Chapter One: Steve
"without becoming one"
"We are a go. Establishing radio silence now."
Steve shifted his weight from foot to foot as he reached up to switch his hidden com to a secure, muted channel, already missing Natasha's presence in his ear. He hated undercover work, but there were so few people that they could trust now with S.H.I.E.L.D gone that more often than not they had to run down leads on Bucky personally. Still, there had been plenty of time for her to brief him on the plane ride, so at least he knew his part.
As Natasha had instructed, Steve waited for a count of five before taking a deep breath and beginning his walk, turning the corner and making his way toward the entrance of the impressively modern building as casually as he could. He didn't understand the appeal of modern banks, really. Steve's idea of a bank was a solid fortress built of brick and metal, with a large vault door to intimidate any potential thieves. Buildings like this – sleek and bright and more like offices than anything else – struck him as incredibly flimsy.
Then again, the things worth keeping under lock and key had changed since his day. Whereas when he was a kid people put gold or jewels or cash in physical vaults, nowadays the real treasures, Natasha and Sam assured him, had mostly gone digital. This particular bank was apparently a cutting-edge outfit with a huge ultra-secure database housed alongside the more traditional bank accounts and lockboxes.
Steve spotted Natasha a few paces closer to the entrance than him, coming from the opposite way. She was dressed in a smart pantsuit and carrying a huge purse on her shoulder, sunglasses askew on her head as she fumbled around inside of it. Steve realized she wasn't going to look up in time to avoid running straight into the door, so he took the hint to jog ahead and open it for her.
"Oh, thanks," Natasha said politely, eyes absently scanning him without a hint of recognition showing on her face. She almost immediately went back to digging through her bag. Steve nodded at her, hoping the same vaguely polite look was on his face, and kept moving toward the line for the tellers.
There was a portly old security guard sitting at a little desk just inside the door. "Looking for your sunglasses, miss?" the man called to Natasha just as Steve passed him. The man was gray-haired, with a friendly, wrinkled face. He was probably just for show, as most of the building's security was supposedly high-tech enough to function automatically. Still, Steve did make a mental note of the gun on the man's hip.
Steve couldn't look back without seeming too interested, but he heard Natasha make a vague affirmative noise, and then an "oh!"
"Thank you so much!" he heard her say, clearly turning on the charm. The guard chuckled and didn't ask to look inside her bag.
Scratch office building – Steve thought that on the inside this bank looked more like a fancy hotel than anything else. Anyone walking in was greeted by a wide open, marble-embellished lobby stretching between the entrance and the teller windows, several plush seating areas with artwork, indoor plants, and desks dotting the floor at intervals widely spaced enough to give the illusion of privacy. Closed-off offices with frosted glass doors lined the walls to the left and right between decorative architectural columns, a pattern repeated on the floor above that could be glimpsed beyond the railings of the balcony hallways overlooking the lobby. There were also several hallways leading off into the back of the building, concealing in the distance the entrances to what were, according to the blueprints he and Natasha had studied, the actual secure storage areas of the bank.
There were a number of people in at the moment – about twelve customers, with a couple of bank employees at the teller windows on the main floor and who knew how many employees in those semi-visible offices, Steve noticed with some dismay. Natasha would probably tell him that it was good camouflage, having a crowd to blend into, but Steve didn't like dealing with so many variables in enemy territory. Though in the months since the incident in DC, most of the Hydra personnel at the bank appeared to have vanished, they couldn't be one hundred percent sure everyone still working here were the innocent people hired to give the institution its false legitimacy. Well, except for Natasha's contact, a tech guy that had been embedded as a teller here back before everything had happened, a (rightly, as it turned out) paranoid Fury positioning him personally to investigate the institution's shady financial dealings. Natasha wouldn't have called this mission if she hadn't completely vetted her intel.
The plan was to meet up with Natasha's contact on the teller floor, where he would then lead them down to Sub-Level Four, the only point in the building besides the bank director's personal office to have access to the secure database. Once there, they would retrieve as much data from the Hydra files as they could without being detected, and then hopefully leave through the front door as smoothly as they'd come in, without alerting any potential leftover Hydra spies that they were ever there.
According to Natasha's contact, the bank was severely understaffed today due to a nasty flu outbreak – there were only two tellers scheduled to work the floor, so Steve and Natasha got in line one right after another to guarantee that one of them would be called to see him without it seeming choreographed. The person that was called to the other teller was to stall for as long as possible with inquiries about opening an account to give the pair their privacy.
It seemed like a simple enough mission on paper. Then again, Steve knew better than to trust that meant anything in the real world.
John Randall resisted the urge to check his watch again. He knew what time it was, he knew what time Agent Romanoff would be there (two minutes to go) and the nervous tick would just give him away, which would be unacceptable. Enough had already gone wrong today.
It was all Brenda's fault. She'd gotten sick just like many other people in the office had after he'd added that contaminant to their coffee machine. She had said yesterday that she wouldn't be in today, meaning it would have been just him and his overworked, easily-distracted supervisor on this shift. But there Brenda was, picking up the extra hours despite her hacking and wheezing and sniffling and leaking. All because she was saving up for a vacation to the Bahamas.
John wished he was in the Bahamas. Good God, he could go for a mai tai and a nap on the beach right about now.
There was Romanoff getting into the back of the short line with Rogers. John counted the number of customers ahead of them and tried to do some quick mental math to estimate at which windows they'd end up.
Three, two, one…
"May I help the next customer?"
An unfamiliar civilian man in his mid-forties, accompanied by a teenage girl (that John could only hope was his daughter) approached the window.
…Damn.
"I'm here to access my safety deposit box." The man rested his hands up on the counter, tapping his fingers impatiently. The daughter – about fifteen or sixteen, if John had to guess – shifted the weight of her backpack impatiently and picked at her ragged, brightly painted fingernails, looking antsy and distracted. Probably bored to be running errands with her father, if John had to guess. John thought about snorkeling with tropical fish to keep his customer service smile from turning into a frustrated grimace as first Romanoff and then Rogers were called to the other windows in short order.
"What account, sir?" John asked, taking down the man's information mechanically as he watched Rogers end up in front of Brenda and Romanoff get stuck with his supervisor Deborah.
"And may I see your identification, sir?" he asked, deciding that lighting his tropical beach scented candle would be the thing to do as soon as he got home from this miserably botched day.
"Oh, I see that your safety deposit box is on Sub-Level Four," John said once the account information came up. "Excuse me for one moment, sir. I'll have to have my supervisor step in as soon as she's finished helping her client, as she is the only available person right now cleared for that particular level." Officially, John didn't have access to the secure database, so he had to keep his cover until he could somehow pull one of Fury's agents aside–
"Well, how long is this going to take?" Well, he got snippy quick. John Randall took a deep breath and resisted the urge to check his watch.
As John Randall stepped away from his station to alert his supervisor Deborah that she was needed as soon as she was available, a loud sneeze echoed through the large room, quickly followed by six others in rapid succession. Most people turned to look at the cause of the commotion – a red-nosed, runny-eyed, pale and clammy teller whose name tag labeled her as "Brenda."
"Bless you, ma'am," said the customer at her window, a polite, if slightly pained, smile on his face.
Most of the other customers looked away, quickly bored or disgusted. But the girl at John Randall's window tugged on her father's sleeve, eyes widening with recognition of the face that had been all over the news – and more importantly for her, the internet. "Dad, is that–"
Her father looked over to where the large blond man was stammering his way through an interaction with the now coughing teller. His eyes narrowed, jaw going tense. Though he had never met the man in person, he recognized Captain America as well. "Peanut. Go offer that poor woman a tissue," he said, signaling with his hand like he was swatting a fly.
The girl started a bit. "…Really?" she asked, face pinched with nerves.
"Really," her father replied, voice going hard.
The girl's eyes widened and she quickly nodded. "Right." The teenager shrugged out of her backpack and passed it to her father before squaring her shoulders and making a beeline for the sick teller, her nervous energy putting a bounce in her step as she cut in front of Captain America.
"Oh my gosh, are you okay?" the girl asked, voice tight and high. "S'cuse me," she tossed over her shoulder at the Captain as offered the woman a packet of tissues. "Here, do you need one of these? Here you go. I've got more–"
"Uh–" Captain America began, but the girl cut him off again, as bubbly as she dared, just slightly too loud, and – most importantly – distracting.
"Sorry to interrupt, just – what's your name?" the teenager asked the sniffling woman, the note of sympathy in her voice strong enough to coax a response.
"Brenda."
"–Brenda, should you be working? No offence, but you seem really sick."
"I'm okay–" the woman behind the counter protested weakly, only to be interrupted by another deep coughing fit that set her eyes to tearing up.
The teenager let Brenda's hacking peter out in its own time, keeping a surreptitious eye on the Captain to ensure that he was still watching the exchange instead of her father. "Brenda, sweetie, you owe it to yourself to be honest about what you need."
Brenda's face reddened, then crumbled as she began wail. "I'm sorry! I'm trying. But I'm just so tired, and full of snot with this stupid flu going around and a bunch of people just up and quit without notice a little while ago so we're understaffed and– "
"Okay, whoa–" the blond man behind the girl interjected, clearly panicking at the sight of the sick, exhausted woman bursting into tears, holding up his hands in surrender and beginning to look around for help. The girl's smile dropped – she had to get back on track, make Brenda stop crying.
"Oh, honey!" the girl interrupted between hiccups and coughs, "you should probably go home."
"But they need me, and I have to finish with–"
"Of course! But you have to promise me – hey! Look at me!" Brenda startled a bit at the forceful interjection, but the girl couldn't think of any other way to cover her demand for Captain America's attention, so she just barreled on, "…promise me that no matter what, no matter how understaffed they are, no matter what they think of you leaving, no matter how furious your boss may be, no matter how–"
"Seriously?" the Captain sighed behind her, and she was losing his attention, her father was going to be so disappointed–
"Gun!"
Everyone in the building flinched, and turned to find the source of the sudden shout. The chubby, silver-haired security guard was on his feet, eyes wide with alarm, reaching for his sidearm, when–
Three sharp gunshots cracked the air, and three pools of red bloomed on the chest of the old man's white uniform shirt. He fell to the ground.
A heartbeat passed, and then all hell broke loose.
One of the tellers must have hit the alarm, because there was a sudden clang as security doors slammed shut over all the building's exits. Some people screamed, some took off blindly running, some dropped and huddled behind furniture. In the chaos, Steve and Natasha whirled to find the shooter. Natasha reached quickly into her large bag, Steve gathered himself to charge–
A deafening screech rang out, the sound wave hitting Steve like a physical blow, lifting him off of his feet and throwing him into Natasha, both of them flung several feet backward before crashing to the ground and rolling haphazardly to a skidding stop several feet away from each other on the marble floor.
Steve attempted to gather his bearings to stand and face the threat, but his ears were ringing, a high, constant, needling tone as his vision wobbled dangerously in front of his eyes. He shook his head frantically, ignoring the dull pain the motion brought, willing sound to come back into the world.
Slowly, it did – distorted and soft, like he was underwater.
"Everybody on the ground!"
A shape came close and loomed over him – the image sharpened and softened periodically, like a camera that wouldn't quite focus. A man, mid-forties – the shooter, the shooter, he–
The gunman leaned down and struck Captain America hard across the head with the butt of his pistol. Under normal circumstances the blow wouldn't have phased the super soldier, but now it set his head to ringing all over again. Steve's vision spun and darkened as he choked down a sudden wave of nausea.
"Head count, Peanut!" the shooter boomed, a confident, energized smile splitting his face as he handed the teenage girl a gun of her own out of the school bag he carried. The girl took it with a grimace but obediently moved around the room to gather their new hostages.
"Now, I don't have to tell you people that nobody leaves until I get what I want, do I?" the gunman asked, sitting down on one of the plush chairs in the middle of the floor and putting his feet up on a polished glass table. "Don't make the mistake of thinking I only have this," he gestured with his gun almost lazily, "to use on you." He glanced over at where Captain America was still shakily trying to get to his feet and chuckled.
"He said nobody leaves!" the girl barked, moving around a doorframe and entering the teller's side of the windows to usher them out onto the main floor.
"Hey! Stay down!" the girl shouted at Steve, who had just managed to get to one knee. His head was still fuzzy, but the ringing was mostly a dull background tone and his vision was no longer spinning. He caught sight of Natasha, her small, previously-concealed gun in her hand, crouched behind a desk near the entrance to one of the back hallways, out of the line of sight of the shooter or the girl. Natasha held a finger to her lips, then motioned that she was going to make a break for it. Smart move – better to have an ally in play free in the building than try to pick a firefight with someone who had powers they didn't understand. Steve tried to make his eyes focus on the shooter so that the hostile pair wouldn't follow his gaze to her.
"Listen, listen!" Steve said, putting as much authority into his voice as he could muster while he still kind of wanted to throw up. "I don't know who you are… I don't – I don't know what you want. But these people," Steve gestured vaguely at the people who had been shepherded into the center of the room – away from Natasha. "They aren't a part of whatever this is. They don't have to get hurt."
"That's up to you then, isn't it?" said the shooter, smiling in a bland, utterly comfortable way, getting up to amble around the room. He weaved, unconcerned, between the crouched and whimpering civilians. "Peanut. Let's let Captain America prove how serious he is about cooperating with us and keeping these nice people safe. You– " the shooter suddenly reached down and yanked at Brenda's arm, forcing her to stand with a pained cry, "–you minions don't have access to level four? But do you have access to the head boss's office?"
"I can't – We don't – They – They don't give us–" Brenda stammered through panicked breaths.
The shooter began to look annoyed. "You're doing a terrible job of bargaining for your life, Brenda," he said, bringing his gun up to press under her jaw.
Brenda hiccupped out a squeak of fear. "I – I–"
"Answer him!" the girl shouted from across the room, startling everyone but her father, whose smile only widened.
John Randall closed his eyes and cursed Brenda's Caribbean vacation aspirations. "I can! I have access," he said, trying to remember the talk he'd had with Fury about how he was the right man for this job, even if he was just a nerdy tech guy – about how he was smart, and brave, and how he had the right stuff. How he was serving a greater purpose, and how Fury trusted him to get to the truth.
With guns pointed at his face, John felt like that talk had happened to someone else. But as he watched Brenda cry, he said anyway, voice only shaking a little: "I can get you into the database."
The shooter paused, biting his lip and assessing. Then, he broke into another energized grin. "Good man! You should thank him, you know," the gunman admonished Brenda, throwing her back down to the floor, "that guy just borrowed you some time."
"How much longer?" demanded the gunman, tapping his fingers quickly on the arms of the fancy desk chair in the bank director's lavish office, which had an elaborately unnecessary balcony overlooking the foyer below, where most of the hostages – Captain America included – still waited.
"A few minutes!" John Randall answered, voice high and stressed. Thoughts of mai tais and massages were not soothing enough to make him sound anywhere near calm. "Maybe more?! Look, y-you're asking me to download a huge amount of data to you and then scrub it from our systems! Do you have any idea–"
"Inhuman stuff gets priority, even if you have to scrub everything else before you copy it." John nodded his head frantically to show that he understood, not liking the agitation in the shooter's voice or the way he appeared to be getting twitchy.
"No moving!" John flinched at the yell from downstairs, where the terrifying teenage girl was keeping the other hostages at gunpoint.
The shooter grinned at John's jump. "Give me another head count, Peanut," he called over the balcony railing, before leaning back in the fancy chair. "Tick tock, tick tock, Mr. Randall."
A minute went by; some progress was made.
Then, panicked, from downstairs: "Where's the woman?"
The shooter furrowed his brown and hurried to look over the balcony railing. "What woman?" he called down.
"The boss woman," the daughter called back up, "the one that can get us to level four. She's not here anymore!"
The shooter's face spasmed into a grimace. "Go find her. Give us a shout if there's any trouble." He held the gun over the railing conspicuously, "and everybody down there remember that you're all just fish in a barrel to me."
Natasha gingerly made her way forward, gun out, mindful of any additional hostiles that may be in play. The bank floor shift supervisor, a woman with curly, graying hair whose name tag said was "Deborah," followed close behind at Natasha's signal. Once she was sure they were out of earshot of the powered shooter and his daughter, Natasha turned to the older woman. "Ma'am, help will be on the way soon, but right now, for the safety of everyone in the building and for the sake of national security, I need access to your security credentials."
Deborah looked taken aback by the request, but then she drooped with relief. "We're going to be alright aren't we? These back halls are like a maze – they won't find us here!"
"Ma'am, I–" Natasha cut herself off abruptly, straining to hear what she thought might have been the sound of approaching footsteps.
"Is everything alright?" Natasha held up a hand to silence the woman. …There. Faintly, barely audible – someone very stealthy was sneaking around back here with them.
Natasha leaned into Deborah's ear and whispered as softly as she could: "We need to be quick. Is there a secure place you can get to? An office that locks?"
"Yes, you need a keycard to get into these offices–" Deborah's answering whisper was harsh and carrying, and Natasha put a hand over her mouth.
"Get in one and lock the door behind you," she instructed the shocked woman. "Don't come out until law enforcement gives you the all clear."
Wide-eyed, Deborah nodded and scurried to the nearest doorway, swiping her key card and then tossing it to Natasha as she slipped inside the door. Natasha caught it easily in the hand that wasn't holding the gun and hurried forward on near-silent feet, determined to catch whoever was back here with her by surprise.
In the end, they caught each other by surprise.
Natasha had the hostile right where she wanted them – trapped in a long hallway with few intersections to dart into, which was the best she could do for a kill box in this building. She raised her gun and darted out of hiding, catching him in her sights–
For half a heartbeat she didn't recognize the person in front of her. The ratty clothing, scraggly beard, and the greasy hair didn't match the visual of anyone she'd seen in the building so far, and he had looked so different – almost inhumanly blank – the last time they had crossed paths. But there stood James Buchanan Barnes, eyes wide and desperate, tense as a deer in headlights.
She noticed his eyes flick to the side, toward an exit. Flight over fight for now. Good. But not great. Natasha's mind raced, suggesting and discarding what to say to him almost instantaneously. She didn't know his mind, she didn't know what was left of it, didn't know what he needed to hear to–
"Hey!" Natasha recognized the voice of the shooter's daughter and deemed her a more immediate threat than the man who looked like he'd rather bolt than throw a punch. She spun and pointed her gun at the girl, but just before she had the shot–
A deafening screech split the air, the sound wave hitting Natasha like a wall of bricks, throwing her backwards and slamming her into an actual wall.
"How much longer?" the man with the gun growled over his shoulder from his perch. He was leaned over the balcony railing to watch the hostages huddled in the center of the floor below, but it was clear he was beginning to get twitchy the longer his partner was gone.
Steve had the wrong angle to see the man that had been pulled up to the office to work the computers, the desk too far back from the railing to be in line of sight. "It's almost…"
"I've noticed you've stopped typing," snapped the gunman, turning and leaning his back along the balcony railing to face the man at the desk. Steve tensed, head whipping around in the instant of privacy to assess his options. The external doors looked to be bolted shut, and the offices had electronic locks that required keycards he didn't have. There were too many civilians to get them all out of the line of fire before the gunman could take out at least a few, and–
"M-My part is done," the trembling voice of the computer expert rang out in the otherwise quiet lobby. "Everything's running on its own now. All that's left is to wait for it to finish."
"Excellent," declared the shooter, who swung his gun back from over the balcony railing to point at the hostage. Before Steve could even shout, the gunman had fired.
In the foyer, people screamed.
Steve reacted as if the gunshot had been a starter's pistol, lunching forward into a dead sprint and kicking off of a desk to leap toward the railing of the balcony, which he caught and hauled himself over in a smooth movement. The shooter had time to whip his head around in Steve's direction, but not time to dodge the full-body tackle.
The shooter let out a yell as he hit the ground, gun skidding way as he lost his grip. Steve was on him, get him into a hold, ready to–"
A piercing shriek and a wave of percussive force hit Steve totally off guard and sent him crashing back over the balcony and sprawling on the ground.
"Dad, are you okay?" Steve heard from the bottom of the ocean, stretched and distorted and ringing all at once.
"Glad you're back, Peanut," came the twisted reply.
Steve jerked when someone touched his shoulder, but he looked up and managed to focus his eyesight enough to place Natasha. Once she was sure he wouldn't fight her, she began to pull him to his feet, staggering toward the hallway entrance from which she'd just come.
"Everybody back in your goddamn places!" the gunman shouted down to the hostages, out of breath and clearly off balance. But Steve and Natasha were already gone.
They stumbled through the halls together, leaning on each other, Steve blindly following Natasha through the twists and turns. Finally, the came to an area she must have deemed safe enough, because she pulled a keycard and ushered them into a dark personal office to take a breather.
"Have you been in contact with anyone outside?" Steve asked as soon as his ears stopped ringing enough to hear Natasha's low response.
"No," she huffed, slumping to the ground and attempting to feel along her lower leg to find out what exactly what had been damaged by that last blast before the gunshot had distracted the girl. "But we missed our check in so they should be cutting their way through the perimeter lockdown by now. I didn't manage to access the database before Screech over there found me. Thanks for warning me, by the way."
Steve huffed a laugh, cracking his jaw to try and get his eardrums to pop and relieve some of the pressure still ringing around in there. "My coms were fried." They blew during the initial sonic attack, as best as Steve could remember.
Natasha gripped her toes and attempted to manually rotate her ankle, growling under her breath at the results. "Any idea who this guy is? What he wants?"
"He's after something in the Hydra database. Kept telling the hacker to pull information on inhumans."
Natasha huffed a breath that might've been a laugh if she wasn't in pain. "That explains a lot."
Steve bit his lip. "Seems like he's almost done with whatever it is he's doing." He paused, and decided the only way out was through. "Far enough along to kill your contact."
Natasha said a word that sounded sort of like Russian but mostly like cursing.
"It's only a matter of time before he does something with the hostages to cover his exit," she said after a moment, brows furrowed like she was thinking through a math problem.
"You think he'll move them?"
Natasha shrugged. "Unlikely. Too much baggage. And daddy's little princess is already plenty of protection. No…" she looked to the ceiling for a moment, eyes flicking with the racing of her thoughts. "If it were me? I would wound as many as possible without outright killing them – make it so that they need immediate medical attention as priority one, to tie first responders to the scene. Get a head start."
Steve did not comment on the opening of that little speech. "We need a plan." Natasha opened her mouth to suggest something, but he cut her off. "Scratch that. I need a plan. One that doesn't involve you on that leg."
Natasha scowled at him. "You shouldn't go back in there alone. That girl's voice hits like a brick wall. You felt it."
Steve wasn't ever going to be as good a spy as Natasha, but even he picked up on the fact that she hadn't argued. "I'll figure something out."
There was blood and brain matter soaking into the fancy office's fancy carpeting. The girl had stepped in some of it on her mad dash toward her father. She was pale and swayed a bit on her feet, unable to stop staring at the corpse, clearly fighting back bile. "…Dad…"
The gunman glanced up at where his daughter was looking and rolled his eyes. "That's not important, honey," he said, clear strain under the sugary sweetness in his voice. "What is important is getting what we came for." When his daughter still didn't look at him, he became annoyed. "Peanut! Come here," he called, voice firm. The girl gulped and went to her father, who cupped her head with the hand not currently occupied by a gun. He sighed hard through is nose and pasted on a brittle, manic smile. "I can't do this without you." When she still would not look him in the eye, he crouched down a few inches to her level, trailing his hand down to her shoulder and shaking her just hard enough to jostle her. "You're my girl. My little Peanut?"
The girl hunched her shoulders, wide-eyed. "Yeah, I just–" like a magnet, the bloody scene behind them pulled her eyes around.
Her father shook her again, his impatience at her lack of attention clear and sharp. "You're making this more difficult than it has to be. You don't want to be difficult, do you?"
The girl flinched. Then she took a deep breath, and looked up at him with trust shining in her eyes. "No, Dad. You know best. I'm sorry."
"Hush, baby," he said, pulling her in for a one-armed hug. "Sometimes you have to do hard things for the people you love. Isn't that right, my little Peanut?"
The girl shuddered a bit, but she did not start crying. "I love you, Dad. I'm sorry."
"You know what we've gotta to do now," said the shooter, steering her toward the balcony to gaze down at the group of huddled people. The girl looked up at her father over her shoulder, eyes wide and startled. "I don't have enough bullets, Peanut. It's gotta be you."
The girl went pale and began to shake. "I…"
"You don't have to do this, you know," came the voice of Captain America, ringing out from somewhere below them and making them both flinch. They began to search the area frantically with their eyes, but the Captain was far enough back that he was out of line of sight, and therefore line of fire.
The gunman wrapped his arm around his daughter from behind, pressing his chest to her back to keep her facing the hostages, his gun also pointed at them. "Yes, she does," he called in a frantic sort of sing-song. "You're not going to stop us from getting out of here!"
"You don't want to hurt these people." Captain America's voice echoed in the large room, bouncing and booming off of marble and glass so that no one could be sure quite where it was coming from. "The police will be here soon. Best thing you can do now is surrender. No one else has to get hurt."
"She can and will hurt whoever I tell her to, and you are pushing us dangerously close to pulling that trigger, Captain!" barked the shooter, pushing on his daughter's shoulders so that she was leaning over the balcony – over the small, terrified crowd.
"She can speak for herself," there was a pause, and the girl held her breath. "You can choose not to hurt these people. You can choose not to listen to him."
"She's not going to!" the shooter barked out into the empty air, shaking the girl by the shoulders for lack of another target. "She knows what's best for her!"
Steve realized the gunman was becoming more and more agitated the longer this went on – he wasn't sure he could stall long enough for backup. The one silver lining was that the girl had been quiet since he first called out to her, holding off on the sonic attacks. He wasn't going to be able to take out the gunman if he was too busy fighting her. He needed her to stand down. "You owe it to yourself to be honest about what you need!" Steve cried, hoping that her own words would have the desired effect on her.
"Dad, I–" The girl's voice is high and stressed and scared – for the first time, she sounded as young as she actually was.
"Quiet! Do as you're told!"
The girl let out a sob and Steve prayed that she could hold on to sense. "Dad, I don't want to–"
"It doesn't matter!" There was the sound of a punch landing hard on flesh, the dull thump of a body hitting the ground. Steve saw red and began a mad dash for the back staircase, which would empty him out into the hallway by the office without putting the hostages in the line of fire.
"You know how difficult you are to deal with," Steve heard the gunman holler as he took the stairs three at a time, "all those little inhuman 'accidents' that I had to cover for you? You're lucky I'm so goddamn forgiving! Are you aware ow much we could do with freaks like you? I'm helping you learn to do the only thing you're good for–!"
Steve burst through the stairwell door just in time to see the gunman pull his arm back to strike his daughter across the face with the butt of his gun. But before Steve could make a move, an unearthly screeching ripped into his ears, driving him to his knees, hands clasped near-uselessly over his aching ears.
"No!" cried the gunman. It took all of Steve focus to look up and realize that the man was writhing on the ground as well, clearly in the same incredible pain that was echoing through Steve's skull. The scream was not a directed blast like the ones she had hit him with before, but it was still inhumanly powerful, incapacitating everyone who had the misfortune to be in hearing range.
"You ungrateful little bitch!" the cried, his deep booming yell barely audible over the high-pitched racket coming from the girl's mouth. It felt like it was literally needling its way into Steve's brain. He registered that he was slightly worse off than the gunman appeared to be, and cursed his sensitive super soldier hearing.
Steve saw the man reach for his gun, and heard the blissful split-second silence when the girl's inhuman shrieking paused as she gasped at the sight of her father taking aim in her direction.
Steve was too far away from her. He wouldn't reach her in time. He knew it, they all knew it–
The girl opened her mouth and screamed, louder and longer than ever before.
It took everyone in the building several minutes to recover from the auditory assault they experienced. Many people – Steve included, he was both ashamed and impressed to admit – blacked out for a short while under the physical strain. Even getting people back to their feet was difficult and disorienting, heads throbbing and ears ringing as their eyes and stomachs threatened rebellion.
It took an additional precious few minutes for Steve and Natasha to find each other again, stumbling around half-deaf and disoriented, the world silent save for a high-pitched ringing in their ears. Natasha had motioned for them to move back up to the office where the final confrontation had happened, and they had helped each other stumble up the steps, fighting vertigo as their hearing slowly returned.
Once there, Natasha moved her contact's body out of the way of the computer terminal with only a slight wrinkling of her nose.
She showed more frustration once she'd had a chance to examine the computer.
"Damn it. It's all gone."
Steve looked up at her from his spot across the room, crouched over the body of the gunman. It was a mess. Many people who had been indirectly exposed to the scream had been bleeding from their ears, some from their noses, but this guy – well. It was a mess.
"The girl–"
Natasha looked at him – saw his face, his eyes, and the set of his jaw. She sighed deeply through her nose. "Go, Steve. I'll coordinate from here."
It didn't take long for Steve to follow the bloody shoeprints down the maze of halls in the building. The girl stood at an intersection of hallways, looking around with uncertainty. She was chewing on her brightly-painted fingernails.
"Hey," Steve called gently. The girl turned to look at him, and she looked… odd. Tired. Relieved. Sad. Scared. Haunted. He knew that look. "Hey. I'm Steve. What's your name?"
"Melanie."
"Okay Melanie," Steve said. His gut was telling him one thing, the little voice Natasha had beaten into the back of his head was telling him another. Ignoring the responsible Natasha voice, Steve stepped forward. "Everything's gonna be okay–"
At his approach, the girl flinched. "Stay back! I–!" She began breathing rapidly – shallow, panicky breaths.
"Okay!" Steve was quick to reassure her, backing up again. "…I know you're scared."
"I didn't mean– I just– he! He just–!"
"I know. Melanie? I hear you. What you did was self-defense."
The girl froze for a long moment, blinking wide, wet eyes at him. Whatever she saw on his face must have comforted her, because she seemed to deflate. "But I…"
"I know you don't want to hurt anyone. I believe that. You did the right thing, not hurting those people down there." Steve took a tentative step forward. When the girl didn't react, he took another. "You can still do the right thing." Another step.
"I… I just… I wanted…" Melanie choked out a sob.
Steve wanted to reach out and comfort her, but he also didn't want to spook her. "Melanie, can you look at me?" he asked. She nodded, but it took her a few breaths to look at him. "I'm right here, Melanie."
She stared at him for a moment, interrupted only when they both heard shouts and sirens coming from the direction of the main entrance. Law enforcement had finally broken through, it seemed. At Steve's side, Melanie gave a watery laugh. "I think this is the part where I get arrested."
Steve offered her his hand. "Is that gonna be okay?"
Melanie looked into his eyes, and took it. "I think so."
In the end, they were lucky to have made it through with as few casualties as they did.
Three people were dead. One of them Steve didn't feel the least bit sorry about. Steve and Natasha gave their on-scene debrief to the local authorities, were triaged by the ambulance that had been called in along with the police, and then were shuffled out of the way to be dealt with after all the other priorities. They watched the chaos of it all, illuminated in blue and red flashing lights, curled on one of the ridiculously plush sofas in the lobby of this ridiculous excuse for a bank.
"Was it really him?" Steve asked, too exhausted to be hopeful.
"There's no way to know for sure. It was only a split second image in between a couple of rounds of intense head trauma. And that system wipe took everything in the database including the building's security footage, so there's no objective record–"
"Nat."
Natasha chewed her bottom lip for just a second, something done for his benefit, to signal her uncertainty. "That's what it looked like in the moment."
Steve closed his eyes and very deliberately did not get his hopes up. He thought about how Bucky – the Bucky he knew was still in there somewhere – wouldn't have wanted Steve to sacrifice all those innocent bystanders, or this girl to her father, just to reunite with him.
After a moment he opened his eyes again, looking out at the police car where Melanie had been peacefully loaded in just a few minutes ago.
"Think she's gonna be okay?"
"I think she has a shot. Thanks to you."
Steve smiled bitterly. "Thanks to me?" He hung his head, shrugging in mock self-depreciation. "I shouldn't have let her go that far." Steve paused for a moment, then added solemnly: "she shouldn't have to carry that. I could've gotten there sooner and–"
"Steve," Natasha interrupted him firmly. She tilted her head to look him straight in the eye, and she refused to let him look away. "Stop that. It's not your fault. You can't control other people's choices. All you can do is try to make choices you can live with."
Steve looked out at the blue and red flashing lights, and at the girl asleep in the car underneath them. He thought maybe he did.