Steve walked out into the frigid air, bottle of Asgardian mead in hand. Tony was already standing out on the balcony staring out to the city's lit-up skyline. Inside, the Christmas festivities were winding down with everyone going back to their own quarters, including Natasha carrying a sleeping Nadia down to her bed. Steve promised his wife that he would carry down their daughter's pile of gifts when he returned to their quarters.

After his and Natasha's conversation with Phil, Steve had kept one eye on Tony. The engineer had spent the rest of the evening uncharacteristically quiet and lost in thought. He'd already been out here on the balcony for the last forty minutes, causing Bruce and Pepper to take turns looking through the windowed wall to check on him before having hushed conversations with each other. Bruce was about to walk outside when Steve laid a hand on his shoulder. "I'll talk to him," he said.

Bruce's eyebrows rose. "You know what's going on? Because he wouldn't tell us."

Steve didn't answer the question, just walked through the door. He stood in the shadows, not sure on how to exactly start this conversation. Thankfully, as usual, Tony was the first to open his mouth.

"Guess you heard from someone in DC, too," Tony said, face still turned towards the skyline.

Steve ambled up to his side and joined up at looking at the skyscrapers lighting up the night. "Phil heard from a source. Passed the news on to me and Natasha."

"What did his person hear?" Tony asked.

"Possibility of Congress bringing up charges of treason against Bucky," Steve answered.

Tony took a sip of whatever was in his glass tumbler. "I've waited decades for some kind of justice against that man. And now I'll probably have to settle for bumbling legislators arguing about things only to stroke their own egos," he said bitterly.

"Buck and Howard were friends, you know," Steve said.

Tony scoffed. "Friends don't murder each other."

Steve wanted to tell him tales of how Bucky and Howard would make bets on who could get the most dames to dance with them, bicker about sniper rifles, and stay up too late staring into campfires, each battling their own inner demons. "He didn't murder him on purpose," Steve argued, but he knew Tony wouldn't understand what he was trying to say as soon as the words left his mouth.

"He ripped the steering wheel out of the car, watched it flip and catch fire, and still put bullets in my parents. Sounds pretty on purpose to me."

Steve took his own sip of liquor at that. He knew a report on Howard's death was in the file of information Natasha and Phil had spent years putting together. He remembered sitting in the DC diner, looking at Peggy's handwritten order that things be made to look like an accident, Howard was drunk while driving on icy roads. Nothing more than that. For the thousandth time, he wondered if Peggy knew who the dreaded Winter Soldier really was. Surely someone—Phil, Fury, Natasha—knew if S.H.I.E.L.D. had ever investigated into his identity, but Steve was too scared to ask. What if they did know? What if they knew who Bucky was when he was still alive and didn't bother to do anything? Did Peggy realize who it was? Had she tried?

"You're probably going to testify on his behalf, right?" Tony asked. The question came with the first instance of the engineer looking Steve in the eye for the last two hours.

"Yes," Steve answered honestly.

Tony shook his head. "You even know what all he did?"

"It wasn't him," Steve argued. Tony opened his mouth to argue, but Steve cut him off. "If Congress charged Bruce for treason for actions that the Other Guy did, you wouldn't do the same thing I am?"

"It's not the same thing," Tony countered. "The Hulk isn't an assassin."

"He's still killed people," Steve responded.

"But it wasn't murder."

"Bucky wasn't in control of his actions. I'm sure of it," Steve said. "They manipulated him, wiped his memories, brainwashed him, something. Natasha said they did the same thing to her."

"Then how can you trust either one of them to be honest and truthful?" Tony questioned. On instinct, Steve felt his body draw up to his full height and his face turn into something hard. Tony grimaced. "That's not entirely—look, it's late. We're both really touchy about this. Let's not end the holiday with a huge fight."

"Just wait to have it another day?" Steve asked tightly. Tony shrugged and started to walk away, but Steve called after him. "You gonna testify against him?"

"If asked? Yeah."


The New Year rang in and still no word from Phil's contacts in DC. Steve and Tony still hadn't finished their discussion, and from the way they were expertly avoiding each other, it might never happen.

The rest of the world stayed quiet, wrapped in a fresh layer of snow. Clint joked that he was grateful that the bad guys seemed as reluctant to fight in the cold weather as he was, but everyone knew it wouldn't last. It never did. Granted, things were better with Thor's sleep chamber powering a defense system against alien invaders, but there were still plenty of people on the Earth's surface to cause trouble.

"We have to do something about the office," Natasha reminded him over lunch one day.

Steve looked up from the intelligence report he was reading. "What exactly did you have in mind?"

Natasha shrugged. "Not keeping a newborn in the same room as multiple weapons? Decorating is your job, remember?"

He did. His mind went back five years to Natasha asking how he would decorate a nursery. When she followed up on his advice of yellow walls, he thought she was mocking him. Turned out, she just didn't consider herself an aficionado at décor and trusted his better judgment.

They hadn't mastered talking things out yet then. Even these days, it could be a coin toss.

"Do you want to find out if it's a boy or girl, or have it be a surprise?" Steve asked.

"I don't like surprises," Natasha answered.

"Never noticed," he replied with an easy smile. "You're, what, fourteen weeks now? How long until we can find out?"

"Bruce told me at sixteen with Nadia because of the genetic testing."

Steve felt his stomach churn at those two words. "If we fought hard to keep your cloned DNA out of the hands of S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists then, do we even have a chance to make sure things can stay quiet when my genome is involved?" he asked. "Scientists have been trying to get their hands on my DNA for decades. I don't want our kid—"

"One mess at a time," Natasha said, cutting him off. "Besides, maybe your body won't let the super soldier genes passed on. Maybe just plain old Steve Rogers."

"Then be prepared to listen to a lot of wheezing." She smiled at that. He knew she was just trying to placate him right now, and he was grateful for it. Certainly she was wondering which of her own genetic enhancements the baby might inherit.

"Let's get out of here for a bit," Natasha offered.

"Nadia's preschool starts back up on Monday. You want to pull her out?"

"And have her be all distraught and in mourning? No," Natasha answered. "But we could go out to your place in Brooklyn for a week. Tell everyone to leave us alone for a few days, and while they're at it, they can revamp the office into something baby-proof."

"You seem to enjoy bossing everyone around," Steve pointed out.

"Not nearly as much as you like taking orders," Natasha replied with a smirk.

They spent the next few hours packing and making arrangements. Natasha handled the conversation with Tony about some minor reconstruction on what would become the baby's nursery, and from what Steve overheard, their conversation seemed pleasant enough. Steve didn't think Tony would go so far as to rig something terrible or do shoddy construction in a nursery as some act of revenge, but Steve knew what it felt like to have pain gnawing at you for years and years.

When they picked Nadia up at pre-school and began the drive over the bridge to Brooklyn, the young girl bounced in her car seat with excitement. "We're going to see Zelda!"

"Not today," Steve said, making sure his tone was gentle. The thought of being torn apart from her best friend could send his daughter into an understandable tailspin.

"Then where are we going?" Nadia questioned, confusion evident in her voice.

"To Daddy's little apartment. You remember that place, right?" Natasha asked.

"I think so," Nadia answered. "Why are we going there?"

"Uncle Tony, Aunt Pepper, and their friends are going to help get the baby's room ready," Steve replied. "Plus, Mama and Daddy need a little break from the city. We're not going to use any screens while we're there."

"But what if I want to talk to someone?" Nadia whined.

Natasha twisted in her seat to look at their daughter. "Expecting a lot of phone calls?"

"I don't know," Nadia answered with a shrug.

Natasha faced the front of the car again. "I thought we wouldn't deal with that kind of attitude for another decade," she muttered. "And before you even open your mouth, don't you dare say the word 'clone.'"

The quietness of the small apartment wasn't as restful as Steve had hoped. The silence and calm cloyed at him. Also, it easily bored Nadia, which meant she asked a hundred questions an hour about whatever crossed her mind. Steve and Natasha took turns trying to entertain her as best they could and got after her when her huffing and puffing at being bored became a little too melodramatic.

The relative silence was broken on the fifth day of their stay, two days before they were to return to the Tower. Steve came into the living room after tucking Nadia into bed to find Melinda May sitting at the small kitchenette table. "Captain," she greeted.

"Why do I have a feeling that you're not here for girl time with Natasha?" Steve asked.

Melinda smiled dangerously. "Because you've been a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent long enough to know better."


"You've been on this, too?" Steve asked. It was the following morning in S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. May had stayed pretty tight-lipped during her visit to the Brooklyn apartment, promising more information at the morning briefing. After she'd left, Steve and Natasha had decided their attempt at respite in the borough was officially screwed over. Tony was done doing whatever he needed to do to the apartment, and the morning would mean moving back to the city.

"You guys weren't the only ones dealing with the elementary school hostage situation in Moscow," May reminded him, not that Steve needed to hear it. The number of people for their usual morning meeting had doubled with the presence of May's team crammed around the table. "I'm not going to just walk away from something like that, especially a situation involving kids and hostage situations."

Steve knew there was something more to that statement, but there was no way he was going to ask Nick Fury's wife what she meant . "What did you find?"

Agent Triplett motioned at the holoscreen and pulled up a satellite picture. The image zoomed continuously in until it revealed a shot of what looked to be an abandoned warehouse. "This is fifty kilometers outside of Kiev. We checked it out a couple of days ago, but couldn't get access inside. While the building looks old and empty, there's a brand new lock on the door that can only be opened with a certain individual's DNA."

"Whose?" Phil asked.

"Yours," the young British woman, Jemma, said while looking at Steve. "We were able to recognize that the genetic sequence belong to you, and we tried our best to replicate it to gain access, but as I'm sure you are aware, doing so is virtually impossible. We're going to need the real thing if we want to get inside."

"How did you find this place?" Clint asked.

"Through the hostage's background," May answered.

"We didn't find anything," Phil replied, a look of faint confusion on his face.

"That's because you don't have me," a young woman told him while grinning triumphantly. Steve remembered that she'd introduced herself as Skye, and he also remembered overhearing a number of stories from when May came over to talk and drink with Natasha and Maria about how the hacker was as good at getting them out of trouble as she was at getting them into it in the first place.

"What little we found on his history led us to this location," May explained. "Took us a while to get there, but sounds like we still made more headway than you."

Phil bristled at the jab, but it was Natasha who leaned forward in her seat and spoke up. "It was a storage facility," she remarked.

"You were there?" Phil questioned.

Natasha shook her head. "Its codename changed every few years, but I remember seeing packages being sent to and from there on cargo manifests. It was associated with the KGB."

"What's so important about a storage facility?" Bruce asked.

Tony looked at him with an expression of mock insult. "How many times have we watched Indiana Jones movies? Only the really cool things are kept in huge storage warehouses."

"We're not looking for the Ark of the Covenant," May pointed out.

"What are we looking for?" Steve asked.

This time it was the Scotsman's turn—Fitz—to manipulate the projection hovering over the conference room table. "My dwarves—uh, robotic sensor drones—weren't able to get inside. There are no windows on the exterior, so they couldn't peek in either. But they weren't able to detect any thermal signatures, nor were there any sings of explosives or other types of ordinances."

"Just because you can't see a booby trap on a scan doesn't mean it's not there," Clint said.

"What do you want to do?" May asked Phil.

The handler rolled his lips as he thought it over for a moment. "This DNA scan, how much of a tissue sample are they asking for?"

"Only a single drop of blood," the British biochemist answered. "I understand your concern, Agent Coulson, but it is unlikely that Captain Rogers's genetic sequence could be fully analyzed with such a small sample."

"Hasn't stopped people from trying before," Bruce replied. "And it usually blows up in your face when you do. Trust me."

Phil looked at Steve. "It's your call," he said. "We can bury this or chase it, but it's your decision."

But it wasn't just his. He turned in his chair to look at Natasha. She was still staring at the readouts from Fitz's drones that had scanned the warehouse. "What do you think?" he asked quietly.

"I think it's trouble," she answered. "But I also think neither of us are very good at walking away from obvious traps."

He gave a small smile in agreement. "When do we leave?"

They were on the ground twelve hours later. Natasha stayed behind in what May's team called The Bus—their suped up 747 jet—to watch over from afar. The scientists, Skye, and Banner stayed back with them. Steve led a team of Clint, Tony, May, and Triplett to approach the warehouse. He signaled those on the ground to fan out while Tony hovered in the air a few hundred meters above them as look out, his blue repulsors barely visible in the night sky.

Just as Simmons and Fitz promised, the decrepit warehouse had what looked to be a state-of-the-art locking mechanism on the main door. As Steve approached, a panel slid open to reveal the tip of a needle. He eyed the device a second before pulling his left glove of with his teeth. "Attempting to unlock the door," he announced over comms. Slowly, he reached his hand out towards the device. A laser grid appeared over his index finger, and when it apparently moved into the right spot, the color changed from red to green and the needle sprung up and pricked his finger. He hissed, not out of pain or surprise but just habit, he supposed. Steve pulled his hand back and sucked on the pad of his finger until it stopped bleeding before pulling his glove back on. As he did so, the device beeped, and he heard a hissing sound as the mechanism unlocked. "We're good," he said to the others. "Everyone on me, except Stark. You keep an eye out."

"Got it, Cap," Tony replied.

Once Clint, May, and Triplett were at his side, he slowly led them into the building. They'd made it five steps when Steve's enhanced hearing picked up a whirring noise. "The dwarves," May explained. "Let them do recon for us."

Steve nodded but didn't feel great about the idea. He could taste the bitter tinge of adrenaline in his mouth. This could be nothing, he knew, or it could be everything. Most likely something in between. He tried to keep his mind off Bucky and wondering if his best friend had ever stepped foot inside the warehouse, and what connection it held to Steve's life.

"Place is clear," Natasha spoke in his ear. "No power being drawn anywhere save for a room in the sub-basement in the building's northwest corner."

"Stark, we can cover lookout duty from here," Phil said. "Join the team in case they need backup for people we're not seeing or whatever's inside."

"Understood," Tony answered. And a second later, Steve heard him land hard on the ground outside. May took point and led the others down the stairs off to their right. Steve would've preferred to be in the lead position, but her head was probably clearer than his at the moment.

True to the drones' readings, the warehouse was empty. The floor they'd entered on was completely barren. Steve could make out lines on the floor where rows upon rows of metal shelves had stood and the track marks from machinery like forklifts once roamed. Down in the basement, the space was sectioned off. There were hallways and corridors with darkened rooms off to the side. As they walked by, Clint and Triplett did quick checks of doors to make sure the rooms were completely empty and they weren't bypassing any clues. Tony kept his helmet shut, which told Steve that he was using JARVIS to help him complete scans to verify what Fitz's droids had found.

At the end of the corridor, the light on the end of May's gun revealed an identical locking mechanism from before. May turned expectantly towards Steve while the others fanned out to surround them. "Well?" she asked.

Steve fought a sigh. "Simmons, you said they couldn't do anything with one drop of blood. What about two?"

"Captain, the odds of finding—"

"He's being funny," Natasha said to interrupt the scientist. "You sure about this?" she asked him.

"Nope. You?"

"We've come this far," she told him.

He pulled off his left glove again, his finger already healed from the previous pinprick. Over comms, Phil issued an unnecessary order for Fitz and Tony to keep an eye out for any changes to make sure nothing literally blew up in their faces. Steve let his finger be pricked once more, and immediately, the door hissed open. Once it did, Steve knew that this room was indeed different.

Despite apparently drawing power, the lights weren't on. They slowly moved into the room. In the darkness, Steve could make out a chain hanging from the ceiling. His hand reached out toward it. "Stark?"

"Pull it," Tony answered.

Steve did so, and the room because awash in a yellow light. To Steve's left was a chair similar to what you'd see in a dentist's office, except there was an arm attached to it and huge electrical cords powering it. A number of screens were nearby. Tony moved toward it to start taking readings. But Steve's attention was quickly drawn to what was standing in the center of the far wall.

Steve closed the ten feet between himself and the large metal cylinder quickly. The metal tube held a door with a small window at eye level. Steve turned the wheel to unlock and open the hatch; it creaked loudly as he pulled it wide. He saw there were a number of vents lining the inner walls of the tube, but his attention was quickly drawn to something silver laying in the bottom of the chamber.

He picked it up and his stomach sank as he ran his thumb over the name on the dog tag.

JAMES B. BARNES