For a year and a half after the Battle of New York, Steve had lived in Washington. Don't you want to go see the world? Natasha had asked him on that last day they were all together. You owe it to yourself to see the world, Rogers. But Steve hadn't really wanted to see the world. He didn't want to see how much had changed, or to his chagrin, how much of it had stayed the same. He didn't know what he had wanted to see. And besides, he figured, in his line of work, you got around to seein' the world pretty quickly—whether you wanted to or not.

So, he decided he would go back to D.C. with Fury and Romanoff. Throw yourself back into the feel of things, pretend that it doesn't affect you—and maybe, one day, it won't. He didn't realize that going to D.C. would lead to finding out Bucky's alias as the Winter Soldier, Fury's supposed death, and ultimately, the divisive civic-eruption of SHIELD. What an exhausting experience. And that next year, when Ultron asked him: What will you do without a war? He knew he didn't have much left in him. This past year, alone, had been enough to knock him off his feet. Sure, 'he could do this all day' and hold his cracked, bleeding fists up to the authoritarian bully of some abstract ideal, but it was wearing him down. He was backing out onto the ice and he didn't know how to pull himself back onto land.

Well, he should be honest here—it wasn't that part of the job that exhausted him, it was the emotional toll. Every day he lived in this foreign world, in this new time, in this distant era that was not where he belonged, he felt pieces of himself—what he would have done before, what he would have said, choices he would have made—begin to fade. He felt translucent, at times, and barely held down to anything other than promises and ideals and thoughts from another time. He was a man made out of memories and not much else.

D.C. had been where that all started. And now, standing on Constitution Avenue, across the street from Tony's Café, looking into the glossy window and staring at the image of himself staring back, he felt a wave of fatigue settle into his skin. He felt ancient. The sun beat down onto him with a merciless, vicious energy that seemed to want to absorb anything he had left. He was wearing aviator sunglasses, his leather jacket, and a t-shirt that Sam had gotten him that said: MY FRIEND GOT ME THIS T-SHIRT FROM BROOKLYN. He probably stood out. No, he knew that he did, but he couldn't bring himself to care that much about what happened from there on out.

He was old. He was tired. And he wanted this to be over.

Just as he was about to enter the restaurant, a lovely blonde-haired woman emerged, talking to a group of other snooty-looking people. She was wearing a striped, light-blue portfolio shirt, with expensive navy slacks tucked neatly around her waist. She looked professional, but when he saw the thigh holster attached to her hip, he figured she—like her aunt before her—was not someone you attempted to rub the wrong way. He didn't want to be wrong and assume it was her, and he probably would have remained unsure, that is, until he saw her eyes. Bright, ferocious, and victoriously brown. He would have recognized those exuberant, opal orbs anywhere. Her aunt had the same ones.

"No, Bert—that's not what we agreed." She snapped at one of the men in her party. "Female healthcare is out of the question." Her hand—a tool she seemed to use to slice through unnecessary pretense—waved out in front of her to hold the conversation to her liking. "We are talking women—women with HIV, women of sexual assault, trans women, women with irregular menstrual cycles who rely on their birth control for any number of reasons. How can you—"

"—Carter, it's not as if you're actually—" The man, Bert, was beginning to speak, until Sharon interrupted him, that is.

"I'm not actually a woman? Is that what you're implying?" By some miraculous strength and flexibility within her facial features, her entire expression seemed to narrow disbelievingly at this man who dared tried to argue. "I don't have HIV, so I don't get to contribute to the political conversation?" She bumped her lip up in an exaggerated 'huh' matter, as if Bert was suggesting an actual point she needed to consider.

Steve couldn't help but smirk at the sight. The girl had fire. He didn't really have to imagine where that came from.

"Sharon—that is absolutely not what I was—"

"No, you're doing the thing that most people do, when they're trying to not say the thing they really mean." She crossed her arms underneath her breasts and did a 45 degree turn so she was facing him with a dangerous expression on her face. "In other words, you don't like my bill because, for once, in the history of the G.O.P., it's a piece of legislation that doesn't deal with dicks." She spat the last word with a lethal, vehement energy that meant to strike into the flesh, that meant to cut and tear, that meant to end all contention. And it worked because the sudden crassness of her statement, after being so professional, seemed to take Bert and the other members of the group a bit off guard.

Bert released an even sigh and cocked his head, watching Sharon, before an easy smile came to his features. "You haven't changed since law school." He seemed amused. A bit of a soft-humored expression appeared on his features as if there was a change in him that wanted to reach back to a distant part of their lives, perhaps to a distant Sharon and a distant Bert.

Sharon rolled her eyes in exhaustion and shook her head. "I'll see you after the break, Bert." Bert shook her hand, lingering to pass words along with one of the other congressmen in her party, before they all parted ways. Some headed back towards the Senate Offices, but others headed towards expensive, luxury sedans parked in reserved parking spots that lined all the way down Constitution Ave. Sharon, on the other hand, stayed behind to talk with a couple who were seated at a table near her. And though she was only talking, it was clear that the group was separating, then. Steve knew he had to make his move.

He advanced quickly and came up behind her. "Senator Carter?" He asked quietly, hoping not to spook her amidst her conversation with the couple.

The young woman's back tensed with a visible rigidity, as if she had been expecting someone to approach her the moment she turned her back. She turned slowly, her face being caught in a patch of dazzling sunlight as she squelched her eyes together to get a better look at the man before her. She analyzed him intently, maybe a little too intently.

"Roger Stevens." He flashed a fake press badge for a fake newspaper, apparently somewhere in Ohio, of all places. Why Natasha had chosen Ohio as the promised spot, he had no idea.

Sharon's eyes traced over him with an increasingly tightened, concerned expression crossing her features, but even so, a small, yet genuine smile was beginning to form over her lips. "Ah, Mr. Stevens, what can I do for you?"

What could she do for him? He ran over Natasha's plan in his head. He was never the best liar, but if he genuinely meant what he said… Maybe, this could work. "Well, with your campaign coming up for the Presidential election in November, our readers are finding themselves in an odd place."

Sharon chortled, that genuinely interested smile remaining on her face. "And why is that?"

"Well, they like your ideas, your platform—they like you, but they're not sure if they can trust you or not. And given who your family is and it's—erm—" he paused, trying to find the right words. "Well, remarkable history, I think writing a sort of 'biographical opinion piece' on your family could really win them over."

Sharon found herself chuckling at his statement. "You want to know about the Carters." She acknowledged his words with a nod of her head.

"Yes, ma'am."

The senator was smirking wryly at his usage of 'ma'am,' staring at him with a weighted gaze. She dug into him with that smirking smug gaze, as if she could dissect him, open him up, analyze everything inside, and then piece it all back together again. And while she was smiling, there was a rabid essence to her stare, as if her very DNA was tied into something ferociously defensive. She was a Carter, after all. She eventually gave a sigh and inclined her head to show she would entertain the possibility of an interview. "Walk with me, Mr. Stevens, my lunch hour ends in twenty minutes. If we cut across by George's Monument, we can take an extra ten minutes on the way to my office." She was still holding his eyes with that fierce, primal energy, even as she had relented.

It took him a minute to realize that Sharon was referring to the Washington Monument on the edge of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, by giving it an informal nickname 'George.' He smiled a bit at the girl's quirkiness. She was like Peggy, sure, but that vivacity he felt vibrating off of her in thick cords—that was hers all alone. He began to follow after her, as she was already moving, easily striding to her side as they walked towards that massive obelisk, before them, the one that stabbed the cloudless sky with unflinching, careless authority. The last time he had been by this part of the National Mall, he had been racing Sam along the glimmering, reflecting pool that commemorated Honest Abe. It didn't feel like three years should be an inordinate amount of time (especially given how old he was), but—Christ—how long ago that felt…

"Mr. Stevens, what do you want to know?" Sharon interrupted his self-pity, raising an eyebrow as she looked across the gap between them with a sharp look on her face that seemed to say: 'I absolutely do not have time for your introspective bullshit.'

Steve chuckled at her expression and nodded in agreement. "Why not just start with what you want to talk about." He smiled cautiously at her, earnestly—as if he didn't want to get on her bad side.

The senator was still looking at him with a dubious, yet entertained countenance. He got the impression she suspected something about him—he still hadn't removed his sunglasses, or his hat (even in the presence of a lady—Joseph Rogers would have clapped him on the back of the head)—but she seemed impressed about something, as well. It was as if she didn't get the chance to pick what she wanted to talk about, often. "My family… Well, obviously, I'm not the typical purebred, high-blooded, and British lord-kind of type." She gesticulated her lack of 'Britishness' with her hands.

"Obviously." Steve agreed with a good-natured chuckle.

"You were right, Mr. Stevens, the Carters were remarkable, but everyone's always been the same, for the most part, and, in a way that's pretty sad. Take my grandfather, for instance. He was a geneticist in the first World War, was on this crazy, emblazoning path with an enzyme in goats' milk. The Royal Society, before the second World War, even claimed he was on the forefront of some kind of miracle cure to cancer."

"He was?" Steve prompted with a wild look in his eyes.

"Well, according to the stuffy-faced muckety-mucks of the 40's—yeah, they thought he was. At least, his testing on his cancer-ridden rats was working. That is, until he and my grandma died in the War." She paused, as if trying to remember all the complicated events and history of her family. "Anyway, after that, the Royal Society figured it was really their discovery, and my grandfather had nothing to do with it. He was discredited, left out of the research, and when they finally released the findings, the old guy was, apparently, full of shit, as it had been nothing more than a fluke.

"My mom—same deal, right? Brilliant, Shadow Secretary for Education and Science, under Margaret Thatcher, but she was cold. I mean, she had me when she was 47, and everyone thought she was crazy for having a kid. She called it 'a mercy,' and not for her, for me." Sharon swallowed, tucking her hands into her pockets as they walked. Her eyes were wired with some undercurrent of electricity, like she wasn't upset about her mother's cruel words. "See, my mom had this philosophy: children shouldn't have parents for too long. And luckily for her, that was true—she died when I was 20." Sharon smiled with a sense of acceptance, as if she had long thought about this, and had concluded that this was what her mother had wanted.

"But I can't blame her." The senator turned to look at Steve, a gentle smile touching her features. "Everyone she loved died by the time she was 10. She grew up way too fast, and that's hard. People thought she was cruel just because she was sad." She seemed lost in thought; stuck on some distant thing that even she couldn't reach. She had said the words with a sort of distrust coating her voice. To anyone else, they probably wouldn't have noticed, but Steve wasn't 'anyone else.'

"You don't believe that she was that cruel."

"It doesn't matter what I believe." She said with that savage smirk appearing across her face. "But that's what happens with Carters—we're born into greatness, we have old money, we have great minds, and we know how to think. But then we fall from grace, and after that, we don't usually have the energy to fight back."

"And you do?" Steve asked quietly, trying to keep Sharon's words from reminding him of Peggy. "Have the energy to fight back?"

Sharon slowed in her walk but didn't stop. "I think that depends on the situation." She said softly as that vivid, enraged energy seemed to leave her. She seemed stuck on his question. Sharon was campaigning for the presidential election after President Ellis' term ended in a few months, and so far, though she was the popular candidate compared to the other guy, something told Steve, perhaps she found herself feeling more like the 'purebred' Carters of her past, more often than she would have liked. "I'll do what needs to be done." She said with a sort of iron-edge in her voice. Steve knew she meant it and didn't dare question her nerve.

Still, he felt a bit guilty for breaching on an, obviously, touchy subject. Even so, he knew he had to do it again. "If that's the case, then I need to ask you somethin', ma'am, and despite how crazy it sounds, I need you to answer it."

The two of them stopped in the middle of the path—a tour group, which had been trailing behind them, realized Sharon and Steve had stopped, and began to split around them, as the guide ventured on about the construction of the Washington Monument many years ago. And while, to anyone watching, it would seem that the two of them were still locked in conversation, if you had dared to look closer, something had visibly changed besides their movement. An apprehensive, yet undeniable tension seemed to work itself between the two. And in one fluid moment, Steve removed his sunglasses and suddenly, Sharon, knew exactly who she was looking at.

If Natasha had been watching, she would have scalped him. He did the exact thing she told him not to do—'don't reveal yourself to Sharon Carter, no matter how tempting it is.' But Natasha wasn't here, and neither was Sam, a stupid move, on his part, perhaps, to let his team off for the day, but he figured he could handle a minute conversation with a senator. However, as he watched her face mold from upended, icy suspicion to unsurprised confirmation, he knew. "And what question is that, Captain Rogers?"

"Your aunt—your mom's sister—"

"—Margaret Carter." She finished for him, her expression not giving away anything.

"Did you know she was alive?"

Sharon's eyes locked on his, a tense and threatening manner seemed to have overtaken her. He was suddenly made aware, and therefore, understood, why Sharon Carter did not have body guards, as any member of the federal government would. She could have taken him, or at least, she had been trained to fight. She raised her face to meet his eyes, all the snarky amusement had been stripped from her gaze and she could only meet his, with a malevolent glimmer resting there.

"Captain, you need to be very careful about what you say here." The noise around them from the tourists and patrons began to fade as their conversation encompassed everything else. Steve noticed that even the temperature of the air on his skin, felt ten times frostier, despite the warm, balmy spring air. "You were warned." She said softly, meeting his eyes with a steady urgency, another warning in the disguise of that wriggling, dangerous tension between them. "And this road you're about to step on, it's not long, but it's deeper, than you can possibly imagine." She cocked her head and even though he wanted to look away, even though he wanted to peer away from those monstrous brown eyes of hers, the eyes that looked so much like Peggy's, he couldn't. "For the sake of the people you care about—think about what you're about to do."

Steve's brow furrowed and that look—that steely, impossible-to-move resolve—came across his features, his teeth gritting behind the grim line of his lips. He thought of Peggy, on that cliff before the raging English Channel, giving a smile that was winged with all the hope in the world, before she cast herself into the waves. "I have."

The senator, realizing that he had already thought through this, offered a single nod and walked the short distance to the public restroom building. In between the opposite entrances, there was a bulletin board crammed full of notices for events and talks and conferences happening in the Capital (or had happened, some of them, Steve noticed were dating back from months ago). Sharon pulled a particular flier down, one that Steve had noticed populating the area quite frequently, and flipped it on its back, before she pulled out a pen and scribbled something on the back of it. She carefully put the pen back in her shirt pocket and returned to him, holding the flier at the ready.

She looked around to make sure they weren't being watched, before she shoved it into his hands. He looked down at the flier, read over it, and frowned sharply, looking up at the senator's urgent, terrified eyes. He was tempted to turn it over in front of her to read what she had written, but something told him, as he met the intensely focused eyes of Sharon Carter, he should wait until he was far, far away from her and from the public eye.

"I'm giving you twelve hours, Rogers, twelve hours to do this and get the hell out of D.C." She spoke quickly, insistently, as if each word needed to be spoken and urged with great deliberance. "After that, I'm informing the F.B.I. that the biggest criminal on their watchlist is in town. Do you understand?" She stabbed her eyes into his, glancing to his lips, to his nose, to his eyes to make sure every part of him wasn't lying as she nodded. "Afterwards, the game will change—they'll come after you with everything they got. And this city, by then, will be crawling with your fingerprints. I'll have to file a report. The whole world will know that you were here."

Steve nodded wordlessly.

"And whether that's enough time or not, it's all I can give you." She said softly as if some terrible existence hung over her head, something that had been hanging over her for a while. He could only guess what kind of threats Peggy had placed on her head, her own niece. "Good luck, Steve." She finished, before she abruptly turned and continued up the steps to her office, leaving Steve to the shocking revelation she had just dumped on him.

Later, in a Starbucks, not far from where Steve had walked with Sharon, Cap, Natasha, and Sam, all stared down at the flier that he had laid out in front of them. Staring back at them, from the crinkled page, was the familiar, lovely, and refined face of Pepper Potts. Steve had seen fliers all over D.C. for her much-awaited talk about her success in international business. She was one of the youngest CEOs in the global economy, it was no surprise to see her at some prestigious conference, presenting tips on her success.

But what made this particular flier alarming was what Sharon had written on the back of it. Written in fine, but scribbled cursive, were just two, incredibly puzzling words: 'the second.'

Sam scratched his head as they all stared distantly with bleak expressions. "O.K. soooo what does that mean?"

"Well, if there's a 'second,' maybe there's a first…? Of something?" Natasha frowned.

"A second of what?" Sam asked tiredly as he rubbed his eyes with the back of his fingers. "How long did she give you until our asses are under fire from the Feds?" He had directed his gaze to Steve.

"Twelve hours." Steve answered with a frown on his face. He was looking down at the flier with concern leaking into the creases of his forehead, the slide of his nose and the crease between his brows furrowing into the perfect 'T.' He was all hard lines and puzzlement. Why did everything have to be so damn complicated? They were being pressed on a time limit that they didn't even have all the limits for.

"Should we call Tony? Maybe he would know." Natasha suggested.

"No." Sam and Steve both spoke sharply in response, causing a taken aback roll of the eyes from Nat.

But to some degree of luck, or perhaps, it was simply gruesome timing, the barista turned up the volume on the TV hanging in the corner of the coffee shop, as a breaking news feed interrupted the program, and suddenly, everyone in the entire shop was watching. "Breaking news in from Moscow this morning, weeks after the destruction of Moscow's royal palace and intelligence agency, the Kremlin, the body of Director Alexi Shostakov has been discovered in a warehouse nearly a mile away from the site of the explosion."

Natasha's face was doused in shocking, plummeting emotion. Her hands going to gently cup her mouth in some kind of sinking revelation. She knew this had been coming, but some part of her hoped, beyond anything, it wasn't.

The reporter continued. "And while the death of the Director is a shock to many, the particularly odd part about the Director's demise is the way in which it happened. It seems as if a bullet from an M16 A3 rifle, a single, untraceable bullet to the heart, was the weapon of choice. And near Shostakov's body, even more important figures of the Kremlin's upper channels lay in dismal positions, all killed with the same weapon. It would seem that Shostakov is the first in a string of gruesome killings that happened on that historical, bloody night."

Steve knew the moment he heard 'first,' somehow, someway, Sharon Carter had gotten ahold of that broadcast and made sure 'first' was put into the script. The reporter said more, but by then, the three of them were no longer looking at the broadcast, they were looking down at the smiling, unassuming face of Pepper Potts—the 'second.'

"Now, can we call Tony?" Natasha asked.