Dream a Little Dream of Me (ABO 'verse)
Sep. 30th, 2016 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agentrebornIn the year following the signing of the Sokovia Accords, the higher-ups in the U.S. Military all agree that the Accords (or rather, the Discord that followed) were a clusterfuck of epic proportions. The general consensus seems to be well, that could've been handled better.
Sure, the United Nations got the signatures they needed (well, most of them at any rate) and the new safety checks brought a renewed sense of security to the world. The U.S. Military gained unprecedented control of the remaining superheroes in the fold (sure, in theory, the UN panel rules over the deployment of any super-powered -- or technologically aided -- individual, but in practice, the Military’s running the show), but they lost Captain America.
As it turns out, the man behind the shield was as much a symbol as the uniform he wore. Steve Rogers -- the Brooklyn boy who hated bullies, the Super Soldier, the sickly omega turned Alpha's Alpha, the man out of time -- captured the imagination of the American people. Even his disgrace through the Accords and his subsequent disappearance did little to dim the public's faith in him. In fact, if General Ross has to read another New York Times article questioning the Accords referencing Captain Rogers' refusal to sign as evidence of their flaws, he may actually shoot someone. (Or perhaps order a drone strike on the New York Times editorial offices. As the days pass, that is beginning to feel more and more appealing.)
It becomes clear that Captain America (and Steve Rogers) needs to be brought back into the fold. The Accords have their poster boy in Tony Stark, but the Military need Steve Rogers' wide-eyed patriotism to lead the way. Except the Military can’t get Steve Rogers because Steve Rogers abandoned his country and his shield for one James Buchanan Barnes (aka the Winter Soldier). As it turns out, nothing the Military can offer (or threaten) can sway Steve Rogers in the face of his loyalty to his childhood friend. No matter what that friend has become.
In the endless meetings with army psychologists and profilers strategizing on how to bring Captain America back, one thing seems obvious; the death of Margaret “Peggy” Carter came at exactly the wrong time. Without her, Steve Rogers lost his moorings and now he’s cut adrift, his only anchor the friend he lost during the war. The time for ideals have come and gone, the man out of time needs a person to tie his anchor lines to; a country won’t be enough. Not when he’s gotten that tantalizing whiff of hope to recapture the past he thought he lost. (From what little they got out of the Winter Soldier before his very messy escape, the psychologists agree, the man who was Lieutenant Barnes is gone. But Captain Rogers can’t seem to accept that.)
If only Ms. Carter was still alive, she could have been a powerful pawn in the gamble for Captain Rogers’ loyalty. Certainly not the Queen she once was on the board, as the first Director of SHIELD, but pawns are easier to handle than Queens. The Alzheimer’s would be a problem, of course, but one that could be handled. In fact, one of the psychologists (a Dr. Roberts) thinks it may have worked in their favor.
Sharon Carter, the niece, is briefly considered and then discarded. Her work with the CIA makes getting to her difficult; for all the bullshit about inter-agency cooperation the CIA likes to spout they sure as hell don’t like sharing their agents. Besides, too many reports have her down as a Captain America collaborator during those hectic days of the first signings of the Accords and all the profilers agree she’s stubborn and idealistic in all the wrong ways. They need someone they can easily sway.
The solution, as so often seems to be the case, comes from the most unlikely of sources.
After the Fall of SHIELD many of their resources -- personnel, safehouses, technology -- were absorbed by the Military. It was an influx so vast, years later they are still working on cataloguing it all. Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise that absorbing the remains of two different clandestine operations (one hiding in plain sight within the other) with nine different layers of security clearance would be time consuming. What does come as a surprise is the lack of any kind of top-secret overview. It appears, the different compartments of SHIELD had no idea what the others were doing.
The archivists, the admin and the research and development staff all agree that sifting through the information (and the vast caches of technology) is like trying to build a one million piece puzzle. Except they’re missing the box and the pieces are hidden in about a thousand different places.
Jenna McDonald, assistant of the chief archivist says it’s more like a hundred fifty-thousand piece puzzles, but the pieces are all mixed together and each puzzle has at least five different people working on it, unbeknownst to each other. Oh, and someone has thrown away all the corner pieces. It is, she says, a total mess.
The seed to the Solution to the Military’s Steve Rogers Problem is born during Jenna McDonald’s lunch hour, which -- if you ask her -- is more like twenty minutes. The breakroom on the first sub-level is potentially the most depressing place on Earth with its oppressively brown walls and corduroy clad chairs that must hail from the 1970s. (It wouldn’t be so bad if there were windows. But there aren’t and the low-energy bulbs in the light fixtures give the space an almost dungeon-like feel.) But it’s either that or the cafeteria two floors and fifteen security checkpoints away and who has time for that?
“They kept everything,” Jenna complains to the table at large over her wilting salad from the grocery store down the road. She stabs a leaf of spinach and some ham with her plastic fork. Elizabeth Malone from the tech-team hums agreement from the head of the table where she’s decimating the lemon-herb chicken and rice she brought for her lunch today.
Mateo Rodriguez, who keeps the minutes for the endless Captain America Crisis meetings (documenting every idea, no matter how far-fetched), looks over from the coffee machine. Depressing or not, when the new coffee machines were installed, the best one went to the sub-level breakroom (which may or may not have something to do with the research and development team being on that same floor) and he’s got five mugs lined up and a short, hastily written post-it note with everyone’s order stuck to the machine itself.
“Like what?” he asks, raising his voice to be heard over the rattle of the beans for Dr. Coleman’s double-shot of espresso being ground.
“Like the blueprints for the first SHIELD headquarters. A compound which, I’ll have you know, hasn’t existed since the sixties,” Jenna says around her mouthful of salad. She swallows and waves her fork at Elizabeth. “Oh, and today, they tell me there’s a whole freezer full of the frozen eggs of every female Alpha field agent who served during the first decade of SHIELD.”
“Sorry, what?” Mateo turns fully from the coffee machine. Surely he misheard that.
“Oh, yeah,” Walter Shaw from Elizabeth’s team chimes in, hands wrapped around his giant mug of coffee. “Giant, clunky freezer from the sixties. Must’ve been high tech at the time. Proper dinosaur now.”
“It’s pretty interesting, actually,” Elizabeth says, closing the lid on her tupperware after a quick glance at her wristwatch. “SHIELD initiated the omega surrogacy program so the female Alpha agents could continue their work uninterrupted by the burden of childbirth.”
Walter nods sharply, his hair falling into his eyes. “Howard Stark actually pioneered oocyte cryopreservation about twenty years before it made it into mainstream medicine. Director Carter was the first to undergo the procedure to show that it was safe.”
“So,” Mateo switches the blue mug underneath the coffee machine drip to the chipped white mug -- double macchiato coming up for Mr. Brown, “you’re saying, technically, you could make a baby for the deceased Director Carter?”
“I doubt the eggs would still be viable after all this time,” Walter says. “But we could have a look at her DNA.”
“More than that,” Elizabeth says, tucking her tupperware container away in her lunchbox as she stands. ‘We could use the genetic material to make test-tube Alpha soldiers. It’d be an ethical grey-zone, but the donor’s dead, and with the Alpha population dwindling-- It’s something to think about.”
“I just want to know how to file them,” Jenna interjects, pushing her two-thirds empty bowl away. “In a batch like ‘Unfertilized Eggs, Alpha female’ or separate like ‘Unfertilized Eggs, Director Carter’?”
“Separate,” Elizabeth says with all the decisiveness of someone who has never worked with any kind of archiving in their life. “Then you can cross reference that to the mind-imprint file and label it all ‘build your own Director.’ You coming, Walt?”
Walter stands up hurriedly. He downs one last gulp of his coffee with a wince at the heat hitting the back of his throat. He sets the half empty mug down in the sink (no beverages allowed in the lab) and catches the confused look on Mateo’s face. He grins.
“When Director Carter was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the SHIELD higher-ups freaked. They were afraid important knowledge might be lost. So they did what any reasonable organization would do and performed a full mind scan. Memory, personality. Everything saved. Except, you know, there’s no way to access it without downloading it to a body, so--”
“Walt!” Elizabeth calls from the door.
“Sorry! Coming.” Walter shoots Mateo an apologetic smile before he hurries after Elizabeth.
“That’s messed up,” Mateo says to the room at large. Only the last mug left to go and then he can head back up to the meeting room just in time to catch the tail-end of their lunch.
“You haven’t even heard the half of it,” Jenna says with a sigh. Technically, she has another forty minutes for lunch. In actuality, her inbox had seventy-three unread emails before she left for lunch and fifty of them were marked urgent. She dumps what remains of her salad in the trash. “Remind me to tell you about the frozen corpses sometime.”
---
A week later, the daily Steve Rogers Crisis meetings have come to a standstill. The ideas being volleyed around become fewer and more repetitive. The frustration in the room is obvious. They’ve tried everything. The best and the brightest minds available to the Military have all been brought in for brainstorming sessions, floating idea after idea but never finding a viable solution.
“It all comes down to the personal connection,” Dr. Roberts says (for what might be hundredth time). “Without that, there’s no chance.”
“And it has to be a connection stronger than to that of Barnes, his childhood friend from the good old days. A little slice of home delivered with a side of murderous assassin.” Ms. Ramirez from the profiling unit reaches for her third cup of coffee, wishing it had a splash of something stronger. “We’ve been over this.”
“I still think, if we found him, we could send someone in. Build a relationship,” Mr. Brown argues (for probably the hundredth time as well).
“A new connection isn’t going to cut it,” Dr. Coleman says from the head of the table. “We’ve been over this too.”
“The man’s practically celibate. For what we know, he might still be a virgin. You telling me that if we send in some hot young omega he isn’t gonna--”
“Even if it did work,” Dr. Coleman interrupts Mr. Brown, “It would take too long to build a relationship like that into something substantial. The Captain’s loyalty has to be earned; he won’t just give it up to the first cute omega who smiles at him. We’ve all seen the man. Every omega in the world smiles at him.”
“I’m just saying, a bond would--”
“Expose our agent to him the instant it snaps into place and then he’d know everything they know.”
“Fine. What about one of the Avengers?” Mr. Brown offers, throwing the words down like a challenge.
“One of the Avengers? Which one?” Ms. Ramirez shoots back, taking up the challenge. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but we barely have anyone left. Rhodes can’t walk, Tony Stark failed spectacularly the first time around, and Romanoff’s in the wind.”
“It’s a shame about Carter--” Dr. Roberts says, taking a manila folder from one of the many stacks littered across the table. She flips it open and leafs through the pages absently.
“Wait, the old one or the niece?”
“The old one. We discounted the niece weeks ago.” Dr. Roberts closes the folder and pushes it away. There’s nothing in any of these that will help them. She knows. She’s read them all back to front and sideways already.
“Yes, yes. We all know. It’s a shame about Carter. She would’ve been perfect,” Mr. Brown sneers. “But Carter’s dead, so stop barking up that tree. There’s no way--”
Behind his computer, fingers poised against the keyboard, Mateo clears his throat. “Well, actually--”
---
Seven months after Steve Rogers went AWOL, Peggy Carter opens her eyes.
Amidst a sea of complicated equipment, Peggy blinks up at a white ceiling accompanied by a symphony of machines beeping steadily. The light hurts her eyes, sending sparks of pain shooting through her optical nerves to her temples and she squeezes her eyes shut. Her head feels stuffed with cotton candy. God, she’s getting too old for this. Waking up in the hospital with no memory of how you got there is for young people. (Or, she thinks with a pitch of horror, the very old. But she’s not there quite yet, is she?) She’s got field agents for this these days for crying out loud.
Laying completely still Peggy goes through the checklist she made for herself during the war, mentally cataloguing the sensory input from her body. It’s been a long time since since she last had to use it, but she still remembers it with startling clarity. Twitching her hand upwards, she feels a twinge of oddness and resistance. That would be the I.V. needle. Plastic tubes itch in her nostrils, that’s oxygen. Her throat feels sore and her careful, exploratory swallow catches hard enough for her to wince. There’s no tube there now, but she must’ve been intubated. Nine times out of ten, that means surgery. Her head feels strange, red and purple blotches spreading across her field of vision every time she opens her eyes. Head injury? Except her head doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts. That’s odd-- Voices begin to filter in and halt her careful self-examination--
... think she’s waking up.
Increase the drip.
EKG is moving, we have active brainwaves.
Get the camera. Quick now.
Are you recording?
Doctor Hewlett is going to be pissed he missed this.
Did the integration take this time?
I guess we’re going to find out.
Moment of truth, people.
Something’s wrong.
Deep in her bones, Peggy can feel it. She has woken up on a morphine drip before, it feels nothing like this. Whatever drugs are in her system -- and there are some, there must be, she can feel it -- they’re like no analgesics she’s been on before. And she’s not in pain. Never has she woken up in a hospital bed without a stitch of pain somewhere, but beyond that-- The aches and pains of growing older (the creaking elbow, the aching hip, the dull throb at the small of her back -- all old friends by now) aren’t there either.
Memories are coming in fits and starts-- The doctor’s office. The Diagnosis, It’s only been three weeks since a woman ten years her junior told her that her mind is beginning to slip and that there is nothing to stop its descent. Only three weeks-- Unless it’s been longer. Something like a sob works its way up her throat. The research she did mentioned this. Moments of clarity amidst a sea of forgetting. The activity in the room which has been building to a crescendo suddenly ceases, like stepping through a tornado to the eye of the storm.
“Director Carter.” The voice is calm, comforting, as it emerges from the sudden hush, and Peggy can sense a presence looming over her. Peggy’s eyes snap open. The man’s features are shadowed, the bright light a shining halo around his silhouette. “Can you hear me?”
After another painful swallow, Peggy nods. Her brow furrows so deep it makes the back of her eyes ache. (Or maybe that’s just the light still.) The man’s face splits open in a wide grin, light glinting off his teeth.
“Welcome back.”
---
Over the course of the next five weeks, Peggy is briefed on Project ReGenesis as she learns to use the new body (identical to her own sixty-five years ago, right down to the scattered constellations of birthmarks on her left shoulder and the back of her left hip, but oddly lacking in the scars she’s spent a lifetime accumulating) they grew for her in a lab somewhere.
(ReGenesis. Such a bloody stupid name. There’s a slip of paper, right in the back of the project folder with the dictionary definition: “Merriam-Webster: Regenesis - new birth : renewal”. Peggy can see why they picked it -- especially since Project Rebirth was already taken by the Super Soldier Serum program -- but, it sounds like the title of one of those stupid action movies her daughter used to love so much growing up. And if they’re going by dictionary definitions here, she vastly prefers the Oxford one: “The fact or process of forming or being formed again”.)
Lieutenant Andrew Tanner from the Military Intelligence Unit is assigned as Peggy’s personal aide. He sits, patiently watching as her physical therapist helps her teach a body that has never moved an inch in its life walk, sit, and grasp things. As she picks up increasingly smaller objects (from a tennis ball down to a grape) he briefs her on the decades she’s missed. In his dry, toneless voice he tells the tale of the Fall of SHIELD as if it’s nothing but memorized talking points and not the crowning achievement of her life’s work going down in flames. When a grape bursts between her fingertips, she privately imagines that it’s his smug little face. (Petty, yes. But surprisingly satisfying.)
There was always a rivalry between the army and SHIELD. Part of it, no doubt, due to her. Back in the early days, those generals and admirals in their fancy uniforms thought she’d play ball. After all, the SSR had a long history with the military and Peggy was deployed with their men. Surprisingly, Peggy had no desire to become the military’s pawn. They never truly got over that. In the dull drone of Lieutenant Tanner’s history lessons, she can already hear those same assumptions. They made her, so she will work with them. Clearly, Lieutenant Tanner hasn’t read her profile.
Once Peggy has mastered walking and picking things up without knocking them over or breaking them, it’s time to relearn how to fight and fire her gun. They didn’t bring her back to sit behind a desk and carefully peel oranges; they want her in the field.
Relearning combat is painstakingly slow. They say you never forget how to ride a bike. Peggy can’t test the theory as the closest she gets to bike is the stationary training one in the gym, but if her skills with a gun are anything to go by, she’s definitely forgotten how to ride a bike. Or rather, this body has never learned and it seems the knowledge sits in the bones rather than in the brain. Her accuracy with her gun used to be top of the class, now she’s happy if she hits the target at all. As frustrating as it is, her mind knowing every last step to this dance her body keeps stumbling through (always five steps behind), at this point it’s only a matter of building muscle memory.
Over the pop-pop-pop of Peggy’s gun (each bullet hitting a little closer to the target), Tanner continues the never ending briefing. They’re on to the history of HYDRA now, and Tanner details every instance and way a snake slithered into her house under her watch. It would be better, she thinks, if he at least took some pleasure from tearing down her legacy. But it’s all the same dry, factual tone.
Three days after she hits her first bullseye Lieutenant Tanner hands her a stack of folders on their way from the gun range.
“This will be your team,” he says, gaze locked on the end of the hall.
“No, they will not.” Peggy stops and Tanner stops two steps later. A look of bewilderment crosses his face. He opens his mouth to argue and she drops the folders, unopened, into the nearest trash can. (Dramatic effect does come in so handy when making a point.) His mouth closes. Something like satisfaction flashes through Peggy as she watches his stricken face.
“Those were handpicked,” Tanner grits out.
“Tough.” Peggy keeps walking, leaving him staring after her. “I pick my own team,” she calls back at him. The words are final, even though Tanner doesn’t realize that yet.
The team Peggy picks -- after two weeks of relentless (if pointless) resistance from Tanner -- is a small strike team, easy to deploy, easy to move undetected, comprised entirely of betas. The Military favors Alpha soldiers, but Peggy has found betas to be better. Their noses un-attuned to the pheromones of both Alphas and omegas, they’re not as easily distracted and they don’t have the same flare-ups of territorial instincts as Alphas.
While Peggy spends her days gradually building her team as well as her muscle memory and her evenings doing her homework on HYDRA and the decades she’s missed, the search for Captain Rogers goes on. Surprising everyone, it’s not Steve Rogers they find first. A convenience store camera (illegally installed and hidden from plain view) picks up the Soldier buying a magazine and a pack of over-the-counter heat suppressants in Berlin. He’s got a hoodie and a baseball cap on, but the jaw line is unmistakeable. The Winter Soldier -- the ghost of the world of intelligence -- has been caught on camera.
The team dedicated to the retrieval of Steve Rogers flies into a frenzy. The experts all agree: Where Barnes is, they’ll find Rogers. When asked, Lieutenant Tanner makes it very clear that Peggy Carter isn’t ready for the field yet, nor is her team. It’s Ross who overrides him. Carter doesn’t have to be ready. She just has to show up and show her goddamn, five-million-dollar, face. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.
Seventeen hours later, Peggy is in a helicopter touching down just outside of Berlin. Her team of five spreads out, moving through the trees like ghosts. It’s a ten mile hike to Barnes’ suspected hideout; they can’t risk Barnes hearing an engine or the sharp chop of the helicopter’s rotors. Discretion is the better part of valor. The pace is brisk: they have no time to waste. Dawn is only six hours away and they need the cover of darkness if they’re to pin Barnes down.
It feels good to be back in the field. Don’t get her wrong, being Director of SHIELD was a privilege and a gift. But it was a gift that came with paperwork, meetings, and always seeing the bigger picture. Boots on the ground, you have your orders, your gut and your team. Accomplish the mission parameters, stay alive, and bring everyone back home with you. Easy. Unlike, say, balancing the budget or approving department spending.
The mission this time is simple enough (if not easy): Locate Barnes, use him to find Steve and rescue them both from HYDRA’s clutches. Bring them back home and try to reverse whatever brainwashing has been used on either one of them. Of course, the both aspect has not been officially sanctioned. The military doesn’t care about Barnes. They only want Steve back.
Barnes has holed up in Kaserne Krampnitz, an old Nazi military base taken over by the Soviets at the end of WWII and then abandoned after the Wall came down. In the briefing room, photos of its former glory flashed across the screen interspersed with newer photos picturing its decay. Peggy can’t help but wonder if Barnes feels it, that odd wave of nostalgia for the war, like she does. Things were simpler back then. The enemy was the enemy and you shot to kill. Of course, if what they tell her is true, Barnes doesn’t remember the war. He doesn’t remember anything.
They stop just beyond the tall walls surrounding the sprawling complex. The grey of the concrete wall is broken by colorful graffiti. Not just cluttered signatures of miscreants past, but hauntingly beautiful art standing in stark contrast to the rusted barbed wire atop the wall.
The team gathers around Peggy, their faces dimly lit by the blueish glow of the small screens strapped to the inside of their left forearm (with the exception of left-handed Garcia, hers is strapped to her right arm). Technology sure has moved on from her day. The devices are all connected and anything one team member does can be seen instantly across all screens. Currently displayed is a map of the fifty odd buildings of the base. There are no details except for what could be discerned from satellite photos, the blueprints apparently lost to the ravages of time. (They sit somewhere, Peggy is sure, in a dusty filing cabinet in a dark basement waiting for Russia to decide to digitize them.) There’s too much ground for them to cover before dawn if they go as a team; they’ll have to split up.
“Holden, you take building one through nine. Daniels, ten to seventeen. Johnson, you and Hernandez split eighteen to thirty-five, Garcia, you’re on thirty six to forty five, I have the rest.” Peggy handpicked the best the Military had to offer for her team, they’re seasoned officers, and yet splitting up makes her stomach twist. Privately, she prays Barnes will be in one of her buildings. There’s no telling what will happen if someone else finds him first.
“When you clear a section, mark it green and move on.” They’ve been through this already, in their mission briefing (which, pun not intended, was more brief than Peggy would have preferred), but repetition is the mother of successful missions. “If you locate Barnes, mark his position and withdraw. We will all converge back here and set up a plan.”
In the briefing, Tanner referred to Barnes as the Target, the Winter Soldier, or just the Soldier. He encouraged Peggy to do the same. Even in her own mind. He’s not the man you knew anymore. In fact, he’s not a man at all. He’s a weapon. Peggy nodded, smiled, and completely ignored Tanner’s order cloaked as advice. She won’t pretend she and Barnes ever got along. He was a cocky, flirtatious little shit and honestly, she had a hard time understanding what Steve saw in him. But he’s still a damn person, no matter what was done to him. And if she thinks of Barnes as a thing, if she lets her team think of him as a thing, what hope do they have of bringing Steve back?
“Do not try to engage Barnes alone.” Peggy gives Daniels a long, hard look. As the shortest member of the team, Daniels has a lot to prove, and she’s been making bad decisions all week in training to prove how tough she is. “He’s a better fighter, soldier and killer than you are. We take him on as a team or not at all.”
Daniels gives a sharp and short nod, and the others follow suit. They’re a good group, Peggy only wishes they’d had more time together. Their loyalties are still split between their old supervisors and her. They’re not like the Commandos who would have marched into Hell for Steve and afforded her the same loyalty after he was gone and the lack of him at the head of their unit nearly ate them all up from the inside.
“And if the shit hits the fan, and you have to discharge your weapon, remember no killshots; we’re taking them both alive.” Another nod from the team, this one a little more reluctant. Yet again, Peggy wishes for the Commandos. Or hell, any of her SHIELD agents. They may have disagreed with some of her calls, but if she gave the order, they damn well followed it. She’s not so sure now.
“Radio silence from now on. We don’t want to alert Barnes to our presence before we’re ready.” With a collective yes, ma’am, they disperse. There’s an opening in the fence and they climb through quietly before heading off to their assigned buildings. Peggy waits until they’re all out of sight before heading in herself. She leaves the combat helmet on the ground behind her, and her gun in her holster. Barnes needs to know she’s not a threat.
Buildings forty-six to forty-nine are empty, in building fifty, the upper floors are in such poor state there’s no way Barnes would’ve set up camp there. It’s the first floor or the basement and both of those come up clear. Building after building lights up green on the map on her device. Seems everyone’s search is coming up short. But they’re not even halfway through yet and dawn is fast approaching.
The moment Peggy steps over the threshold of building fifty one, she can tell that something is different. It looks as derelict as all the others, with paint flakes from the ceiling covering the floor, and the crumbling walls covered with graffiti. It has the same smell of mold and stale urine and eerie silence as all the other buildings. But there’s something-- Peggy can’t put her finger on what. But, her pulse picks up and her movements slow down. She puts each foot in front of the other with careful precision, each quiet crunch of the paint flakes beneath her boots making her pause and listen for any other noises.
There are none.
After clearing the first floor, Peggy makes her way upstairs with that same slow precision. Even her breathing has changed, it’s calm and slow, barely audible even in the quiet of building. The further she moves into the building, the more certain she becomes that what separates this building from the others is the difference of walking into an empty room and one that is occupied.
A long hallway of open doorways (the doors either open or gone) leads down to a single closed door. Peggy begins moving down the hall, her gun still holstered. On the left of her is a bathroom, the tiles falling off the walls, a bathtub turned upside down in the middle of the floor. A floorboard creaks behind her and she freezes, her heart suddenly caught in the base of her throat. She takes a deep, aching breath trying to swallow it down. The skin between her shoulderblades tightens even as she tries to force herself to relax. Slowly, slowly, she holds her arms out from her body, open palms facing up and out; she’s not going for a gun here.
Sure, the United Nations got the signatures they needed (well, most of them at any rate) and the new safety checks brought a renewed sense of security to the world. The U.S. Military gained unprecedented control of the remaining superheroes in the fold (sure, in theory, the UN panel rules over the deployment of any super-powered -- or technologically aided -- individual, but in practice, the Military’s running the show), but they lost Captain America.
As it turns out, the man behind the shield was as much a symbol as the uniform he wore. Steve Rogers -- the Brooklyn boy who hated bullies, the Super Soldier, the sickly omega turned Alpha's Alpha, the man out of time -- captured the imagination of the American people. Even his disgrace through the Accords and his subsequent disappearance did little to dim the public's faith in him. In fact, if General Ross has to read another New York Times article questioning the Accords referencing Captain Rogers' refusal to sign as evidence of their flaws, he may actually shoot someone. (Or perhaps order a drone strike on the New York Times editorial offices. As the days pass, that is beginning to feel more and more appealing.)
It becomes clear that Captain America (and Steve Rogers) needs to be brought back into the fold. The Accords have their poster boy in Tony Stark, but the Military need Steve Rogers' wide-eyed patriotism to lead the way. Except the Military can’t get Steve Rogers because Steve Rogers abandoned his country and his shield for one James Buchanan Barnes (aka the Winter Soldier). As it turns out, nothing the Military can offer (or threaten) can sway Steve Rogers in the face of his loyalty to his childhood friend. No matter what that friend has become.
In the endless meetings with army psychologists and profilers strategizing on how to bring Captain America back, one thing seems obvious; the death of Margaret “Peggy” Carter came at exactly the wrong time. Without her, Steve Rogers lost his moorings and now he’s cut adrift, his only anchor the friend he lost during the war. The time for ideals have come and gone, the man out of time needs a person to tie his anchor lines to; a country won’t be enough. Not when he’s gotten that tantalizing whiff of hope to recapture the past he thought he lost. (From what little they got out of the Winter Soldier before his very messy escape, the psychologists agree, the man who was Lieutenant Barnes is gone. But Captain Rogers can’t seem to accept that.)
If only Ms. Carter was still alive, she could have been a powerful pawn in the gamble for Captain Rogers’ loyalty. Certainly not the Queen she once was on the board, as the first Director of SHIELD, but pawns are easier to handle than Queens. The Alzheimer’s would be a problem, of course, but one that could be handled. In fact, one of the psychologists (a Dr. Roberts) thinks it may have worked in their favor.
Sharon Carter, the niece, is briefly considered and then discarded. Her work with the CIA makes getting to her difficult; for all the bullshit about inter-agency cooperation the CIA likes to spout they sure as hell don’t like sharing their agents. Besides, too many reports have her down as a Captain America collaborator during those hectic days of the first signings of the Accords and all the profilers agree she’s stubborn and idealistic in all the wrong ways. They need someone they can easily sway.
The solution, as so often seems to be the case, comes from the most unlikely of sources.
After the Fall of SHIELD many of their resources -- personnel, safehouses, technology -- were absorbed by the Military. It was an influx so vast, years later they are still working on cataloguing it all. Perhaps it should not have come as a surprise that absorbing the remains of two different clandestine operations (one hiding in plain sight within the other) with nine different layers of security clearance would be time consuming. What does come as a surprise is the lack of any kind of top-secret overview. It appears, the different compartments of SHIELD had no idea what the others were doing.
The archivists, the admin and the research and development staff all agree that sifting through the information (and the vast caches of technology) is like trying to build a one million piece puzzle. Except they’re missing the box and the pieces are hidden in about a thousand different places.
Jenna McDonald, assistant of the chief archivist says it’s more like a hundred fifty-thousand piece puzzles, but the pieces are all mixed together and each puzzle has at least five different people working on it, unbeknownst to each other. Oh, and someone has thrown away all the corner pieces. It is, she says, a total mess.
The seed to the Solution to the Military’s Steve Rogers Problem is born during Jenna McDonald’s lunch hour, which -- if you ask her -- is more like twenty minutes. The breakroom on the first sub-level is potentially the most depressing place on Earth with its oppressively brown walls and corduroy clad chairs that must hail from the 1970s. (It wouldn’t be so bad if there were windows. But there aren’t and the low-energy bulbs in the light fixtures give the space an almost dungeon-like feel.) But it’s either that or the cafeteria two floors and fifteen security checkpoints away and who has time for that?
“They kept everything,” Jenna complains to the table at large over her wilting salad from the grocery store down the road. She stabs a leaf of spinach and some ham with her plastic fork. Elizabeth Malone from the tech-team hums agreement from the head of the table where she’s decimating the lemon-herb chicken and rice she brought for her lunch today.
Mateo Rodriguez, who keeps the minutes for the endless Captain America Crisis meetings (documenting every idea, no matter how far-fetched), looks over from the coffee machine. Depressing or not, when the new coffee machines were installed, the best one went to the sub-level breakroom (which may or may not have something to do with the research and development team being on that same floor) and he’s got five mugs lined up and a short, hastily written post-it note with everyone’s order stuck to the machine itself.
“Like what?” he asks, raising his voice to be heard over the rattle of the beans for Dr. Coleman’s double-shot of espresso being ground.
“Like the blueprints for the first SHIELD headquarters. A compound which, I’ll have you know, hasn’t existed since the sixties,” Jenna says around her mouthful of salad. She swallows and waves her fork at Elizabeth. “Oh, and today, they tell me there’s a whole freezer full of the frozen eggs of every female Alpha field agent who served during the first decade of SHIELD.”
“Sorry, what?” Mateo turns fully from the coffee machine. Surely he misheard that.
“Oh, yeah,” Walter Shaw from Elizabeth’s team chimes in, hands wrapped around his giant mug of coffee. “Giant, clunky freezer from the sixties. Must’ve been high tech at the time. Proper dinosaur now.”
“It’s pretty interesting, actually,” Elizabeth says, closing the lid on her tupperware after a quick glance at her wristwatch. “SHIELD initiated the omega surrogacy program so the female Alpha agents could continue their work uninterrupted by the burden of childbirth.”
Walter nods sharply, his hair falling into his eyes. “Howard Stark actually pioneered oocyte cryopreservation about twenty years before it made it into mainstream medicine. Director Carter was the first to undergo the procedure to show that it was safe.”
“So,” Mateo switches the blue mug underneath the coffee machine drip to the chipped white mug -- double macchiato coming up for Mr. Brown, “you’re saying, technically, you could make a baby for the deceased Director Carter?”
“I doubt the eggs would still be viable after all this time,” Walter says. “But we could have a look at her DNA.”
“More than that,” Elizabeth says, tucking her tupperware container away in her lunchbox as she stands. ‘We could use the genetic material to make test-tube Alpha soldiers. It’d be an ethical grey-zone, but the donor’s dead, and with the Alpha population dwindling-- It’s something to think about.”
“I just want to know how to file them,” Jenna interjects, pushing her two-thirds empty bowl away. “In a batch like ‘Unfertilized Eggs, Alpha female’ or separate like ‘Unfertilized Eggs, Director Carter’?”
“Separate,” Elizabeth says with all the decisiveness of someone who has never worked with any kind of archiving in their life. “Then you can cross reference that to the mind-imprint file and label it all ‘build your own Director.’ You coming, Walt?”
Walter stands up hurriedly. He downs one last gulp of his coffee with a wince at the heat hitting the back of his throat. He sets the half empty mug down in the sink (no beverages allowed in the lab) and catches the confused look on Mateo’s face. He grins.
“When Director Carter was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the SHIELD higher-ups freaked. They were afraid important knowledge might be lost. So they did what any reasonable organization would do and performed a full mind scan. Memory, personality. Everything saved. Except, you know, there’s no way to access it without downloading it to a body, so--”
“Walt!” Elizabeth calls from the door.
“Sorry! Coming.” Walter shoots Mateo an apologetic smile before he hurries after Elizabeth.
“That’s messed up,” Mateo says to the room at large. Only the last mug left to go and then he can head back up to the meeting room just in time to catch the tail-end of their lunch.
“You haven’t even heard the half of it,” Jenna says with a sigh. Technically, she has another forty minutes for lunch. In actuality, her inbox had seventy-three unread emails before she left for lunch and fifty of them were marked urgent. She dumps what remains of her salad in the trash. “Remind me to tell you about the frozen corpses sometime.”
---
A week later, the daily Steve Rogers Crisis meetings have come to a standstill. The ideas being volleyed around become fewer and more repetitive. The frustration in the room is obvious. They’ve tried everything. The best and the brightest minds available to the Military have all been brought in for brainstorming sessions, floating idea after idea but never finding a viable solution.
“It all comes down to the personal connection,” Dr. Roberts says (for what might be hundredth time). “Without that, there’s no chance.”
“And it has to be a connection stronger than to that of Barnes, his childhood friend from the good old days. A little slice of home delivered with a side of murderous assassin.” Ms. Ramirez from the profiling unit reaches for her third cup of coffee, wishing it had a splash of something stronger. “We’ve been over this.”
“I still think, if we found him, we could send someone in. Build a relationship,” Mr. Brown argues (for probably the hundredth time as well).
“A new connection isn’t going to cut it,” Dr. Coleman says from the head of the table. “We’ve been over this too.”
“The man’s practically celibate. For what we know, he might still be a virgin. You telling me that if we send in some hot young omega he isn’t gonna--”
“Even if it did work,” Dr. Coleman interrupts Mr. Brown, “It would take too long to build a relationship like that into something substantial. The Captain’s loyalty has to be earned; he won’t just give it up to the first cute omega who smiles at him. We’ve all seen the man. Every omega in the world smiles at him.”
“I’m just saying, a bond would--”
“Expose our agent to him the instant it snaps into place and then he’d know everything they know.”
“Fine. What about one of the Avengers?” Mr. Brown offers, throwing the words down like a challenge.
“One of the Avengers? Which one?” Ms. Ramirez shoots back, taking up the challenge. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but we barely have anyone left. Rhodes can’t walk, Tony Stark failed spectacularly the first time around, and Romanoff’s in the wind.”
“It’s a shame about Carter--” Dr. Roberts says, taking a manila folder from one of the many stacks littered across the table. She flips it open and leafs through the pages absently.
“Wait, the old one or the niece?”
“The old one. We discounted the niece weeks ago.” Dr. Roberts closes the folder and pushes it away. There’s nothing in any of these that will help them. She knows. She’s read them all back to front and sideways already.
“Yes, yes. We all know. It’s a shame about Carter. She would’ve been perfect,” Mr. Brown sneers. “But Carter’s dead, so stop barking up that tree. There’s no way--”
Behind his computer, fingers poised against the keyboard, Mateo clears his throat. “Well, actually--”
---
Seven months after Steve Rogers went AWOL, Peggy Carter opens her eyes.
Amidst a sea of complicated equipment, Peggy blinks up at a white ceiling accompanied by a symphony of machines beeping steadily. The light hurts her eyes, sending sparks of pain shooting through her optical nerves to her temples and she squeezes her eyes shut. Her head feels stuffed with cotton candy. God, she’s getting too old for this. Waking up in the hospital with no memory of how you got there is for young people. (Or, she thinks with a pitch of horror, the very old. But she’s not there quite yet, is she?) She’s got field agents for this these days for crying out loud.
Laying completely still Peggy goes through the checklist she made for herself during the war, mentally cataloguing the sensory input from her body. It’s been a long time since since she last had to use it, but she still remembers it with startling clarity. Twitching her hand upwards, she feels a twinge of oddness and resistance. That would be the I.V. needle. Plastic tubes itch in her nostrils, that’s oxygen. Her throat feels sore and her careful, exploratory swallow catches hard enough for her to wince. There’s no tube there now, but she must’ve been intubated. Nine times out of ten, that means surgery. Her head feels strange, red and purple blotches spreading across her field of vision every time she opens her eyes. Head injury? Except her head doesn’t hurt. Nothing hurts. That’s odd-- Voices begin to filter in and halt her careful self-examination--
... think she’s waking up.
Increase the drip.
EKG is moving, we have active brainwaves.
Get the camera. Quick now.
Are you recording?
Doctor Hewlett is going to be pissed he missed this.
Did the integration take this time?
I guess we’re going to find out.
Moment of truth, people.
Something’s wrong.
Deep in her bones, Peggy can feel it. She has woken up on a morphine drip before, it feels nothing like this. Whatever drugs are in her system -- and there are some, there must be, she can feel it -- they’re like no analgesics she’s been on before. And she’s not in pain. Never has she woken up in a hospital bed without a stitch of pain somewhere, but beyond that-- The aches and pains of growing older (the creaking elbow, the aching hip, the dull throb at the small of her back -- all old friends by now) aren’t there either.
Memories are coming in fits and starts-- The doctor’s office. The Diagnosis, It’s only been three weeks since a woman ten years her junior told her that her mind is beginning to slip and that there is nothing to stop its descent. Only three weeks-- Unless it’s been longer. Something like a sob works its way up her throat. The research she did mentioned this. Moments of clarity amidst a sea of forgetting. The activity in the room which has been building to a crescendo suddenly ceases, like stepping through a tornado to the eye of the storm.
“Director Carter.” The voice is calm, comforting, as it emerges from the sudden hush, and Peggy can sense a presence looming over her. Peggy’s eyes snap open. The man’s features are shadowed, the bright light a shining halo around his silhouette. “Can you hear me?”
After another painful swallow, Peggy nods. Her brow furrows so deep it makes the back of her eyes ache. (Or maybe that’s just the light still.) The man’s face splits open in a wide grin, light glinting off his teeth.
“Welcome back.”
---
Over the course of the next five weeks, Peggy is briefed on Project ReGenesis as she learns to use the new body (identical to her own sixty-five years ago, right down to the scattered constellations of birthmarks on her left shoulder and the back of her left hip, but oddly lacking in the scars she’s spent a lifetime accumulating) they grew for her in a lab somewhere.
(ReGenesis. Such a bloody stupid name. There’s a slip of paper, right in the back of the project folder with the dictionary definition: “Merriam-Webster: Regenesis - new birth : renewal”. Peggy can see why they picked it -- especially since Project Rebirth was already taken by the Super Soldier Serum program -- but, it sounds like the title of one of those stupid action movies her daughter used to love so much growing up. And if they’re going by dictionary definitions here, she vastly prefers the Oxford one: “The fact or process of forming or being formed again”.)
Lieutenant Andrew Tanner from the Military Intelligence Unit is assigned as Peggy’s personal aide. He sits, patiently watching as her physical therapist helps her teach a body that has never moved an inch in its life walk, sit, and grasp things. As she picks up increasingly smaller objects (from a tennis ball down to a grape) he briefs her on the decades she’s missed. In his dry, toneless voice he tells the tale of the Fall of SHIELD as if it’s nothing but memorized talking points and not the crowning achievement of her life’s work going down in flames. When a grape bursts between her fingertips, she privately imagines that it’s his smug little face. (Petty, yes. But surprisingly satisfying.)
There was always a rivalry between the army and SHIELD. Part of it, no doubt, due to her. Back in the early days, those generals and admirals in their fancy uniforms thought she’d play ball. After all, the SSR had a long history with the military and Peggy was deployed with their men. Surprisingly, Peggy had no desire to become the military’s pawn. They never truly got over that. In the dull drone of Lieutenant Tanner’s history lessons, she can already hear those same assumptions. They made her, so she will work with them. Clearly, Lieutenant Tanner hasn’t read her profile.
Once Peggy has mastered walking and picking things up without knocking them over or breaking them, it’s time to relearn how to fight and fire her gun. They didn’t bring her back to sit behind a desk and carefully peel oranges; they want her in the field.
Relearning combat is painstakingly slow. They say you never forget how to ride a bike. Peggy can’t test the theory as the closest she gets to bike is the stationary training one in the gym, but if her skills with a gun are anything to go by, she’s definitely forgotten how to ride a bike. Or rather, this body has never learned and it seems the knowledge sits in the bones rather than in the brain. Her accuracy with her gun used to be top of the class, now she’s happy if she hits the target at all. As frustrating as it is, her mind knowing every last step to this dance her body keeps stumbling through (always five steps behind), at this point it’s only a matter of building muscle memory.
Over the pop-pop-pop of Peggy’s gun (each bullet hitting a little closer to the target), Tanner continues the never ending briefing. They’re on to the history of HYDRA now, and Tanner details every instance and way a snake slithered into her house under her watch. It would be better, she thinks, if he at least took some pleasure from tearing down her legacy. But it’s all the same dry, factual tone.
Three days after she hits her first bullseye Lieutenant Tanner hands her a stack of folders on their way from the gun range.
“This will be your team,” he says, gaze locked on the end of the hall.
“No, they will not.” Peggy stops and Tanner stops two steps later. A look of bewilderment crosses his face. He opens his mouth to argue and she drops the folders, unopened, into the nearest trash can. (Dramatic effect does come in so handy when making a point.) His mouth closes. Something like satisfaction flashes through Peggy as she watches his stricken face.
“Those were handpicked,” Tanner grits out.
“Tough.” Peggy keeps walking, leaving him staring after her. “I pick my own team,” she calls back at him. The words are final, even though Tanner doesn’t realize that yet.
The team Peggy picks -- after two weeks of relentless (if pointless) resistance from Tanner -- is a small strike team, easy to deploy, easy to move undetected, comprised entirely of betas. The Military favors Alpha soldiers, but Peggy has found betas to be better. Their noses un-attuned to the pheromones of both Alphas and omegas, they’re not as easily distracted and they don’t have the same flare-ups of territorial instincts as Alphas.
While Peggy spends her days gradually building her team as well as her muscle memory and her evenings doing her homework on HYDRA and the decades she’s missed, the search for Captain Rogers goes on. Surprising everyone, it’s not Steve Rogers they find first. A convenience store camera (illegally installed and hidden from plain view) picks up the Soldier buying a magazine and a pack of over-the-counter heat suppressants in Berlin. He’s got a hoodie and a baseball cap on, but the jaw line is unmistakeable. The Winter Soldier -- the ghost of the world of intelligence -- has been caught on camera.
The team dedicated to the retrieval of Steve Rogers flies into a frenzy. The experts all agree: Where Barnes is, they’ll find Rogers. When asked, Lieutenant Tanner makes it very clear that Peggy Carter isn’t ready for the field yet, nor is her team. It’s Ross who overrides him. Carter doesn’t have to be ready. She just has to show up and show her goddamn, five-million-dollar, face. It’s too good an opportunity to pass up.
Seventeen hours later, Peggy is in a helicopter touching down just outside of Berlin. Her team of five spreads out, moving through the trees like ghosts. It’s a ten mile hike to Barnes’ suspected hideout; they can’t risk Barnes hearing an engine or the sharp chop of the helicopter’s rotors. Discretion is the better part of valor. The pace is brisk: they have no time to waste. Dawn is only six hours away and they need the cover of darkness if they’re to pin Barnes down.
It feels good to be back in the field. Don’t get her wrong, being Director of SHIELD was a privilege and a gift. But it was a gift that came with paperwork, meetings, and always seeing the bigger picture. Boots on the ground, you have your orders, your gut and your team. Accomplish the mission parameters, stay alive, and bring everyone back home with you. Easy. Unlike, say, balancing the budget or approving department spending.
The mission this time is simple enough (if not easy): Locate Barnes, use him to find Steve and rescue them both from HYDRA’s clutches. Bring them back home and try to reverse whatever brainwashing has been used on either one of them. Of course, the both aspect has not been officially sanctioned. The military doesn’t care about Barnes. They only want Steve back.
Barnes has holed up in Kaserne Krampnitz, an old Nazi military base taken over by the Soviets at the end of WWII and then abandoned after the Wall came down. In the briefing room, photos of its former glory flashed across the screen interspersed with newer photos picturing its decay. Peggy can’t help but wonder if Barnes feels it, that odd wave of nostalgia for the war, like she does. Things were simpler back then. The enemy was the enemy and you shot to kill. Of course, if what they tell her is true, Barnes doesn’t remember the war. He doesn’t remember anything.
They stop just beyond the tall walls surrounding the sprawling complex. The grey of the concrete wall is broken by colorful graffiti. Not just cluttered signatures of miscreants past, but hauntingly beautiful art standing in stark contrast to the rusted barbed wire atop the wall.
The team gathers around Peggy, their faces dimly lit by the blueish glow of the small screens strapped to the inside of their left forearm (with the exception of left-handed Garcia, hers is strapped to her right arm). Technology sure has moved on from her day. The devices are all connected and anything one team member does can be seen instantly across all screens. Currently displayed is a map of the fifty odd buildings of the base. There are no details except for what could be discerned from satellite photos, the blueprints apparently lost to the ravages of time. (They sit somewhere, Peggy is sure, in a dusty filing cabinet in a dark basement waiting for Russia to decide to digitize them.) There’s too much ground for them to cover before dawn if they go as a team; they’ll have to split up.
“Holden, you take building one through nine. Daniels, ten to seventeen. Johnson, you and Hernandez split eighteen to thirty-five, Garcia, you’re on thirty six to forty five, I have the rest.” Peggy handpicked the best the Military had to offer for her team, they’re seasoned officers, and yet splitting up makes her stomach twist. Privately, she prays Barnes will be in one of her buildings. There’s no telling what will happen if someone else finds him first.
“When you clear a section, mark it green and move on.” They’ve been through this already, in their mission briefing (which, pun not intended, was more brief than Peggy would have preferred), but repetition is the mother of successful missions. “If you locate Barnes, mark his position and withdraw. We will all converge back here and set up a plan.”
In the briefing, Tanner referred to Barnes as the Target, the Winter Soldier, or just the Soldier. He encouraged Peggy to do the same. Even in her own mind. He’s not the man you knew anymore. In fact, he’s not a man at all. He’s a weapon. Peggy nodded, smiled, and completely ignored Tanner’s order cloaked as advice. She won’t pretend she and Barnes ever got along. He was a cocky, flirtatious little shit and honestly, she had a hard time understanding what Steve saw in him. But he’s still a damn person, no matter what was done to him. And if she thinks of Barnes as a thing, if she lets her team think of him as a thing, what hope do they have of bringing Steve back?
“Do not try to engage Barnes alone.” Peggy gives Daniels a long, hard look. As the shortest member of the team, Daniels has a lot to prove, and she’s been making bad decisions all week in training to prove how tough she is. “He’s a better fighter, soldier and killer than you are. We take him on as a team or not at all.”
Daniels gives a sharp and short nod, and the others follow suit. They’re a good group, Peggy only wishes they’d had more time together. Their loyalties are still split between their old supervisors and her. They’re not like the Commandos who would have marched into Hell for Steve and afforded her the same loyalty after he was gone and the lack of him at the head of their unit nearly ate them all up from the inside.
“And if the shit hits the fan, and you have to discharge your weapon, remember no killshots; we’re taking them both alive.” Another nod from the team, this one a little more reluctant. Yet again, Peggy wishes for the Commandos. Or hell, any of her SHIELD agents. They may have disagreed with some of her calls, but if she gave the order, they damn well followed it. She’s not so sure now.
“Radio silence from now on. We don’t want to alert Barnes to our presence before we’re ready.” With a collective yes, ma’am, they disperse. There’s an opening in the fence and they climb through quietly before heading off to their assigned buildings. Peggy waits until they’re all out of sight before heading in herself. She leaves the combat helmet on the ground behind her, and her gun in her holster. Barnes needs to know she’s not a threat.
Buildings forty-six to forty-nine are empty, in building fifty, the upper floors are in such poor state there’s no way Barnes would’ve set up camp there. It’s the first floor or the basement and both of those come up clear. Building after building lights up green on the map on her device. Seems everyone’s search is coming up short. But they’re not even halfway through yet and dawn is fast approaching.
The moment Peggy steps over the threshold of building fifty one, she can tell that something is different. It looks as derelict as all the others, with paint flakes from the ceiling covering the floor, and the crumbling walls covered with graffiti. It has the same smell of mold and stale urine and eerie silence as all the other buildings. But there’s something-- Peggy can’t put her finger on what. But, her pulse picks up and her movements slow down. She puts each foot in front of the other with careful precision, each quiet crunch of the paint flakes beneath her boots making her pause and listen for any other noises.
There are none.
After clearing the first floor, Peggy makes her way upstairs with that same slow precision. Even her breathing has changed, it’s calm and slow, barely audible even in the quiet of building. The further she moves into the building, the more certain she becomes that what separates this building from the others is the difference of walking into an empty room and one that is occupied.
A long hallway of open doorways (the doors either open or gone) leads down to a single closed door. Peggy begins moving down the hall, her gun still holstered. On the left of her is a bathroom, the tiles falling off the walls, a bathtub turned upside down in the middle of the floor. A floorboard creaks behind her and she freezes, her heart suddenly caught in the base of her throat. She takes a deep, aching breath trying to swallow it down. The skin between her shoulderblades tightens even as she tries to force herself to relax. Slowly, slowly, she holds her arms out from her body, open palms facing up and out; she’s not going for a gun here.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-06 05:21 am (UTC)Bucky hadn't always been an omega – HYDRA bolted that on somehow, turned a normal man into whatever he was these days, and for the most part, it helped keep him submissive with the programming doing the rest.
Just like his arm, it is what is it. He can't take it back.
While Steve's off getting supplies – a specific list he made damn sure is too long for a day trip – Bucky crosses his finger that the worst of his heat will come and go and he can go back to whatever stands as normal for him these days. It isn't fun if he toughs it out. But he's done it before and truth is, he doesn't want to set Steve off again with his pheromones and leaving them open to attack as they test each other's endurance. Back in the HYDRA days it was simple, clear cut: there were two standing orders with a heat, with conditioning strong enough that even an omega's urges couldn't always break through. If the Winter Soldier was out in the field, he was authorized to let anyone take him – Alpha, Beta; it didn't matter so long as the heat was taken care of...and he made sure whoever happily screwed the living daylights out of him disappeared after. Back at HYDRA”s facilities, it was different. Last thing they wanted was a sexed-up super soldier killing anyone who dropped their pants or hiked up their skirt for him. The favorite method seemed to be drug cocktails, able to curb the heat long enough that he could be put into cryo. One handler seemed to have it out for him: he used to put him in Iso instead, let the Soldier sweat and moan it out and called it “character building” and it's Jacob Gray that Bucky's thinking about as he ignores that familiar warning ache in his bones. The way he can feel his underwear moist already with precum, cheeks flushing. Waiting it out isn't a party but it isn't impossible.
It is impossible to ignore the intruders, though.
Bucky watches them, debates a preemptive strike. Opts to wait. HYDRA conditioning demands he follow protocol and pick one or two to take care of the heat; cull the rest.
He isn't proud to admit it's...hard to stomp down the urge. It feels more real than anything, more real even than his memories of Steve back in Brooklyn, and he has to remember to pop the heat suppressor's cap and down one of the pills as he crouches near what used to be a window. It's chalky and while it wasn't cheap, he knows this won't do much to curb the heat – not with his amped up metabolism. At most Bucky expects to get a clear head long enough to deal with the immediate threat.
The problem is he can tell even from here that they brought an Alpha. This one's a woman, her head turned away, face obscured by shadow as she ducks into one of the buildings and the team starts a sweep of the place that's more methodical than he'd like. The others he's confident he can deal with even with the time limit on the heat suppressor. The Alpha, though. It's only because of the heat suppressor that Bucky hasn't already prostrated himself on the ground to wait for her. What he knows is she's the leader and if he can get control of her, maybe he can find out how many are on the way. If they have Steve. She can probably smell him even if she doesn't know exactly where he is. Keeping that in mind, he waits a few minutes to make sure the leader has time to get inside, away from her team, but the woman has her hands already up like she knows he's there even as Bucky eases out with all the silence HYDRA's implanted into his very being. Like the Alpha, he hasn't drawn in his gun: not because he necessarily plans to take her alive, but because the noise will bring her buddies running. He wants this quiet. Intimate. The knife in his hand feels familiar, even comforting. Bucky's eyes glitter from under his ratty baseball cap.
“Turn; slow, easy. Name, rank, and how many of you are out there. I'll know if you're lying.”
Bucky's grip tightens on the knife hilt as his mouth thins and stares at the small of her back, eyes flicking up to the place where the Alpha's shoulder blades meet. There's something about the woman that he wants to say looks familiar, something he can't place his finger on. The stance, maybe, the way she shifts her weight from foot to foot. That bathroom to the side would be the place best to take her down before he can't control the heat, even now brimming under the surface like water about to come to a boil.
no subject
Date: 2016-10-09 01:26 am (UTC)The voice is familiar and it isn’t. How much that has to do with his transformation and how much is due to the failures of human memory, Peggy has no idea. It’s not like with Steve. Peggy would know every curve of his face, the smallest inflection of his voice. It was war, but some things you remember. With memories all she had to keep her warm at night after the war, Peggy took them out and replayed them over and over again until they were etched against the back of her eyelids, as irrevocably part of her as the scars littered across her skin. Now the scars are gone, but the memories remain. Barnes, however, was never more than a blip on her radar: a satellite orbiting the bright shining star that was Steve.
It wasn’t part of the order, but Peggy’s hands slowly raise until they’re level with her shoulders, her gaze locked on the closed door at the end of the hall in front of her. Look how harmless she is. (Except now, she can see the view screen strapped to her lower arm out of the corner of her eye and track the movements of her team.) The turn is slow, deliberate, her boots scraping against the dusty floor, until she’s facing him.
Barnes isn’t quite what she was expecting. Gone is the clean cut, cocky boy who used to flirt with everything that moved. She knew that much, of course, the briefings provided a multitude of footage of the Winter Soldier in action. (Most of it captured during the Fall of SHIELD.) But the man standing in front of her looks nothing like that. The footage showed a weapon. But gone is the armor, the exposed metal arm, the mask, the war paint (was it someone’s job to paint it on him? she can’t help but wonder, or did he start every mission by strapping himself into his armor and applying the dark streaks around his eyes?) and in front of Peggy stands a man she wouldn’t look at twice if she passed him on the street. A worn baseball cap is pressed down over long and tangled hair, his eyes and the knife cradled in his hand both glint in the dark. There’s that rush of adrenaline she missed so much when she retired from the field, the sudden and intense clarity that only comes when her life rests on the edge of a blade.
“Peggy Carter,” she states, voice loud and clear in the darkness, eyes locked on his face to see if her name draws a spark of recognition. “Well. Margaret, technically.” Her nose itches. There’s something about Barnes that’s new--
The pieces begin to click together, spinning faster and faster in Peggy’s head. The strange feeling when she crossed the threshold; the sudden knowledge someone was behind her (was it a noise at all or just her brain translating what her nose already knew?); Tanner’s adamant insistence on an all Alpha team. The Winter Soldier -- Bucky goddamn Barnes -- is an omega.
Bloody Tanner. Detail oriented little bastard couldn’t have mentioned that somehow, somewhere down the line, someone altered Barnes’ hormonal composition from beta to omega? Peggy’s never heard of such a procedure. But, if Steve Rogers could step out of the Vita-Ray Chamber with a new set of pheromones to go with his brand new and improved body, anything seems possible.
Now that they’re standing face to face, the scent of Barnes is thick, a damn punch to the gut. Something about it is wrong. Not by much, but it’s a little off. Like there’s a chemical quality to it. A dampener? Or is it the result of a manufactured omega? A residual side effect of whatever drug they pumped him full of to get him to this state?
“Major, these days. The Army is ever so fond of their ranks.” Though her tone is light, Peggy’s eyes are locked on Barnes’ face, watching him warily like she might a wolf advancing on her position. Body still, breathing slow and easy, her mind ticks away quick, quick, quick, evaluating the situation from what little information she has.
Either Barnes is bluffing, or he’s already seen the team. (Peggy should have known Barnes would keep a watch of the perimeter at night. They should’ve come during the day. He wouldn’t have expected them to move on him in broad daylight.) If he’s seen them, it’s no accident he came after her first. Now, question remains if he recognized her or if he’s here because she’s the only Alpha on the team.
“There’s six of us, but you knew that. Didn’t you?” Slowly, slowly Peggy’s hand begin to sink down. “James Buchanan Barnes,” she says softly, brows pulling together in a soft frown. “What have they done to you?”
no subject
Date: 2016-10-16 04:43 am (UTC)Back during the war, Bucky hadn't really noticed that Peggy Carter was an Alpha. He'd suspected, sure, and guys talked - gossip had a way of going down the line and jumping across the ocean. Mostly he'd thought about flirting with her and even then, he hadn't exactly put his heart into it. Hard to after he’d spent weeks drooling on Zola’s table. It isn't like now, where he can't stop himself from noticing all the Alpha tells he missed, his breathing quickening in response as he sucks in a sharp breath and wishes he hadn't.
Everything aches, the pull in his chest and his crotch just as real as it felt back at HYDRA. It doesn’t care who Peggy’s with or how she got here.
“I can count,” Bucky’s voice is tight as he maintains a stranglehold on it, hoping it doesn’t tremble with need and betray him even if he’s sure his scent is already doing that just fine on its own. How Peggy’s here, very not dead and nothing like the old woman she was supposed to be, is beyond him. Frankly he doesn’t care. His eyes do that quick, almost casual once-over even though he can see she’s armed and she holds herself like she can handle herself in a fight. “Probably not much different than what they did to you,” he throws the ball back in Peggy’s court, but the truth is he’s stalling, and now he wishes he hadn’t sent Steve on that supply run because he has no idea how long he can hold off the urge to start stripping. “I could kill you before the others get here.”
He lays it on the table, hopes that Peggy takes the threat seriously even though he has a feeling she’s probably picked up on the crappy heat suppressors trying and failing to stomp down a super soldier’s metabolism. Gun would’ve been better just so he doesn’t risk finding any excuse – any excuse – to get close to an Alpha. She was beautiful before, when he was normal. Now that he’s an omega, fighting a losing battle with his heat, and he thinks she’s the most gorgeous thing on the whole damn planet.
Aware that time isn’t on his side, Bucky steps forward, grip on his knife still tight, other hand balled into a fist, jaw set and everything in his body language screams that he’s on edge. If this wasn’t Peggy...well, he probably would’ve just let another Alpha take him right then and there, and slit their throat once the heat was satisfied. But this is Peggy Carter and he knows how Steve felt – still feels – about the woman and maybe he’s showing weakness now, giving an enemy operative an out.
“Call off your operatives.”
He passes before one of the dusty windows that’s somehow remained intact over the years, with enough light penetrating through the grime showing how he can’t hide the too-shiny quality to his eyes, the way his pupils have blown out as if every sense is on high alert and focused like a laser on Peggy.