Of long necessity, Pepper was an early riser. Tony wasn't, and she'd put the earliest hours to good use before Tony would wake, sometimes cranky, and she'd have to let her own work take a back seat to Tony's needs.
This morning, she came to the common room for breakfast and found that Bucky and Natasha had already been gone an hour.
"Russia," Steve said in answer to her unasked question, a fork with scrambled eggs and bacon on it paused midway to his mouth. "Bucky's dropping her in St. Petersburg before going on to Novgorod."
"I hate feeling useless."
Watching Steve eat reminded Pepper that she should have breakfast, too. It was at least something to do while she waited for … something. News from Bucky or Natasha, in the best case, or another attempt on her life in the worst.
"Useless?" Steve prompted, and Pepper gave a one-shoulder shrug as she crossed to the fridge.
"They're off in Russia, Maria's working on it from here, and I'm doing nothing to help. I don't like it." She opened the fridge, surveyed its contents. No leftovers this time, so she gathered yogurt and berries and set them on the counter.
"They also serve who only stand and wait," Steve quoted. If Pepper hadn't known Steve Rogers was incapable of being rude, she would've sworn he'd spoken around a mouthful of food.
"I've never been good at waiting." Pepper scooped yogurt into a bowl, scattered raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries over it.
"You'd rather speed and post o'er land and ocean without rest? Yes, I know the poem."
"I don't know what I'd rather do." Pepper brought her breakfast to the table, sat across from Steve, and spooned a few berries into her mouth.
"Look at it another way. What don't you want to do?"
"I don't want to be killed by a terrorist assassin." The words were out before she thought. What was it about super-soldiers that made her such a blabbermouth?
"That's a good goal." To his credit, Steve didn't sound amused or, worse, patronizing. "How do you go about reaching it?"
"I don't know what I can do," Pepper said. "I have to rely on bodyguards, and Avengers, and -"
She stopped, at least this once, before she blurted something even more embarrassing.
Steve's mouth twitched, just a little. "And that annoys the spit out of you."
Who needed to blurt, when Steve Rogers could apparently read minds? Pepper sighed and set her spoon aside. "What Maria said last night, that Tony's a hard target. It made me realize I'm an easy target."
"Soft target," Steve murmured.
"I don't want to be," Pepper said. "I don't want to be the damsel in distress."
"You wouldn't be," Steve said.
"I have been."
But Steve was shaking his head. "You were kidnapped, yes, but you did everything you could once that happened."
"You weren't there."
"No, but I've gotten to know you a little bit, and I'll bet you were sassing him the whole time, and looking for ways to escape. That's not a damsel in distress."
"Still, I'm an easy - soft - target, and I don't know how not to be."
Steve regarded her for a long moment, then something in his expression shifted, and he wasn't just Steve sharing breakfast with her, he was Captain America. "Nobody can stop a sniper's bullet. But I can help you be harder to kidnap."
"You mean teach me self-defense? I had some lessons, before." And still relied on someone else to rescue me.
"This century always uses too many syllables," Steve observed. "No, I'm not going to teach you self-defense. I'll teach you to fight. It'll be hard, and it'll take time, but at the end of it, you'll be a hard target." He paused, a slight grin spreading across his features. "In a different way than Tony."
Pepper chuckled at that, but she was considering his offer. It was a natural outgrowth of the conversation she'd had with Bucky that first night - knowing what she could do would lead to her doing more than she had before. In this case, doing meant defending hers- fighting for her life.
And that was what she hadn't wanted to admit before. She hadn't wanted to admit that she might have to fight for her life - she lived in the twenty-first century, after all, and it was supposed to be a civilized place.
Maybe it is, but that doesn't mean all the people in it are.
"Yes. I want to learn."
"It'll be rough," Steve warned her. "I won't go easy on you because you're a woman, or because you're Tony's friend, or because you're Bucky's soulmate."
"You shouldn't," Pepper agreed. "And I don't want you to."
"Then I'll see you in the gym at seven."
#
Steve would love Novgorod, Bucky decided. An artist's dream. All medieval on the one hand, and all modern on the other.
Then he winced. That comparison could as easily describe him, with one hand flesh and blood and the other cybernetic, and he was certainly not an artist's dream. Nightmare, perhaps, but not a dream.
Bucky put those thoughts aside, focusing instead on putting one foot in front of the other as he crossed the footbridge over the Volkhov River from the Sophia Side of the city to the Trade Side.
The city had grown since the last time he was here - whenever that had actually been - but still he found his way past too many churches and cathedrals to name, though his mind supplied him the names: Transfiguration of Our Savior, Philip the Apostle, Nicholas the Wonder-Worker, and others.
Then he'd passed through the tourist section of the Trade Side into the more modern area where people lived and worked, played and drank, and then deeper into the areas where respectable people wouldn't go.
Here, Bucky would find the russkaya mafiya, the bratva. They weren't terrorists themselves, but they knew everything that happened within their territory. The Novgorod bratva might not have much reach, but they could contact other groups, and some of those groups had worldwide influence. If anyone could get him a lead on the Ten Rings or the Mandarin, it would be the bratva.
Finding a prostitute was easy. Persuading her to take him to her pimp cost less than Tony Stark would spend on alcohol in an hour. Bucky was careful to show only his flesh hand when he paid her.
The pimp, however, proved surprisingly unwilling to introduce Bucky to his avtoritet. Instead, he screamed for a krysha, the enforcers that were never far away. The krysha who responded stood several inches over six feet and brandished a crowbar.
"Vy ne khotite chtoby sdelat' eto," Bucky told him, his hands stuffed in the pockets of the hoodie he wore.
Apparently the man did, in fact, want to do that - he rushed toward Bucky. Bucky ducked under the man's swing.
"Neuklyuzhiy," Bucky told him. "Very clumsy."
The man swung again, and this time Bucky caught the crowbar in his metal hand. He held fast as the krysha struggled to wrest the crowbar away. Then the light caught on the metal hand and the krysha blanched. The asset gave a satisfied smile.
"YA khochu , chtoby uvidet' sovetnika," Bucky said.
The krysha still stared at Bucky's hand. "Bozhe moy."
"God's not here," Bucky said. "I am. I said, I want to see your sovetnika. Don't make me say it again, English or Russian."
"He'll kill me."
"You know who I am, and what I've done. Do you want me to do it again?"
Finally, the krysha let go of the crowbar. Bucky tossed it aside.
"I will have to call him," the krysha said.
"Fine. But if I have the barest reason to suspect you might be thinking of trying something funny, I will tear your heart out through your throat." Bucky let the fingers of his metal hand clench, as if anticipating that very action.
"No tricks, nothing funny, I swear."
"I hope your word is good. For your sake."
