Chapter Ten

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Steve's head jerked upright from where it had fallen onto the edge of the bed, and he stared at his hand, still holding Peggy's. Had she…

It happened again.

Even with his enhanced vision, Steve couldn't see anything, but he distinctly felt the pressure of her fingertips increase for a moment. His heart suddenly started pounding so hard he wondered if it could crack his ribs. "Peggy? Peggy, if you can hear me, squeeze my hand again."

It had been three days since the procedure, and he had stayed by her side almost the entire time. When the medical staff made him leave so they could care for her, he would go down to the gym and work out the feelings of helplessness that sitting beside her bed left him with. He hadn't gone through so many punching bags since before the Battle of New York. Like clockwork, he would then return to sit by her door, freshly showered, and wait for the staff to let him back in.

In all that time, Peggy had shown no sign of life. Now though - could she really have squeezed his hand, or was it some kind of muscle spasm?

One of the machines started beeping shrilly, and he started, every nerve strained for action. He had no idea what the sound meant, or even which machine was making it, but it couldn't be good - could it?

"JARVIS?" he snapped, the emergency turning his voice to steel.

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Tony was working on a better life support system in the lab when JARVIS suddenly cut in, his electronic voice somehow taking on a note of urgency.

"Sir, my protocols are being interfsswshhzzzzss..."

The sound cut out in a burst of static, and didn't come back. Tony frowned, concerned. "JARVIS?"

Clint's tight voice broke through the speakers a heartbeat later. "Tony, SHIELD agents are in the tower. They've manually hacked an elevator and are on their way up. Not sure what they did to JARVIS, but he's rebooting - be back up in a sec."

"What?" Stark dropped the simulation and took off towards the doors. He wasn't much good at running; the whole arc reactor situation had taken a toll on his lung capacity. Even after its removal, the scar tissue made it difficult to draw a full quick breath, but he knew his tower and every last shortcut better than the back of his hand.

"I can intercept," Natasha's voice came over the intercom, but Tony shook his head before he realized she couldn't see him. While either of the assassins could probably get to the invading agents first, their relationship with SHIELD was complicated, and he knew they hoped to avoid a confrontation.

Besides, this was his stuff these people were messing with.

"No, I got this," he gasped, slamming out of the lab and catapulting down a flight of stairs. With JARVIS out, and the system hacked, the elevators were unreliable, so he had to do this old school.

It was a race to the fiftieth level, where the elevator shafts that served the lower corporate levels of the tower ended, and where the private elevators began - the elevators that served the upper floors where Tony's labs, the medical wing, and the Avengers' living quarters were located. The race was close. Breathing hard, Tony dropped through a hidden maintenance panel and scrambled to his feet just as the indicator light on the hacked elevator blinked on and the doors began to open.

Man, that team was fast. Tony made a mental note to invent something brilliant to keep this from happening again.

"Look guys, Iron Man here," he announced, lounging against the wall in an attitude he hoped looked nonchalant, trying desperately to control his voice so they wouldn't see how out of breath he was. It was distinctly satisfying to be in charge of the situation, assert his authority. "Not trying to threaten you - actually, yeah, that's exactly what I'm trying to do. If I have to get out the suit, I will. Oh, and in what universe do you think you can get away with hacking JARVIS?"

JARVIS apparently took this as his cue to finish his restart sequence and butt into the conversation. "Sir, incoming message from Captain America."

"Not now, J. I've got trespassers to deal with." Tony surveyed the intruders: six agents, all fully geared up, none of them looking very intimidated. The leader stepped forward, holding out some kind of official paperwork, which Tony completely ignored. He hated being handed things, especially by uninvited guests.

"We've come to claim the body," the agent started, but Tony interrupted. It was his standard defense - if he could keep people from reaching the end of their sentences, they'd get angry or sidetracked, and maybe make a mistake or get distracted from the actual topic.

"Wow, cliche much? I mean, that sounds exactly like it came right out of some old B movie from…"

The agent barely blinked, cutting in firmly. "Stark, stop. We know it's here, and we have the legal authority to claim it."

Well, okay, so that hadn't worked at all. Tony rubbed his chin, thinking fast. He could call the suit, but he was pretty sure Pepper wouldn't like it if he scorched up the walls again. She'd just had them painted. Okay, the suit would be a last resort then, though he wasn't excluding it completely.

"Urgent, Sir." JARVIS again. Had his AI always been so insistent?

"I said not now, J," he snapped back at the ceiling, and then turned to the waiting agents. "Look, you can't have her. She's not just an it, she's a person who's important to Captain America. Captain America, guys! I mean, where's your sense of patriotism? It's like stepping on a bald eagle or something..."

Steve's voice suddenly came over the speakers, tense and urgent. "Tony, something's beeping - I think something is wrong, but I don't know what to do."

Tony felt a brief flash of mingled irritation and pride - when had Cap learned to activate JARVIS' emergency override codes? Then the meaning of the words broke through, and he cut Steve off short before he said anything more incriminating in front of the agents. "Really? Yeah, okay. JARVIS, execute evac code PEP12 and patch Cap through to Bruce."

Turning back to the confused agents, he smiled as innocently as he could, spreading his hands. "Sorry, not sorry, guys. Places to go, people to see." As per the code he had entered, JARVIS opened the private elevator closest to where he was standing, and Tony stepped backward into it, keeping his eyes on the agents even as they started toward him. "Still can't have her," he called through the closing doors, and grinned at the looks on their faces as the lights suddenly went out.

Man, he loved his AI.

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By the time Tony reached the medical center, the incessant beeping had been shut off by Bruce, who desperately needed the calm. He was bending over the woman on the bed, doing something mysterious with a stethoscope. Steve, obviously routed from his place by her side, was standing against the far wall. Tony didn't even think he'd heard his own rather dramatic entrance - Steve's whole attention was trained on Peggy's body, and the tension in the room was thick enough to cut with a knife.

Bruce suddenly laid aside his stethoscope and glanced up at Steve. "I'm going to try something, Captain," he told him tersely. "Watch that screen and tell me what her heartbeat does." Steve nodded wordlessly, trying to look at the screen and Peggy at the same time. Tony went to stand by Bruce, peering over his shoulder.

"What's up?" he asked in an undertone, noting the doctor was fumbling with the controls of the external pacemaker system that kept Peggy's heart beating.

"I need to - ah, there." Bruce finally found the control he wanted, and snapped it off. Tony's heart leapt into his throat as the machine shut down completely - and the line on the heart rate monitor fell flat. Steve choked out a wordless, strangled sound. Tony scrambled for the controls with a yelp, trying to turn it on again, but Bruce held him back. "Wait, wait…"

Nothing.

Bruce's face furrowed with concentration. "Come on, girl, you can do this."

Still nothing. The room hung silent in terrible suspense.

"Peggy," Steve's voice was softly, horribly desperate, and suddenly Tony knew what he must have sounded like when the plane went down. "Peggy?"

The line on the heart rate monitor jumped.

It jumped again - and again - and then again and again in an increasingly regular pattern. Tony found himself whooping in delight, leaping up and down and slapping a quietly satisfied Bruce on the back. Steve crumpled to his knees by the bed, holding Peggy's hand to his cheek and hiding his face, shoulders shaking.

"Thank God," he gasped very softly. "Oh, Peggy - thank God."

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"So, what exactly was all that beeping about?" Tony asked, once all the celebration was over.

Steve still knelt beside the bed, looking completely drained, but with a light of hope in his eyes that neither Bruce or Tony had ever seen before. Briefly, Tony wondered how long the man had been awake - possibly since England, because Pepper had said he hadn't slept on the plane, and the guy had an enviably insane ability to go without sleep. Maybe now Steve could get some real sleep in an actual bed, although from the look on his face, Tony was pretty sure it would take more than Iron Man to get him to leave Peggy now.

"It was - um," Bruce was distracted by some of the other equipment, testing their readings against a clipboard he held. "Oh, her heart. It was trying to beat on its own, slightly out of synch with the life support machine." He uncapped his pen, holding the cap between his teeth while he scribbled.

"So wait, you just decide to turn the thing off and hope her heart keeps going?" Tony was a little surprised; it seemed uncharacteristic for the careful scientist to gamble with a woman's life.

Bruce blinked up from his clipboard and pulled the pen cap out of his mouth. "Tony," he explained patiently, "I know how long a brain can go without blood before it starts to die, and we were well within the safety zone. I was going to give her four more seconds before turning it back on. Fortunately," he patted the foot of Peggy's bed affectionately, "she took over."

"Can she hear us?" Steve broke in hopefully. Bruce frowned, not sure how to answer. Peggy still showed no sign of consciousness, but her heartbeat remained steady, and Steve stoutly averred she had squeezed his hand before the machines started beeping. Tony remained healthily skeptical. Bruce carefully refrained from stating an opinion.

"I don't know how much brain activity is occurring, or even if there is any," the doctor admitted ruefully, reviewing the papers on his clipboard and then glancing down at Peggy's face, still half covered by the ventilator. "You're welcome to talk to her if you like - it can't hurt. Without more advanced equipment, though, it's impossible to tell what's going on."

Tony, at his elbow, brightened visibly. "I can make it! What do you want?"

Bruce stared him down dryly. "You can't make anything like that without specialized electrodes. The kind you've got will fry her brain before they pick up any information, and we can't get any fancy supplies in here without Fury noticing."

Tony bristled a little at the slight to his capabilities. "Wanna bet? I got some reserves; I bet I can build anything from scratch that you need…"

JARVIS cut in suddenly, much to the billionaire's exasperation. Really, that AI had no regard for a good conversation. "Sir, what would you like me to do with the agents?"

Steve's head snapped upright, immediately alert. "Agents? What agents, Stark?"

Tony squirmed a little under the intense glare of two of his best friends. "Oh, yeah. Agents. Forgot about them. Little thing, you know how it is..."

Bruce folded his arms, voice very flat. "Tony, what did you do with the agents?"

"Well," Tony's voice went up nearly an octave as he tried to find a way out. He would've escaped through the door, but Bruce was in the way. "I - put level fifty into lockdown."

"They made it to the fiftieth floor?" Steve was somewhere between alarmed and incredulous, and nobody missed the way his hand twitched toward the shield he wasn't carrying.

Bruce took the news without blinking. Really, Tony thought, Bruce ought to be somebody's dad because he was awfully good at it. "Now what are you going to do with them?" the doctor asked, almost conversationally.

"Well," Tony gestured aimlessly. "I just figured I'd leave them there. Resident pets and all that. Pepper was wanting a dog the other day, but these will be way easier to housetrain. I have a secure elevator separate from the rest of the system so I can still reach my Audi…"

"Tony."

Wow, Bruce was really, really good at going all parental. Tony raked his hands through his hair and threw up his arms.

"Fine, okay, okay. I'll think up something. Remember, genius here, guys."

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Two hours later, the frustrated agents were getting ready to break the windows and rappel down the exterior of the building when Tony showed up with a blaze of renewed light and a story of technical malfunction. "Hey, sorry guys. My computer system has orders to lock this floor down when he's hacked. Takes forever to unlock the override codes."

The lead agent's jaw clenched, and he looked about two inches from biting somebody's head off. "You can't fool us, Stark. We all heard Captain Rogers over the intercom. What was that all about?"

Tony shrugged eloquently, surveying the damage the agents had done trying to get through the stairwell lockdown door. "Wow, what'd you do, try to beat it down with your heads? Solid titanium. Have some self-respect - at least bring a blowtorch next time."

"Stark!" There was a warning note in the man's voice that Tony, in a rare move of prudence, decided not to ignore.

"Oh, yeah, all that beeping and stuff." Shaking his head dismissively, he spread his hands theatrically, opening his eyes wide to look as innocent as possible. "Tell you a secret: Cap still can't get used to technology. The timer on the microwave is still a major shock, every time."

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The agents left; they had no other choice. All the elevators were set to take them only to the main floor, no matter what other buttons they pressed. When they tried to hack their way up again, the electricity for the whole lower fifty floors was instantly shut off. As per the building's fire code, the stairwell doors remained unlocked, but even the lead agent was daunted at the thought of climbing ninety-odd flights of stairs.

Besides, they'd lost the element of surprise.

Clint watched the camera feeds grimly as the black cars finally drove away. His eyes flickered across the screens, picking out agents on nearby rooftops who'd been left behind to keep tabs on the tower. They were good, but he was an expert, and it wasn't all that hard to spot them. Relaxing back into his chair, he put his feet on the counter and continued to watch. When the first man moved, he would be ready.

SHIELD had retreated, but only temporarily. For the moment, the Avengers had a reprieve - but everybody knew that it was only a matter of time before SHIELD came back in full force.

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So - do you think she squeezed his hand? Or is Steve running so low on sleep that he's starting to imagine things from sheer exhaustion? Also, fun fact: Tony's confrontation of the SHIELD agents was one of the first fleshed-out pieces of this story that I wrote.

Thanks for the encouragement, folks! Any thoughts? I'd love to hear 'em. Have a nice day!