, and eventually Clint grabs his carbon-fiber bow, winds up, and thwacks Happy’s head so hard that he staggers backwards and collapses on his ass.
“Forget it!” grumbles Bucky, interrupting as Happy struggles to his feet. He shoves the three apart, glaring at them with a withering stare. “Nat and me will find the fucker.”
Happy looks up at him, startled; Natasha just purses her lips.
“I was gonna pay one of them a visit anyway,” he says darkly; Steve glances up sharply at his tone, but Bucky doesn’t care. “And Rhodes—sorry, but this shit needs to get done now . Nat and I’ve got a better chance of finding the guy our way than yours." If anyone can make sure this guy doesn’t come after Peter and the others—it’s the former assassins. "Just stay with Tony and the kid.”
Rhodey nods, stepping out of the suit. “Fine,” he says.
Natasha lifts her chin. Her red hair is braided back into twin dutch braids; not a hair is out of place, even with all of the fighting. “Sounds good to me,” she says. Clint, of course, agrees to tag along. Those two are a fucking matching set—they rarely come without the other.
Somehow, Bucky’s surety seems to temper any arguments, so they agree to let those three go after the witness-killer: Bucky, Clint, and Nat.
Before they go, Bucky says goodbye to Steve—he’s voted to stay behind as a functional bodyguard for the kids. Bucky grips him by the face full-handedly, thumbs over his cheeks, the rest of his fingers along his jaw and the neck. Most of the bruising has gone down thanks to Steve’s super-healing—all that’s left is faded greens and yellows as any sign of what happened to him. “Don’t do anything stupid until I get back,” says Bucky, stealing Steve’s usual saying.
Bucky wants him to say it back. He needs him to say it back: How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you.
But Steve just gives a weary nod, and just tilts his head against Bucky's chest and sighs.
Bucky kisses him again, and then again, and Steve grips the back of Bucky's neck like he’s going off to war. “I'll be back tomorrow,” he says. “I love you.”
Steve’s brow draws together. “Love you, too.”
Pressing a couple buttons at the pilot’s station, Sam Wilson lowers the Quinjet’s gangplank while they’re still midair; the rush of cold high-altitude air makes everyone back away from the still-extending ramp.
Bucky steps away from Steve and takes one last look at the plane: Tony cradling Peter in the corner, Banner squatting once more beside the pair as he checks the kid’s vitals, Rhodey and Pepper talking insistently in the other, Sam Wilson in the pilot’s seat alongside a co-piloted Happy, the Paxton family huddled together in their seats with their sleeping child, and red-haired Natasha strapping a parachute rig to her back and buckling it across her chest.
(After all this time, it’s still instinct for Bucky to grab a parachute, too, even though the Winter Soldier can readily endure a fall from that height.)
And then there’s Steve, who’s still looking at him with those guilty-fucking-eyes; his cheek hollows where he gnaws at its inside, and the butterfly stitches at his forehead strain with the tensity of his grimace.
Pulling a wired pin at his belt, Clint Barton’s supersuit extends with a hissing pop: a ripstop-nylon wingsuit unfolding from his usual Hawkeye suit. With a bodily twist, Natasha Romanoff jumps off the gangplank with her parachute-rig buckled in tight. Clint follows suit a few seconds thereafter in his Hawkeye-styled wingsuit, diving off the ramp headfirst; the Soldier jumps without either, and he feels the heavy-handed drag of air across his whole body, knowing that he will hit the ground with a force that should flatten any man but will only strain Bucky’s knees.
Somehow, he’s not the least bit worried about the impact.
Bucky’s got his mind on something—someone—far more significant.
Quentin Beck.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 9:12 AM
Tony Stark is old.
He is almost fifty years old.
(He turned forty-eight back in July, and he spent the entire day working on one fucking screw in Peter’s weapon. Dum-E and U tried to throw him a birthday party by making confetti out of torn strips of post-it notes. He’d screamed at them until his throat went raw and then returned to his work. Tony spent that evening watching Charlie pull out Peter’s raw-bitten fingernails with a pair of pliers.)
And in the grand scheme of time and age and everything else—he’s really not that old. He could live another fifty years if the universe permitted it.
But in these past four months, he’s lived much more. Every day was a year; every second was an hour. Every moment that he spent without Peter carved another wrinkle into his skin. Every hour that he was forced to watch Peter tortured— was like a carved gash in the damp recesses of his brain.
He’s old.
Tony’s old and he’s tired and he wants to spend the rest of his life caring for this kid.
He cradles the kid, smoothing a hand over his check. On an average day, Peter’s healing would’ve wiped him clean of bruising overnight. But these bruises—they’ve probably lasted days on him. Remnants: a fist on his cheek, a palm on his stomach, a boot to his back.
Imprints of people who hurt his kid while he watched.
Beside him, Banner tries to get an IV into Peter’s arm and, finding no viable veins, gets one on the back of his thin hand. He straps a cuff around the kid’s arm—the kid’s arm is so small that the polyester wraps around twice before hitting velcro.
Having him back is like a dream.
The kid wakes sometime during the Quinjet ride, eyes cracking open at the sound of Tony’s voice before fluttering closed again. Tony spends the rest of the ride holding Peter. Cradling him. Telling him that he’s safe.
But whenever his mind goes slack, that sleep-starved, mind-numbing lax, he finds himself calculating again—chemistry, mechanical engineering, weapons design.
He can’t help it.
Even when Peter’s sitting right in front of him, he’s still trying to find a way to rescue him.
He knows tales of people like this—people who lived in such horror in captivity that they couldn’t adjust back to normal life afterward. but Peter—Peter wasn’t gonna be one of those people, right? Peter was smart—smarter than any kid he’s ever met. He was gonna come to his senses. He was going to. He had to.
The thing is, Tony didn’t rescue him. Pepper rescued him.
After all this time, Tony failed his kid.
Whenever he closes his eyes, he sees Peter in that chair. His precious kid—bleeding and bruised and crying out for him. Screaming for him.
And eventually… Just giving up. So lost in a haze of pain and terror that he rarely spoke at all.
To watch his kid morph from that happy-go-lucky whirlwind of a teenager to this… Charlie should’ve killed Tony. That would’ve been easier to bear.
Tony doesn’t have enough energy for rage or revenge. He’s spent so long at that peak of anxiety that now… Now, he’s just tired. Old and tired.
At some point as they enter the state of New York, that little bald girl wakes up. And, unable to recognize where she is and wretchedly bewildered as to what’s going on, she starts thrashing, scratching at her mother’s face and screaming for Peter. Banner injects her with a quick and light sedative, and she rests in her mother’s arms as her thrashing slows, remnants of her nail attacks still bleeding on Mrs. Paxton’s face.
The mother looks at Tony then as she holds her now-sedated daughter to her chest, the girl’s bruised cheek resting on her shoulder—from all the way across the Quinjet.
And they're both doing the same thing—just holding their kids.
It's such a fucking privilege. To be able to hold his kid. To touch him. To feel the warmth, the alive of his body. The low thrum of his heartbeat through the skin of his neck.
They truly do mirror each other: two exhausted parents cradling their just-returned children.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 9:19 AM
Pepper Potts stays seated as the Quinjet lands carefully onto the Tower rooftop.
There’s a Stark medical team waiting there, and a pair of stretchers: one regular, one child-sized. As soon as Tony gets the kid into the stretcher, though, his legs give out from beneath him.
His eyes flutter—the whites and the darks of his eyes—and he tilts back, knees bowing, head tilting back, and he collapses backwards into Rhodey, who catches him with surprised ease.
Pepper doesn’t move towards him.
She just watches as someone brings out another stretcher, piles her ex-fiancé onto it, and carts him away. One of the nurses approaches her and, with a slight touch of her back, offers to take her to a hospital bed. “That’d be nice,” she hears herself say. She knows the kids will be safe and Dr. Cho’s hands—so the woman escorts her away.
The nurse gives her an ultrasound and confirms that her baby—even through all of the stress, her baby is okay. “You still don’t want to know the sex, Ms. Potts?” asks the nurse, wiping away the goo from her extended belly.
Pepper shakes her head.
The nurse nods, tosses the wipe, and washes her hands at the nearby sink. “Is there anything else you need?”
Pepper doesn’t know how to begin answering that question. “No,” she says, pulling her maternity blouse down over her stomach. “I’m okay.”
After her checkup, Dr. Cho gives her periodic updates on the patients—Peter, Cassie, and Tony—over text. Peter is stable. Cassie is awake. Tony is sleeping.
She feels.
Of course she feels.
But it’s too much all at once. Freeing Tony, getting Peter back, running from some witness-killing maniac.
And all the while, she has a little piece of Tony inside her. She has spent countless days hating him, fearing him, loving him—and now he’s here, like a dream injected with warmth.
Fuck it. She’s never been one to think too much about her feelings—never got much out of therapy except an hour of peace and quiet.
So instead of moping or crying or sitting on her ass, Pepper does what she can do.
She fixes things.
Pepper gives statements to reporters, staves off hawkish paparazzi, speaks to the police about what happened—as much as she knows—and postpones their interrogations as long as she can. She talks to a few possible lawyers—ones who could help keep the bastards in prison without bail—and then to police officers at their respective jails, all of whom reassure her that nothing drastic will happen until the following day.
“Judge doesn’t work weekends,” says one officer. “So you’ve got another day at least, till the first hearing.” She contacts another lawyer—some guy at Nelson and Murdock who Clint Barton suggested for enhanced criminal cases—and sets up a meeting with him. She writes email after email to each New Hampshire jail to plea for criminal protective orders for Peter and the others, as well as no-bail pleas for the offenders. It’s a lot—but it has to be done. She contacts pediatric psychiatrists and pediatric surgeons and enhanced doctors she’s never met before—all so Peter and Cassie can get the best medical help possible.
She works. And works . And works.
Pepper checks on the suspects (still six dead, seven alive) and their locations. None of them have broken out and come for them. None of them are going anywhere.
The news is still the same: MISSING CHILDREN FOUND ALIVE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE. FAMILIES REUNITED WITH THEIR CHILDREN. The news reporters didn’t know that Peter’s only living relative couldn’t even get out of bed—that Peter hadn’t seen her since his rescue two days prior.
Pepper keeps the general public in the dark about what truly happened inside of that bunker. There’s some drone-taken photo floating around of Tony staggering out of the Quinjet and holding Peter’s prone body—looking so much like Michelangelo’s Pietà that even the news reporters drew the comparison. She tries to wipe the Internet of any copies she could find—but it has gone so far that it’s impossible to strip from the public.
She even gets that doctor's kid a temporary room to stay in—ensures he has food and water and some Internet access—as well as a new phone so he can contact his parents (parent, she has to correct herself when she speaks to him). He shrugs and mumbles something about being emancipated when she asks, and then fumbles through his backpack absentmindedly.
Poor kid.
And after about an hour of work, she returns to the Tower’s Medbay; their hospital rooms are in a neat row: room one for Tony, room two for Peter, room three for Cassie. Down the hall (in room eight) is his Aunt May's hospital room, where she currently lies unconscious and unaware of her nephew's presence. Whenever she wakes up, Pepper will be the first to tell her.
Pepper Potts drifts from one room to the next, checking on each of them as she can. Dr. Cho explains and re-explains every medical decision she’s making, mostly just stabilizing the children, feeding them over IV, and monitoring their labs. “Give it to me straight, Helen,” she says. “Don’t sugarcoat it—how is he?”
Dr. Helen Cho grimaces. “Not good. They sent over his chart from the New Hampshire hospital—we’re focusing on his refeeding syndrome now, trying to keep his calories low and in control. We’re not going to worry about his leg or his head until we’ve got that in check.”
Pepper runs her hand over her belly.
Helen winces. “Pepper, I have to say… This kid should probably be dead. I honestly don’t know how he’s still alive—after all of this damage, and in his condition…. It’s remarkable he’s breathing on his own, let alone talking. ” She shakes her head. “I’m not sure exactly what his mutation did to him, but… This kid’s a walking miracle.”
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26 — 10:35 AM
Deborah works at the police station most weekends.
She’s an ordinary person with an ordinary job. She has a husband and two kids, reads romance novels in her free time, and has a scar through her eyebrow from when she fell off her bike as a kid. She’s ordinary.
She spends the morning going through old paper files and computizing them, typing them into the shitty prison computer system. It’s busywork, and Deborah listens to music as she does it, her frizzy hair tied back in a braid.
She lives in New Hampshire, for fuck’s sake. Nothing ever happens in New Hampshire.
But halfway through her Sunday morning shift, when she turns around to get back to the front desk, the Winter Soldier is standing a couple feet away from her, dressed in full uniform: black eye makeup, mask over his nose and mouth, strapped-leather vest, leather sleeve, black military pants, knee pads, double-clasped belt, combat boots. There’s a messy star carved into his carbon-fiber arm, as though with a kitchen knife or a fingernail.
And he’s glaring at her with such dark sobriety that she jumps, letting out a small scream before she claps her hand over her mouth.
Deborah didn’t even hear the door open.
Her first thought, strangely, is: The Winter Soldier doesn’t usually go out in the daylight.
But today—he does.
She’s never seen the Winter Soldier in real life—only on television, dragging some super-criminal to prison or appearing hollow-eyed bedside Captain America for a news interview. Honest to God—the man scares the ever-living shit out of her. He doesn’t move at all, his muscle-wired body rooted to the floor, but the supersoldier’s eyes continue to follow her as she backs away from him. “Jesus Christ —you scared me, man.”
The Winter Soldier is eerily silent, his cold blue eyes following her still; he stands alone in his gear, gripping a semi-automatic rifle in one hand like it’s a cell phone.
“You’re, um.” She swallows. Her voice doesn’t seem to be working properly. “You’re a good guy now, right?”
The Soldier doesn’t say a word. He just stands there in his gear, looking more and more out of place as the seconds pass. His eyes flick behind her at the sound of a man yelling—some of the guys in the overnight holding cells must be getting riled up.
“You here for one of them?”
A short nod of his masked chin.
“Who?”
A stretch of pained silence. His gaze shifts again to the cells behind her. Then Winter Soldier speaks, deliberate, his voice so gravelly that it’s like his vocal cords have been dipped in tar: “Quentin Beck.”
Deborah feels the tension go out of her shoulders. “Oh,” she says, relaxing. She knows the man—Beck—because he arrived early this morning with a few other criminals on account of ‘witness protection.’ She’s not sure of the whole story, and honestly she doesn’t care. “Go for it.”
The Winter Soldier doesn’t blink.
She’s been listening to the guy half the morning—bragging to all the other guys in holding about how he fucked some kidnapped teenager. “Heard about what he did.” One of the earlier guards had to put him in solitary because he kept fucking talking about it. Most the other people in here were drunk-and-disorderlys, not murderers or rapists or abusers—but this guy? From what she’s heard so far, Quentin Beck is all three rolled into one shitty ball. What a fucking creep. “Can’t take the gun inside, though,” she says. “I'd lose my job.”
He places the semi-automatic deliberately on the counter. His arm whines as it moves, the scrape of metal and wire. It’s the only sound now in this mostly-empty jail.
“Any other weapons?”
The man’s face tightens. He peels a strap of throwing knives from his thigh, a larger blade tied at his calf, two handguns belted to each hip.
“Follow me,” she says once he’s done, scooting from behind the counter.
She takes him through the back, past a couple dozen holding cells, most of them empty. “He’s in a cell alone—had to put him in solitary ‘cause the other guys kept threatening to kill him.” Her face sours.
At last, they reach the door at the end of the hallway. There’s a small barred window in its center, and a person is visible inside: the brown-haired guy. Quentin Beck.
“Hey,” Deborah says, grabbing the Winter Soldier’s arm. It feels like a shitty idea as she does it, so she quickly draws her hand back from the muscled man, resting her hands on her belt instead. “Look—don’t kill him, alright?”
The Winter Soldier looks down at her, eyes dark, the emotion there so muddled it’s practically hieroglyphic. He moves his chin down a smidge as though to say: fine.
That’s good enough for her.
Deborah unlocks the door with her keys; surprisingly, she doesn’t feel scared. “You’ve got thirty minutes till my shift ends.” Reattaching her keys to her belt, she nods to the guy. “Just…make him pay.”
Then she leaves, the keys jangling at her belt.