Chapter Ten

First there was the search for Steve. She used "search" as a gross exaggeration, since there was nowhere to look. Steve vanished into thin air, so there were really only two possibilities. Either he went through Loki's portal with Barnes (whether he went willingly or not mattered very little), or he'd been dragged through one of the golden portals by the creatures. They all obviously hoped for the former, although that option didn't give them much to be happy about either.

Loki was just one of the reasons. Sure, Sam kept repeating that Barnes remembered Steve, but Natasha wasn't about to trust one of the most dangerous men on the world just cause he claimed to have regained some of his memories from the early 20th century. And he was working with Loki.

Natasha was absolutely certain Thor had not lied to them. He was a lot better at both subterfuge and deception than most people gave him credit for, but Natasha doubted he could've faked so much grief and raw pain. He did not know his brother was alive, Loki was just that good when it came to lies. Magic probably made things easier on that front.

They stayed in Poland for a few days, but they all knew there was no point. If Loki and Barnes could raid five Hydra facilities around the world under twenty-four hours, they could pop up with that portal wherever they liked. There was no way to tell where they would show up next, since the Hydra base in Poznań was their last and only lead. They didn't even know whether they would go after Hydra again, or if they were done with them. It was frustrating beyond words how one-sided this conflict was. Barnes and Loki knew the board and the pieces, while the rest of them didn't even know which game they were playing.

All in all, it was a unpleasant three weeks for everyone. And now Steve was back. Right as rain, not a scratch on him. He lost some parts of his uniform, but that was about it. Natasha was eager to get intel out of him about what happened to him in the past weeks, which is when a whole new level of frustration started.

'I told you it was not three weeks for me,' Steve said.

'Yes, and that's about all you said,' Natasha told him as she leaned on the doorway. Steve was back in Washington, didn't even consider going to New York. Not that she expected him to accept the offer of going back to the Tower. And it wasn't even about Vision or the Maximoffs. She was rather sure Steve and Tony did not talk to each other since Ultron. If Steve needed help with anything he called Sam, then called her, and usually asked her to bring Clint along if she wanted to. When things went really bad he was happy to accept help from Thor, Hill, Bobbi, or Sharon, and reluctant to accept help from Wanda, Pietro, and Vision. He always argued that Bruce wanted to be left alone, and nobody ever tried to ask him to contact Tony.

The last three weeks helped the rest of them to build back some of the bridges – that while not burned – but were seriously damaged. Of course Steve was not around for that, since it was all for him. He brought them back closer together than they were in months, but somehow remained on the outside.

'I told you about the N'Garai,' Steve said as he started putting away his groceries. Natasha caught him coming home from the store.

'Yes, they're evil demons, very helpful.'

'What exactly are you expecting from me here?' Steve asked.

'I'd like you to tell me everything you have not told me so far,' she answered simply. Steve sighed.

'It's not relevant,' he said.

'You can't know that.'

Steve turned around.

'I told you he made a deal, but not with Loki. I don't know who. I don't know what the book was, I don't know what else they took from Hydra.' Steve took a deep breath and looked at the ceiling for a moment. 'I know you think that's not much, but I only had a few hours to actually coax some answers out of Bucky. I wasn't going to start interrogating him... I just... I just wanted him to talk to me.'

'Last time you said it was about a day, now you said it was a few hours.'

Steve looked frustrated.

'A few hours when we talked,' he said.

'What else were you doing then?'

'We ate some sandwiches... slept a bit.'

'Really?' She wanted to smack him on the back of his head.

'Don't start.'

'You ate food that was given to you, and then just went to sleep? I don't know why you're not more worried about these three weeks you lost.'

'Look, I didn't lose three weeks. Time just probably passes differently there. We're talking about doors to other dimensions here.'

Natasha let him get back to his groceries for a bit, knowing when Steve needed a few moments. The frustrating thing was that Steve did not look at all of this with the same amount of concern the rest of them did. They had three weeks to come up with probable scenarios, evaluate and re-evaluate the threat Loki and Barnes posed. They made plans, they prepared, they were all ready to go the second they caught sight of any of them. Steve though, he spent less than a day with the man he still called his best friend, had some tentative conversation with him, gathered some minimal intelligence, and considered it a good start. Well, "good" was a strong word. Steve was worried, and he obviously wanted to know more as well, but his entire being lacked that sense of urgency he wore around himself like a cape while they were hunting Barnes down before.

'He said "I'll be seeing you", so they're obviously going to show up eventually,' Steve said when he closed his fridge.

'Yes, and I wonder what they're doing in the meantime,' Natasha said. 'We don't know where to look, they could be in the middle of something right now, and we're just sitting around. We only found them the last time, because they wanted to be found.'

'We'll find them. This is big, Natasha, they can't move in the shadows indefinitely.'

'Yes, this is big, that's why we need to be prepared.'

'We are prepared,' Steve argued. 'Everyone is aware of the situation, if we catch a trail, we'll be ready to move. What else can we do?'

They could do more if they had more intel, but she was not about to bring that up again. There was no changing the past. Steve's relative calmness with the situation worried her more.

'You can't trust him,' she reminded him seriously. 'I mean it. Not with Loki in the picture.'

Steve was quiet, putting canned goods into a cupboard. Natasha couldn't see his face.

'Steve.'

'I don't,' he said.

Natasha pushed herself away from the doorway.

'Next time I ask, try to be more convincing,' she told him, and headed to the door.

Steve got out of the kitchen just when Natasha put her hand on the doorknob.

'You can't seriously expect me not to give him the benefit of the doubt here,' he said.

She turned back to look at him. He wanted some sort of a blessing, someone to agree with him, give him a nod. Unfortunately, Natasha couldn't be that person.

'You're going to do what you want,' she told him, because that was the truth. 'What you think is best... or right. I'm going to do the same.'

This was not the answer Steve wanted, obviously. But he trusted her to tell him the truth, so she did just that.

'Barnes is not the problem,' she added, even if she knew that Steve wouldn't misunderstand her earlier words. 'We all know that, but he is still a part of it. Try not to forget that.'

Steve didn't argue, he knew all this already.

As Natasha walked down the stairs she thought about how completely useless it was sometimes to waste words on Steve, especially when he already made up his stubborn head. And yet, she did still trust him to do the right thing.

x-x-x

Clint was waiting in the car, sunglasses on, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Natasha got in the car and turned to him.

'You're being childish,' she said and signed. Clint looked at her over the rim of his sunglasses for a moment, then shrugged.

'I'm not mad at Cap,' he said, still drumming his fingers.

'That's why you waited here,' Natasha continued, her voice was quiet, but she signed every word, so Clint didn't have trouble following, even with all the traffic zooming by.

Clint took off his glasses and finally stopped tapping the wheel.

'I just... He cares about Barnes a whole lot more than he cares about the rest of us altogether,' he said. 'I'm allowed to be a bit irritated about that, when we don't even know whether the guy's just a little bonkers or full-on psycho. He is prowling around with Loki.'

'We don't know Barnes' plans,' Natasha remarked.

'You read all the files, Tasha,' he said. 'Neither Sergeant Barnes, nor the Winter Soldier were known for long cons. Even before Hydra got their hands on him he was the guy who finished fights, the one who put the bullets in the right brains. He's not the guy with the plan, so my money's on Loki. That scheming son of a bitch.'

Clint had great insight, as always, Natasha couldn't even argue with him. Clint kept on talking, he wasn't done just yet.

'So I don't care what he's getting out of this deal he made, or why he made it. He's-'

'That's not true,' Natasha interrupted him. 'You know it matters why he signed up for this. You know what he was getting away from. He probably took the first chance he got.'

There was a moment where they both stayed quiet, both of them just thinking in silence, shaking off bad memories, and past demons.

'So what? We extract him?' Clint asked. 'How?'

Clint was basically reading her mind with how well their minds seemed to work together.

'I don't know yet, but I'm sure we're going to need some help.'

'Sounds good to me,' Clint shrugged as he slipped his sunglasses back on and started the car.

x-x-x

When Steve vanished the rest of them stayed together, and after a few days they returned to the US to regroup. And while they could handle themselves just fine, and did not actually need any "designated leader", there was still just one place they could think to go to. To think, to plan, to stay together in order to be able to move as a team at the first sign of Loki, Barnes, or Steve himself. That's why Clint and Natasha drove straight back to New York, and did not stop until they reached 200 Park Avenue.

They could've arranged for a plane, instead of doing the four-hour journey, but they both liked to drive, and there was not reason to hurry and not waste a little time like this. Clint probably thought that the world was going to go to shit again very soon, that's why he suggested it. And to be fair, there was no time but the present to do something pleasant. For Clint, a four-hour drive on a highway (without being chased or shot at), and stopping for half-decent diner food on the way, counted as time well spent. Natasha made fun of him for it, but still bought him a bunch of candy at a gas station. And Clint was all smiles by the time they got back to New York, so it was all absolutely worth it.

Stark knew they were coming even without JARVIS, but he paid them basically zero attention when the elevator opened. Natasha heard that he was in some heated scientific discussion with someone. When Natasha caught sight of the giant screen that person turned out to be Dr. Foster. Neither of them noticed that they entered the room, they were so immersed in the discussion.

'There is no way he can just open up portals to different dimensions by himself, no matter the equipment, there just has to be more than what he can carry with himself!' Jane was saying, rather loudly and enthusiastically.

'Think outside of the box,' Tony replied. 'An arc reactor is not that big, and there's plenty of juice in it. Not to mention something like the Tesseract. Or what was that thing in London?

'The Aether,' Jane said.

'So, if there was only one precedent, I'd say it was pretty unlikely. But clearly that's not the case.'

'I'm going to have to get some more information out of Thor... he's always very tight-lipped about advanced technology.'

'Can't say I blame him,' Tony said. 'Whenever we get our hands on something powerful, we immediately try to blow each other up, and almost wipe ourselves off the face of Earth in the process.'

'Yeah... bad track record, right there,' Jane sighed. 'Okay, what about any remnant energies?' she asked. 'Or... anything?'

'We scanned and labelled every square inch where portals opened,' Tony said. 'And besides the obvious cracks, we found nothing but some faint weird electromagnetic radiation, and quickly decaying plasmonic fields.'

'What we're looking for has got to be on the other side,' Jane said.

'But if it's something like the Tesseract...' Tony ventured.

'Even so,' Jane shook her head. 'No matter what it is, I'm pretty sure Captain Rogers would've seen it, if Loki had it on him.' Jane said. 'These sort of things tend to be very flashy.'

'That's certainly true,' Stark agreed easily.

'I need more data,' she told him seriously. 'This is quite different from my research, so this whole discussion is purely theoretical until I can actually make real-time readings, or have someone do it for me.'

'What does Selvig say?' Natasha joined the conversation, which was the moment the two of them even realized that they were standing in the room. No greetings were exchanged, they stayed strictly on-topic.

'He's been... a bit all over the place since Loki's name was mentioned,' Foster said. 'But he's going to work on it too.'

'We've got a big pile of steaming nothing,' Tony said, turning to them. 'The portals they used on the Hydra bases were one thing, it could've been just a short-cut between two points in space.'

'Maybe something similar to the Bifrost... or the Tesseract,' Jane finished. 'But with everything Captain Rogers said, this seems fundamentally different... I really need to talk to some theoretical physicists... not that flesh-and-blood people opening up portals to other dimensions is something anyone is an expert in.'

'We've got you Foster, you're the expert,' Tony said.

Jane sighed, then nodded, looking determined. 'Okay, but I'm still going to need some readings, or we're just taking stabs in the dark.'

'I can do that, or Vision,' Tony nodded. 'If we get the chance. But call if you have any new theories anyway.'

'How's Thor?' Natasha asked. Thor decided not to stay at the tower for the time being, but with Jane. Of course they weren't that far from New York, so he was ready to jump in if anything changed about the current situation.

'Well, y'know... it's Loki, he's not okay. It's...' she put her elbows up on the desk she had her laptop on, taking a big breath. 'He's been dealing... both with what happened to his Mother and Loki, but this just... he's more sad than angry right now. But I'm pretty sure we're going to circle right back to angry real soon.'

She fiddled with her hair and gave them a faint smile. 'But he's Thor, so he's putting on the smiles, he doesn't want anyone to worry.'

'Let me know if he's brooding too much, and I'll send birdie here over with a six-pack,' Stark said, jerking a thumb in Clint's direction.

'What a horrible burden,' Clint said, deadpan. Then he smiled up at the screen. 'But I'm ready to take one for the team.'

That made her laugh, which was probably the point.

'All right, send data, if you have data,' she said. 'I've got some phone calls to make, and e-mails to write.'

'Yes, work that big brain,' Tony agreed. 'Talk to you later.'

She said a quick bye, even waved a little, but they all saw that her mind was already somewhere else. That happened a lot with her. Tony turned off the screen and turned fully towards them.

'Why does your faces make me think, that Captain America's going to hate me even more for what you're about to ask from me?'

'That's oddly specific,' Natasha said with a frown. 'And Steve doesn't hate you.'

'Not the point. You were in Washington, but not you're here, which I suppose means you finally decided on a plan,' Stark said. 'I just assumed it's not a "Steve approved" plan.'

'Well, you're not wrong,' Clint shrugged.

x-x-x

'You know what we need for this to actually work?' Tony asked. 'For them to show up.'

'Steve was pretty confident that they will,' Natasha said. 'But it can be tomorrow or a month from now.'

'Or never,' Tony said.

'I doubt what we saw was the grand finale,' Natasha argued. 'Seemed more like a prelude to me.'

Tony walked to his bar and poured himself a drink. Only when he emptied the glass did he look up at them again.

'Okay, Loki is not going to do this cloak and dagger style all the way, I'll give you that. He likes showing off, and make things big and spectacular,' Tony agreed. 'But what about Barnes? Where do you stand on him right now?'

'He's dangerous,' Natasha said. 'But he's an assassin, and a covert operative, not a conman. I doubt he could actually fake remembering Steve.'

'That doesn't help the rest of us,' Clint remarked.

'And again, there's Loki...' Stark added.

'Which is why we need to separate them,' Natasha said. 'Look, if Barnes just got himself into a mess, we can get him out of it. If he's a threat, we will have him off the streets, and under surveillance.'

'Win-win,' Clint agreed.

Stark scratched at his beard, then poured himself another drink. Watching how many glasses he drowned was always a good indication of how stressed or uncomfortable he was. Two was not worrisome, but Natasha still kept an eye on the bottle.

'And what about Cap?' Tony asked. 'You said he didn't seem very gung-ho about capturing him since he got back.'

'But he still wants him away from Loki,' Natasha said.

'He is not going to be happy with you two. With any of us,' Tony said. 'I don't even get it why you're not over in Washington, trying to convince him.'

'If this would be about anyone but Barnes, I would try,' Natasha said. 'I would probably even succeed. But this is Barnes. Steve's got a blind spot the size of Serbia when it comes to him.'

'Well, I hope you're prepared for the wrath of the star-spangled man,' Stark shrugged, his nonchalance was just a little forced. 'Because I am not taking the flank for all this, just so you know.'

'It's going to be a team decision,' Clint said. 'If we all agree, Steve will have to agree too.'

'Right,' Stark snorted. 'And I'm going to nominate Stane for a port-mortem Noble piece prize.'

Natasha wanted to say that Tony was exaggerating, but she knew exactly how hard it was to change Steve's mind once he decided on something as the right course of action. And Barnes of course, it all came down to Barnes. She did not doubt for a second that Steve still had the safety of people set as a firm priority, but beyond that, it was all about Barnes. It wasn't even just about the files she read, the plain black and white evidence of how far Steve was willing to go for his friend, she just knew Steve. She knew he was not going to give up, and won't do anything that could compromise rebuilding the friendship they had. But Natasha couldn't give Barnes the benefit of he doubt in this situation, and she was not alone.

'All right, I'm in,' Stark sighed at last. 'But you get to inform the rest of the team about all this.'

'Oh joy,' Clint murmured, taking the words right out of Natasha's mouth, their minds really did work on the same wave-length.

x-x-x

To be continued...