22 May 2012, Washington DC
Rumlow, Brock. Commander, STRIKE Team A, STRIKE Div. 305C.
Steve looked down at his phone once more to check the room number even though it hadn’t changed in the five seconds since he’d last looked. A glance up told him he was in the right place, but something kept his boots stuck to the too-shiny tile.
At least here in the STRIKE facility, the background noise was more familiar to him than the quiet din of the rest of the Triskelion. It helped that the other soldiers were more focused on training and drilling than gawking at Captain Fucking America. Steve watched a team run by in a loose grid formation, and felt an odd, bittersweet lurch when none of them gave him more than a second glance. Familiarity, loneliness, and something Romanoff had referred to as ‘culture shock’ all warred for space in his head.
His first meeting with Rumlow had been… less than stellar. Though to be honest, most of the past month had been less than stellar. Having space whales drop out of the sky and squish most of Manhattan could really dampen the mood.
Quiet voices drifted out of Rumlow’s office, then a quiet, “Copy, sir,” was all the warning Steve got before a tall, lanky man with angular features and mousy-brown hair stepped out. He looked familiar and- oh. From the Tower. He was one of SHIELD’s cleanup crew; specifically, one of the STRIKE agents.
The man stopped dead in his tracks, blinked a few times, then gave Steve a polite, “Captain,” before striding off to wherever he was going.
Steve was left staring after him, feeling both dizzy and floored at the same time. Something was-
“It’s rude to stare.”
His attention snapped back to Rumlow’s office; namely, the Commander himself leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed and an eyebrow raised.
“Sorry, sir, I, um…” Steve swallowed and shook away the odd vertigo of seeing what he’d thought was a familiar face. The doctor said it was something related to his ‘PTSD.’
“That’s Lieutenant Commander Rollins. You’ll be working closely with him. He also doesn’t take kindly to people staring at his ass.” Rumlow stepped back into his office and motioned with his head for Steve to follow. Once they were inside, he sat back at his desk and waved a hand at the empty seat opposite him.
The office was spartan, functional in every way without any excess. A small icebox - no, a refrigerator - stood next to an equal-size gun safe, topped with a microwave and what Steve now knew was a coffee maker. Two frames decorated the wall to the left of Rumlow’s desk; one contained a picture of Rumlow and Rollins covered in what appeared to be paint splotches and grinning like twits, and the other was a picture of a younger man in a Navy uniform, with a narrow, sharp face like Rollins.
“So, Fury’s made you my problem,” Rumlow observed with a tilt of his head as he looked Steve up and down. “Exactly how much of a problem do you intend to be, Cap?”
Steve put his hands on his knees and looked Rumlow in the eye. “None, sir. And for the record, even if being queer is legal now, I’m not in the habit of pursuing married folk.” That had been one of the first things Romanoff told him about the STRIKE agents. Don’t mess with Rollins unless you want Rumlow crawling down your throat.
The flicker of surprise on Rumlow’s face was fleeting, and he recovered well, but it showed nonetheless. Steve mentally kicked himself; while this brave new world seemed to be (in some ways) more open and accepting, he hadn’t had time to get a read on the STRIKE team yet.
“Well, that’s good,” Rumlow finally said. “At least now I know you’re not as straight-laced as the media lets on.”
Steve allowed his shoulders to relax a little. “That’s a carefully cultivated image, sir. And not that I have any interest in going anywhere near the minefield that is social media, but I’m under explicit orders to leave it alone.”
“Good.” Scooting papers around on his desk to clear the surface, Rumlow tapped the dark glass to bring an embedded computer display to life. “So you’ll be a fresh set of eyes on this, then. Tell me what you think…”
Two hours later, Brock’s door clicked shut behind Rogers. Brock sat back in his chair and rubbed his face, groaning quietly. What was scheduled to be a short introductory briefing had turned into a long conversation about team tactics, resource utilization, and baseball.
And while Brock was pleasantly surprised with how well-adjusted Rogers seemed, all things considered, something still ate at him. It wasn’t the none-too-subtle hint at the man’s sexuality. Hell, Rollins was as gay as it got. As long as his soldiers didn’t fuck where they worked, Brock had no hesitations about recruiting qualified men and women regardless of which flavor of Skittles they preferred.
It was something he’d said about Rollins. Married folk. But… how the hell could Rollins be married, and Brock wouldn’t know about it? In fact, Brock was almost positive that Rollins hadn’t had any tail in… what, five years?
Frowning, he pulled up Rollins’ personnel file. Any spouse would be listed there as next of kin.
When the file loaded, Brock’s frown deepened; his own name filled that slot instead. Something else caught his eye, though: with the exception of first names, everything else in the family history was redacted.
The password for a security clearance that he technically didn’t have didn’t reveal any more information. Whoever had locked the file had the highest access out of either side of the SHIELD coin. A quick query revealed one CARTER, M had done just that in 1995, just a few weeks after Brock met Rollins for the first time.
Brock’s fingers hovered over his keyboard as he chewed his lip. Well. Rather than risk triggering a data access violation, he could go about this another way.
A backdoor into the IRS’s tax database didn’t get him as far as he’d hoped, given that the man’s fucking Social Security Number was redacted as well. Brock swore and rubbed at his eyes, then stared at the numerical keypad before slowly typing out a number that he couldn’t recall learning.
The database churned for a few seconds, then spat out the 2011 joint tax return for Rollins, Jonathan Andrew and Rumlow, Brock Elliot.
His blood ran cold as he stared at the screen. How in the hell…
It didn’t take long for Brock’s tactical training to start moving the pieces around and getting them to fit in ways that became increasingly alarming. Or intriguing. Brock wasn’t quite sure which, yet.
He hesitated for several long seconds, then stood and walked through the door connecting his office with his lieutenant’s. And wasn’t that a thought. How had they avoided a fraternization discharge?
Questions swirled through Brock’s head as he looked around for any clue that he wasn’t going crazy. It took him a bit to notice the slightly off-color rectangle on the wall with a nail hole near the top, and a quick look through the two nearby desk drawers revealed a matching picture frame.
Brock slowly turned the frame over in his hands and had to sit down heavily in Rollins’s - Jack’s - chair. There they were, visibly younger, dressed to the nines and grinning wide in what was unmistakably their wedding picture. He threaded a hand into his hair and curled his fingers as he stared at something that shouldn’t have been possible. Shouldn’t have been legal.
With shaking hands, he put the frame back exactly where he’d found it, reset the chair to its previous position, and headed back to his own office.
Post-mission reports waited on his tablet, but while they weren’t going to write themselves, Brock couldn’t get himself to focus on them. He set the tablet stylus down before he dropped it and rubbed his hands over his face. A trip to the vending machine to grab a Coke sounded appealing, but… he wasn’t sure he could navigate his way through the rest of the work day without someone noticing how jittery he was.
Packing up his tablet and laptop, Brock pulled on his old, worn, slightly-too-large leather jacket and slung his bag over his shoulder. It was easy enough to fake a phone call on his way to his car as an excuse to be in a hurry, but once he got there, he just sat and stared through his steering wheel.
Married.
To his second in command.
How many handbooks and manuals did he have in his desk right now condemning that very behavior? How many violations had he racked up, that he couldn’t even remember?
Brock exhaled shakily and looked down at his hands, noticeably missing any sort of ring. If they’d been married for as long as the outdated haircuts in the picture indicated… what happened? And why?
And how could Jack, his second, someone he knew would take a bullet for him without a second thought, hide this from him for so long?
Jack scowled into his drink as he leaned on the bar counter, chin resting in the palm of one hand. Fucking Rogers and his fucking perfect hair and perfect teeth and perfect scores and why was everything about their newest team member so fucking perfect. Not that Jack really had a lot of room to hate the kid, all things considered, but… still. It was humiliating to have the Fucking New Guy come in and neatly dismantle all of Jack’s records in the various training facilities.
It didn’t help that Rumlow had been oddly distant the past few days, spending most of his time in his office working on classified projects.
Jack took another sip of his whiskey, set the glass down, and poked at his phone with his free hand to send another bird flying at another pig. Really, the pigs should be building better structures if they didn’t want someone taking out the entire thing with one well-placed impact to a load-bearing column.
He had to stifle a groan as someone slid onto the barstool next to him; it wasn’t as if the place was packed to the point that one couldn’t observe the common courtesy of one stool’s buffer.
“Hey, there. This seat taken?” The other man’s voice was rough, slightly slurred, and full of San Francisco.
Jack resigned himself to an awkward conversation with someone who couldn’t take a hint. “It is now.”
“Say, you wanna refill?”
He glanced up at the other man, scanned him from head to toe in a few seconds, then turned back to his phone. “I’m good.”
The brusque brush-off seemed to put his unwelcome guest off a little; Jack was able to take several breaths of stale pub air before he was accosted again.
“Let me be more clear… You here for a quiet drink, or you wanna have some fun toni-”
“Sorry, babe.” A hand slid around Jack’s back at waist level and a body pressed itself up against his side. “Got held up in traffic. This guy givin’ you any shit?”
It was only thanks to decades of undercover training that Jack didn’t stab his newest companion, punch him, or otherwise react to the fact that the newcomer’s voice was Brock’s.
“I, uh.” Smooth, Jack. He swallowed, then slid an easy smile onto his face as he turned to his Commander. “Nah, not too bad. He just stopped by to… oh, look. He’s gone.”
Brock chuckled quietly and perched on the empty stool next to Jack, one elbow on the bar counter and a comfortable space between them. “Sorry about that. Guy looked like a real prick.”
Clearing his throat, Jack shook his head and picked his drink back up. “It’s fine, sir. Thanks for the save.”
Somehow, that was the wrong thing to say, judging from Brock’s unsettled grimace. “There’s… something I’d like to talk to you about.” Jack’s face must have done something complicated and unpleasant, given how quickly Brock backpedaled. “No one died, you still have your job, your brother’s fine. Sorry.”
Jack closed his eyes and drew in a breath once his lungs remembered how to work. “Jesus. Don’t start a conversation like that. Even without a Code Foxtrot.”
“Sorry,” Brock said again, more quietly this time. “It’s just… I found something that… I wanna ask you about.”
As he turned to face his commander, Jack’s eyebrows drew together. Was Brock nervous? “...okay?”
Brock chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then reached into his jacket’s inside pocket and pulled out his phone. “Rogers said somethin’ the other day that kinda got me thinking,” he began as he unlocked the screen and tapped through his pictures. “And, well. I’m… sorry for diggin’ through your stuff, but…”
When Brock turned the phone around, Jack found himself looking at a picture taken of the wedding photo he’d set in his desk years ago and forgotten about. His mouth went dry and he swallowed, then glanced up at Brock. “I…”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Jack?” Brock’s voice was quiet, but without any of the intensity of anger. Instead, he looked almost… scared. “You kept quiet about this for years. Why?”
Jack turned back to his drink, mostly because he couldn’t bear the raw emotion in Brock’s eyes without feeling it himself. “Because you can’t tell someone they love you.” He tossed the rest of his drink back, tucked a few bills under the glass, and got to his feet. “I’ll see you on Monday, sir. Have a good evening.” Shrugging on his jacket and heading for the door, Jack ignored the burning in his eyes.
He got to the end of the block outside the pub when footsteps caught his attention. “Jack, wait.” When he turned around, Brock was holding something out to him. “You, uh. You forgot your phone.”
Jack hesitated a moment, then took it, careful to keep their fingers from brushing accidentally. “Thank you.”
With the same quiet defiance that popped up whenever Brock called a superior officer on their bullshit, he stared up at Jack. “Are we gonna talk about this?”
“It’s-” Jack swallowed and looked at his feet. “Sir, fraternization regulations exist for a reason.”
“For fuck’s sake, Jack, we ain’t on duty. You don’t gotta call me-”
“What are you hoping for? That we’ll just go back to whatever we had before and everything’s gonna be fine? How do you expect to tell our soldiers that the rules don’t apply to us?”
“They knew before.”
“You don’t know that.” It’s not like they’d exactly broadcast their marriage, once Jack accepted his post on Brock’s team.
“Harrison told me, when I asked him.”
Jack swore under his breath and turned away, looking up at the starless sky. “Brock, I-” His voice cracked and he closed his eyes, then took a breath. “What do you want me to say?”
The light changed and a few cars drove by before Brock spoke. “I want to know why your personnel file’s redacted. I want to know who the man is that I’m trusting with my life and the lives of our soldiers.” After a moment, he quietly added, “I want to know who we were to each other. And why you didn’t fight for that.”
Swallowing thickly, Jack had to look away for a few seconds. “You read the report for Libya?”
Brock nodded.
“That’s not what happened. Not all of it.” Jack’s headache, the almost-psychic knowledge of where Brock was trapped, Brock’s reaction when they’d found him… all of it was omitted from the official report.
The lines around Brock’s eyes deepened with his confusion, and he took half a step closer. “Then tell me.”
Jack looked at him tiredly before nodding. “Not here, though. I have an off-base apartment.”
“I know.” With a hesitant half-smile, Brock started walking toward it. “That was in your file.”
An awkward laugh creaked out of Jack as he fell in step next to Brock. “So, um. What did Rogers say?”
“Oh, I caught him starin’ at your ass on his first day…”